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Christopher Tollefsen writes at Public Discourse, sometimes a defense of shared liberal values can become the partisan promotion of one of liberalism’s strands:
ecently, I gave my final lecture in a “Contemporary Moral Problems” course. Over the past sixteen weeks, we had covered a wide range of issues: welfare, civil disobedience, racism, sexism, affirmative action, hate crimes, pornography, immigration—plus the standard range of bioethical issues such as abortion, euthanasia, cloning, and so on. I chose, in my final lecture, however, to return to a claim made by Amy Gutmann in an essay on education that we had read earlier in the semester. Speaking specifically of higher education, Gutmann wrote:
Higher education is a gateway to the professions in modern democracies and it is also an institution that serves as a bulwark against ideological repression by the state and other powerful political forces who are all too often motivated to repress ideas that are unpopular or offensive (or both).
Having just covered nearly the entire range of disputed ideas over which there could conceivably be an effort at “ideological repression,” I was somewhat amused. Gutmann’s claims, particularly the second, struck me as rather self-congratulatory: look what a brave group we academics are, protecting our students from the powerful political forces seeking to illicitly mold their minds. But beyond that, her claims seemed to overlook both the level of ideological agreement that shapes the academic world together with the culture of Western liberal democracy more generally, and the more specific forms of disagreement that take place within that overarching framework of agreement—forms of disagreement that often do separate academics from at least many of their fellow citizens. These forms of agreement and disagreement do have implications for how we should think of at least one purpose of higher education, but they are more modest than the freedom-fighter conclusion reached by Gutmann.
[Read the full article here.]
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