Aristotle often evaluated a thing with respect to its “telos”—its purpose, end, or goal. The telos of a knife is to cut. A knife that does not cut well is not a good knife. The telos of a physician is health or healing. A physician who cannot heal is not a good physician. What is the telos of a university?
The most obvious answer is “truth”—the word appears on so many university crests. For example, Veritas (“truth”) appears on Harvard’s crest, and Lux et Veritas (“light and truth”) appears on Yale’s. If we allow the word “knowledge” as a close relative of truth, then we take in many more university mottos, such as the University of Chicago’s, which, translated from Latin, is “Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.” (Even the fictional Faber College in the movie Animal House had the motto “Knowledge is good.”)1
Of course, universities are now complex multiversities that have many departments, centers, stakeholders, and functions. The president’s office has many goals besides pursuing the truth; so does the athletics department and the student health center. So do the students and the faculty. But why are all of these people and offices together in the first place? Why do people see universities as important and, until recently, as trusted institutions,2 worthy of receiving billions of dollars of public subsidy? Because there is widespread public agreement that the discovery and transmission of truth is a noble goal and a public good.
If the telos of a university is truth, then a university that fails to add to humanity’s growing body of knowledge, or that fails to transmit the best of that knowledge to its students, is not a good university. If scholars do not advance the frontiers of knowledge within their disciplines, or if they betray the truth to satisfy other goals (such as accumulating wealth or advancing an ideology), then they are not good scholars. If professors do not pass on to their students a richer understanding of the truth, as it has been discovered in their discipline, along with skills and habits that will make them better able to find the truth after they graduate, then they are not good professors.
There are alternative candidates one might propose for the telos of a university. Perhaps the most common alternative is something about progress, change, or making the world a better place. Karl Marx once critiqued the academy with these words: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”3 Some students and faculty today seem to think that the purpose of scholarship is to bring about social change, and the purpose of education is to train students to more effectively bring about such change.4
We disagree. The truth is powerful, yet the process by which we arrive at truth is easily corrupted by the desires of the seekers and the social dynamics of the community. If a university is united around a telos of change or social progress, scholars will be motivated to reach conclusions that are consistent with that vision, and the community will impose social costs on those who reach different conclusions—or who merely ask the wrong questions, as we saw in chapters 4 and 5. There will always be inconvenient facts for any political agenda, and you can judge a university, or an academic field, by how it handles its dissenters.
We agree with former Northwestern University professor Alice Dreger, who urges activist students and professors to “Carpe datum” (“Seize the data”).5 In her book Galileo’s Middle Finger, she contends that good scholarship must “put the search for truth first and the quest for social justice second.” She explains:
Evidence really is an ethical issue, the most important ethical issue in a modern democracy. If you want justice, you must work for truth. And if you want to work for truth, you must do a little more than wish for justice.6
For those who want to attend, teach at, or lead universities of the sort Dreger imagines, where the telos is truth, we offer advice based on the ideas and research we covered earlier in this book. We organize our suggestions under four general principles that can help universities thrive, even in our age of outrage and polarization. High school students should consider these principles when applying to college, and college counselors should consider these principles when recommending schools to prospective applicants and their parents. We hope that students, professors, alumni, and trustees will discuss these suggestions with the leadership and administration of their schools.
Endorse the Chicago Statement. Most colleges and universities, public and private, promise free speech, academic freedom, and freedom of inquiry in glowing language.7 But these preexisting commitments to free speech, many of which were written in the early twentieth century, have not stopped professors and students from being punished for what they say. That is why we recommend that every college in the country renew its commitment to free speech by adopting a statement modeled after the one affirmed by the University of Chicago in 2015. That statement, written by a committee chaired by legal scholar Geoffrey Stone, comprises a commitment to free speech and academic freedom updated for our age of disinvitations, speaker shoutdowns, and speech codes. Thus far, it has been adopted by administrations or faculty bodies at forty colleges and universities, including Amherst, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, and Vanderbilt.8
FIRE has produced a modified version of the Chicago Statement that can serve as a template for other schools (see Appendix 2). Here is the key passage:
The [INSTITUTION]’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the [INSTITUTION] community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the [INSTITUTION] community, not for the [INSTITUTION] as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose.
