Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, is the author of "A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now," "Diversity: The Invention of a Concept" and "The Architecture of Intellectual Freedom." Wood came to campus Tuesday afternoon to address intellectual diversity and free expression on college campuses as part of the University's Critical Conversation Speaker Series.
“Just how much intellectual diversity should there be in American higher education?” Wood asked as he opened the conversation for what he prepared to discuss. “How free should expression of ideas be on campus? Must they extend to the view of people such as Milo Yiannopoulos and Richard Spencer?”
With an audience filled with students, faculty and community members, the room lay silent.
“I would say, though with some hesitation and reluctance, yes they should,” Wood said. “I would not go out of my way to invite these people to my campus but if some students arranged such an event, I would do my best to treat it like any other speaking event.”
Wood established his belief in the importance of intellectual diversity and freedom of expression across campuses, considering these to be necessities in an education, not luxuries. Wood said he finds blame for the current heightened violence and dissent nationwide as a direct result of abandoning the principles of intellectual diversity and freedom of expression.
“Once the willingness to listen to those you disagree with vanishes, there’s a very short step to [make things] right,” Wood said. “How else will you silence those you dislike?”
Wood said people find it easier to give superficial assent to general ideas of intellectual diversity without estimating the difficulty to uphold those ideals in practice. What’s harder, he said, is tolerating the ideas one may hate.
“You are not protecting those students at all by sheltering them from ideas that you dislike,” Wood said. “If we treat people too fragile to hear the truth, they will learn one thing for sure: fragility. That is not a characteristic of great advantage for people pursuing careers of any kind.”
He also finds blame in the orthodoxies of people's everyday lives, particularly those of higher education professors. Wood believes intellectual diversity requires people to move into the “discomfort zone” of violating their held orthodoxies.
“A history department that doesn’t allow some historians to believe in American exceptionalism is an impoverished history department," Wood said. "An environmental studies department that lacks some members who are skeptical of global warming theory is self-enfeebled.”
Wood said virtually every discipline has its own form of political correctness and warned that the more stuck on that form, the more intellectually exhausted it is, demanding that professors teach their students controversies.
“College campuses are meant to be the ideal places that students can encounter the widest range of ideas and learn how to sift them,” he said.
Wood said he believes privilege plays a deep role in the economy of intellectual diversity oppression. On today’s campuses, the accusation that others enjoy in labeling what another says as irrelevant is a “new kind” of privilege.
“New privilege is granted and includes any kind of immunity from making a clear argument," Wood said. "An exemption from backing up your statements with the sort of evidence that can be transparently evaluated by others and a dispensation to having to weigh alternative views based on the facts.”
Wood began his series discussing anecdotes of three professors whose troubles with intellectual diversity in academia have sparked major controversies across the nation and media within the last year: Amy Wax, Bruce Gilley and Bret Weinstein.
Wax found herself in trouble after discussing her distress with the academic success of her African-American students, stating she couldn’t remember any of her African-American first-year students graduating in the top quarter of her class. This statement led to her removal of teaching first-year students at the University of Pennsylvania — a position she had held for more than 20 years.
Gilley, a Portland State University political science professor, fell under scrutiny after the publication of his article in a well-known peer-review journal in which he claimed the success of colonization in the third-world countries. He has since resigned.
Weinstein, a biology professor at Evergreen State College, held his regularly scheduled class on April 12, 2017, a day declared by university officials as a Day of Absence, in which all white students and faculty were to leave the campus grounds. Weinstein refused, was called a racist and after months of threatened violence, he resigned.
Wood explained that each professor held a tenured position and was committed to academic freedom. Despite this commitment, the professors’ careers were placed in jeopardy.
“The assaults of all three cases were occasioned by things that Wax, Gilly and Weinstein said," Wood said. "It was their words.”
He urged students not to believe these incidents were isolated but rather a larger indication of a changing generational divide that needs to be acknowledged.
