The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: Modern universities are a threat to democratic freedoms

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Starting point is 00:00:35 These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

Starting point is 00:00:55 I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Hello and welcome to the monk debates. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. Modern universities are a threat to democratic freedoms. Well, it's a picture of students at Middlebury College in Vermont preventing a lecture by sociologist Charles Murray last week.

Starting point is 00:01:35 The students attacked him and even injured a professor escorting Marie so badly that she went to the hospital. Professor who was called a transphobe by students who tried to get her sight subsequently has resigned. This is big news in this field. Kathleen Stock quit her job at the University of Sussex earlier today. The head of the Berkeley Atmospheric Sciences Center, David Romp's, is stepping down from that position because the university refused his choice of guest speaker on climate science because of the speaker's political views. Hello, I'm your moderator. Griffiths. By now, we've all heard of cancellations across North American campuses,

Starting point is 00:02:18 professors who face reputational and professional damage due to deviating from what are perceived of as standard opinions. Students who are forced to recant for behavior deemed problematic by the university culture. A new institution for higher learning is hoping to change all this. The recently established University of Austin aims to prioritize and protect freedoms of expression and intellectual diversity. Its supporters argue that universities are fundamentally broken. They operate like, quote, authoritarian regimes, close quote, more interested in promoting, quote, left-wing intellectual heterodoxy, close quote, as opposed to teaching students how to think for themselves. protecting young adults from ideas which could offend them, appealed supposedly their development

Starting point is 00:03:10 and their understanding of basic democratic principles. Here's one of the founding trustees of the newly created University of Austin, Barry Weiss. Students are being coddled and treated almost, like professors are treating them, are taking on the role of being babysitters. Universities used to be and are in a democracy, supposed to be a sacred place in the pursuit of truth. They're in the truth pursuit business. And increasingly, it seems, they're in the business

Starting point is 00:03:41 of turning out social justice warriors. Others argue that today's hysteria about what is being taught on university campuses is overblown. A few examples of intolerance, amplified by news outlets and shared on social media, do not represent how these institutions actually operate, nor what's really taking place in the average university classroom.

Starting point is 00:04:03 Supporters of today's universities also insist that welcoming new voices into academia has made their institutions more diverse, more democratic, and more free than ever before. On this installment of the monk debates, we challenge the essence of these arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved. The modern university is a threat to our democratic freedoms. Arguing for the motion is Heather Heying. She's an evolutionary biologist and a founding trustee. of the University of Austin, Texas.

Starting point is 00:04:36 Arguing against the motion is Aaron Hanlon. He's an associate professor of English at Colby College. Heather, Aaron, welcome to the Monk Debates. Thank you for having us. Hello, thanks for having us. Looking forward to today's debate. This is one of those debates that I think has captured the public imagination. What is the role of universities in society today?

Starting point is 00:04:59 What kind of debate is happening on university campuses? and how is it impacting our culture? So the opportunity to have that conversation with the two of you, you've got considered opinions, but deeply divergent views is just going to be a privilege and a pleasure indeed. What I'm going to do is put a couple minutes on our show clock off the top to give both of you a chance to set out your opening statements, your opening remarks in this debate.

Starting point is 00:05:28 Heather, take us away. Well, I'm arguing in favor of the resolution. which is, be it resolved, modern universities are a threat to democratic freedoms, because market forces have encroached where they have no place, flipping priorities on their heads. Instead of ideas and the pursuit of truth

Starting point is 00:05:44 being at the forefront in our institutions of higher ed, financial imperatives are. Universities focus on big science, which brings in big grants, which in turn brings in big money for the institutions in the form of overhead, which means financial incentives drive what questions are asked,

Starting point is 00:05:59 what research funded, and what answers are accepted. And universities are also focusing on big amenities for undergraduates. Undergraduates are courted like customers as if they are purchasing a degree rather than purchasing access to an education. As administrations bloat and the bottom line drives more and more decisions, we see administrations cave to demands of students who are increasingly radicalized by some segments of the faculty. Engaging and confronting confused undergraduates is in fact the job of faculty. Catering to their every whim, assuring them that they are victims and caving to observe demands, as happened famous. at Evergreen, where I was tenured and which I loved, is a betrayal not just of the students,

