Universities have always been the site of differing visions. But what happens to higher education when universities put social, political, or ideological values before academic values?
Similarly, in the universities of the Third Reich, at a time when German scholarship led the world in many fields, the majority of professors went along with Hitler’s monstrous political vision, even as their Jewish colleagues were being sent to the camps.
The history of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany has shown the disastrous effects of political ideology on education. When a particular ideology controls universities, they cease functioning as educational institutions. Instead, they become centres of indoctrination that serve the interests of the political power structure.
And lest we lull ourselves into thinking that the ideological capture of our universities could not happen here, the testimony before the U.S. Congress of the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT should give us pause. In failing to answer directly whether calls for Jewish genocide violated the speech codes on their campuses, these three university administrators, in their well-credentialed ignorance, vividly demonstrated the educational decay that currently plagues higher education—one that arises from a commitment to the contemporary political ideology of Diversity, Inclusivity, and Equity (DIE).
Now, it may be the case that society would be better if it were more inclusive or more directed toward equity. But the notion of “better” cannot be legislated beforehand but must itself be open to critical dispute. DIE raises difficult moral and political questions that invite criticism, debate, and disagreement. They are topics for discussion in the seminar room, not principles which should order university life.
Ideologies offer a grossly simplified and distorted version of the world. In her 1951 opus, “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt explained that ideologies start from “an axiomatically accepted premise, deducing everything else from it. ... Ideological argumentation [is] always a kind of logical deduction.”
The report quickly notes, “To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community.”
Universities and the community of scholars play a distinctive role in society. They provide a crucial forum where all ideas—no matter how passionately held or widely promulgated—can be challenged, debated, criticized, or rejected in their entirety. To cite the Klaven Commission again, “By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones. In brief, a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.”
Asking the university to serve a social, political, or ideological agenda inevitably comes at the cost of dispassionate engagement and critical inquiry into how the world stands. To close down debate in the name of a fashionable ideology is to cut off the university’s lifeblood and disown its “educational” raison d’etre.
The educational mission of our universities can be restored if scholars across disciplines reject the ideology of DIE and embrace a culture of academic freedom. To sustain the educational mission, universities must prioritize values that promote freedom of expression, academic freedom, openness, candour, and criticism, including criticism of DIE. Very simply, universities must once again prioritize educational values over dogmatic ideology.
