What's wrong with higher education? (not much)

I got an email linking to a Youtube clip of David Horowitz speaking to students at UC-San Diego, in which a Muslim woman apparently reveals that she is a genocidal anti-semite. The email touched off a discussion of what is wrong with higher education that we let such views go unchallenged while enforcing a strict code of political correctness in other realms of political discourse. I thought my response was (uncharacteristically) cogent, so I've decided to blog it. This may also serve as a fitting send-off to our graduating seniors. Since I'll never be asked to give a commencement address, this will have to do.

My experience in higher education is apparently different from yours; certainly I never saw anything like what happened in that video (though it's not clear that the student's "yes" meant what everyone thinks it meant; I'd need to see more tape to be sure). I went to Georgetown, a fairly conservative Jesuit institution, from ‘81-85. There the main political controversies were poverty vs. Reaganomics, Central America, and apartheid. The radicals on campus were working at homeless shelters and with groups like Sojourners, protesting US support for the Contras, blockading the South African embassy, and also trying to get student health services to provide birth control (I wonder if the University ever relented on that one). I then went to U. Wisconsin from 1987-93 (not the hotbed of radicalism that say UC-Berkeley is, but close). "Political correctness" was starting to be a buzzword then. When a fraternity had a party where everyone came in black face, they were put down pretty hard. But most of the radicalism I saw was inward-directed. Feminists marched bare-breasted to "take back the night" and banned "scents" at clubs and concerts in solidarity with people with "environmental sensitivities". There was a lot of activism around AIDS awareness. Tommy Thompson as a new governor vowed to crack down on pot, and thousands of people gathered around the state capitol for a smoke-in (but they were too chicken to smoke the real stuff because he promised to arrest people who did). Young parents would push strollers through the streets during the Willie St. festival commemorating student riots in 1968, munching on hash brownies while the police looked the other way. One of the biggest controversies was Indian hunting and fishing rights in northern Wisconsin - a federal court ruled that the Ojibwe Indians had the right to fish for walleye during spawning season because of treaties dating from the 1830s. Non-Indian fishmermen and people who made their living on tourism were upset about this because they thought this would deplete the population of the prized walleye on Wisconsin lakes. The racists came out of the woodwork, gathering at boat landings all over northern Wisconsin to harrass the Indians while they gathered spawning walleye. Hence leftists at UW gathered there as well as silent witnesses, standing between the Indians and protesters to ensure they could exercise their rights in peace. The Gulf War was also big, but protesters always made sure to distinguish between their opposition to the war and their support for soldiers as people. Then I went to the College of William and Mary, then Gettysburg College, two very placid, socially conservative institutions with very little going on by way of political controversy (though after I left W&M seems to have loosened up a bit: students recently put on a sex workers art show). Which is all to say that in my almost 30 years at institutions of higher education, I have never (that I can recall anyway) seen anything like a Muslim student advocating genocide, much less any comment like that being condoned. I have, however, seen a lot of racism and anti-gay bigotry from students, and Georgetown allowed Roberto D'Aubuisson (founder of El Salvador's death squads) to speak at an event sponsored by the Young Americans for Freedom.

It's important to note that political controversy is and ought to be a central part of the college experience. The idea of a liberal arts education (whether you get it at a "liberal arts college" or a big university) is for students to look at questions from a lot of different angles. Question the frame of reference that you come with (as a Christian, Muslim, Jew, son of dock worker, daughter of financial analyst, whatever), ask how the way you look at the world is formed by that frame of reference, try out different frames for size. Get exposed to a lot of different ideas, some of which you might find offensive. Hopefully get so engaged that you become an advocate for one or more causes. Be free to make stupid mistakes and get slapped down for them in the court of public opinion. Years later, be able to look back at that experience and say wow, did I really believe that crap? but be happy you did because now you have a better understanding of how different people look at the world in different ways.

Most faculty stand on the sidelines and watch this happen rather than participate in it. We toss some kindling on the fire and see what students make of it (such as our Management department which has students read the Communist Manifesto in between accounting courses). Some faculty get right in there and advocate for their beliefs. People like David Horowitz criticize this as "indoctrination," and sometimes I'm sure it goes too far (at Boston College Mary Daly used to forbid men from enrolling in her advanced classes in feminist theory), but by and large I think it enhances students' education to listen to and engage in debate with an informed, impassioned advocate of one cause or another. My best experiences as an undergraduate were in this kind of situation: arguing with my Marxist macroeconomics teacher over the lessons learned from Chinese development under Mao, watching my Russian history teacher, a Polish exile, come near to tears explaining to us what it was like living in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe (it's like walking in the wind, he said, you can spend your life going with the wind or fighting against it, but you can't avoid having your life defined by it), arguing with my conservative constitutional law professor who obsessed about the ludicrous ways that the commerce clause had been stretched to facilitate government activism. I don't hear a lot of students complaining about indoctrination at Gettysburg, but when I do I tell them that the appropriate response is to challenge their professor right there in the classroom - stand up for your beliefs while admitting to yourself the possibility that you're wrong and the professor is right.

There's a lot of silliness in higher education. In many cases, silliness is exactly the point. Sometimes offensive opinions are aired, and sometimes, unfortunately, they are tolerated. But it's part of a process of intellectual discovery that is ultimately for the good. For all the controversy it engenders, little harm is done by a 20 year old college student saying something stupid in public. At least we're not dumping millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico or robbing widows and orphans on our way to a quick score in the financial markets.