Starting point is 00:06:37 I argue, but of education itself. One example. I know a woman who recently graduated with a BS in math from a well-respected state university. In order to earn that degree, she had to take not one, not two, but three diversity courses. They were not a waste of time. No, they were actively disempowering, demotivating, and anti-educational. Had she taken their messages to heart, she would have believed that as a disabled woman who was the first in her family to go to college, she had no place in math. It would never be accepted in the field. In the classes, she learned that if she failed, it wasn't her fault, and if she succeeded, she was a hero. So the partsing of humans into these immutable demographics, reducing us to our easily labeled identities is not merely anti-democratic, I argue, it's anti-human. Take all this together and you have a perfect storm. Just as purchasing votes or politicians puts democracy at risk, so too does our pay-for-play model for universities, in which both research and students are for sale. put the university's closest held ideals of uninhibited truth-seeking at risk. Thank you, Heather, for that opening statement.

Starting point is 00:07:40 Okay, Aaron, your opportunity to do the same, a couple minutes on the show clock. Let's get your opening remarks, please. So my understanding of the typical kind of primary mechanism being identified that by one who favors this resolution is that there is this stifling campus culture, I think that works in many of the ways to produce a lot of the outcomes we just heard from Heather, that this culture makes certain topics taboo such that they can't be openly discussed or researched, and that furthermore, this culture is not politically neutral, but that it's a particular malady of the political left,

Starting point is 00:08:20 where political left may be anything from a centrist Democrat like Joe Biden or a professor who ticks the D-box on a form to somebody well to the left of Biden, like an AOC. So these are my assumptions. My interest is in I'm happy to talk about this particular mechanism and this particular culture. And I like what Heather said about the kind of market forces at play here. That's another mechanism that interests me. I'm also interested in other mechanisms that might be producing the outcomes that we're seeing.

Starting point is 00:08:51 And to what extent those are part and parcel of the modern university versus things that are bigger than it. Okay. Thank you, Aaron. and chance now for rebuttals, Heather, you're up first. Well, I don't hear much in what you just said, Aaron, to disagree with. The one caveat being that I probably don't look like the perhaps character, but sometimes accurate portrayal of what people on, quote, unquote, my side of the issue sound like,

Starting point is 00:09:22 partially because I'm a liberal myself. And, you know, I have always. voted for and lived in blue areas. And it is thus actually particularly worrisome from my perspective to see what feels like, quote unquote, again, my team going off the rails. And it is of course true that having lived through one of the most famous incidents and having had a university that I loved go off the rails rather publicly and rather famously, and it has not righted itself yet, will affect one's ability to see whether or something. or not that is a general trend.

Starting point is 00:10:00 In the spring of 2017, Evergreen State College, a public liberal arts school in Olympia, Washington, erupted with protests and YouTube videos of the unrest went viral. Students confronted biology professor Brett Weinstein in his classroom. Now, he was being accused of racism. And I do disagree with the framing that is out there, not that you have done. but that this is entirely a problem with the left, because in fact, I reject the idea that most of what is happening is, in fact, of the left. It feels to me like extraordinarily illiberal thinking, illiberal policies that are masquerading as the left,

Starting point is 00:10:47 but just as so much of what is being taught on campuses is dressed up as careful critical thinking, as, for instance, science. So, too, I believe that most of what is happening on college campuses with regard to shutting down speakers and taking out the ability of administrations to feel like they can stand up, that that is cloaked in the costumes of the left, in the language of the left, but it's not really. It's, in fact, it comes from a place of deeply illiberal thought. and it is, in fact, because things are wrapped in language that don't actually represent what's inside, I think it's confused many of us. Thank you, Heather. Okay, Erin, your opportunity also for a rebuttal.

