☆ How cancel culture poisons local higher education (for faculty and students alike) (3/5)
When universities keep hiring ideological “mini-me’s” and pressure all other faculty to keep their mouths shut, discourse becomes toxic; faculty and their research grow out-of-touch; and students get unknowingly indoctrinated into the fold. An Opp Now exclusive. With SJSU prof emeritus Elizabeth Weiss and UATX prof David Puelz.
Opportunity Now: In your opinion, what do local colleges lose when they stop valuing rigorous, scientific study—and pivot to, “Actually, we just want to hire faculty in our ideological camp”?
Elizabeth Weiss: When the faculty start becoming homogeneous, they lose the ability to assess what is true or not because they basically become a belief system as opposed to a questioning system. This turns intellect and scholar into belief and pseudo-religion—they simply must believe the orthodoxy, whatever that is.
Within departments, you get ideological cliques of people who get along and people who are completely isolated. Civility and collegiality are disregarded when it comes to outsiders, who are viewed as not human. For instance: one of the things I noticed at San Jose State is that when folks were protesting (say, against a fee hike or the new union contract), you’d see a lot of posters on campus referring to their opposition as parasites or vermin.
And then the students: they get taught to mimic their professors, to parrot the preferred viewpoint instead of actually learn. They graduate with a false sense of achievement and get put in situations where they’re doomed to fail. So you lose the purpose of the university, which isn’t to train students for a job, but to set up the next generation to think clearly—engage with their world in deep, complex ways.
David Puelz: Obviously, you get a tremendous ideological imbalance—that's the first-order effect almost by definition. And then another major problem is bloat. You have these massive administrations that, basically, have to justify failed scholarship and a lack of rigor for students (which inhibits critical thinking skills).
ON: As Humanities graduates ourselves, we’re familiar with how easily these majors and classes can get hijacked by ideologues. Is this problem—and the associated lack of rigor, quality scholarship, etc.—a concern for any other disciplines?
DP: Yes, because of General Education requirements. Take University of Austin’s neighbor, UT Austin: for their Computer Science degree (and they pride themselves on their CS program), you need 40 classes to graduate. But if you check out the degree plan, only about 17 of those classes—and that’s being generous!—directly relate to learning computer science. Think about the other classes students are using to fulfill degree requirements: not just those potentially ideology-driven like English or Social Sciences, but also impractical ones like Equity in STEM Education. This is an actual UT class.
I’ll emphasize that it’s important for universities to have a good, compact set of intellectual foundation courses that all students take. We have the best in the world at UATX. This gives students breadth. But it's too easy for GE to become a mass that grows and grows and grows and gets hijacked. A lot of universities should thoughtfully pare down what they require students to take.
EW: It’s easy for a student to think, “Well, I'm not going to be indoctrinated because I'm going into Computer Science.” Or, “Anthropology is this niche field, so I don’t have to worry about ideology.” But everyone’s being indoctrinated into the system through GEs, regardless of their major.
For instance, ethnic studies classes were on their last legs in California but got revived in 2020: Gavin Newsom signed in a new ethnic studies GE requirement (for CSU and UC colleges). Plus, it’s being introduced into high schools. There’s no denying that all of this contributes to the explosion of ideology in GE that wasn’t the original intent.
Students should be able to enter a university without deciding on a major yet, take some general classes their first year, and say, “Oh, now I know what to pursue.” They should get exposed to important things that might lead them to a major (while expanding their knowledge). Not a bunch of ideology.
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