OPINION:
Campus shout-downs, disinvitations and academic cancellations are so common today that hundreds have been documented in recent years. For every incident that makes headlines, there are surely dozens more that do not.
Much has been written about Stanford Law School’s recent embarrassment, which stands out in a long parade of them because a diversity, equity and inclusion administrator joined students in verbally abusing a federal judge. With law students chanting and shouting to prevent his remarks, Judge Kyle Duncan of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asked a school administrator to restore order to the classroom. Instead of asking students to muster some civility or leave the lecture hall, Tirien Steinbach, associate dean for DEI, delivered prepared remarks accusing Judge Duncan’s work of “literally deny[ing] the humanity of people.”
Her conduct was so egregious that the university president and law dean issued a formal apology. That provoked one-third of the law school’s class to don masks and dress in black to protest the apology.
Why were students so angry? It was not the topic Judge Duncan was invited to lecture about — how appeals courts interact with the Supreme Court when precedent is in flux. Instead, the students were irate that he had once issued a judgment declining to force prison officials to use female pronouns in reference to a male prisoner locked up on child pornography charges.
The incident is a vivid reminder that “woke” ideology is a threat to collegiate learning as we know it. Here we have aspiring lawyers at one of the country’s most prestigious law schools refusing to learn about the federal court system from a federal judge because they disagreed with him on an entirely unrelated matter. Whether Stanford-educated lawyers who launch into hysterical theatrics when confronted by an idea they dislike will be much good at their jobs is a question potential employers should be asking.
The point of this intimidation and abuse is power, of course. Activists are working to reshape the intellectual environment by making dissent from the far-left university orthodoxy so unpleasant that right-leaning students and faculty will hold their tongues — or better yet, pretend fealty to the new campus creed.
Ostensibly, all of this is occurring to advance the ideals of diversity, equity and inclusion. In reality, DEI activists are destroying the American university and robbing students of their best chance to pursue a “small l” liberal education. That is a point that gets insufficient attention: DEI activists are not just imperiling free inquiry; they are also undermining the kind of learning that builds analytic ability, develops strength of character, and fosters civil dialogue.
The harm done will be borne by students in the short term and by American society for decades to come in serious and concrete ways.
First, the campus viewpoint of monoculture makes it more difficult to develop critical thinking and analytic writing skills. Learning to think and write is like learning to play the violin: It takes thousands of hours of practice assessing the quality of arguments (and then trying to articulate a reasoned judgment in clear and precise prose).
This requires identifying and interrogating underlying assumptions, comparing and contrasting accounts, and assessing the credibility of sources and the reliability of evidence. Practice analyzing the appropriateness of an experimental design or the validity of inductive and deductive steps in a reasoned argument builds the same muscle.
“Woke” ideology purports to answer all the big questions in a range of humanities and social sciences disciplines, making the intellectual work that once defined a liberal education unnecessary. Instead of learning to think, students graduate accustomed to reading like plundering soldiers: collecting evidence that supports a predetermined faith position and rejecting data that raises difficult questions.
Second, leaders on the left are making a mistake by teaching “young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want,” according to a recent essay by Matt Yglesias. He wonders whether higher (and rising) rates of depression among young liberals might be a consequence of the left’s growing propensity to interpret offensive or unwelcome speech as profoundly harmful. Doing so builds shallow, brittle personalities — students prone to emoting explosively but who struggle to communicate calmly and reason carefully.
The alternative is to welcome the opportunity to wrestle with uncomfortable ideas, including those that force emotionally difficult reflection on core features of individual identity. That helps to build depth of character, resilience and grit — the ability to deal with adversity productively instead of melting down into catastrophizing hysterics.
Third, college campuses should expose students to a wide variety of perspectives and viewpoints. Interacting with — and even befriending — those with whom one vehemently disagrees teaches students that people of goodwill can disagree respectfully. This behavior builds tolerance for a range of viewpoints and can teach students to err on the side of assuming good intentions. In this way, viewpoint diversity on campus fosters norms of civil deliberation — habits graduates can take with them into broader society. None of this can happen, though, on campuses that build stifling viewpoint monocultures.
Exposing students to heterodox ideas is a particularly important mission for law schools because their graduates may not encounter such ideas in their professional lives. For example, an examination of contributions from employees at America’s top 100 law firms by gross revenue reveals that, between 2017 and 2020, 97 of these firms contributed more to Democrats than Republicans. In dollar values, the donations favored the left by a nearly 6-to-1 ratio, with $61 million donated to Democratic-affiliated groups and just $11 million donated to Republican groups. Though the 2016 and 2020 elections show the general electorate is narrowly divided by a handful of percentage points, the legal profession is dangerously close to becoming an ideological monoculture.
The battle to protect and restore free inquiry on college campuses is just beginning. That DEI activists often violate the First Amendment and norms of academic freedom is a powerful argument against their intolerance. But we must also remind educators and administrators why those ideals are so essential. Without them, liberal education becomes next to impossible. DEI warriors cannot kill off liberal learning completely, because students will always yearn to explore the big questions. But they can drive it off college campuses into new institutions, mediums and underground universities.
• Jonathan Pidluzny is the director of the Higher Education Reform Initiative at the America First Policy Institute. Richard Lawson is the executive director of the Constitutional Law Partnership at the America First Policy Institute.
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