Starting point is 00:11:37 You can react to Heather's opening statement or what you've just heard now. Yeah, so I think I would address one of the things that I think people in my position who are, let's say, wary of a lot of the conventional claims of the illiberal academic left, stifling free speech and stifling free thought and so on. One of the things about that position that certainly tends to bug people like me is the extent to which it might ignore some of the things that the issues that Heather raised. Market forces, for example, a customer service model and mentality, for example, the way that science and scientific research works in certain types of institutions for example, although I would add that there's a huge array of different types of universities,

Starting point is 00:12:28 some of which are maybe more beholden to kind of large scientific grant and profit-seeking than others. But all of those, for example, are things that I think are much more powerful mechanisms or forces of illiberalism in higher education than, for example, a kind of particular culture or vaguely defined culture of the academic left. I'm interested in kind of shifting this question to looking at some of these other mechanisms besides this vaguely defined, as I see it, culture of illiberalism on the left. So I'll leave it there. Thank you, Aaron. Let me just remind our listeners that our debate today, the resolution, be it resolved, modern universities are a threat to our democratic freedoms.

Starting point is 00:13:16 And Heather, let me just jump in here and try to think of some questions that are kind of top of mind for our listeners to kind of. guide our conversation and have you guys bounce off them. And maybe, Heather, to begin with you, you know, there's a contention that what we're really focused on here is the exception and not the rule, that there are, yes, these high profile examples of cancel culture, of incidences of acute political correctness on college campuses here in Canada or in the United States. And those get a completely disproportionate share of attention. and focus in the media, some of it purposely amplified. What's your response to that?

Starting point is 00:14:00 I mean, how broad is this threat? Because I want to refocus this debate on our resolution. You're arguing, Heather, that modern universities are a threat to our democratic freedoms. For some people, that is a very high bar. That's a long way to reach. I think we want to hear more as to why you think we're actually at that point. Yeah. Well, I do think it is because of the deeper issues, that the, you know, the woke

Starting point is 00:14:22 ideology, if you will, the illiberal practices that are widespread, that are in every university at this point, whether or not there have been shutting down of speakers or actual protests or actual riots, right? Like those things remain the rare events, but in every single university,

Starting point is 00:14:42 there are now DEI programs and officers, and you can argue that this is the other university, the non-academic part of the university, but in part because, because, of the financial incentives that have become the rule at the universities, the courting of undergraduates as consumers, and separately the courting of grant dollars by administrations, turning scientists into grant-seeking robots

Starting point is 00:15:08 who then have less to do with governance, who then have less say in how universities run. These things have paved the way for what has come in, as, you know, I'll call it woke ideology as a shorthand. And I think Aaron and I will disagree about how important that is and how widespread it is. But for me, I think of it as the frosting on the cake. And higher ed, if higher ed is the cake in this perhaps not particularly well-formed analogy, then you can't just scrape the frosting off.

Starting point is 00:15:41 Higher ed itself has been sick, has been at risk, and is putting the ideals of democracy at risk long before the woke ideology was able to move in. And indeed, I would argue, and I have argued elsewhere, the liberalism that we're seeing. And the moving in of this, you know, of, for instance, the diversity, equity, and inclusion officers into actual coursework, such that, you know, the woman that I referred to in my opening statement had to take three classes to get a bachelors of science in math, having nothing to do with her field. that were actually anti-educational, that would not have been possible had the institution of higher ed been healthy to begin with. We had a patient to move from a cake to a health metaphor that was sick. And it's easier to see for many of us the woke ideology that is

Starting point is 00:16:37 infected it. But that doesn't mean that the patient wasn't sick to begin with. Okay, Aaron, let's get you to respond to that. There's a woke ideology. It's icing on the cake. It's now systemic. It's structural to campus life. And its impacts on our democracy are real and pernicious. So if there is this embeddedness of diversity, equity and inclusion in our institutions and classrooms, the question I would then have is, is it doing the thing that we say it's doing? Is it, in other words, actually changing? hearts and minds to make people actually take the illiberal position on some of these issues. Is it as stifling as we're saying that it is? I think in many cases where that type of arrangement

