We descended on Utah to speak at four universities. It was surreal, as if sworn enemies had jumped into a foxhole together to unite against a common foe.
Peter Boghossian is a popular atheist philosophy professor. I lead a national Christian campus ministry on 125 campuses. He’s spent the last decade or so attacking religious faith, calling it a virus. I seek to reclaim the intellectual voice of Christ in the universities and to show that faith is a virtue.
But something more threatening than each other is afoot. We rallied together to fight it. Thus we visited four Utah campuses in early February. Together we taught a perspective that might be even more controversial on campus today than either atheism or Christianity.
Feelings of Allure and Suspicion
For many, this “band of (unlikely) brothers” itself was alluring and contentious. For others it was the topic that drew them in. Our events centered on “The Death of Intellectual Diversity in the University: How Social Justice and Identity Politics are Destroying the University and Culture.”
But isn’t the campus already the most diverse place on earth? Universities emphasize diversity, it seems, more than knowledge itself, right? And isn’t social justice good? From the left to the right, it seems to be all the rage these days.
Our events centered on “The Death of Intellectual Diversity in the University: How Social Justice and Identity Politics are Destroying the University and Culture.”
Our answers to that may surprise you. Apparently they did more than that with some of the students and staff at these schools, though. Our answers threatened them.
You’d think a global Christian ministry president team-teaching with a leading atheist would make for enough diversity for schools to get excited about. No such luck. If you haven’t been on campus in the last five years, you would scarcely recognize what you see there today.
Not Your Grandma’s University
The university was intended for people to gain knowledge in the pursuit of truth through open, reasoned discussion. More and more now, though, the options are limited to “hating or celebrating” certain politically orthodox viewpoints. Universities once honored free speech and the free exchange of ideas. Times have changed.
Michael Bloomberg spoke at a Harvard University commencement address. He pointed out there that 96% of all Ivy League faculty are liberal. He concluded that “conservative professors are a dying breed.” Ivy League universities do well to practice diversity of sex, race, class, and gender. That makes them good, he said. To be great, though, they require something the Ivy League is lacking, viewpoint diversity.
Liberal atheist and best-selling author Jonathan Haidt, a professor at New York University, agrees. He worries that universities are becoming echo chambers. They’re “social justice universities” teaching Critical Theory (which I’ll return to in Part 2 of this series) rather than “truth universities” teaching critical thinking.
For those ages 65 and older moving toward retirement, the ratio of left to right leaning professors is 12 to 1. For younger scholars under age 40 it is 23 to 1. (In New England is it 28 to 1!) In Religion departments it is a whopping...
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1 comment:
don't fall into the trap of thinking that this attitude of "social justice in all things" and "university echo chamber" is something new. it was there in the 1970s and 80s when I was going to school. it is worse and more in the open today. in yesteryear, it was known as the unspoken secret you learned in order to get a degree. thank God I went into engineering where thinking was a requirement; the liberal arts schools were just pitiful. anyone hiring a liberal arts degree holder is getting what they deserve.
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