Dangerous doctrines

Cross posted at Political Arguments.

Via Hit and Run, a defense of the intellectual competence of the college undergraduate.

No one seriously doubts that the average campus is a liberal enclave or believes diversity on elite campuses extends past skin color. But is it really so poisonous? The words "brainwashing" and "indoctrination" cannot possibly be less applicable to media savvy American students, and the idea that an 18-year-old is an empty receptacle waiting to be pumped full of Marxism is its own brand of absurdity. Harvard Yard is not a totalitarian state, and after a required helping of queer lit, a student can always switch to C-Span and watch a gay escort throw softballs to President Bush for a heady dose of conservative ideology.

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I agree with the sentiment and conclusions of the author. But I can't help but feel uncomfortable with the claim that mere exposition to ideas is either harmless or neutral.

The consensus among liberals (generously defined) is that there is nothing objectionable about being exposed to all kinds of information as long as you are not coerced into any particular conclusion. But even if we define coercion quite broadly—including psychological and social pressure of various kinds—the fact remains that knowledge can have profoundly disruptive effects.

My world-view was altered quite severely by reading J. S. Mill and Kant and Rawls. I recently rediscovered an old high-school paper in which I made a vigorous case for the subordination of the individual's selfish wants to the good of the community. After fourteen years of liberal theory, I no longer believe in the latter, much less give it priority over the former. Likewise with the idea of pluralism. The first day of Charles Larmore's Value Pluralism seminar he asked the students if they believed that it was possible to construct a single ranking of human goods or values that was universally applicable; I was the only one who admitted to this. Two years later I was not so certain, and currently a certain variant of value pluralism is a major part of the argument in my dissertation. No one coerced me into this change of heart—I know for a fact that Larmore still takes issue with my understanding of pluralism—but the mere exposition to a new idea deeply affected my thinking.

The argument against censorship in Academia should acknowledge this. Instead of maintaining—facetiously—that nothing will come from students listening to a lecture on the Problem of Evil or reading Das Kapital or The Descent of Man. We should respect students enough to let them change their minds, and not just dismiss them as "organization kids" too self-centered and thick-headed to give a damn. But we should also think them capable of making informed decisions, and not insulate them from the heterodoxies that pave the path of an educated life.

That's not to say that there's something right about "professors [ ] using the classroom as an anti-capitalist soapbox". Professors should be teaching, not preaching, and they should encourage debate, not command consensus. But that's an issue of professional ethics and the academic's self-understanding of her role as a scholar or an activist (I side with scholarship). Letting ideas affect us and expecting that they will affect others, and being honest about these effects, is the kind of liberalism we should espouse.