An academic counterrevolution against the Enlightenment and critical thinking
The result is a fossilizing of minds and epidemic of bigotry
Universities, students, and politicians alike are engaged in a counterrevolution against the Enlightenment and critical thinking. Freedom of speech is turned on its head. Students are taught to vilify opposing viewpoints, and to denounce a free marketplace of ideas as a pretext for disturbing the putative infallibilities of unschooled youths. Any disagreement is assailed as a “microaggression.” Teaching the heliocentric theory of the universe might be banned because it upsets believers in the geocentric theory deduced from the Bible. This is madness on steroids—a national lobotomy.
John Stuart Mill recognized that 90 percent or more of what we believe depends on exposure to competing explanations that are found unconvincing or less persuasive. Shielding minds from new or rival ideas causes critical thinking to atrophy. Words without thoughts are meaningless.
Freedom of speech glitters when it strikes at the most fundamental beliefs of others. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas elaborated in Terminiello v. Chicago (1949): “[A] function of free speech under our system of government is to invite dispute. It may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger. Speech is often provocative and challenging. It may strike at prejudices and preconceptions and have profound unsettling effects as it presses for acceptance of an idea.”
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes underscored that discovery of truth is crippled if orthodoxies are shielded from challenge. He instructed in Abrams v. United States (1919): “[W]hen men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution.”
John Milton similarly denounced censorship in Aeropagitica: “Let her and Falsehood grapple; whoever knew Truth to be put to the worse in a free and open encounter.”
Voltaire, standing at the summit of the Enlightenment, reportedly avowed, “I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
The urgency of free speech is at its zenith in school settings. The Supreme Court amplified in Sweezy v. New Hampshire (1957): “The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident. No one should underestimate the vital role in a democracy that is played by those who guide and train our youth. To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation. No field of education is so thoroughly comprehended by man that new discoveries cannot yet be made. Particularly is that true in the social sciences, where few, if any, principles are accepted as absolutes. Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust. Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.”
The United States is racing away from these Enlightenment verities back to the Dark Ages. Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota is emblematic. It rebuked and declined to retain an adjunct professor, Erika Lopez Prater, for exhibiting to students a 14th-century painting showing a winged and crowned Gabriel pointing at the Prophet Muhammed and delivering to him the first Quranic revelation. The Professor also showed a second image, from the 16th century, depicting Mohammed wearing a veil. No student in the class raised concerns. There was no disrespectful commentary.
A student, president of the university’s Muslim Student Association, later complained that the paintings disrespected the Islamic prohibition on images of Prophet Mohammed. That understanding is not universal among Muslims. Omid Safi, a Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke University, said he regularly shows images of the Prophet in class (reported in the New York Times, January 8, 2023, p. 17). Professor Safi explains that these images were works of devotion created by pious artists at the behest of devout rulers. In fleeing to the United States during the Iraq-Iran war, Safi packed an image of Muhammed holding a Quran.
Professor Lopez Prater was scolded by the dean of the college of liberal arts. The University’s offer to teach the next semester was rescinded. David Everett, vice president for inclusive excellence, condemned the Professor’s class as “undeniably inconsiderate, disrespectful, and Islamophobic.”
If there are better ways to pulverize free speech and arrest critical thinking, they do not readily come to mind.
Censorship, thy name is academia. The Dark Ages are returning.
I have seen the report of The New York Times on the Hamline incident.
Let me unpack some of the details as the NYT reports them. (For this purpose, I will assume, arguendo, that the NYT got the facts of the story right. With the NYT, of course, one can never be entirely sure, as its editors have lately made clear that mere facts and objective reporting will not be allowed to get in the way of the propagation of necessary messages.)
Although some of Professor Prater's defenders have themselves descended into annoying gibberish (e.g., Christine Gruber at the University of Michigan inanely chirping about a need to "decolonize the canon") and Professor Prater herself was too quick to write an apology, I am hard pressed to see what Professor Prater did wrong.
Indeed, she bent over backwards to give "trigger warnings".
Perhaps she bent so far so as to trigger the very uproar she sought to avoid.
From the points of view of the discipline of art history in general and that of the history of Islamic art, in particular, and, certainly of academic freedom, her conduct was unexceptionable.
It is sad to see Hamline University so ill served by its administrators.
According to the NYT's report, one of those administrators has the title of "Vice President for Inclusive Excellence", and he behaved as one might expect by the holder of such a title: Opposed to inclusion and ignorant of excellence.
One would like to see the faculty rise up to defend one of its own, even though she is but a lowly adjunct.
The NYT report relates that, to his credit, a professor of religion at Hamline, Mark Berkson, attended an open campus meeting on the matter and asked challenging questions about the interplay between respect for the religious sensibilities of students and third parties, on the one hand, and academic freedom, on the other.
The report goes on to state that, in the very midst of the forum, as Professor Berkson raised his voice, at least socratically, in defense of academic freedom, none other than the Vice President for "Inclusive Excellence" sidled up to him and said something to the effect, "Now is not the time."
The NYT does not report whether or not the Vice President was chomping on a cigar and had a menacing bulge in his pocket.
The Vice President's actual words are unknown to me, but it seems his message was something out of Ring Lardner's world: "'Shut up', he explained."
According to the NYT, "Hamline’s president, Fayneese S. Miller, co-signed an email that said respect for the Muslim students 'should have superseded academic freedom.'"
Well, there you have President Miller's prioritization of things, and all things become clear.
/s/ Joseph A. Morris