Choose an institution that has adopted the Chicago Principles, and then learn how to shed light on the dark corners of inquiry, and of your own mind.

How might faculty, administrators, and students foster free expression in higher education? Rather than rehash events of the past, I would like to offer advice for members of each of those three groups.

The Chicago Principles

Individuals doing the right thing cannot solve this problem. Game theory tells us that as an individual, if you stand against a mob, you will be torn apart, unless one of two things are true: 1) a large number of other people are willing to stand with you, quickly, or 2) your institution has your back.

Most people will not stand up for what they believe because risk-aversion and fear are powerful motivators. Given this, if you do stand up, you nearly guarantee that you will be alone, or close to it. That leaves the second option: your institution must have your back. Institutions of higher education must adopt the Chicago Principles, such that administrators, faculty, and students know that, if they do stand up and defend their right to free expression, their institution will not turn on them.

The Chicago Principles are probably familiar to readers of Public Discourse, but in summary, they guarantee “all members of the University community the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.”

What is a University for? As Jonathan Haidt has argued, you cannot simultaneously maximize both a pursuit of truth and a pursuit of social justice. The University of Chicago made it clear that, as an institution, it sees its mission as the pursuit of truth. Compare this with The Evergreen State College, the public liberal arts college where I was tenured until resigning last year, an institution that was once pedagogically experimental and allowed for a deep dive into ideas both disconcerting and dangerous.

In 2011, Evergreen modified its mission statement to read, in part: “Evergreen supports and benefits from a local and global commitment to social justice.” This seems innocuous on its face. Not only that, it seems morally good and, therefore, that anyone objecting to it must be, somehow, on the wrong side of issues that us “good people” care about. This is where the danger lies.

The search for truth and beauty, in its many forms, is what higher education is for, and about. The Enlightenment opened up our world, and gave us, among other things, the beginning of a formalization of the scientific method. One of the great strengths of the scientific method is its ability to reduce the role of bias and emotion in what we understand to be true. It is, at its core, a method for reducing bias. But in an era of information overload, when it seems that nothing can be trusted, many are reverting to trusting their own feelings above all else. It is ironic that, as people have come to lose faith in our system, they have run from science, and not toward it. For while scientists themselves are humans, and therefore fallible, rigorous application of the scientific method is the best cure for human fallibility ever devised.

One key distinction between human beings and most non-human animals is that we acquire insight cumulatively. Not only do we stand on the shoulders of giants, but riding on the shoulders of giants is our niche. We should learn from them when we can, and credit them always. What we should not do is trust that they are right simply because they are famous, or lauded, or because it is easier than thinking for ourselves. Institutions of higher education are supposed to be in the business of making, assessing, and communicating truth claims, and teaching others how to do the same.

Advising Administrators, Faculty, and Students

My advice, then, to administrators, faculty, and students:

Once an institution adopts the Chicago Principles, administrators are free to embrace and uphold them by, among other things, creating an explicit expectation that protest is acceptable—honorable, even—but not if it hinders others’ ability to hear, convey, and exchange ideas.

Administrators should not allow vocal authoritarian minorities to hold their campus hostage. And they certainly should not collude with such vocal minorities in order to achieve their own goals. We are, in effect, experiencing a dearth of adults, people willing to make unpopular decisions and stand by them. When someone throws a tantrum, regardless of their age, ceding to them because it is easier in the moment is always the wrong response. It creates larger tantrums down the road.

Administrators and faculty, in their role as hiring authorities, change their campus with every hire of new faculty. So when hiring a chemist, for instance, hire an actual chemist, not a “chemistry educator,” which is code for something else entirely.

To faculty, my advice is trickier, as faculty are in some ways the most entrenched lot. Those without tenure are at risk of blowback for politically incorrect actions or views, those with tenure are more likely to defend the status quo than question it, although tenure is supposed to allow for exactly the opposite.

Faculty: do not model authoritarianism yourselves in your classrooms, labs, or studios. Do not rule with fear (or pointless workload). Ruling with fear is easier, perhaps, than establishing trust and allowing dissent, but it will backfire.

Similarly, faculty, do not encourage students to respect you based on your credentials, either implicitly or explicitly. It is your ability to convey and wrestle with ideas that is valuable, which you can and should model for the students. This requires risking being wrong and being willing to return to your students with information that is more accurate or relevant to the question at hand. You need to be willing to make corrections, to be able to say: “I was wrong about X. Here’s why.” Think of yourself not as gatekeepers to hallowed halls, but as mentors and fellow humans who are learning as they go.

