You asked who had the better of this enlightening exchange. (Thanks for hosting it. I thought it was great, well done.)
I vote for Mounk, because I heard from him a more compelling vision for the future of academia -- one grounded in its historical role as a fearless truth-seeker rather than one where colleges are beholden to political ma…
You asked who had the better of this enlightening exchange. (Thanks for hosting it. I thought it was great, well done.)
I vote for Mounk, because I heard from him a more compelling vision for the future of academia -- one grounded in its historical role as a fearless truth-seeker rather than one where colleges are beholden to political masters with their thumbs on the scale of intellectual debate.
I heard two contending solutions to the woke crisis. Rufo wants to counteract wokeness by legislating content and building up conservative alternatives to, as he sees it, hopelessly woke-captured institutions. I understand that Rufo thinks that the laws he backs don't go as far as those laws' critics fear. Maybe he's right about that. Even so, their aim is clearly not to prevent indoctrination in general but rather to disfavor certain ideas. He wants to create conservative universities to counter liberal ones. He thinks that universities should heed and reflect the views of the people put in charge by a plurality of voters, and he calls that democracy. Well, it's democratic in a sense. But it has little to do with actual education. His approach ultimately fuels more siloing and polarization, the signature evil of our age of splintered media -- he wants Fox News U. to counter MSNBC U. -- and is fundamentally opposed to any responsible or worthy view of the purpose and aims of any university.
Here's what I mean: I attended the University of Chicago Law School from 2000-2003. It's nobody's idea of a woke stronghold, and it certainly wasn't then. Most agree that it's a safe space for conservatives and conservative legal scholarship. That's been its calling card for decades. So, I -- liberal Democrat that I was -- encountered the best arguments on behalf of conservative viewpoints, taking classes from the likes of the libertarian Richard Epstein, the conservative textualist 7th Circuit judge Frank Easterbrook, and others. (I also learned from my conservative classmates.) I'm glad I had that exposure, and I have greater understanding and appreciation of those views as a result. I even buy some of them, and I probably never would have otherwise.
At the same time, I also took classes from the likes of Barack Obama and Cass Sunstein (old-school liberals), and Catharine MacKinnon (often labeled a "radical feminist"), who was visiting one year I was there. I gained new appreciation of MacKinnon's views through her class and her magisterial casebook, Sex Equality and, once again, I have more sympathy for them than I probably otherwise would have had. And the thing about Obama and Sunstein -- the two who came closest to reflecting my own views -- is that they didn't indoctrinate. They wanted you to think, and they were masters of the core academic virtue of not just paying the other side lip service but really arguing it, for the sake of argument, and ultimately for the sake of enlightenment and deeper understanding. I didn't learn about conservative ideas just from conservatives but from liberals too. I hear Mounk doing likewise in his classes, where he teaches an intellectual tradition for which he personally has little sympathy and which he blames for the very crisis he agrees demands pushback. And good for him for doing that.
Would Rufo do the same? Would he even permit it? His vision for New College includes hiring "new faculty with expertise in constitutionalism, free enterprise, civic virtue, family life, religious freedom, and American principles."
All that of course is freighted language that basically means "conservative." How many of my University of Law School professors and lecturers would have satisfied his hiring criteria? I'm in favor of ideological diversification of universities. But I haven't heard Rufo say that he merely seeks greater balance. I perceive a zeal for indoctrination, except in the other direction. Rufo's frank appeal to ideas, his ideas, wedded to power is, to my ear, downright terrifying. I think Mounk is right to see a bit of the Marxist showing its face in Rufo's own approach.
Consider, as an alternative to Rufo's vision for New College, the mission statement of, say, Notre Dame, once again, nobody's idea of a hotbed of wokeness: "The University is dedicated to the pursuit and sharing of truth for its own sake. As a Catholic university, one of its distinctive goals is to provide a forum where, through free inquiry and open discussion, the various lines of Catholic thought may intersect with all the forms of knowledge found in the arts, sciences, professions, and every other area of human scholarship and creativity." See the difference? If you're not committed to doing something like that -- in short, as Mounk repeatedly intoned, "Veritas" -- no matter your inclinations or institutional commitments (to Catholicity in the case of Notre Dame), you're simply not an actual school. I don't dismiss Rufo as a right-wing hack, as many do. He's far smarter, as in intellectually, and interesting than that caricature would suggest. Still, I don't trust Rufo as a steward of veritas. Do you?
Rufo might reply, with exasperation, so what's your solution, because you say you don't trust me, but how can we trust the powers that be that have corrupted these institutions for so long? It's a fair point, but it ultimately points more in Mounk's direction than Rufo's: pushback from within the academic community and from the outside culture as well and from pressure groups like FIRE. Indeed, Rufo's own activism has been important in exposing excesses. I think we're already seeing that sort of pushback working.
I would perhaps go a bit further than Mounk in at least hearing out political reforms that could rein in bloated bureaucracy of all sorts, not just DEI, address the scandal of anti-Asian discrimination masquerading as merely nudgy affirmative action, and address shoddy scholarship and academic fraud across the board. To answer Rufo's challenge directly, I'm skeptical of "eliminating" DEI outright, because what that label means isn't entirely clear. Universities are required, after all, to enforce anti-discrimination mandates, mandates I basically agree with. They can do so fairly or unfairly. Doing so fairly doesn't counsel closing the office but rather doing it better, with, I'm sure, far fewer employees and codes.
Ultimately, though, Mounk is right. You're not going to unseat the Ivies as premier academic institutions, and, what's more, you shouldn't really want to. You should agitate to have them, and every school, live up to their core academic ideals.
