Unlearning Liberty

The truth is, we live in certain times.

I know the saying is that we live in uncertain times, but that is not the case today. America’s metaphorical culture war increasingly feels like a religious war, with too many crusaders and high priests and too few heretics on each side. And yet, the number of educated Americans is at an all-time high and growing. With nearly 70% of high school graduates attending college, upwards of 30% of the population already holding a college degree, and our national discourse dominated by those who have a BA at minimum, one might expect that we’d be in a golden age of thoughtful, creative, intelligent debate and discussion. But that is not the America we live in. The most overlooked reason for this paradox is that the best hope for improving discourse and fostering a deeper, smarter national dialogue, higher education, is failing miserably. And it’s failing largely due to 30 years of censorship on campus, which has taught students to use cheap tricks to shut down discussion rather than stimulate debate, and a system that rewards uncritical minds and unreflective certainty rather than bold scholarly skepticism and doubt.

Recent studies show that students are unwilling to express themselves in the classroom, afraid to hold unpopular views on campus, and are failing to develop critical thinking skills to an embarrassing degree. This is the natural result of a campus environment where you can actually get in trouble for expressing the “wrong” opinion, for engaging in the “wrong” kind of devil’s advocacy, or for provoking discussion with irreverent or unapproved ideas. At the same time, we are paying more and more for higher education, which, perversely, expands the very campus bureaucracy that fosters this anti-free speech environment.

On campus today, students get in trouble for everything from mild satire, to politically incorrect short stories, to having the “wrong opinion” on virtually every hot button issue, and, increasingly, simply for criticizing the college administration. Most campuses cling to speech codes that violate First Amendment principles, without understanding that they not only chill speech but teach students that maybe an open exchange of ideas really isn’t such a good thing.

With all of this going wrong in our society’s “sophistication machine,” it was just a matter of time before the cultivation of bad intellectual habits in our educated classes started damaging the way our entire country talks within itself.