Starting point is 00:17:30 or agenda, diversity, equity, and inclusion as a kind of administrative phenomenon in higher ed, in many places where that has impact is in the residential side of students' experience, in other words, the place where students are unsure. about what will happen if they go into a common room or a lounge or something like that and say the wrong thing in heated discussion with their classmates, something like that. That's a very particular problem in a very particular type of institution. And this is where some of what we're talking about around diversity, equity, and inclusion kind of links up with my bigger question about scope, which is, I think, more to Rudyard's initial prompt. How many of our institutions

Starting point is 00:18:16 have the problems of residential four-year institutions. That's one thing if the claim is that we're talking about a kind of large-scale systematic problem for U.S. democracy and democratic freedoms. The other question is at even places like Colby College, which is undeniably a New England liberal arts residential college with a left-leaning faculty and a left-leaning student body, do these programs, institutions call it diversity?

Starting point is 00:18:46 equity and inclusion outside of the classroom function the way that we're that we're saying they do. Do they have the hold that we're saying they do? Are they not turning some students actually more conservative is another interesting question? And furthermore, in the classroom, even if they're on a syllabus or even if it looks that way, is the classroom discussion really playing out in the ways that we're saying? Those are some things that I would at least question, push back on rather than assume that the presence of diversity, equity, and inclusion equals a kind of stifling outcome, either on a smaller or even broader national scale. Let's hear your rebuttal on that, Heather.

Starting point is 00:19:25 Yeah, well, I would say to the question of whether or not students are finding a different environment in classrooms and in colleges overall, and whether or not that may, in fact, be causing them to swing away. you know, in very modern times, you know, it's, of course, hard to know what COVID has done to any of this with regard to remote learning and such. But I do feel, I don't have any data on this, but I do feel like there was beginning to be just a little bit of resistance, a little bit of pushback. But most of the data that are often referred to to say, look, when people go to college, they actually end up, you know, the same kind of political place as they were before, or if you're control for their siblings who didn't go to college. It's the same. That research is from, as far as I've seen, from 2014 and earlier. And as Lukianof and Haidt point out and research admirably and fairly thoroughly, I believe, in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, they point to, and research suggests that we see a pivot right around then in terms of what was happening,

Starting point is 00:20:39 culture-wide in terms of family dynamics and in terms also of exactly what was happening, both in the academic portion of colleges and the student affairs side of colleges, such that you ended up with a perfect storm. And we can talk a lot about, you know, the helicopter and snowplow parenting and the legal drugging of children and the screens and the algorithms and, you know, all of these things. But I would say that all of those are actually, again, on top of the underlying, basically, business model of the university, the business model of the modern university from at least mid to late 20th century in the U.S. has been pay for play. And that has been the thing that has allowed everything else to go awry.

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Starting point is 00:22:15 I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program. So, Aaron, just to, again, re-focus us around our motion today, be it resolved, modern universities are a threat to democratic freedoms. Again, the layperson sitting on the outside looking in at these campuses, maybe a campus like Colby College, would say, where is the free speech? Where is the range of debate? I mean, is it not undeniable that on many university college campuses, maybe a majority, maybe not, I want to hear your take, the range of

Starting point is 00:22:57 what you can say is constricting, not expanding, and that this is potentially really serious for our democracies, for our civic culture, because universities, arguably, are supposed to be that vibrant part of the public square, where the full diversity or range of opinions can flourish, and that in turn supports a flourishing of, you know, heterodoxy and debate and discussion in society at large. Is that view, that outside view of the university, right or wrong in this moment? I would not deny that there are problems of self-censorship and that there are problems of of students feeling caged in in terms of how they can express themselves and what types of topics they can pursue to an extent.

