Free Citizens

 

I receive and subscribe to online email publications from Chris Rufo I received one on 10/2/2023, entitled, Cultivating Fee Citizens, and I will quote some lines from it, and comment on them below.

 

Rufo: “Wall Street columnist Willaim Galston has offered a thoughtful criticism of my higher-education reform proposals in two recent columns. The crux of Galston’s argument, is that, through my work with Florida governor Ron DeSantis abolishing DEI bureaucracies in public universities and recapturing New College of Florida on voters’ behalf, I represent a profound threat to ‘liberal education.’ As evidence, he cites a partial quote of mine—‘the goal of the university is not free inquiry’—to illustrate my supposed illiberalism.

 

This quotation is a misrepresentation, but an instructive one. My full quotation raises the question not of method but of purpose: ‘The goal of the university is not free inquiry—free inquiry is a method toward some other goal.’ As I explained as part of a symposium on higher-education reform at Stanford University, in the classical tradition, the goal of ‘liberal education,’ derived from the Latin word liber, meant the cultivation of the free citizen and the pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty. Today, many universities have relinquished these transcendental ends and have replaced them with a new, secularized trinity—diversity, equity, and inclusion’—or, like Galston, have settled on a defense of procedural values, such as ‘free inquiry’ and ‘academic freedom,’ with no particular end in mind.”

 

My response: I sense a need to clarify here, and be careful. Unlike Rufo, I would classify free inquiry and academic freedom, with accompanying free thinking and free speech on campus for administrators, staff, professors and students, not just as procedural methods but as ends in themselves that promote, contribute to and are indispensable to helping students reach those transcendental ends that each educated citizen should evince.

 

It is not transcendental ends in classical, essentialist education versus Galston’s portrayal of Leftists and woke postmodernists pushing authoritarian conformity to their Marxist ideology under the excuse of free inquiry and academic freedom, which he seems to suggest that Ruo and others are suppressing. The woke crowd crush free inquiry and free speech on campus, and professors are so beaten down that academic freedom is rare now, but the woke will argue that Rufo’s reforms are stifling their nonexistent academic freedom and free inquiry.

 

Rufo: “This is a grave error. Though free inquiry and academic freedom can serve as powerful methods, being value-neutral, they cannot establish a value-hierarchy or provide a firm basis for scholarly standards. In his essay, Galston suggests that Nazi scapegoating and Soviet pseudo-science should be excluded from academic life, but on what standard does this judgment rest? If ‘academic freedom’ is the ultimate criterion, scholars who pursue error are just as entitled to their positions within the university as those who pursue truth. Under a regime in which ‘free inquiry’ is the highest value, nothing can be prohibited—everything must be allowed, including ideas that are anathema to right reason.”

 

My response: Perhaps a compromise of some sort can be realized. Rufo does seem to want to restrict academic freedom and free inquiry a bit—I want radical free inquiry and academic freedom for supercitizens on campus and beyond campus--(and canceling, thought control and enforced academic groupthink and conformity from the Right is no more desirable than is the totalitarian orthodoxy now enforced universally in Academia by the dominant, intolerant Left), but if the professors are slightly curbed by regents to use their work on campus to pursue truth and not error, so that their inquiry and departments are consistent right reason, then Rufo could curb some of the woke pursuits. I would try to find minority number of positions or departments for Marxists dissidents to have tenured slots to do their work and make their case.

 

I also think Rufo can curb a lot of the Leftist excesses on campus by curbing HR and all of these DEI bureaucrats, and mostly leave professors alone with their academic freedom and free inquiry. He could this way meet his transcendent ends without shutting down tenured professors. By controlling the Administrators, the bureaucrats and department heads, Rufo could end wokeness, give kids a good liberal arts education, while leaving professors alone to speak and research as they largely see fit. That is an effective, honorable compromise.

 

Rufo: “Galston describes the ‘civic education’ he received at Cornell University and University of Chicago as an ideal, beginning with the Greeks and Romans, traveling through the American Founding, and concluding with the radical criticism of Rousseau and Nietzsche. I object to none of this. In fact, it resembles the kind of thoughtful, rigorous core curriculum I hope to see at New College of Florida, where I am a trustee. Scholars who illuminate the great ideas of our civilization and have a shared commitment to the telos, or proper end, of education, deserve the support of state institutions, and a wide variety of viewpoints within those bounds should be encouraged.”

 

My response: I think Rufo is willing to compromise: the state of Florida and its regents control the telos of the campus to provide an education consistent with the values of most taxpayers providing funding for colleges to educate youth to be good citizens, all while professor express a wide variety of opinions openly without repercussion.

 

Rufo: “The problem, however, is that Galston’s ideal is nowhere to be found in many state universities. The ideologies that now dominate humanities departments . . . ”

 

My response: Galston remembers free universities of 60 years ago that were not transformed from colleges that educated and uplifted babyboomers into politicized social justice activist factories cranking out cloned radicals that dominate Academia today. We do want Rufo’s needed reforms, without ending academic freedom and free inquiry.

 

Rufo: “ . . . –critical race theory, queer theory, and others—are not producing the insights of Nietzsche or Rousseau, let alone Aristotle or Plato. They are producing pseudo-scholarship more akin to racial scapegoating and Lysenkoist genetics that Galson rightly decries. Their adherents’ capture of academic departments has been documented to the point of exhaustion . . .  My contention is that these activist disciplines are not scholarly, rigorous, or worthy of public subsidy. In the past, the basic social compact  regarding higher education was that the people, through their state legislators,  would charter and fund state universities in order to advance the cause of knowledge and to educate young people as citizens of the republic; in exchange, public-university administrators and faculty pledged to be prudent stewards of public resources and to pursue truth, rather than partisan activism.

 

That social compact has been broken. Activist administrators and professors have treated the public universities as a vehicle for their private political interests and openly flouted the wishes of the voters who pay their salaries, establishing coercive DEI departments and transforming scholarly initiatives into little more than their agitprop. These activists have used the structures of ‘academic freedom’ not to help discern the truth, as intended, but to protect their domination over the academy, which has been untethered from old ends. Only a naïve person would believe that departments of critical race theory and queer theory are oriented towards the true, the good, and the beautiful; they are, in their own words, explicitly opposed to these concepts.

 

In his column, Galston boils down this complex dilemma into an old shibboleth: ‘Can the government rightly restrict the content of education in higher education?’ This formulation misses the point. In the matter of public universities, it is the same as asking if the government can restrict the government—an oxymoron. A better question, which captures the essential nature of our dilemma, would be: Can legislators reform the public universities to bring them back into alignment with their scholarly mission and the wishes of the public? That answer to that question is a resounding ‘yes.’ In a republic, the people have an absolute right to limit, reform, and restrict their government, including their public universities.”

 

My response: Rufo is right as long as dissident professors and students can enjoy unorthodox speech, writings and research, curb the administrators more than the dons.