The Outstater
Will We Take Back our Colleges?
The Stanford Review: “What is the most important problem in the world right now?”
Stanford President Jonathan Levin: “There’s no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.”
The Stanford Review: “That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.”
LOOKING OVER the governor-elect’s transition councils, you will have to search for anything definitive about the cultural disaster that is higher education. Yes, something called the Education Council has been formed under the direction of a partner in one of Indy’s silk-stocking law firms. That does not bode well for needed systemic changes.
That is the case even though the capture of our universities by extremists is one of the few issues in which a governor has operational responsibility and an issue which polls say is major. But the council’s mandate is as broad as it is sanguine: “To ensure a high-quality education for all Hoosiers by raising standards in K-12 and higher education, expanding school choice, keeping curriculum focused on core education rather than political indoctrination, and enhancing college and career readiness for high school graduates.”
You can expect that “political indoctrination” will be where the governor is in danger of sliding off point. The temptation will be to enforce one’s own terms of indoctrination. So don’t be surprised if the administration comes up with nothing more than a strongly worded letter to trustees suggesting yet a new set of Indoctrinators, one to please the exo-campus clientele, particularly the powerful religious groups, Jewish and Christian, but even the secular patriots of the Indiana Policy Review.
That, dear friends, won’t meet the challenge before us, one aptly described by Ilya Shapiro, author of “Lawless: The Miseducation of America’s Elites”:
“If colleges and universities don’t course-correct, they will continue to alienate themselves from the American mainstream and lose even more public trust. If they continue to teach destructive ideas about the American Founding and intersectional-privilege hierarchies as basic curriculum — if, in other words, the illiberal takeover of higher education proceeds apace — then these institutions will become increasingly irrelevant in American public life.”
Shapiro goes on to define what he means by that illiberal takeover (one painfully apparent on any visit to Bloomington): “What we’ve seen on campus over the last decade isn’t the venerable complaint that the Berkeley hippies have conquered the faculty lounge. Instead, we’ve seen the illiberal Left drive the entirety of campus culture, with university officials facilitating, and even fomenting, social-justice mobs, with everyone else keeping their heads down to avoid the crossfire.”
Is the governor-elect prepared to tackle this? We can hope so, but if not he can ask for help. It is only a short drive over to Meridian Street to the august Liberty Fund, an Indiana-born private educational foundation with a global reputation. He will find experts there on the Socratic Method, that is, philosophical inquiry requiring the asking and answering of questions to stimulate critical thinking and illuminate ideas — just the reordering of the campus discussion needed to put our universities and colleges back on the rails.
The Liberty Fund has put together a reading list specifically for governors and legislators that is by itself a full liberal education, “liberal” being used here in the classical sense of a willingness to respect opinions different from one’s own. For the goal, please know, is not to win an argument or take over Dunn Meadow but to help students come to a deeper understanding of the issue at hand. It encourages active learning and examination, Socrates being the exemplar of that education that fundraisers laud but none honor. Here is R.J. Snell, editor-in-chief of Public Discourse, explaining how it works:
“Rather than entering the classroom as if it were a war and battle while ensuring combatants have equal armaments, we would be better served to attempt a thorough understanding of the text or problem at hand, an attempt virtually guaranteed to reveal that we do not understand. If we admit that we do not understand (as did Socrates), interlocutors are no longer advocates or opponents but engaged in the work of shared inquiry. Interlocutors mutually inquiring are friends with a common good — understanding — and intellectual exchange is an act of mutual assistance. Questions no longer intend to prove or disprove, establish or defeat, but to understand, which comes at no expense to the other.”
What a great university that would be.
Compare it with the sappy social-justice promises built into the IU mission statement, e.g., to build “partnerships” with “communities,” to achieve “full diversity” and to maintain a “friendly environment,” however any of that may be defined by people obsessing over pronouns and whether Isaac Newton was black.
And how interesting to put some of Bloomington’s monochromatic views under the Socratic lens: on affirmative action, on climate change, on carbon-free energy, on reparations, on open borders, on transgender surgery, on Palestinian statehood, on ideology-driven tenure,
As the great man famously said, if you want to change the world, you begin by changing yourself. — tcl
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