Starting point is 00:23:51 In my experience, the range of debate, including on contentious issues, race, abortion rights, things like that, is much broader than what kind of mass media accounts for. generally speaking, my understanding is that college students have tended to actually kind of be more free speech supportive than Americans surveyed who have had some college and more than those who have had no college. So one question is if college is so sort of stifling in this sense, why are people coming out of it with greater appreciation for free expression than those who haven't had that? opportunity or have chosen otherwise. I think when people research this, they find that the primary mechanism for students feeling like they can't say something is what their peers are going to think of them. And this just kind of goes back to something that Heather mentioned that I think is really important. Now, a period of time over which students entering college were entering

Starting point is 00:25:00 with increasingly left-leaning views. And perhaps, as Heather mentioned, also entering with certain types of experiences having been parented in certain ways and showing up in college with a certain sort of set of beliefs and a set of skills about how to handle conflict and controversial discussion. This is an example of what I would say is kind of not actually about higher education and the failure of institutions of higher education. This is an example of something that's, you know, kind of a title wave that's much bigger than higher education. It's something that deserves our attention. But I actually think the way that we kind of lay this on the doorstep of, you know, lefty professors and higher education can actually kind of distract from,

Starting point is 00:25:47 you know, the substance of the problem, which happens before a student sets foot in college. I'd love to respond to that. Yeah. I think too often, I mean, again, there's a sort of drumbeat in what I'm talking about with regard to the underlying financial model of what hire it. has become, are we blaming some of what we're seeing on students who arrived with insufficient skills to defend themselves? Yes. Are we blaming some of what we're seeing on faculty who arrived, perhaps, into faculty positions with insufficient skills? Perhaps. But that doesn't mean that we don't owe both those students and the institution of higher ed, a better system to challenge the students in their youth and their naivete so they actually become educated

Starting point is 00:26:36 rather than indoctrinated. And so to your question about whether or not undergraduates at community colleges, which are not residential, which are often commuter students who are trying to get an education in between paying their rent and raising their kids, for instance, that is going to be a very different situation. But for the four-year schools in this country, we have what looks to me and what I see mirrored in the kinds of research that Jen McWhorter points out and Hyatt and Lukianoff point out, an epidemic of indoctrination rather than education. I believe that there are a lot of faculty who want to connect with their students and who want to teach them to invite in opinions that they did not come in with. and is it possible that the culture outside of the classroom is making it ever more difficult for faculty to do that? Absolutely. It 100% is. But part of that culture is itself being created by, again, the model in higher ed.

Starting point is 00:27:43 And just this seems a little bit arcane, but I think it's important. What happens when big science is favored over little science because big science brings in big grants and the overhead that comes out of the grants and goes to the universities is between 40 and 80%. Well, of course, you end up with a particular kind of science being privileged. And you also end up with those scientists, all the scientists now, who have been privileged because of the big scientists, being given gifts by administrations so that they can focus more in bringing in grants and less on the other things. And so you end up with a reduction in teaching load. So it's the very skilled scientists who are less in front of students and a reduction in governance.

Starting point is 00:28:24 And so what I certainly saw firsthand at Evergreen and what I've heard stories of from many other institutions is you have scientists increasingly taken out of governance responsibilities. Those responsibilities are then filled from all the rest of the places in academics. And some of them are good and honorable as I imagine you to be, Dr. Hanlon. But there are, of course, many fields that are new. and perhaps this is a place where you and I do wildly disagree, but some of the very new fields that have been called grievance studies fields will have people in them that can hire more and more and more of themselves and hire more and more into the so-called other university,

Starting point is 00:29:08 the student affairs branches of the universities, because they are the ones now populating the governance jobs. Because some big part of the university, which is now paying the bills for the university, because it's bringing in the grants, has had its duties of governance offloaded. So this, again, this goes to, you know, how is it that we end up with, you know,

Starting point is 00:29:29 grievance studies, people making decisions that are not good for students or higher ed. In part, it's because the scientists are largely freed from those responsibilities because of financial incentives. Erin, let's respond to that and then I've got a question for you. Just something really quickly I wanted to respond to.

