What Happens When Universities Put Ideologies Before Academic Values?

When a particular ideology controls universities, they cease functioning as educational institutions, writes Patrick Keeney. Jorge Salcedo/Shutterstock

Commentary

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?

History provides some clues. For example, Soviet genetics research was effectively destroyed by Lysenkoism. This pseudoscience vehemently rejected the theory of natural selection and instead aligned itself with the official ideology of Marxism-Leninism. Scientists who dared to deviate from the official line were dealt with harshly—either fired, sent to the gulags, or executed.

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.

Unfortunately, we have allowed DIE to regulate the function of our universities. For example, many faculty positions are now restricted by race, as in a recent job posting at the University of Victoria for a full-time assistant professor in the music school. The posting specifies that “selection will be limited to members of the following designated group: Black people.” In posting such advertisements, universities abandon the educational objective of finding the best candidate. Instead, they serve overtly political ends, namely, furthering the ideology of Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity (DIE).

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.”

From first principles, ideologies make claims about the world that are immune from falsification by either experience or logic. They ignore the nuanced, mysterious, and multifaceted world we live in and insist on a sort of sterile certainty. They impose a world where facts are seen only through the lens of a preconceived theory. Events are placed on a Procrustean bed and stretched or shrunken to fit the preferred ideological narrative. Hence, in the DIE understanding, the Christmas and Easter holidays are systemically discriminatory legacies of colonialism, as the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal recently informed us.

Ideologies are anathema to the academic mission and the distinctive role of the university. Here is how the Kalven Commission at the University of Chicago put it: “The mission of the university is the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge. Its domain of inquiry and scrutiny includes all aspects and all values of society. A university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices, and institutions.”

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.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.