With college students returning to campus, and the brutal war in Gaza continuing unabated, many
schools—including mine—are bracing for renewed protests. As president of
Wesleyan University in Connecticut, I have already received demands from
Pro-Palestinian undergraduates—not to mention emails from students, parents,
and alumni demanding that I silence those undergraduates. Throw in the
heightened tension of a presidential election in two months, and the coals on
many campuses may only get hotter.
That’s a good
thing. Colleges and universities should not retreat into some fantasy of
neutrality. They should help students practice something that has become a
prominent theme in the presidential race: freedom.
In the West, the
student has long been conceptualized as someone on the path to freedom, to
thinking for oneself in the company of others. It’s an idealized notion, to be
sure, but a practical one as well. The proof of a good education is that one’s capacity
to learn continues to grow after graduation—and that’s precisely what economies
that prize innovation, and democracies that encourage deliberation and change,
need from their participants. The student, practicing freedom on a path to
maturity, learns how to attend to others; and paying attention is a key step in
creating opportunities, righting wrongs, or helping those who are suffering.
The good student turns out to be a good thinker, a good provider, and a good neighbor.
The good
student doesn’t do this alone. Deeply embedded in the culture of American
higher education is the notion of what literary historian Andrew Delbanco calls
“lateral learning, the proposition that students have something important to
learn from one another.” While we expect professors to offer instruction in the
fields in which they have expertise, most American colleges, especially
residential ones, promise that learning will be a communal journey in which
one’s peers help one to flourish. But if these peers are too much like oneself, if a
student too easily “fits in” at a college, then the journey won’t go far.
Homogeneity in the student body—not
only in terms of racial or ethnic identity, but also in points of view, belief
systems, aspirations, interests, and so on—undermines colleges’ mission to help
students develop personal autonomy. That’s why it’s so important for schools to
recruit students from every part of the country (and, if possible, from around
the world). It’s also why the Supreme Court decision ending race-based
affirmative action was so pernicious: It privileges (questionable) notions of individual
fairness over community diversity, causing the community as a whole to learn
less. Lateral learning really only works when students, both inside and outside
the classroom, have to navigate difference—it’s a critical element to
practicing freedom.
At the same time, if we truly
believe in the benefits of diversity, we in higher education should take to
heart criticism of our own insularity and our role in effectively reinforcing forms
of inequality and elitism. If our students are learning to look down on anyone who
lacks the same level of education, then our talk about diversity can seem just
a cover for defending the current economic and cultural hierarchy. Wearing the
mantle of progressivism doesn’t get you off the hook. Just because you believe
you are on the right side of history doesn’t justify contempt for those who don’t
share your vision of the future.
In education, insularity should be the enemy. Yet we liberal-arts
academics, despite celebrating broad learning, often nurture niche cultures and
speak in esoteric dialects that would seem foreign to many Americans. At the
same time, extreme parochialism has been growing in the public
sphere, thanks in part to fear-based politics. This is antithetical to liberal
learning, whether it is conducted under the reactionary guise of various
nationalist causes or the progressive guise of defending the latest version of
a “minoritized” identity. In both cases, certain kinds of people are too often dismissed
as having nothing to teach us.
Writing off people with whom one disagrees will
always be easier than listening carefully to their arguments or attending to
their creative endeavors. But without tolerance and open-mindedness, inquiry
can be at best just a path to self-congratulation, and at worst, violent
scapegoating. By contrast, a liberal education should deepen one’s ability to
learn from people unlike oneself and with whom one doesn’t agree. Such a
relation to others can help calm the politics of resentment raging about us.
But does it? Critics of higher education say it’s a phony
meritocracy, accuse faculty of indoctrinating students, and claim that students
pad their resumes with meaningless credentials and demand straight A’s merely
for having completed the assignments. The charges of unfair student admissions
that underpinned the legal assault on affirmative action, like the criticisms
above, attack the integrity of learning as a path to freely thinking for
oneself. After all, if the opportunity to study is unevenly made available to
people, then it should be rejected by a thoughtful person who recognizes that such
education is really corruption. If going to college means participating in
one’s own indoctrination, then one can find no enlightenment there.
Campuses have long been screens upon which the broader
culture expresses its anxieties about political and social change, economic
dislocation, and the decline of traditional mores. Critics on both the left and
the right haven’t been questioning the modern Enlightenment idea of learning as
a journey to maturity so much as doubting whether students were actually on
that path. Whether accusing students of radicalism or conformism, apathy or
grade-grubbing, nearly all critics bemoan the inability of undergraduates to
think for themselves.
Critics of higher
education want it to live up to the ideal of being an opportunity for learning
freedom. So do its defenders. And so do many of its students. To that end,
there are two fundamental pragmatic goals for the university: to preserve
culture and to stimulate inquiry for the sake of social progress. Of course, we
will debate with one another about how much we should be preserving and what
really counts as progress. But those debates help higher education fulfill its
purposes—by offering an opportunity, to paraphrase John Dewey, to teach
students to
share in the arts of living. “Civilization is uncivil,” he wrote, “because
human beings are divided into non-communicating sects, races, nations, classes
and cliques.” We practice freedom to break down those artificial divisions
and to open up possibilities of meaning, of joy, and of productive work.
Practicing freedom can be messy, as it
surely will be on many campuses this fall. Thinking for yourself in the company
of others, especially when the coals are hot, is not easy. But our
disagreements will teach us lessons that will serve us well long after the coals
have cooled.