Many people now use the internet for discussion of deep, resonant, complex ideas, which can be fruitful. But if you do so rather than coming together in real life, with people who may disagree, you guarantee finding yourself in a silo, out of which you cannot see. Such echo chambers can become so loud and self-referential that you can cease to believe in the reality of anything outside of them. Too many classrooms are not places for engagement, but rather for bland dissemination of facts. Time together is precious: let us be willing to disagree with respect, and able to shift as we take new ideas and ways of thinking on board. The revisioning of belief in the face of new evidence is core to the scientific method. Everyone claiming a life of the mind should be willing to do the same: change their minds when the evidence calls for it.

And finally, to students, I have the following advice, although truly, this applies to everyone.

Consider the distinction between being part of a group, and being a follower. Speak up in small conversations, among friends, when you know that there is social pressure not to do so. Perhaps you lack the confidence that your convictions are apt, but being silenced into not exploring them is evidence that something is amiss.

Be open. Walk around with positive expectation rather than a feeling of grim defeat, and more diverse experiences will come your way. Do not seek safe spaces, be on the lookout for microaggressions, or demand trigger warnings. Yes, there are moments when what you want is the familiar. But if you allow yourself to take umbrage at that which is unfamiliar—by convincing yourself that unfamiliar is synonymous with outrageous—you will have an ever narrower horizon. Embrace the idea of the unexpected—not just the unexpected itself. This will be easier to do if you do the following:

• Have friends who think differently from you or have truly different life experiences.

• Travel. Leave behind as many of the reminders and comforts of home as you can, so that you actually immerse yourself in other people’s worlds.

• Explore the physical world, not just the social one. The physical world provides non-gameable feedback on how well you are doing. Spend time engaging with experiences and tools that do not respond to emotion and manipulation, and you will learn much about the universe.

Remember, or come to realize, that all brains are different. Nearly all students at elite colleges, and many students at all institutions of higher education, have a particular way of being academically successful: they read easily, follow commands to do homework (even when it feels pointless), have at least some facility with writing and math. But there are many brilliant people out there who do not fall into this rubric. Neurological diversity crosses all demographic lines.

Do not let anyone tell you: we don’t ask those questions here. Dangerous questions exist. And there are going to be some ugly answers. Education and research, the twin goals of post-secondary institutions, are the routes towards understanding, and ultimately minimizing, the prevalence of ugliness in human interactions moving forward. Disappearing ugly facts, or silencing those who speak about them, gives them power that they do not deserve. Choose an institution that has adopted the Chicago Principles, and then learn how to shed light on the dark corners of inquiry, and of your own mind.

This essay originally appeared in Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, New Jersey, based on comments made at the Department of Justice on September 17, 2018. It is reprinted with permission.

Share

Curriculum

1. Have multi-day field trips for all middle and high school students, every year.

   1. Work with regional field stations to accommodate this.

2. Outdoor day trips at least 6x / year for all grades.

3. Re-fund and rebuild music and art programs.

   1. Music: all analog, at least until middle school. Include percussion.

4. Encourage open inquiry and, in high school, longer-term projects, rather than checklists of methods or outcomes that are currently being passed off as science.

5. Focus on the local natural and physical world, and learn from comparisons to schools in other places:

   1. For instance: How long is the sun above the horizon on the Winter solstice? Are there flowers growing in March? How about in a state far away? Why is there a difference?

   2. Use local natural history as a segue into local history, as well as art.

   3. Reveal and teach about things that fill people with awe, such as the night sky, the ocean, a horizon that is far, far away.

      1. Every child should see a dark night sky at least once every year.

6. Bring back Shop and Home Economics classes. Do not restrict access to classes by sex, but also do not expect equal interest in each class by members of both sexes.

   1. Shop: consider only manual tools until high school.

   2. Home Economics: include practical math like budgeting and bookkeeping.

Health

1. Later start times for schools, especially middle and high schools (whose students can and should be encouraged to be responsible for getting themselves started in the mornings).

2. Longer and/or more frequent recess for elementary school students.

   1. Encourage free play during recess, with no top-down enforcement regarding inclusion in games that children invent and play.

