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Emilie Kao
Emilie Kao is senior counsel and vice president of advocacy strategy with Alliance Defending Freedom.
What would cause a professor to risk losing lifetime tenure? At UNC-Chapel Hill, professors are risking their jobs by threatening to withhold grades until the school ends the suspensions of anti-Israel student protestors. The professors’ actions reveal how ideology has warped American higher education. Professors have taught neo-Marxist ideology that ranks groups on a scale of “oppression” for decades. This ideology produced the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views espoused by today’s protestors. As a Middle Eastern Studies major at Harvard in the 1990s, I never heard the Israeli side of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. And though Hamas was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of innocent Palestinians, I was simply taught that Israel was the oppressor.
Few of the student protestors today know about Hamas’ human rights abuses against the Palestinian people or the complex history of the Palestinian-Israel conflict. Instead, they have been conditioned to believe a simplistic narrative. Instead of asking questions, they have been taught that there is only one right answer: Israel is in the wrong.
In a 2021 article, two political science professors astutely referred to this kind of indoctrination as “training.” As they go on to explain, however, “the problem is that ‘training’ tends to assume that the truth is already known. It claims expert knowledge of truths about such complex and abstract things as ‘justice’ and ‘race’ and ‘gender.’ But when these ‘truths’ are, in fact, a matter of reasonable disagreement and current political contestation, the trainings become indoctrinations.”
“This ‘training,’ then, is ‘contrary to one of the chief ends of the university itself, which is the pursuit of truth,’” they observe. “To preserve the pursuit of truth, the university can’t place any matter beyond debate. As Hannah Arendt also observed, ‘Academic life requires asking the ‘unanswerable questions.’”
But today, as administrators, faculty, and students all know, some questions are “unaskable.”
At Harvard, faculty who dare to ask the “unaskable questions” are made into outcasts. Those whose views do not align with dominant narratives of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) on race, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity are turned into professional pariahs.
Professor Carole Hooven discovered what questions are off-limits when she wrote a book on the role of testosterone in explaining sex differences. The Harvard administration’s failure to defend her freedom to state that sex is biological and binary led her to resign. As she explains, “DEI culture” recasts even the mention of some “ideas as ‘dangerous’ or ‘harmful,’ which squashes viewpoint diversity and the open, vigorous debate that should be at the heart of a thriving institution of higher education.”
This undermines the university’s commitment to the integrity of knowledge and learning. The implementation of DEI requires our nation’s brightest academics to assent to approved opinions. After epidemiologist and Harvard School of Public Health Professor Tyler VanderWeele took disfavored positions on marriage and abortion, other academics condemned him and refused to work with him.
Students are paying a high price due to their professors’ ideological homogeneity. Instead of engaging in debates on morality, ethics, and policy, they evaluate whether a speaker is valid through the lens of their social identity. When a view that does not fit into the accepted beliefs is expressed, students would prefer to shout them down rather than debate.
Employers have taken notice. They rescinded job offers to students associated with letters blaming Israel for the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terror attacks. Others plan to recruit at different schools.
DEI administrators have played a crucial role in narrowing the scope of debate on college campuses. They have supported “cancel culture” by defending students’ use of mob tactics and by punishing students for expressing their beliefs. DEI places Jews at the top of the oppressor scale and college DEI officers are disproportionately and vocally hostile to Israel. So, despite the Holocaust and rising anti-Semitism (and with 45 people working to promote DEI at the average university), it’s no surprise there is a pervasive lack of sympathy on campus when Jewish people are actually victimized.
For universities to find their way back to their true purpose, they must recognize how they got lost. Leaders need to examine whether American campuses are places where both faculty and students can ask important questions or places where they learn to self-censor.
Universities can correct course now by restoring academic freedom so that both faculty and students can ask “unaskable” questions. America needs morally courageous critical thinkers. It’s time for schools to treat students as real participants in their education by restoring the freedom to think.
This article was originally published by RealClearEducation and made available via RealClearWire.
