In Defense of Higher Education

We are being irresponsibly and unfairly attacked for partisan ends.

I don’t usually get angry at what I read, but I am sensitive to attacks on education.  Particularly, what I see as an attempt to deflect attention away from real problems by conjuring a spectral distortion of “race theory,” and thus mounting a slash and burn attack on many good scholars and competent administrators.

The anti-intellectual rigidity they see in others, I find in their own arguments.  There is always the possibility that an unsupported theory will gain wide acceptance in an academic field and that its supporters will make absolutist claims about its importance. I think we can safely say that evidence of widespread misuse of critical race theory is nonexistent. But these partisans seem bent on alleging a nearly incurable taint to the whole enterprise of the humanities and the social sciences and mounting a crusade against higher education.

Let me try to take them at their word and be serious about their charges.  First, I think we might all agreed that “critical race theory” is a specific reference to a component of graduate school seminars on specific social structures than imbed discriminations that affect people of color in the United States.  (As such it should be viewed as a tool for the study of several important social issues, insightful and worth consideration.) It is not a general view of racism or the history of racism. 

Second, I think we need to see this as an irresponsible attack on a real problem inherent in the very nature of education as a social practice: assertions about the world are often construed by the listener as truths about the world.  Even those social science and literary theories that seem relatively well grounded are just that, “theories,” and are offered in good faith in classrooms, as testable hypotheses and plausible explanations of “social fact.” 

I can speak best about theories in social science, and I candidly admit that I could not stop my students from taking what I said in class or in causal conversation as more inherently true than I intended.  Here is the problem.  In teaching what at the present is a consensus view among scholars in a field, you are stating as close as possible a fact, i.e. information about the views of an important sub-group.  I see no fault with that.   If you are going to be a sociologist, you need to know what presently is “best practice” in the field.  You are NOT saying, however, that what these scholars present, their consensus view, is an absolute truth. 

And this particular consensus view, critical race theory, is not in itself all that controversial.  Sociologists have long shown that constraints are imposed on individual behavior by the norms, rules, laws, conventions, and structures of society.  The observation that these constraints affect different people and different groups of people in different ways is evidence based and relatively noncontroversial. 

Of course, one can push any theoretical interpretation too far.  The social scientist in me readily admits this and then asks for some credible evidence as to the extent it is being done. The exact impact of social constructions on behavior is a valid topic of research.  Do differential policing strategies result in effects that disproportionately impact one group more than another?  Let’s look and see.  Scholars do not assume without investigation and evidence.  Theory might suggest that it does.  Theory without evidence is not a strong basis for policy.  Academics know this and practice this.  Is there any study that shows that many scholars act differently?  Show me, and I’ll give it the careful attention that it deserves, but only as much as it deserves, given its standards and methods.  That is science. 

True academics regret when their findings are misunderstood and misapplied. Public figures must do all they can to correct this.  Not exploit it. I suspect that current understandings of race in American are not such a problem, but again, the more it is, the more we need to commit resources to its correction.  That’s how public policy should function. 

I do not, though, accept the use of a “bad apples” critique (with no effort to determine the proportion in the basket) to start a crusade against education in order to advance the interests of one or another political party.

We need free and open centers of learning. We need to nurture and respect our universities, among the greatest in the world. We need educated citizens.  We need broader minds and perspectives.  We need our leaders to be “readers,” i.e. consumers of the best ideas that our universities can provide.   

I have rarely met in all my years in higher education, from Yale to Washington University to Georgia to Heidelberg to the American University of Malta, scholars who are closed minded and avidly partisan.  A few, yes.  Of course.  We are talking about a great number of the most respected institutions in our society with one of the most dedicated and ethical group of employees.  Actually, I have often claimed that their real fault lies elsewhere.  Like all of us they may be too cautious, too hesitant to accept new ideas, too CONSERVATIVE.  [Footnote: It’s not been all that bad.  It has let me and others play the rebel.]