3. Reestablish the Presidential Fitness Test, which encouraged individual excellence. It was replaced in 2013 with the Presidential Youth Fitness Program, which instead focuses on equity and inclusion. Bring competition back.

4. Encourage sports participation.

5. School lunch to be as local, fresh, and organic as possible. Connect it to the school garden when possible.

6. No vending machines at schools, until and unless the contents are improved.

7. Make adherence to the childhood vaccine schedule optional.

8. Prohibit bribes for compliant student behavior (e.g. cookies for Covid shots).

Reality, Family, and Biological Sex

1. Information about students under 16 years old shall not be kept from their parents.

2. Remove the new Title IX reforms, including especially protected status for the fictional category “gender identity.”

3. Sex Ed: proceed with caution. No trans ideology. Encourage children to be whatever they want to be, except the impossible. No child can become a dragon or a butterfly; similarly, no boy can become a girl, nor can any girl become a boy.

4. Bathrooms: never “gender neutral” except when single occupancy. Males to use men’s bathrooms only; females to use women’s bathrooms only.

5. Locker rooms to be single sex.

Diversity, Equity and Inclusion

1. Eradicate DEI offices and staff.

2. Do not provide sponsorship or funds for meetings that are exclusionary based on immutable demographic characteristics, with the exception of:

   1. Sports, to be separated by sex (not gender)

   2. Student-created and led clubs, which can be eligible for small funds.

3. Address class-based inequalities of opportunity.

   1. Support and build programs similar to the Gilman International Scholarship Program (run by the State Department), which provides small grants to low-income undergraduates to study abroad.

Technology

1. No computers or tablets in elementary school classrooms.

2. Intentional technology only in middle and high school classrooms.

3. Phones:

   1. Elementary and middle school: no phones at school. If students travel to school with phones for practical reasons, they forfeit them at start of school, to be retrieved at the end of the day.

   2. High school: no phones inside classrooms. Have drop boxes for phones outside each classroom.

Administration and Bureaucracy

1. Get rid of the assessment metrics and—only if necessary—rebuild from the ground up. Existing metrics supposedly measure learning and progress, but are generally misleading at best, backwards at worst.

   1. Less paperwork, more freedom, fewer scripts for teachers to follow.

2. Clean up and streamline the Org Charts, from individual schools to the Dept of Education.

   1. More teachers, fewer administrators.

   2. Then: Reduce class size.

   3. Next: Reduce school size.

3. Leave schools free to experiment with alternative curricular structures and pedagogies, including but not limited to Montessori, Waldorf, full-time immersive programs, and for high schools, Great Books curricula.

4. Reform or eradicate the Schools of Education.

Facilities

1. Decentralize: More, smaller schools are preferable to fewer, larger schools. More nimble, more creative, more human.

2. Grow: Build gardens and grow food. Encourage children to get their hands dirty several times a week.

3. Beautify:

   1. Encourage art, including by students where appropriate.

      1. Frequently freshen with bright, fresh paint.

   2. Regularly update facilities with a combination of skilled tradesmen (carpenters, tile layers, plumbers, etc.) and summer jobs for high school students, who learn from the professionals.

Teachers

1. Hire young people with degrees in science to teach science; degrees in math to teach math; degrees in history to teach history, etc.

   1. Allow exceptions for the talented and creative who have no degrees, especially until the universities right themselves and the degrees once more have meaning.

   2. Remove or substantively revise barriers to teaching such as teacher certifications and credential programs.

   3. Hire only those with curiosity about the world. No petty tyrants; no ideologues.

2. Give good teachers the freedom to teach. Allow them to be creative in the classroom. Encourage them to be uncertain, and to work with students in discovery, rather than being the only authority with the answers.

3. Create Summer travel grants program for teachers to apply for, to encourage them to go new places and learn about the world, and bring that knowledge back to their students in the Fall. Encourage application for and involvement in this program up to once every three years.

Please add your own suggestions in the comments below.

Share

This week’s events prompted me to revisit my 2019 article On College Presidents, which I republish below. First, some back story:

In 2018, I received an email from an editor at Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars. It was one year out from The Evergreen State College blowing up. Evergreen, where I had been tenured; Evergreen, where the president of the college, George Bridges, had effectively led a coup, with the help of activist faculty, staff and students.