Starting point is 00:29:48 I see a kind of wrinkle in this image of the way governance works and the way market forces work in higher education, because I think the way that market forces work by and large is students are not flooding into the types of courses that I don't use the term grievance studies, and I don't find that term useful. But in those fields that we're talking about, we're talking about gender studies and African-American studies and various quote-unquote ethnic studies and so on, I assume that's what we're talking about. I have my critiques of those, but this is not where students are going in pursuit of market outcomes in their higher education. And this is also not where universities are hiring.

Starting point is 00:30:31 It's very difficult to get a line, a tenure line in these areas. So there's just something that doesn't quite add up there in that picture. Heather, to come to you now, this is an argument you'll know well, is a contention that, you know, we're all living through a big kind of cultural moment here, a cultural moment where previously marginalized voices are asserting themselves in institutions and in structures to claim a share of voice, to write historical wrongs, to actually inject what they would feel is democracy, representation into these calcified institutions like universities, and what you might and others might characterize as, you know, the pernicious effects of a so-called culta. of diversity, you know, inclusion, and so on, in fact, is just simply a rebalancing, a long overdue assertion of a greater level of diversity overall in perspectives and attitudes and so on. And of course, there's going to be fights over this. And of course, there's going to be disagreements. And why can't these new insurgent groups use whatever tactics and tools are at their disposal

Starting point is 00:31:48 to assert themselves because any other group and any other situation would do exactly the same thing. In short, you're arguing for an inherently conservative position, a position that wants to see these institutions remain kind of petrified, not scared, but institutionally familiar to your generation to a previous era of the campus, not the campus of the 21st century. Well, that's the opposite of my point. I'm arguing for a revolutionary change in the universities. I think the 20th century university is a petrified dinosaur and needs to change. And that some of the people on quote unquote my side are looking to go back to an imagined time in the past where things were glorious.

Starting point is 00:32:39 And it was the glory days of the university. And that's not me. We need revolutionary change. one in part that modifies the, again, the financial incentives that drive how students understand their own role in the university. They're not purchasing a degree. They're purchasing access to an education. And also one that redefines how it is that research gets done, both expensive research and inexpensive research. And thus encourages a life of the mind. We need a revolutionary change to the structures that actually does allow access to everyone,

Starting point is 00:33:14 doesn't pretend that every human being needs a college education. I don't think that's true. But the fact is, I was at Evergreen for 15 years, and I chose that job over another job offer, another tenure track job offer that I got, an elite private institution. And I chose Evergreen in part because it was public and because it was not selective.

Starting point is 00:33:34 And because for me, I wanted to be teaching students across the demographic range and not just the students that were like me, right? Because I, too, I went to a fancy project. at high school. And I got a very high quality undergraduate and graduate education. And teaching at Evergreen, where a lot of my students were on Pell Grants and I had veterans and mothers and people whose gap years had turned into gap decades and just a tremendous amount of diversity across all of the demographics that you can mention meant that those classrooms

Starting point is 00:34:08 were actually diverse. But most of what is flying under the banner of diversity and inclusion right now is actually not diverse and not inclusive. And I'm arguing that we do need a revolutionary change. We do need something we haven't seen yet in the past. And it needs to actually include all who are interested in pursuing it. Well, let's talk just before we go to closing statements about some of that revolutionary change that you want to bring about, Heather, through a new institution called the University of Austin. And Aaron, you've been critical of the University of Austin. With academic freedoms and discourse under siege at colleges and universities, a new kind of institution is needed to fix the situation.

Starting point is 00:34:47 That's the provocative claim of a group of scholars and activists who are launching the new University of Austin, which they say is, quote, dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth. What is your argument that you have with this institution? What is it that has raised concern on your part, or at least elicited this critique from you, about the startup of this new university dedicated to? a revolution in higher education? The core of my issue is the question of what will it do differently to escape the influence of some of the forces that are bringing about some of the negative outcomes where they exist

Starting point is 00:35:32 that we're seeing? What will be different? What is the thing that enables one to escape market forces to escape the socialization of students prior to the point when they get to college to escape the pool of donors. If it is to pair back a lot of the kind of administrative bloat, if it's to scale back on that, how can we do that while addressing the question that we just addressed, which is can we create an environment that isn't just going to be welcoming to white students, isn't just going to be welcoming to certain types of demographics that is actually going to, you know, substantively address.

