By David Patten
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Christopher Scalia has a product to sell, and he’s
wondering why conservatives aren’t buying it. As an English professor at an
elite university, he’s troubled that so many high-profile conservatives have
been speaking dismissively about the liberal arts.
His sales pitch is reasonable enough: the liberal arts
can make an important contribution to producing the sort of well-informed and
critically engaged public that democracies need to thrive. A liberal-arts
education exposes students to a wide range of facts, ideas, and experiences,
making it harder for the government to control the minds of its citizens.
Likewise, the critical-thinking skills students develop from wrestling with
complex and sophisticated ideas enable them to ask better questions and
challenge authority more effectively.
In theory, a good liberal-arts education is a strong
antidote to authoritarianism. So it is unsurprising that conservatives have
traditionally extoled the virtues associated with receiving one. What, then,
has changed? Scalia seems to think conservatives are simply losing sight of a
liberal-arts education’s benefits and need to be reminded of them. But perhaps
some conservatives are questioning the value of the liberal arts because they see
a slew of indications that what’s offered under that banner at today’s
universities may be increasingly less likely to produce a well-informed,
critically engaged citizen.
Higher Education Is Closed-Minded
In fact, some American universities seem to be reconsidering
whether exposing students to a wide range of perspectives is necessary or
beneficial. They want students to feel safe; not just physically, but
psychologically and intellectually as well. Over the past year, many mainstream
universities have been experimenting with the use of trigger warnings. If an
idea might upset some students, then professors are encouraged to provide a
trigger warning so students can choose to close themselves off.
For example, if a professor is going to discuss sexual
violence, a student who had been raped might prefer to excuse herself. While a
trigger warning might demonstrate sympathy and respect for students who are
legitimately dealing with exceptional trauma, it is clearly a bridge too far to
apply such things in a general manner at a liberal-arts university. Such an
approach undermines the purpose of a liberal-arts education, which is to expose
students to a wide spectrum of views, and not exclusively the pleasant ones.
Coddling students and protecting them from disturbing ideas is not a
sustainable strategy for promoting the sort of civil society conservatives
value.
The “micro-aggression” is another emerging threat to the
traditional liberal arts. Hypersensitive students or teachers tease out the
supposedly vicious and unacceptable deeper meanings of mundane remarks from
their peers and colleagues. Saying something that implies a student has a
mother and a father is a micro-aggression, for example, since the student may
have been raised by two mommies, or maybe just one. Again, this student arrived
at the university feeling safe within his or her own bubble. Educators
preoccupied with micro-aggressions aim to protect sensitive students from
classmates who might have different assumptions about what normal is.
Substituting Political Correctness for Philosophy
Perhaps the best example of the problem with how the
liberal arts are being taught at today’s universities occurred last year at
Marquette University. In an ethics class, a young teacher’s assistant (TA) was
confronted by a student who wanted to debate the ethics of gay marriage. The TA
told the student this issue was not up for debate. She asked the student to
stop talking about the possibility that there could be an ethical argument
against gay marriage. This line of thought made him a homophobe, and a gay
student in the class might feel hurt if he discovered one of his classmates
harbored doubts about the legitimacy of his choices.
Sadly, the consensus in the academy seems to be that this
young TA got it right. Meanwhile, her colleague who exposed the incident to the
public—thinking people would be horrified by what was going on in Marquette’s
classrooms—was stripped of tenure and fired.
This is disheartening, for multiple reasons. The TA seems
oblivious to the fact that if everyone else were as closed-minded as she, no
one would have questioned the former consensus that homosexuality is a form of
deviancy. But someone, quite possibly in an ethics class, challenged the
prevailing point of view. This person asked how someone’s rights could be
denied on the basis of a moral code he did not subscribe to. This started a
debate. The objector was not told to shut up and stop making everyone feel uncomfortable.
Another reason this incident was so ironic is that it
occurred in a philosophy classroom. If there is one discipline that cannot
survive in an atmosphere of political correctness, it is philosophy. Philosophy
critically evaluates ideas. It does not remove some from discussion just
because someone might find them offensive.
Imagine if all of the world’s philosophers were suddenly
forbidden from questioning God’s existence, or from challenging Christian
morality. After all, there is a pretty good chance a Christian might hear such
a lecture and be taken aback. Getting offended is largely the point. Socrates
said provocative things, knowing that others would try to silence him. He did
not relent, and was ultimately forced to take his own life. That’s what
philosophy does. It challenges, it offends, and it risks a backlash. It is not
the role of the philosopher to chastise students for straying from conventional
wisdom.
The Liberal Arts Should Bring Ideas Into the Light
The idea seems to be growing that universities are where
young people go to flaunt their possession of the correct set of ideas, rather
than where they go to learn to reason critically. A full 39 percent of
Americans now believe students ought to be expelled from college for making
racist comments, according to a recent YouGov poll. The poll’s question leaves
it unclear whether respondents thought students should be expelled only when
they make aggressive and taunting remarks like those of the University of
Oklahoma fraternity members caught on video chanting a racist song that
promoted violence, or if the respondents thought any statement regarded as
racist should be grounds for dismissal. The latter allows for broad powers of
thought control. Should students be expelled for trying to link the violence
wrought by the Islamic State to Islam? Our president seems to think that is
racist.
But even without worrying about mass expulsions of
students expressing common-sense beliefs, the high percentage of people who
seem to consider the proper response to a racist comment is to banish the
speaker from the university is disturbing. People who harbor racist or other
backward beliefs are precisely the people who stand to benefit the most from a
liberal-arts education.
It would make more sense for university educators to
encourage students to express negative stereotypes they might subscribe to
rather than to repress them. The whole point of learning to think critically
and to inspect one’s beliefs and values is lost when students are told up front
they should never speak any potentially offensive thoughts they might have, and
consequently should never open themselves for critical evaluation.
All That’s Left Is Vocational Training
As a philosopher myself, I too balked when Sen. Marco
Rubio discouraged an audience from pursuing a degree in Greek philosophy. While
he accurately cited the lousy job market for Greek philosophers, a bad job
market is an insufficient reason to discourage the study of philosophy.
Ideally, a liberal-arts education would help produce the sort of citizen that
can contribute meaningfully to our nation’s political discourse. That is more
important in the long run than a steady paycheck straight out of college.
But the price is only worth it if liberal-arts
universities remain committed to fostering open-minded, free-thinking
individuals. Increasingly, conservatives are coming to doubt this commitment,
so they are left wondering whether students might not be better served spending
their college years preparing themselves for the job market.
Granted, an indictment of liberal-arts universities is
not the same as an indictment of the liberal arts. Conservatives sometimes conflate
the two when they denigrate certain courses of study. But there is an obvious
connection. The liberal arts, after all, are taught in liberal-arts
universities. As America’s universities increasingly concern themselves with
what students can think and say, rather than how to reason and argue, the value
of a liberal-arts education diminishes.
While Scalia may be correct in arguing that the liberal
arts can serve as a bulwark against centralized government power, the growing
preoccupation of liberal-arts universities with political correctness makes
them seem more like an instrument of political power. At least this is the
perception that people like Scalia must counter if they want to win back
conservatives.
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