This summer, Claremont McKenna’s Jon Shields and two colleagues examined the perspectives college students are assigned to read when it comes to controversies like racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion. On these topics, Shields et al. identified the most heavily cited and widely assigned texts, like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Edward Said’s seminal pro-Palestinian volume Orientalism, and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” The study then asked how frequently “these canonical works were assigned with their most important intellectual critics.”
The answer: rarely. The New Jim Crow, which holds that criminal justice should be seen as a facet of a larger struggle between white supremacists and advocates for racial justice, has been assigned 5,389 times in the Open Syllabi Project database. More than 90 percent of the time, it’s unaccompanied by a competing scholarly perspective. Instead, it’s more likely to be assigned alongside works by authors with similar views, such as Coates, Michel Foucault, or Angela Davis. As Shields et al. explain, “It seems that professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreements that shape these important controversies. That is the academic norm, at least in the cases we studied.”
Asked to explain what’s driving these results, Shields mused:
In some cases, professors may not sincerely know that the book they’re teaching has been the subject of scholarly controversy. If you’re a literature professor and you’re teaching The New Jim Crow, you might not be aware, earnestly and honestly, that James Forman Jr. wrote Locking Up Our Own and Michael Fortner wrote Black Silent Majority. But I suspect that mostly what’s happening is the politicization of the faculty. Some professors just . . . very consciously develop courses that have a particular agenda.
I received a note the other week from the dean of one of the nation’s public policy schools. He’d attended a convening of fellow deans where one had presented some data on the ideological imbalance of faculty and asked how it might impact teaching and research. He reported that the whole topic was met with general dismissiveness, with some deans challenging the premise that there exists any imbalance and others explaining that their priority is ensuring the safety and well-being of their students and faculty. (I think the implication was that a conservative intrusion would threaten that safety and well-being. Sigh . . .)
As I see it, the point of merit-based science and academic inquiry is to enable scholars to challenge received wisdom, students to wrestle with uncomfortable questions, and the academy to serve as a place of exploration rather than ossified groupthink. As Yale’s iconic “Woodward Report” put it in 1974:
The primary function of a university is to discover and disseminate knowledge by means of research and teaching . . . The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.
Safeguarding that tradition demands a consistent, principled defense. On that count, campus leaders have fallen short time and again over the past decade, bowing instead to progressive politics and campus convention. The truly maddening thing is that they kept brushing off calls to do better. Today’s posturing is a day late, a dollar short, and, unfortunately, far too politically expedient to take seriously. It’s not that I disagree with what elite campus presidents have said over the past week or two—it’s that these leaders have no standing to say it with a straight face.
You know that old saw, “Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets”? Campus leaders may be making the right call on Trump’s Compact, but they’ve an ocean of work to do before their stance deserves to be deemed anything more than a conversion of convenience. It’s a deeply unfortunate state of affairs for all of us who believe in the promise of higher education.
