Visions of Shadow and Light

There’s this whole thing buzzing in the background about how universities are too left-wing. The buzz of course, comes from the right, who control politics and much of the current social order. I think they are kind of pissed off that there’s this one remaining bastion of dissent against them…

But I was reading this interview and it occurred to me that the issue is deeper than left vs right.

Universities are supposed to be bastions of rational thought. Not of right, not of left. Rather of rationality and intense questioning. If there’s a problem in the system, it is not because the system is skewed to the left, it is that the system isn’t applying sufficient challenge to itself.

If a right-leaning student or professor can come up with a rational, logical and scientific argument for their conservative positions, it should be accepted. The same for a left-leaning position. The test isn’t whether there’s balance between right and left, but whether a rigorous rational thought process was applied to the position.

Assuming that the claims of left-leaning bias are true (and I do think that likely), there are almost certainly two real issues in play.

First, left-leaning positions are probably not scrutinized as strongly as they should be. From my experience (20 years ago) I would agree that professors tend to be sympathetic to positions with which they agree, and thus don’t require the level of rigor they should in defense of those positions.

Second, it is very hard to find right-leaning people who apply rational thought to their positions. Not impossible, and I know a couple conservatives who are very rational and rigorous in understanding their own positions. But people like that are hard to find. The vast majority of conservatives (in my experience) parrot positions and state opinions as though they were fact. If this style of argument is applied in a university setting then of course students applying a lack of rigor should be penalized.

On the other hand, if a conservative student can defend their position by using appropriate rational and scientific rigor then they should do well.

The conservatives have started calling for government intervention in universities, perhaps to impose a “bill of rights” or something along that line. This is amusing, since the “small government” party seems to have no problem with big government when it is used to enforce social strictures…

But hypocrisy aside, such a “bill of rights” needs to defend rational and scientific rigor above all else, because that is the core of the university concept. If it is able, secondarily, to provide some balance between right and left fine. But that should only occur if students taking right or left positions are able to apply sufficient rigor to their thought processes.

My guess is that in such a case universities will remain left-tilted for many years, because there are just too few conservatives out there who apply self-challenging rational, scientific rigor thought to their own positions.