Colleges should also review their policies to ensure that they are consistent with the First Amendment. Public colleges are legally required to protect the expressive rights of students and faculty on campus, so making sure policies do not infringe on free speech is not only good for students, it also avoids the possibility of the college being on the losing side of a First Amendment lawsuit. As for the private colleges that promise freedom of speech, academic freedom, and free inquiry, revising (or eliminating) speech codes is a great sign that they are serious. Prospective applicants should take colleges’ speech codes into account when deciding where to apply, and college students should be aware of their own school’s policies.9
Establish a practice of not responding to public outrage. Strong and clear policies on free speech and academic freedom are useless if the people at the top aren’t willing to stand by them when the going gets tough and the leadership faces a pressure campaign—whether from on or off campus. A university will find it easier to stand by these principles if the president publicly commits to them at the start of each year, before any controversies break out. Of course, if a student or faculty member’s speech or behavior, whether online, in class, or in other campus settings, includes true threats, harassment, incitement to imminent lawless action, or any other kind of speech that is not protected by the First Amendment, the university should act. But even in these cases, university presidents should not act rashly; they should follow their own written policies and disciplinary procedures, which should be designed to ensure that any accused faculty member or student gets a fair hearing. The more reactive universities are to public outrage or illiberal demands for censorship and punishment, the more outrage and illiberal demands they will receive. In an age when outrage can be swift and intense but has a short half-life, universities should allow time for tempers to cool. This is particularly important for protecting junior and adjunct faculty, who can be fired far more easily than tenured faculty.
Do not allow the “heckler’s veto.” University presidents must make it clear that nobody has the right to prevent a fellow member of the community from attending or hearing a lecture. Protest that does not interfere with others’ freedom of expression is protected speech and is a legitimate form of productive disagreement. Boisterous protests that briefly interfere with the rights of other audience members may even be allowed. But if the sum total of protesters’ actions substantially interferes with the ability of audience members to listen, or the speaker to speak, then those who are responsible for the interference must face some punishment. Prospective students should avoid attending colleges that allow hecklers to disrupt events with no penalty.10
Admit more students who are older and can show evidence of their ability to live independently. As we said in the previous chapter, adulthood is arriving later and later, and this trend has been going on for decades.11 We believe there would be many benefits to students, to universities, and to the nation if a new national norm emerged of taking a gap year, or a year of national service, or a few years of military service, before attending college. Prestigious universities have enormous power to promote that new norm by announcing that they will give preference to students who take time off in ways that prepare them for independence. If universities stop admitting so many students whose childhoods were devoted to test prep and resume building and start admitting more students who can demonstrate a measure of autonomy, the culture on campus is likely to improve dramatically.
Admit more students who have attended schools that teach the “intellectual virtues.” If prestigious universities draw heavily from schools that emphasize intellectual virtues, like the one we described in the previous chapter, and that give students practice in debate, then many more K–12 schools will adopt this approach. The next generation of college students will be better prepared to engage with challenging ideas and diverse fellow students.
Include viewpoint diversity in diversity policies. Diversity confers benefits on a community in large part because it brings together people who approach questions from different points of view. In recent decades, as we noted in chapter 5, the professoriate and the student body have become more diverse by race, gender, and other characteristics but less diverse in terms of political perspectives. We suggest that universities add “viewpoint diversity” to their diversity statements and strategies. This does not require equal or proportional representation of political views among the faculty or students, and it does not require that all viewpoints be represented, but it does commit the university to avoiding political uniformity and orthodoxy. 12
Explicitly reject the Untruth of Fragility: What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. A university devoted to the pursuit of truth must prepare its students for conflict, controversy, and argument. Many students will experience their most cherished beliefs being challenged, and they must learn that this is not harassment or a personal attack; it is part of the process by which people do each other the favor of counteracting each other’s confirmation bias. Students must also learn to make well-reasoned arguments while avoiding ad hominem arguments, which criticize people rather than ideas. In summer reading suggestions and in orientation materials for new students, universities should clearly embrace the message of Ruth Simmons, former president of Brown University and the first black president of an Ivy League university: “One’s voice grows stronger in encounters with opposing views. . . . The collision of views and ideologies is in the DNA of the academic enterprise. We do not need any collision avoidance technology here.”13 Explain that classrooms and public lectures at your university are not intellectual “safe spaces.” (Of course, students have a right to freedom of association, and they are free to join and create those elsewhere, on their own time.14) Discourage the creep of the word “unsafe” to encompass “uncomfortable.” Show students the short video clip we described in chapter 4 of Van Jones urging them to forswear emotional “safety” and instead treat college as “the gym.”15
Explicitly reject the Untruth of Emotional Reasoning: Always trust your feelings. In orientations, colleges should emphasize the power of the confirmation bias and the prevalence of cognitive distortions. It is challenging to think well; we are easily led astray by feelings and by group loyalties. In the age of social media, cyber trolls, and fake news, it is a national and global crisis that people so readily follow their feelings to embrace outlandish stories about their enemies. A community in which members hold one another accountable for using evidence to substantiate their assertions is a community that can, collectively, pursue truth in the age of outrage. Emphasize the importance of critical thinking, and then give students the tools to engage in better critical thinking. One such tool is CBT. It is relatively easy to train students in CBT directly, or to offer free access to websites and apps that they can use on their own. (See Appendix 1.) Another tool is the OpenMind program, which equips students with the skills to navigate difficult conversations (see OpenMindPlatform.org).
