When left wingers use the term "Critical", they mean "Critical Theory", not "Critical Thinking":
Opinion | Why Higher Ed Won’t Look Itself in the Mirror
"I traveled to Washington for a meeting of American education scholars. The opening panel focused — appropriately enough — on Trump’s threats to university funding, free speech on campus, and more. Then it was time for questions, and I raised my hand. I said that I agreed with all the critiques of Trump, but I also wondered what those of us who work in higher education might have done — or not done — to bring about this awful moment. Could we use it to look in the mirror, I asked, and not just to circle the wagons?
Dead
silence. Then another member of the audience spoke up. “I just wanted
to say that I was deeply offended by Professor Zimmerman’s use of the
term ‘circle the wagons,’ which connotes a hateful history of Native
American displacement and genocide,” she said, as I remember it. More
awkward silence. Finally, the moderator of the panel interjected with
something along the lines of: “Thank you for reminding us that we need
to be careful in the language that we use to describe others.” So the
panel began with a diatribe about Donald Trump’s assault on free speech
and it concluded with a warning to watch our words.
For the past 75 years, academics have been telling a story about how we enhance democratic dialogue and understanding. Yet we don’t really believe it. If we did, the moderator would have asked the objecting scholar to say more about why she bridled at my phraseology. Then the moderator would have asked me to reply, and eventually we might have gotten around to the substance of my question, which concerned the delicate matter of what degree of introspection, what sort of critical self-examination, might be required of professors and teachers amid the current crisis. None of that happened, of course. The moderator drew the panel to a moralistic and satisfyingly evasive close, and we all went out to lunch.
“Out to lunch” is where much of higher education is — oblivious about how we got here and how we might change course. Yes, Trump represents a dagger at our heart; and yes, we must join hands to resist him. But long before he came to power, growing numbers of Americans — and not just Republicans — were starting to see higher education as something of a scam. We charge ever-higher sticker prices for degrees of increasingly dubious worth, even as we proclaim our commitment to the public good. To make good on that ideal, we cannot simply circle the wagons. We need to look in the mirror...
Truman
received a pair of high-profile reports that defined the contours of
American higher education for the next half a century. The first, Science: The Endless Frontier,
called on the federal government to subsidize university research that
would improve Americans’ health, national security, and standard of
living. The second, Higher Education for American Democracy,
urged the government to help people attend college. That would create a
more equal society, as well as a more virtuous one: Bringing greater
numbers of students into higher education, it would also foster the
skills and the understanding that good citizenship demanded.
Universities
would receive considerable autonomy in deciding how to use federal
dollars and in exchange they would provide the technical know-how and
the democratic spirit to sustain the nation. Education scholars call
this the “academic social contract.”...
When did the contract start to unravel? One common story links it to the
student demonstrations and social upheavals of the 1960s, which soured
taxpayers — especially those on the right — against higher education.
Ronald Reagan won the governorship of California in 1966 by pledging to
“clean up the mess at Berkeley,” which had exploded in protest two years
earlier. (He also railed against campus “hippies,” whom Reagan famously
described as “someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and
smells like Cheetah.”) Yet tuition remained free for in-state students
until 1970, when California instituted a nominal $150 fee. The big
nationwide tuition increases did not kick in until the 1980s, as state
legislatures started to slash their higher-education budgets. After
Reagan ascended to the White House, the federal government reduced
student aid by 25 percent over five years.
Yet the universities were backtracking on their side of the bargain,
too. Despite the Truman-era promise to educate young people for
democracy, universities eliminated core courses designed to introduce
students to the liberal traditions of Western thought; in some quarters
the West itself was imagined as a source of oppression rather than
liberation. Colleges also cut back on distribution requirements, which
had forced students to take classes in a wide range of disciplines in
what used to be described as “Gen Ed.” Now each student would choose
their curricular adventure: They were paying their own way, so they also
got to select their own courses.
At the same time, higher education created systems that rewarded faculty
research and downgraded undergraduate instruction. Any professorial
effort in the classroom meant less time in the laboratory or the
library, where careers were won or lost. That was already apparent in
1947, when the Higher Education for American Democracy report called on professors across the disciplines to teach and model the habits of democracy...
The report also demanded that every professor receive rigorous training in how to teach... most professors still receive almost no formal preparation for these
tasks. To get a Ph.D., you must spend six to eight years mastering a
field and making an original contribution to it. But at the University
of Pennsylvania, where I work, teaching assistants receive three days of
training before they are thrown to the undergraduate wolves.
Professors
cannot fulfill their obligations to their students — and to our
democracy — if they are not deeply committed to educating them. That
means exposing them to a wide range of ideas, which was once the heart
of the liberal ideal. But no longer. In a recent study,
the political scientist Jon A. Shields and two colleagues surveyed
course syllabi to see if professors who assigned Edward Said’s Orientalism also asked students to read Ian Buruma’s and Avishai Margalit’s Occidentalism or other critiques of Said. They also looked to see whether teachers teaching The New Jim Crow,
Michelle Alexander’s now-canonical account of racism in criminal
justice, also assigned scholars who took issue with Alexander, such as
the Yale Law School professor James Forman Jr. or the Princeton
sociologist Patrick Sharkey. Shields’ conclusion was sad and altogether
predictable: These kinds of pairings, these efforts at fairness and
complication, are extremely rare.
Despite our rhetorical commitment to “critical thinking,” we typically
present one side of an issue — the left-wing side, almost always — and
call it a day. Such a practice is not simply a reflection of political
bias, although it is surely that. It is also a mark of bad teaching.