Starting point is 00:36:12 some of these complications that are arising very much because elite institutions that have done things the same way for a long time are actually trying to diversify their student body, diversify their faculty, and have difficult conversations and debates about what it means to be a university now serving a broader population than many of these institutions, mine included, have in the past. So, Heather, let's hear a bit more about the, University of Austin here, and maybe your rebuttal of Aaron's sense that there are these larger forces. We've talked about them throughout this debate. They're going to have a pull. How do you escape their effects? And how do you ultimately, I'd be curious, how do you solve for

Starting point is 00:36:59 things like inclusion? Inclusion is a good thing. Diversity is a good thing. You know that as a scholar and academic, diverse views lead to better ideas, lead to hopefully more dynamism and the sustenance, the basis of the progression of human thought and human ideas. Well, I guess there are at least three ways to respond here. One is with regard to inclusivity and diversity. One is with regard to the new financial model. And one is, you know, as to whether or not this initiative is up to the challenge.

Starting point is 00:37:37 And with regard to the first, I would say, I think one of the places that we really do disagree Erin is that my sense, and again, from within a non-elite and actually incredibly diverse institution that was teaching forward where we had full-time programs where we were in contact with our students for 16 hours a week up to 11 weeks at a time and study abroad programs. So like really in-depth learning communities where you really came to know something or a lot about every single one of your students and they all came to know a lot about you. the question of are we including or are we being diverse never came up because as a result of the model, of the curricular model and the ability to dive deep, not just on the academics, but with people, treating people as individual humans as opposed to brains and jars, just facilitated. So my point with regard to don't we need to be more inclusive and more diverse? We need inclusive, actual inclusivity and diversity.

Starting point is 00:38:37 but I don't agree that there needs be the problem that we are being told that there is because there are ways to do higher ed that already resolves those problems. So that's one. With regard to the financial issues, there are some remarkably innovative ideas being formulated with the University of Austin that allow for students to apply for grants and basically be guaranteed to get those after graduating such that if they don't find work in their field for a consistent five years or so after they graduate, then they get their tuition paid back by the grantors. As to whether the University of Austin can, you know,

Starting point is 00:39:19 taken as a whole is an initiative that can resolve these problems, I don't know. I don't know. I saw at Evergreen, a curricular model that was extraordinary and that got captured, that explicitly got captured by ideologues and by those who would indoctrinate rather than that. than educate. And I know that that system, were it to be reformulated, that curricular model, were it to be reformulated in such a way that it wasn't gamable and had enough financial autonomy to not be forced to solicit grants and other such things was an incredible way of educating people. And I don't know if the University of Austin will be up to that challenge. Okay, let's go to closing statements.

Starting point is 00:40:07 Aaron, you've been arguing throughout this debate against our motion today, be it resolved, universities are a threat to democratic freedoms. What are some of the key insights or ideas you want to leave our audience with? So the question that I want to leave people with to think about is to do with this notion of market forces and how do you combat market forces that produce problems or undesired outcomes? One type of revolution that we haven't talked about is a revolution in faculty labor. We haven't talked yet about the fact that a vast, vast majority between two-thirds and three-quarters of professors working in higher education or working off the tenure track, meaning without the protections of academic freedom, either in their research or in the classroom. So if people are interested in addressing some of the questions that we've talked about today,

Starting point is 00:41:05 I think they should also be interested in changing that scenario and make putting it in place mechanisms in higher education that make academic freedom a reality, not just the majority, but for all of our faculty. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you, Aaron. Okay. Heather, your opportunity to wrap this debate up, our motion today, be it resolved. Modern universities are a threat to our democratic freedoms. you've been arguing in favor of the motion, bring this debate home for us.

