Ideas Over Identity
Over the last two months, nearly every newspaper in the country has run several front-page stories about problems in higher education. As a longtime faculty member, I can illustrate the cause for concern with a recent anecdote from campus.
At this event, I watched the audience respond to a speaker who argued (among other things) that immigrants to the US who learned English did better than those who did not. Afterwards, there was a long line of respondents who challenged the speaker’s point of view. One spoke for several minutes about how hurt she was by the speaker’s perspective. Another lamented the harm to immigrant communities that talks like these perpetrated. A third wanted the speaker to know how offended he was that a monoglot would tell other people to learn a second language. And so forth. Finally, I stood up and asked the following question: “Does anyone think that what our speaker said is true?” The room went quiet.
The sketch illustrates a common theme on campuses these days: we are so focused on our personal reception to ideas that we’re overlooking the evaluation of those ideas. We closely monitor how we feel about ideas or rely on intuitions about the consequences of ideas instead of trying to figure out whether they are true. That’s a betrayal of the university’s founding purpose. Universities were built to discover deep truths about the world and teach those truths to the next generation. As such, universities are fundamentally epistemic institutions. Student and faculty engagement with ideas should be aimed at clarifying and vetting them to see which are true and which are not.
For example, think of how differently this discussion over immigrants and language could have gone. The audience could have pressed the speaker in any number of relevant ways. What counts as “doing better”? Having a higher college completion rate? Earning a higher income? Attaining higher rates of home ownership? Having children with a lower infant mortality rate? And how do we know that this is true? Are there peer-reviewed studies showing that immigrants who learn English do better in these ways? How large was the sample? What are some of the confounding variables that might better explain the correlations—perhaps immigrants who learn English also happen to have college-educated parents? And so forth.
But my students at the event didn’t get to have this discussion. They were shortchanged because our campus culture is focused on identities over ideas, emotion over truth. The audience at the recent talk was focused on how they felt about the ideas presented rather than the evidence for them. This approach makes it difficult to have enlightened discussions on any topic that raises offense or challenges anyone’s deeply held conceptions about themselves or the world we inhabit. Are men more violent than women? Does the Protestant work ethic explain economic success? Should sports be segregated by sex or gender? Is IQ a good measure of intelligence? Are religious people more generous than secular people? Does the American economy perform better under Democratic or Republican presidents?
While these questions might provoke offense, that doesn’t tell us whether they are good questions to ask. Some truths are offensive; some are not. The fact that an idea bothers you doesn’t tell you whether it’s true. At best, it tells you something about yourself. There was once a time when we knew that our emotional responses to ideas weren’t good evidence of their accuracy. That’s a lesson we need to rediscover.
And college campuses should lead the way. We need to rebuild a campus culture focused on the honest and level-headed evaluation of ideas on their evidential merit. That’s particularly important for inconvenient or offensive truths that are both important yet emotionally charged. That’s why my standard advice to incoming freshmen is to think about their thinking. When you encounter a strange or provocative idea on campus, don’t ask how you feel. Ask whether it’s true.