Professors generally refuse to admit any of this, which compounds the
problem. We are like little children who close their eyes in the hopes
that nobody can see them. That was apparent during the fateful testimony
by three college presidents in December 2023 before a congressional
committee investigating antisemitism on campuses following the Hamas
attack on Israel and the subsequent war in Gaza. Asked whether calls for
genocide would be protected speech, the presidents answered — correctly — that it depends on the context.
But here is what they did not say: Universities have not defended this
principle consistently. At Harvard, for example, the eminent
evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven was effectively pushed out for
saying that there are a multiplicity of genders but only two sexes: male
and female. “In what world is a call for violence against Jews
protected speech, but a belief that sex is biological and binary isn’t?”
Harvard president Claudine Gay was asked. She replied that Harvard
supports “constructive dialogue, even on the most complex and divisive
issues.” The Hooven episode proved the opposite, of course.
When Gay was asked whether Harvard prepared its professors to engage
students in that dialogue, she dissembled still further. “We devote
significant resources to training our faculty in that pedagogical skill
and prioritizing that in our recruiting and hiring,” she said. Really? I
have been a professor for three decades, and I have never seen a hiring
decision or a tenure decision that hinged on teaching ability or
accomplishments. Nor have I witnessed any required pedagogical training
for faculty.
We all have Centers on Teaching and Learning, which began in the 1960s
in response to student protests about poor instruction. But the centers
cannot force anyone to participate in their programming, and they
certainly cannot reward good teachers or penalize bad ones. If we truly
valued teaching, we wouldn’t need a separate unit of the university that
was devoted to it. Designed to elevate instruction, the centers
demonstrate our low estimation of it. Ditto for teaching awards, another
legacy of the 1960s: Everyone knows you can make more money by
finishing your book — and getting promoted to the next salary rung —
than you can via a one-off prize...
I am also mortified that our own institutions have done such a poor job
in upholding the values that Trump is undermining. The big question is
whether we can rediscover them, and how.
In
Alcoholics Anonymous, the first step to recovery is admitting that you
have a problem. Most of my colleagues aren’t there yet. The trauma of
Trump is too fresh, too raw, too painful. When a group is under attack,
its initial impulse will be to defend itself. Thus, everything our team
says is right and everything the other team says is wrong. Mocking the
idea that universities are biased against conservatives, the American
Association of University Professors — our most august academic
organization — recently posted
that “fascism generally doesn’t do great under peer review.” In other
words: The reason we have so few Republican professors is because they
are brownshirts in disguise. We do not have to engage or debate them;
indeed, we must not engage or debate them.
As an analysis of the views of people with whom liberals disagree, this
is shameful. Our interlocutors may be wrong, but that does not make them
evil. And this kind of condescending dismissal is also a terrific way
to avoid the hard questions about our own complicity in the degradation
of the university...
We know that growing numbers of Americans have lost faith in us. And so
we tell ourselves that they are racist, or anti-intellectual, or so
blinded by the Trump cult that they cannot see how good we really are.
And we imagine that anyone who doubts us must be on his side. This is
what conservatives mean when they talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome:
It prevents us from thinking straight. It is a cognitive impairment
nearly as obscene as Trump himself. But surely we can circle the wagons
against him while continuing to look at ourselves in the mirror. Or
maybe not so surely — but we must try...
The big problem in higher education is not our scientific-research
apparatus, which was the envy of the world before Trump took a
sledgehammer to it. It is our abandonment of the ideal that propelled us
to build up universities in the first place: the cultivation of
citizens. Students come to college for all kinds of reasons: to have
fun, to get a job, to find a mate. But they generally do not come here
to become better citizens in a democracy, as the report to Truman
envisioned they would.
What would it mean to reconstitute our universities around that goal?
Several universities — including my own — are developing new core
courses for first-year students that explore the history and the
challenges of democratic government, alongside other fundamental themes
in the humanities. Other institutions have established programs around
civic engagement and “dialogue across difference,” which has become
something of a cliché at the Trump-era university. And over 100 academic
leaders — calling themselves College Presidents for Civic Preparedness
— have partnered with the Institute for Citizens & Scholars
(formerly the Woodrow Wilson Foundation) to create new classes and other
campus initiatives to “prepare the next generation of well-informed,
productively engaged, and committed citizens.” This is all fine and good
— indeed, it is great — but it also feels a bit like our Centers for
Teaching and Learning: If we embraced our civic purpose fully and
honestly, we would not need to create special courses and initiatives to
enhance it.
Nor would we need separate schools of civic thought...
There is no organization called College Presidents for Teaching
Preparedness, because we do not prepare people to teach in our colleges.
That needs to change if we want to make good on our democratic charge.
Every department that produces new faculty members should have a set of
required courses devoted to the instruction of that discipline. And
every professor’s teaching — like their research — should be judged by
their peers. Student evaluations are important, but they are not enough.
I have taught at Penn for nine years, and nobody has observed me in the
classroom. I could be doing anything — or nothing.
We also need a set of institutional rankings around teaching, so that
students and their families can make informed choices about where to go
to college. When we survey Americans and ask them what makes for a good
university, they’ll often point to teaching quality. But there is no way
for them to know which institutions promote teaching excellence in
their classrooms. It is wonderful that many colleges are reviving their
curricula to address citizenship and democracy, but without skilled and
informed teachers, curricula alone are unlikely to make much of a
difference.
Effective teaching resembles a workable democracy in that it is premised
on free and open exchange. And if you think we have protected and
nourished that value at our colleges and universities, you haven’t been
paying attention. The current academic culture of fear, timidity, and
conformity is inimical to both education and democracy. Trump has ramped
up that fear, but he certainly did not create it. We created it. It is up to us, therefore, to undo it."
