True Intellectual Diversity
George Will Stans the Coming University of Austin
On Friday, the Washington Post’s George Will wrote a piece titled “How to build a university unafraid of true intellectual diversity”. In it, he celebrates the work being done to establish the University of Austin — which cleverly uses UATX as its moniker which will likely create confusing with its opposite UT-Austin, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
UATX won’t actually have students until 2024 and currently operates out of a nondescript office building on Capital of Texas Parkway. It is currently hoping to pursue accreditation from one of the agencies approved by the Department of Education. The school is hoping to take advantage of the current dearth of hiring in higher ed to identify potential faculty (especially drawing from those too conservative to make the cut in other searches). This summer UATX sponsored a set of workshops on what they called “forbidden courses” addressing the “great human questions of our time”.
Will celebrates the views of UATX founder Pano Kanelos, former president of St. John’s — a Great Books university.1 Here’s a telling paragraph from Will’s article:
Among America’s many broken institutions, higher education is, Kanelos thinks, “the most fractured.” In today’s academic caste system, full-time tenure-track professors do substantially less teaching than do graduate students or part-time adjunct teachers. Teaching and scholarship seem secondary to the nonacademic agendas of institutions’ bureaucracies, which grow like kudzu. Harvard University’s ratio of administrators to faculty is about 3 to 1; Stanford University has 15,750 administrative staff, 2,288 faculty. The bloat enforces “diversity, equity, inclusion” conformities, administers Title IX sexual policing and attends to the emotional serenity of students who feel “unsafe” around intellectual heterodoxy.
I find this paragraph typical of conservative critiques of higher education. Note the use of “caste system” to reference tenure. Kanelos correctly identifies the problems of administrative bloat, without dealing with the realities that promote those. For example, as enrollment became more competitive institutions devoted more resources that were intended to improve retention and graduation rates. DEI and Title IX are not about emotional security but about real issues of discrimination, harassment, and abuse on the basis of race or gender (in part again to keep students enrolled).
The patterns described in that paragraph aren’t limited to the Harvards and Stanfords of the world. They are cutting across all institutional types, as anyone who reads the Chronicle of Higher Ed or Inside Higher Ed knows. Full time faculty positions are being cut and either replaced with adjuncts or simply eliminated due to “program prioritization”.
Here’s how Will ends his tribute to UATX:
Recruiting faculty is facilitated by the flood of inquiries from professors weary of the walking-on-eggshells tensions on campuses, the American places where free discussion is most endangered. UATX, whose trustees include the intellectual luminaries Bari Weiss and Niall Ferguson, will be a safe space for the intellectually adventurous.
For an institution devoted to “the fearless pursuit of Truth” and intellectual diversity, it is telling that Will is excited about the potential of hiring faculty who will say what they think regardless of how its perceived by others.2 And it goes without saying that his excitement over Bari Weiss and Niall Ferguson as modeling "intellectually adventurous" is a bit beyond the pale.
It will not surprise regular readers of this newsletter that I Have Thoughts!
Over the course of nearly four decades, I taught sociology in Conservative Christian Universities. In the middle part of that period, I was an academic administrator often running interference for faculty whose views put them at odds with the constituency.
Teaching sociology meant that I would have to regularly introduce those forbidden topics: economic inequality, race and the nature of racial injustice, gender hierarchies and institution-level sexual abuse, the relationship between religion and power. There really is no other way to teach sociology.3 Many of my students, especially in general education courses, grew up in the rural areas surrounding the Christian University (a surprising number of schools are relatively rural thereby avoiding the sins of the city). They had little experiential connection to these difficult topics.
So I learned how to moderate my presentations with those students in mind. It’s not that I didn’t cover the topics, but I was more circumspect than I am now that I’m retired. I’m sure that the Kevin Sorbo character in the God’s Not Dead franchise has a real analog in higher education, but in my experience those are few and far between.
Like UATX, more Christian Universities profess that All Truth is God’s Truth. But at too many of those institutions, sounding like you’re LGBTQ+ affirming or concerned about the racial dynamics of police brutality or worried about why female faculty are underpaid relative to their male counterparts will earn you a chat with the Provost or the President or both.4
I have never seen someone critiquing Christian Universities for being concerned about the “safe spaces” necessary to keep students from “intellectual heterodoxy”. As I’ve been arguing here and elsewhere, that critique is needed. The future of Christian Higher Education depends not on battling “wokeness” but on making sure that graduates have the capacity to deal with the complex world they live in.
On a positive note, I can identify a couple of real examples of True Intellectual Diversity happening in Christian Higher Education. One came to light at the end of last month when Belmont’s president announced that they would start hiring Jewish faculty members in selected areas. Rather than seeing this as somehow wavering from mission, I’d argue that it’s a measure of how interfaith dialogue can work. And if the institutional ethos is strong, there is minimal risk.
The other example involves Calvin University. As I’ve noted here before, the Christian Reformed Church of North America elevated its position on traditional marriage from a social position to a doctrinal tenet. Because Calvin faculty sign a statement affirming their doctrinal alignment with the CRCNA, this caused concern about how affirming (or affirming-leaning) faculty might be at risk.
However, Calvin chose the path of Intellectual Diversity. Through the leadership of Provost (and friend) Noah Toly and others, the trustees allowed faculty members to dissent from the CRCNA position without risking their jobs. In a piece in Current, former Houghton President Shirley Mullen put it well:
In short, Calvin University is seeking to move to a new level of transparency in embracing the challenge of being faithful to church teaching, honoring the intellectual freedom essential to a university, making space for faculty journeys of individual conscience, modeling vibrant community life that accommodates disagreements with grace, and doing all this while carrying on its educational mission to students in the midst of massive cultural change.
These examples point to the key element of Intellectual Diversity for me. It is a willingness to recognize that there are reasonable points of disagreement and varieties of perspectives involved in the educational process. Intellectual Diversity comes not from celebrating certain voices (as in your Twitter feed over the past month) but by acknowledging the reality of diversity as the building blocks for truly effective education.
There are real echoes of folks like Alan Bloom and Bill Bennett here.
Again, readers of the Chronicle and IHE can see stories every week about problematic faculty-student interactions — here’s today’s entry: https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2022/12/19/arrest-student-class-roils-winston-salem-state?
Well there is, but I don’t consider it sociology. I remember a presentation I heard at a Christian Sociology conference on “Sociology and the Bible”. The presenter said that he noticed a reference to the healing of Peter’s mother-in-law and said “see, there’s Family!”. I was not impressed.
The one parent letter demanding my firing came because of something a social problems text claimed (about Reagan-era abortion gag rules in Mexico) that got explained to the parent (a leader in the state right to life organization) as if I had said it in class.