Civility and conformity

Universities claim to want students who can disagree with each other, but once admitted they'll encounter few professors who deviate from progressive orthodoxy, writes Ross Douthat in the New York Times. Class discussions will occur within "the safety of received opinion."

"Intellectual curiosity about the distant past, a territory in which forbidden authors or dangerous ideas can be encountered from a purely historical perspective" may be tolerated, he writes. But no heresies are tolerated in discussions of current controversies.

He looked at the syllabus for Columbia’s core curriculum last year. "The assigned readings for the world before the 20th century represent a reasonable diversity of worldviews and opinions," Douthat writes. "But once you reach contemporary controversies, the core’s perspective narrows to a frankly insane degree, with almost exclusively environmentalist, de-growth and anticolonial texts assigned to help students understand 'the insistent problems of the present'.”

Liberal and leftist professors could try argue to open discussions to more points of view, he concludes. "But by far the easiest way to give students a sense of the diverse perspectives of the world is just to have people who actually hold those perspectives teaching on your campus."

In his 18 months as Harvard's president, Alan Garber has tried to oppose "illiberalism in all its forms: its Trumpian variant, yes, but also illiberal forces within his own university," writes Franklin Foer in The Atlantic.

As a provost, Garber went along with the progressive zeigiest. But, he told Foer, "he developed a nagging sense that the campus was losing its capacity for difficult political conversation." Students demonized their intellectual opponents, if they dared to speak out. "Self-censorship shut down debates over race and identity even before they began."

"The leader of Harvard . . . knows that elite higher education is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, one that is, in no small measure, of its own making, because it gives fodder to those who caricature it as arrogant and privileged," writes Foer. Can he save Harvard?