The email that I received read, in part:

“We are planning a feature on college presidents. Would you care to write about George Bridges and how he handled the difficulties that arose…”

Why yes, I did want to write about college presidents, and about George Bridges specifically. The resulting article was published some months later (Heying 2019. On College Presidents. Academic Questions, 32(1): 19-29.). Academic Questions is the journal of the National Association of Scholars, and NAS has facilitated me republishing the article here, for which I am grateful.

Share

On College Presidents

Colleges and universities are in the business of discovering, creating, and disseminating knowledge. Human wisdom reliably expands over time, but in the near term it ebbs and flows, making the job of institutions of higher education a difficult one.

There was a shift, early in the twentieth century, from universities as places that taught orthodoxy to its students, to universities in which openness and inquiry were the rule in both research and teaching1. University curricula moved from imagining that we already knew everything there was to know, and all that needed to happen was to push that knowledge into the minds of the young and upcoming, toward a more humble and, frankly, scientific perspective. Such a perspective acknowledges the shifting and incomplete nature of our knowledge, and rewards progress and changes in perspective as new information emerges. This is the university system in which we all came of age. It is also the university system that we need.

When institutions of higher ed. were places of orthodoxy and indoctrination, no less an influencer than Andrew Carnegie argued that for any aspiring “future titan of industry,” a college education was “fatal to success in that domain.2” Carnegie was no fan of the liberal arts tradition—he saw little value in studying history or dead languages, and he prioritized experience over arcane knowledge. But his larger point—that college curricula were out of step with the changing world into which their graduates emerged—was apt. Now, as colleges and universities are again becoming places of orthodoxy, twenty-first century analogs of Carnegie’s in the tech sector are arguing much the same thing: Colleges are too expensive, they teach conformity, and they don’t teach entrepreneurship3.

Carnegie was wrong to imagine that you can know in advance what knowledge will be valuable to you in your life as a thinker, innovator, creator, or entrepreneur. The very premise of the liberal arts is that pursuing knowledge or skills without a clear goal will land you in places that you could not predict going in. A liberal arts education allows for the possibility of educational emergence. This was true in the twentieth century, and it is even truer in the twenty-first.

The need for nimble thinking, creativity in both the posing of questions and the search for their solutions, an ability to return to first principles rather than rely on mnemonics and received wisdom—this is ever more important with the expansion of human knowledge in technology. A misunderstanding of how work will look in the future is driving people to specialize earlier and more narrowly. Higher education is the natural place to counteract that trend and push toward greater breadth, nuance and integration. Students of traditional college age today cannot accurately predict what their career will look like by the time they are seventy years old . . . or even fifty. Or perhaps even thirty. College is where breadth should be inculcated—before the inevitable drive to specialize grabs a student’s attention.

And yet it is at this historical moment that a new orthodoxy is becoming mainstream. It emerges from a small but growing number of faculty who are concentrated in a few disciplines—just a few traditional disciplines, plus many new fields ending in “Studies,” which have been collectively dubbed “Grievance Studies.4” The new orthodoxy is spreading to students, and from there to the broader world. Populist censorship is on the rise.

Mob rule threatens to decide what questions get asked and which topics discussed at universities. Examples include incidents at Yale, Middlebury, Claremont McKenna, Lewis & Clark, and Brown, but there are many more5. Merely questioning the move towards an “equity” agenda is sufficient, in some cases, to have the full wrath of a college descend upon you, as happened to Bret Weinstein (my husband) and me at The Evergreen State College (Olympia, Washington), where we were tenured until 20176. At Evergreen, under the guise of an all-college move towards greater “equity and inclusion,” the core principles of the liberal arts college were dismantled, and those who objected were taken to be enemies of the cause, and therefore of the college itself.

The movement to focus on equity, inclusion and diversity—buzzwords, all—on college campuses is not concerned with questions or ideas. It pretends to be concerned with correcting historical oppression, but because it is not engaged in a good faith investigation of ideas, one of the key tenets of this movement is flat out wrong. “Equality” sounds like “equity” to the untrained ear, but they are not the same thing. “Equity” is code.

The concept of equity was included in the first Principles of the American Society for Public Administration, and in 1981, the ASPA distinguished between the concepts thusly: “equality, which is to say citizen A being equal to citizen B, and equity, which is to say adjusting shares so that citizen A is made equal with citizen B.”7 Equity thus promotes equality of outcome. This is a dystopian idea that was brilliantly satirized in Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron, wherein those with greater ability are handicapped in order to bring society into full compliance.