Starting point is 00:41:33 Yeah. Modern institutions increasingly and not just academic ones are a threat to our democratic freedoms. And they're also a threat to our humanity. And I would say to Aaron's point about adjunct faculty, where we've all heard stories of highly trained scholars driving for many hours a day to get between, two or three of their gig jobs where they don't even have offices. And they may hopefully still be able to find meaning in those few hours of contact that they have with their students. They probably aren't able to keep much of a research program going under those circumstances. But it reminds me

Starting point is 00:42:19 of David Graber's formulation of bullshit jobs. And frankly, it feels like what we are doing to our faculty and have been for decades is the same thing that we are now training our students for. And in fact, I once had a colleague of mine, another tenured colleague of mine, argue when I gave him grief for doing a bad job with the students, for being disrespectful of them, and for walking them through, frankly, bullshit work that was meaningless. He said to me, they're just going to be cogs. why don't we train them to be cogs? Now, that made me feel like we need to give up on most faculty. We cannot be giving up on the students,

Starting point is 00:43:06 and we cannot be forfeiting higher ed. A functioning democracy, a functioning civilization, needs functioning higher ed. And I think, I think, Aaron, you and I disagree about how dysfunctional it is, but I don't think, and I had this sense, too, reading some of what you've written, that we actually disagree on all that much about some of the underlying problems. And we have schools that are informing students through usually covert means,

Starting point is 00:43:38 occasionally overt means, as in the story that I introduced my friend who just got her bachelor's in math, who was forced to excel in three diversity and inclusion courses. We have explicit examples, but more often it's covert. more often it's covert examples wherein we have students reporting, yes, that they're self-censoring. Yes, that they're not asking questions if they feel like maybe not the faculty, but yes, their peers will not appreciate the questions that they're asking. And a democracy requires that people don't be censored and also that they don't be self-censored. We'll never get to a perfect situation. But if higher ed isn't the place to explore wild disagreements, then I'm not sure what we have left.

Starting point is 00:44:26 Excellent. Heather, Aaron, thank you for this debate. This is one of the hotter kind of cultural issues out there. And I think many people, unfortunately, have tried to have this debate and have only contributed to misunderstanding, incoherence, and general confusion. But the two of you have spoken with clarity, concise. and a willingness to listen and engage with each other's arguments and ideas, which is just so greatly appreciated by the Munk Debates community. So thank you both.

Starting point is 00:44:57 Aaron, Heather, for coming on the program today. Thank you both. It's my pleasure. Well, that wraps up today's debate. I want to thank our participants, Heather and Aaron. They certainly give us a lot to think about. We'd love to get your feedback and reflections on what you've just heard. So please send us an email to podcast at Munkdebates.com.

Starting point is 00:45:19 That's MUNK. Debates with an S.com. Here's a recent listener note from Julie about our Monk Debate members' podcast with Gina Stein, where we were talking about the trucker protests that have paralyzed our nation's capital here in Canada. Julie writes, enough with who is right and who is wrong here. Long-haul truckers merely shine light on the state of this nation, and it's high time that straight-talking adults in the room got back into the conference.

Starting point is 00:45:50 conversation pit. Well, Julie, thanks for that note. Is it a conversation pit, a mosh pit, a debate pit? I don't know. But boy, the conversation here in Canada around COVID and its future course of the various restrictions that we've been dealing with has certainly become a hot topic. And one will continue to address on our monk members podcast in the weeks to come. If you want to join the monk members podcast and get our weekly program focusing on the big issues and ideas in the news, simply go to our website. www.munkdebates.com forward slash membership and sign up for your free monk membership. As soon as you do that, go to your membership privileges and you'll see a link to our weekly monk members-only podcast, which is also free for you to listen to as a monk member. And of course, you can go to that same website any day, any hour of the week to listen to great debates on everything from COVID to the future of American democracy to the brewing conflict between Ukraine and Russia we've got it all on our website, triple-w, monkdebates.com.

Starting point is 00:46:55 Thank you for helping bring back the art of public debate, one conversation at a time. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Reza Daya. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating.

Starting point is 00:47:23 Thank you again for listening.

The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it resolved: Modern universities are a threat to democratic freedoms

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