Wood found many other commonalities among the three incidents, but the most important was the origination of the attacks.
“All involve attacks that originated within the academy, not outside, which is important because academia is attacking its own in regard to academic freedom,” he said.
Wood found it jarring that a tenure professor, a position that enjoys maximum protection of academic freedom, could be uplifted from the peer pressure of students’ disregard for intellectual diversity and their dislike for ideas that upend and offend their own.
But Wood asked his audience to consider the issues of students encountering ideas such as these, those that may make them rethink their own notions or simply make them think more critically.
“Is there conceivably any justification to think that Evergreen students would be unable to weigh Weinstein’s views on their merits?" Wood said. "Were black students who heard Wax’s generalization doomed to be crushed by it or might some rise to the challenge?”
Wood called the ability of students to diminish the authority of a tenured professor by launching accusations of the “new norm of higher education.”
“If they [tenured professors] are vulnerable to such flagrant violations to their freedom, what about untenured members? Students? Invited visitors?” Wood said.
Outside speakers and invited guests offer an overwhelming significance to the discussion of intellectual diversity and free expression on campus, according to Wood. He lamented that he has seen the largest collapse in allowing outside visitors to present their controversial topics to large audiences, resulting in the lost opportunity for intellectual diversity.
Auburn University has had experience with invited visitors over the last year, and Wood praised the University for acquitting itself so professionally and not erupting in violence as so many other places have.
“It was a heavy burden on the administration to figure out how to do that, so it can be done, and it can be done well,” Wood said.
However, Wood still emphasized the importance of maintaining invited visitors to college campuses, despite the disagreement in ideologies and beliefs.
“Admitting only speech (that) passes muster with the guardians of political correctness leads inevitably to coersion against dissent,” Wood said.
However, Wood established that the deeper issues of intellectual diversity were not exhausted by the decision of who from off-campus could or could not speak on campus. Rather, the deeper issues lie in what constitutes the daily campus culture.
“Do students live in a place where they not only encounter diverse ideas but in fact do encounter such ideas as part of the substance of their education?” Wood said. “Do faculty members feel free to not only set forth controversial ideas but in fact set forth those ideas as the only legitimate way to teach some subjects, which serious and informed people have genuine differences of opinion?”
Wood believed American education has failed these tests, not because of its attempts to disinvite someone whose beliefs don’t correlate with the majority of a campus but because American education overwhelmingly disinvites non-progressives from faculty appointments.
According to a recent study that examined the political party registrations of 8,688 tenured and tenure-track professors at the top 51 liberal arts colleges in the U.S., 78 percent of the academic departments had zero or only one Republican affiliate.
“But this isn’t news,” Wood said. “Higher education is perfectly aware that the faculty has been overwhelmingly tilted toward the progressive left; the same is true for the administration and staff. The result is an alienation of American higher education to broader American society.”
Wood asserted that asking people to take on the genuine diversity of ideas and the broader world is “like asking a taxidermic bird to sing — it just isn’t it.”
Wood recognized the difficulty disagreements present and admitted it can lead to many professors feeling jeopardized in their self-images as those who care about their students and the improvement of society.
“But so it must be,” Wood said. “Our colleges and universities become stagnant if we do not allow those wrong and dangerous views to be presented and presented as a legitimate part of the curriculum, not just drive-by lectures.”
Unchartered futures appear when disparaging views may be presented. Further, Wood acknowledged that previously held views might be transformed at the encounter of new ideas and students will be given greater knowledge to ponder and sort through in their educational journies.
“I believe those are risks worth taking," Wood said. "So many of today’s students profess to caring more about safe spaces than they do about hazards of an open mind or the wonder of finding out. We owe our students and our society a better vision and quest for knowledge by embracing intellectual diversity.”
The Critical Conversation Speakers Series continues April 16 with The New York Times columnist and best-selling author, Frank Bruni, and his discussion on closed minds on campus.
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