You asked who had the better of this enlightening exchange. (Thanks for hosting it. I thought it was great, well done.)
I vote for Mounk, because I heard from him a more compelling vision for the future of academia -- one grounded in its historical role as a fearless truth-seeker rather than one where colleges are beholden to political masters with their thumbs on the scale of intellectual debate.
I heard two contending solutions to the woke crisis. Rufo wants to counteract wokeness by legislating content and building up conservative alternatives to, as he sees it, hopelessly woke-captured institutions. I understand that Rufo thinks that the laws he backs don't go as far as those laws' critics fear. Maybe he's right about that. Even so, their aim is clearly not to prevent indoctrination in general but rather to disfavor certain ideas. He wants to create conservative universities to counter liberal ones. He thinks that universities should heed and reflect the views of the people put in charge by a plurality of voters, and he calls that democracy. Well, it's democratic in a sense. But it has little to do with actual education. His approach ultimately fuels more siloing and polarization, the signature evil of our age of splintered media -- he wants Fox News U. to counter MSNBC U. -- and is fundamentally opposed to any responsible or worthy view of the purpose and aims of any university.
Here's what I mean: I attended the University of Chicago Law School from 2000-2003. It's nobody's idea of a woke stronghold, and it certainly wasn't then. Most agree that it's a safe space for conservatives and conservative legal scholarship. That's been its calling card for decades. So, I -- liberal Democrat that I was -- encountered the best arguments on behalf of conservative viewpoints, taking classes from the likes of the libertarian Richard Epstein, the conservative textualist 7th Circuit judge Frank Easterbrook, and others. (I also learned from my conservative classmates.) I'm glad I had that exposure, and I have greater understanding and appreciation of those views as a result. I even buy some of them, and I probably never would have otherwise.
At the same time, I also took classes from the likes of Barack Obama and Cass Sunstein (old-school liberals), and Catharine MacKinnon (often labeled a "radical feminist"), who was visiting one year I was there. I gained new appreciation of MacKinnon's views through her class and her magisterial casebook, Sex Equality and, once again, I have more sympathy for them than I probably otherwise would have had. And the thing about Obama and Sunstein -- the two who came closest to reflecting my own views -- is that they didn't indoctrinate. They wanted you to think, and they were masters of the core academic virtue of not just paying the other side lip service but really arguing it, for the sake of argument, and ultimately for the sake of enlightenment and deeper understanding. I didn't learn about conservative ideas just from conservatives but from liberals too. I hear Mounk doing likewise in his classes, where he teaches an intellectual tradition for which he personally has little sympathy and which he blames for the very crisis he agrees demands pushback. And good for him for doing that.
Would Rufo do the same? Would he even permit it? His vision for New College includes hiring "new faculty with expertise in constitutionalism, free enterprise, civic virtue, family life, religious freedom, and American principles."
https://www.tallahassee.com/story/opinion/2023/01/22/desantis-appointees-could-transform-new-college-for-the-better/69823125007/
All that of course is freighted language that basically means "conservative." How many of my University of Law School professors and lecturers would have satisfied his hiring criteria? I'm in favor of ideological diversification of universities. But I haven't heard Rufo say that he merely seeks greater balance. I perceive a zeal for indoctrination, except in the other direction. Rufo's frank appeal to ideas, his ideas, wedded to power is, to my ear, downright terrifying. I think Mounk is right to see a bit of the Marxist showing its face in Rufo's own approach.
Consider, as an alternative to Rufo's vision for New College, the mission statement of, say, Notre Dame, once again, nobody's idea of a hotbed of wokeness: "The University is dedicated to the pursuit and sharing of truth for its own sake. As a Catholic university, one of its distinctive goals is to provide a forum where, through free inquiry and open discussion, the various lines of Catholic thought may intersect with all the forms of knowledge found in the arts, sciences, professions, and every other area of human scholarship and creativity." See the difference? If you're not committed to doing something like that -- in short, as Mounk repeatedly intoned, "Veritas" -- no matter your inclinations or institutional commitments (to Catholicity in the case of Notre Dame), you're simply not an actual school. I don't dismiss Rufo as a right-wing hack, as many do. He's far smarter, as in intellectually, and interesting than that caricature would suggest. Still, I don't trust Rufo as a steward of veritas. Do you?
Rufo might reply, with exasperation, so what's your solution, because you say you don't trust me, but how can we trust the powers that be that have corrupted these institutions for so long? It's a fair point, but it ultimately points more in Mounk's direction than Rufo's: pushback from within the academic community and from the outside culture as well and from pressure groups like FIRE. Indeed, Rufo's own activism has been important in exposing excesses. I think we're already seeing that sort of pushback working.
I would perhaps go a bit further than Mounk in at least hearing out political reforms that could rein in bloated bureaucracy of all sorts, not just DEI, address the scandal of anti-Asian discrimination masquerading as merely nudgy affirmative action, and address shoddy scholarship and academic fraud across the board. To answer Rufo's challenge directly, I'm skeptical of "eliminating" DEI outright, because what that label means isn't entirely clear. Universities are required, after all, to enforce anti-discrimination mandates, mandates I basically agree with. They can do so fairly or unfairly. Doing so fairly doesn't counsel closing the office but rather doing it better, with, I'm sure, far fewer employees and codes.
Ultimately, though, Mounk is right. You're not going to unseat the Ivies as premier academic institutions, and, what's more, you shouldn't really want to. You should agitate to have them, and every school, live up to their core academic ideals.