Explicitly reject the Untruth of Us Versus Them: Life is a battle between good people and evil people. Look closely at how identity politics is introduced to first-year students, especially in summer readings and orientation materials. Draw on readings that take a non-moralistic, systems-level approach to understanding social problems. Given the diversity of the incoming class, including international students, it is a good idea to talk about the many ways that students may unwittingly offend or exclude one another, especially in this technologically supercharged age. Encourage politeness and empathy without framing issues as micro-aggressions. Try instead to use a more charitable frame, such as members of a family giving one another the benefit of the doubt; when problems arise, they try to resolve things privately and informally.
Throughout this book, we have emphasized a basic principle of social psychology: the more you separate people and point out differences among them, the more divided and less trusting they will become.16 Conversely, the more you emphasize common goals or interests, shared fate, and common humanity, the more they will see one another as fellow human beings, treat one another well, and come to appreciate one another’s contributions to the community. Pauli Murray expressed the power of this principle when she wrote, “When my brothers try to draw a circle to exclude me, I shall draw a larger circle to include them.”17 Students, professors, and administrators can all play an important role in widening that circle.
Foster school spirit. Some colleges work hard, in the opening weeks, to foster “school spirit” and forge a common identity. School spirit may sound trivial, but it can create a community of greater trust within which harder issues can be tackled later on.
Protect physical safety. We have argued throughout this book that emotional comfort should not be confused with physical safety. But as we showed in chapter 6, we live in a time when extremists increasingly use the internet and social media to threaten and harass students and professors, particularly those who are members of historically marginalized groups. Sometimes the threats leave the internet and come to campus. Universities must pay for adequate security; they must respond vigorously and work with campus police, local police, the FBI, and other authorities to investigate and punish threats and acts of violence, and they must do so consistently. Given frequent reports from students of color across the country regarding how they are sometimes treated by campus and local police, it is essential that police take extra care not to treat them like potential criminals. It is vital that students from all backgrounds are safe from physical attacks and know that their campus police are there to protect them.
Host civil, cross-partisan events for students. When a campus group invites speakers not for the quality of their ideas but for their ability to shock, offend, and provoke an overreaction, it exacerbates the mutual-outrage process we described in chapter 6. There are many organizations that can help bring interesting and ideologically diverse speakers to campus who can demonstrate the value of exposure to political diversity. If you are a student, try to enlist your school’s College Republicans and College Democrats to cohost events. Whether or not you succeed, consider starting a chapter of BridgeUSA, a student-run network that hosts constructive political discussions.18
Five questions alumni, parents, college counselors, and prospective students should ask universities:
What steps do you take (if any) to teach incoming students about academic freedom and free inquiry before they take their first classes?
How would you handle a demand that a professor be fired because of an opinion he or she expressed in an article or interview, which other people found deeply offensive?
What would your institution do if a controversial speaker were scheduled to speak, and large protests that included credible threats of violence were planned?
How is your institution responding to the increase in students who suffer from anxiety and depression?
What does your university do to foster a sense of shared identity?
Look for answers that indicate that the institution has a high tolerance for vigorous disagreement but no tolerance for violence or intimidation. Look for answers that indicate a presumption that students are antifragile, combined with the recognition that many students today need support as they work toward emotional growth. Look for answers that indicate that the institution tries to draw an encompassing circle around its members, within which differences can more productively be explored.
Many U.S. universities are having difficulties these days, but we believe the problems we discussed in this book are fixable. Combined with the changes we suggested in the previous chapter, the changes in this chapter can strengthen a university’s ability to pursue the telos of truth. A school that makes freedom of inquiry an essential part of its identity, selects students who show special promise as seekers of truth, orients and prepares those students for productive disagreement, and then draws a larger circle around the whole community within which everyone knows that they are physically safe and that they belong—such a school would be inspiring to join, a joy to attend, and a blessing to society.