We cannot let our universities become seminaries for the priests of preselected social-justice causes.
We cannot let our universities become seminaries for the priests of preselected social-justice causes.
T he censorious mob strikes again. Recent weeks have seen universities assault the right of scholars to speak freely. Amy Wax, of the University of Pennsylvania, and Ilya Shapiro, of Georgetown Law, are the latest victims of a crazed zeal to purge the scholarly community of heterodoxy. We are right to be incensed at the silencing of scholars, provocative though they sometimes are. Yet a hyper-fixation on combating university censorship risks obscuring the bigger picture — and with it, bigger challenges. Our cries should be stronger than “Don’t silence so-and-so!” and “Tenure protects such-and-such!” We must call on universities to actively promote a culture of free inquiry and protect an educational vision that prioritizes the pursuit of knowledge over partisan activism. Unless we do, the battle for academic freedom is a lost cause.
To be cradles of knowledge, universities must respect an array of norms that are as indispensable to truth-seeking as oxygen is to life. In addition to honoring the elementary non-censorship rule and avoiding tyrannical double standards, universities should strive to root out institutional biases that suggest limitations on the scope of acceptable inquiry. When universities meet this challenge, they promise a culture where dissent is enthusiastically embraced. When they don’t, academic cultures atrophy.
And atrophy they have. At my own Princeton University, students are greeted at their very arrival on campus with a freshman-orientation program drenched in hypocrisy, double standards, and indoctrination à la Mao. Events that masquerade as innocuous trainings to promote sexual health are just as much partisan boot camps for exponents of a liberationist sex ethic. Students are given pornographic “sex-positive” comic books and participate in crass sex-toy giveaways. They attend mandatory LGBT panels where mainstream ideas about sex and gender are presented as bigoted falsehoods, long dispelled by the “real experts” (activists).
Orientation panels on racial and other forms of “justice” are similarly one-sided. University officials slander their own tenured professors for expressing ideas most Americans call common sense. Students are coerced into confessing their sins — wealth, whiteness, and privilege — in front of thousands of kids they met just days before. If you’re wondering whether any of this is supplemented by a serious exhortation that students cherish heterodoxy, ideological difference, and the inherent value of truth-seeking, I’m sorry to say you’ll be disappointed.
The double standards and entrenched biases don’t stop after freshman orientation. They persist, and a hollowed culture results. Students are programmed to think that they must profess the creed of the woke intelligentsia to be counted among society’s “enlightened.” Brilliant students cower in fear of cancellation. My friends won’t take classes in departments they know will flunk them for arguing in favor of reasonable but unorthodox ideas. Professors table hot topics because they fear the self-righteous 18-year-old who will file a DEI complaint. Perspectives that wouldn’t have caused anyone to bat an eye a few years ago are now cause for uproar. For example, to argue that our existence as embodied persons invalidates the new radical gender ideology is to enact “violence” on a “marginalized community.” To openly support the police means you’ll be ousted from a leadership role on your sports team. To speak up as a pro-life woman means your peers and professors will cast you off as an unsophisticated religious zealot.
These examples are not hypothetical. Nor are the data merely anecdotal. The stats astound: The Heterodox Academy’s Campus Expression Survey reveals that a staggering 62 percent of college students are afraid to speak their minds. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) suggests that the number is 80 percent. FIRE also informs us that a majority of college students (66 percent) support speaker shut-downs, and nearly a quarter support the use of actual violence to stop some forms of speech.
Of course, demands for universities to confront discourse-suffocating biases will fall flat if we don’t fight their deeper cause: a warped vision of higher education. Universities are beginning to adopt official, institutionalized social-justice causes, prioritizing their own activism through one-sided programming, initiatives, and centers. Unsurprisingly, the partisan bureaucrats who have jettisoned the truth-seeking ideal in favor of this new vision see academic freedom and its concomitant norms as mere side constraints — malleable inconveniences to be dispensed with for the sake of predetermined social-justice objectives. To DEI tyrants, open cultures of inquiry look like arbitrary relics of an unfashionable, unprofitable, and outdated notion of what universities do. As one all-too-candid professor admitted to my freshmen peers: “Free speech and intellectual discourse” are defensible only insofar as they are “flexed to one specific aim . . . the promotion of social justice, and an anti-racist social justice at that.” This conception of intellectual freedom is jarring and shameful. But it is not unique.
Ending university censorship is the noble cause of an urgent battle. But defenders of free speech mustn’t risk myopia or tunnel vision. There is a bigger war worth fighting. We cannot let our universities become seminaries for the priests of preselected causes. A dispassionate commitment to truth-seeking must remain the priority. It is this vision that, in our advocacy, we cannot neglect.