For this reason, universities are almost synonymous with tolerance. Students need the freedom to experiment with new thoughts. Was Martin Schongauer a communist? Most probably not. But if an undergraduate wants to write a persuasive essay claiming that he was, the university is the right place to do that.
There is, however, a point at which the freedom to experiment becomes its opposite: a disincentive to a creative life of the mind. In a consumer model of education, students become customers, and instead of provoking them to wrestle with complex and challenging ideas, universities make them comfortable with familiar ideas.
A student who wants to explore challenging concepts is a student with the self-discipline to work at that task. By contrast, a student who’s arrived at the university to have a four-year experience of campus life doesn’t want to be bothered with the intellectual effort required to parse the thoughts of a Kant or a Schopenhauer.
So some of the usual campus weirdness and oddity is harmless. But when college administrators begin to cater to students instead of challenging them, damage is being done both to the individual and to society, as author Tom Nichols writes:
This is a deeper problem than the usual stunts, fads, and intellectual silliness on campuses that capture the public imagination from time to time. There will always be a certain amount of foolishness to a lot of campus life. As a Tufts University professor, Dan Drezner, has written, “One of the purposes of college is to articulate stupid arguments in stupid ways and then learn, through interactions with fellow students and professors, exactly how stupid they are.” College life, especially at the most elite schools, is insulated from society, and when young people and intellectuals are walled off from the real world, strange things can happen.
When institutions entertain students instead of educating them, the net amount of educating declines. Students need to accumulate information and skills - knowing that and knowing how.
Under the banner of social justice, some aspects of higher education have been reduced to confirming students in their already-held beliefs. In such systems, they gain neither knowledge nor skills, as scholar Robert Bork writes:
The result of our egalitarian passion is that Americans, white as well as black, have allowed themselves to become progressively less competent. That fact is attested to in myriad ways: SAT scores keep declining; American students fall well behind the students of many other nations on international science and mathematics tests; even college students frequently lack basic historical and geographical knowledge. Our system of public education at the primary and secondary levels is not performing as well as it did half a century ago, and in places its performance is a disgrace. Universities must offer remedial courses to bring their entering freshmen up to the point they should have reached in mid-high school. Less and less of the four years of college can be spent on what we used to think of as college level studies. Intellectual rigor inevitably suffers as grades are inflated and graduate students are substituted for professors in teaching undergraduates.
Sometimes standardized tests like the ACT or SAT are recalibrated, but there’s no hiding the fact that intellectual activity among some college students is declining.
The good news is that, for students shrewd enough to avoid social justice and political correctness, an education can still be gotten at most universities and colleges. There are professors who are still subject matter specialists, and there are still classes in which students wrestle with significant texts like Parmenides, Xenophanes, Hegel, Kant, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, John Locke, Edmund Burke, etc.
As the mind struggles with complex text, it grows and becomes stronger; in avoiding social justice, it encounters justice simpliciter.
Students who are willing to see beyond mere career training will find that, in obscure and even deliberately hidden corners of the university, the life of the mind still persists. Their imaginations can be fueled as they encounter academic rigor.
What is now needed is for more students to take this path, sharpening their minds instead of accumulating experiences.
