American university students are getting more rigidly dogmatic when it comes to a progressive worldview. Activism, and a leftist bent has been a feature of college life since prior to the Soviet Union, of course, but there has never been a time like today when only students who seek it out by getting an education where conservatism is explicitly part of their university's institutional identity have access to conservative ideas in their classrooms.
While the left has a stranglehold on academics, and a near total lock on theory in the humanities and social sciences, there have been at least a critical mass, up until this decade at least, of balancing academics who don't feel threatened by the existence of ideas they don't agree with, even if their goal is to indoctrinate their students into believing that their political opposition is not only wrong, but anathema. And there still exists a faction within today's liberal arts faculty bodies who believe that exposure to opposing ideas allows one to firm up one's own arguments, think through the challenges to them, and retain the orthodoxy with a better grip on how to affirm it convincingly in mixed audiences. I generally try to appeal to this faction when I bring up any conservative ideas among my colleagues.
However, I fear there has been a tipping point.
I was in a recent discussion in which a colleague's students were offended by readings in Dany Laferrière's novel I am a Japanese Writer. To be sure, Laferrière is an offensive writer. He provokes, plays devil's advocate, and cares not one whit to maintain a sympathetic relationship with his readers. His readers love him precisely for that quality. Why? Because they understand the satire, the over-the-top character of his stereotypes, and the ironic distance between the narrator's/character's opinions and the author's own. This novel in particular is meant to highlight the ridiculousness of the kind of pigeonholing to which he himself has been subjected as a "black" author with a Haitian heritage coming of age in Montréal. What was so offensive to these students? As a black man, he apparently had no right to joke about, parody, pastiche, or satirize people of Asian heritage--he wasn't an insider with the authenticity to perform self-critique of an in-group.
My colleague's concern, as you might well imagine, was that if students are so rigid about purity testing speakers rather than engaging in their ideas, they have become precisely the kind of essentialists that critical race theory has been railing against since its inception. Literature especially is supposed to be a privileged space of imagination where authors and readers alike can get out of the roles that define them for a time, and engage in understanding the universal, and the boundaries of the real--where exploring differences is safe and healthy. The worry with this kind of student, then, is that their rather superficial mapping of skin color to culture works against the very basis of the idea of dialogue across differences--that only those who are "authentic" may have a voice.
I suggested to my colleague that one way out of the dilemma would be to take a look at how culture is defined. Is it the expression of innate characteristics or is it a set of products, practices, and perspectives that agents and communities can alter as a matter of choice? Are cultures time-bound? Geography-bound? Racially and/or ethnically bound? Or are they porous by nature with elements open to transmission to other groups? I specifically mentioned that conservative theorist and Stanford economist Thomas Sowell might be a good place to go because he problematizes the very notion of cultural boundaries.
With no sense of irony whatsoever, the response was: "There are certain things that are not up for debate in my classroom."
Her concern was that Sowell's critique of the fixedness of culture might build a case for denying the concept of "institutional racism". In complete earnestness, she revealed that she thinks of conservative race theory (or rather what she CONCLUDES, before allowing any evidence of what conservative ideas about race even are to begin with penetrate her mind) as the functional equivalent of holocaust denial. In denial of her own utter relativism and dogmatic stance, she was unable to see the moral distinction.
It shouldn't have to be stated, but since one purpose of this blog is to make the assumptions behind ideas explicit, I'll do it: the main difference between a holocaust denier and a conservative theorist who denies the existence of institutional racism is that the former can only do so through a cynical distortion of all of the facts and of analytical reasoning to draw a biased and faulty conclusion, whereas the latter fully engages with the truth of the facts at hand and with rigorous logic to draw an impartial and plausible conclusion. Only by thinking of the two with total relativism can you miss the orientation toward truth that is fundamentally opposed between the two types of deniers. There is a difference of opinion possible between earnest students of a given phenomenon who don't disagree about the basic facts in evidence. Scholars often do come to different conclusions--it's a feature of the diversity of thought--and exposure to their ideas, debate between them, reveals the best of the theories. But holocaust deniers are not students or scholars, they are liars whose deceptive artifice becomes apparent under the light of truth and whose logic is only ever fallacious.
Look, I honestly wouldn't give a holocaust denier the time of day either.
But to deny my ideological other any space in my classroom would accomplish two things counter to the pursuit of truth: 1. kill debate so the truth can't be measured against anything; 2. make me and my students dogmatic.
As the saying goes: if you don't know the other side of the argument, you don't know either side of the argument.
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