In order to live and thrive, culture needs a critical space, a forum for people to reach out to one another. ... University spaces are essential as places of reflection, research and critical thinking the structures that we must establish to fight intolerance, lies, and violence.
Those words grace the masthead of The Kegley Institute of Ethics website and the sentiments have informed our work for over three decades, especially our choice of speakers. While we made an explicit choice early on to be a progressive voice in an otherwise conservative town, we have hardly shied away from controversial speakers, along the way successfully annoying folks from all points of the political spectrum.
Annoyance is not the goal, but it is an unavoidable consequence of bringing forth ideas that are uncomfortably challenging. We risk such irritation for a powerful reason: The fundamental mission of a university is to provide an intellectual environment in which all participants seek truth through critical exploration, knowledge acquisition, and personal growth. This can happen only through ongoing assessment of perceived verities about the world and our place in it which inevitably causes discomfort. Most everyone has experienced the distress of having ones cherished beliefs drawn into question by the power of a strong opposing argument.
But that is what a university is supposed to do, in part because such scrutiny is also at the core of democracy: Political self-governance succeeds only when it embraces the so-called marketplace of ideas, wherein a range of beliefs are floated, with only the best surviving inspection. In the words of Justice Wendell Holmes: The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market. And what better place to undertake this testing than at our learned institutions?
How, then, to make sense of universities seeming intolerance of conservative speakers, as exemplified in UC Berkeleys amazingly inept handling of Ann Coulters scheduled appearance? Shouldnt conservative ideas be a part of the educational marketplace? The simple answer is of course they should; if anything, they should be even more highly valued, given the otherwise general prevalence of progressive voices. Resistance to conservative ideas runs afoul of higher educations mission and only adds to critics perception that academics are ideologically entrenched.
It is important to stress, though, that the problem is not nearly as prevalent as it is too-often portrayed. Sure, there is plenty of dogmatism, on both sides, but universities really are not fomenting a pandemic of intolerance.
Furthermore, recall the metaphor: We should be embracing a marketplace of ideas and one would have to truly stretch that concept to include what Coulter routinely puts forth. Her calling card for years has been to hurl invectives, seemingly with the sole idea of drawing attraction to herself, rather than trying to advance audiences understanding of complex social and political problems. Here is a small sampling:
Comments like these might generate chuckles but there isnt an idea in sight; they are mere rhetorical kicks in the gut, intended to motivate an emotional, rather than a thinking, response. Her bombastic noise, thus, simply cannot be scrutinized in competition within an intellectual marketplace.
To recognize this, however, is assuredly not to also countenance any restriction on her right to freely express herself. That can be justified only when her expressions constitute a clear and present danger to others and Berkeley officials have not yet made a convincing argument that her appearance met that very high threshold, or that adequate policing couldnt control any threat. Yes, that policing might be expensive, but the protections of liberty often are.
Rather, the problem here is that groups like Coulters Berkeley sponsor, the College Republicans, see her as representative of true conservatism. Shes not; rather, she is a master of showmanship who has long appealed to the worst instincts anger, resentment, and bigotry in her followers. Even worse, those who do in fact give cogent conservative arguments, in the tradition of Ronald Reagan or William F. Buckley, are often dismissed as liberals in disguise. We learned this when we hosted the one-time conservative icon, Andrew Sullivan, whom some local Republicans denigrated as too progressive.
To repeat: There is assuredly too much ideological rigidity in the academy. But those who decry this too frequently make the mistake of equating an insistence on ideas and arguments with intolerance. That equation terrifyingly suggests that intellectualism is anathema to conservatism, a conclusion that would certainly send Edmund Burke spinning in his grave.
Christopher Meyers, Ph.D., is director of the Kegley Institute of Ethics at Cal State Bakersfield. The views expressed are his own.
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Academia, political tolerance and Ann Coulter - The Bakersfield Californian