In this context, the newest American College President Study, the eighth edition of a survey and analysis of college presidents that has been ongoing since 1986, is particularly jarring.8 Whereas earlier editions of the Survey found hope in the trend towards greater diversity among college presidents9, the 2017 document would have us believe that, notwithstanding even stronger positive trends in recent years, “equity” must be a primary concern of college presidents. The executive summary of the 2017 document lists three “key take-aways.” The first is about “diversifying the presidency,” the second aboutfinances, and the third, data driven decision making strategies. No key take-away from the 2017 ACPS mentions research, knowledge, or ideas, whereas some aspect of “equity” shows up in all of them.

All else being equal, diversity of experience and opinion is valuable. The more diverse the people engaged in inquiry, the greater diversity in the kinds of questions that get asked. What is encoded in the College President’s Survey focus on “equity,” which is one of the clarion calls of the social justice movement? “Social justice” ought be everyone’s goal—although what “social” adds to “justice” is difficult to pin down. But the social justice movement as it exists is one that privileges victimhood over recovery, accusation over restoration, reversal of fortune over actual equality. It is “politics by other means,” as David Bromwich outlined in his book of the same name. In a chapter on institutional radicalism, he writes, “Thus a prescriptive compassion for those who carry the mark of victimhood—something class never did for anybody—pulls in an opposite direction from the actual sense of social justice.”10 The social justice movement that is gaining power on campuses and spreading outwards is cloaking a mission antithetical to justice and civil rights.

Among grievance scholars, it has become de rigueur to make extraordinary claims without evidence: “Education policy is an act of white supremacy”; “seeing each other as individuals [is] a perspective only available to the dominant group”; “universities are entrenched systems of privilege.”11 Asking for evidence for these claims is, apparently, an assault in and of itself, and there is jargon to prove it: epistemic exploitation12. Now that asking for evidence of racism is itself evidence of racism, we have a fully gameable, authoritarian, and anti-intellectual climate. That is what is becoming of our campuses.

Give a gift subscription

In the particular case of Evergreen, if the goal was to preserve the financial and intellectual integrity of a college, President Bridges appears to have done everything wrong. The story is a long one, and has yet to be fully told, but one précis is this: a pedagogically innovative, public liberal arts college, in which students of myriad backgrounds were able to do rigorous, creative, analytical work, was undone by the collaboration of a new president, with a cabal of faculty and staff who insisted on their vision of “social justice.” Videos of protests that engulfed the campus in May of 2017, taken by the protesters themselves, were but one tiny piece of the madness that took over a once remarkable institution13.

In the months leading up to the protests, President Bridges pandered to the protestors; privately blamed lack of action on his provost (while his provost was equally certain that it was the president who needed to act); and tried to silence dissent within the college by offering goodies to those who were speaking out in exchange for their silence. Furthermore, he empowered “social justice” faculty by allowing them to push through policy changes, silence dissent from their colleagues, and make slanderous claims against other faculty, with no correction or follow-up. After months of social justice faculty writing nasty and often epithet filled emails directed at Bret Weinstein, because he questioned the way the college was being run, several dozen faculty then demanded an investigation of him for the mortal sin of accepting an invitation to appear on FOX News. They had become faculty trolls hiding under Bridges.

Once the protests broke out, the president hired a public relations firm to spread false narratives, and ordered the police to stand down while protestors hunted car-to-car for “particular individuals” on campus, barricaded buildings, and held people hostage. Bridges also assured protesters, in a private (but filmed and uploaded to the web by protesters) meeting between protestors and upper administration, regarding those who disagree with the equity agenda, that “They’re going to say some things that we don’t like, and our job is to bring them on, or get ‘em out . . . bring ‘em in, train ‘em, and if they don’t get it, sanction them.”

The president shut down channels by which faculty and staff communicated; his administration discouraged anyone from talking to the press; and when, in February of 2018, the new provost alerted faculty to the financial troubles at the college, the president chastised her for sharing information that “might end up appearing elsewhere in ways that will be used against us.”

Perhaps the worst set of fiscal decisions made at Evergreen involve administrative bloat. In 2015, there were four college divisions: Academics, Student Affairs, Finance & Administration, and Advancement. By early 2018, Bridges had increased that to seven, by adding Diversity & Inclusion, Indigenous Arts and Education, and College Relations. The first two of these can best be understood as social justice divisions, or pandering to same; the third is public relations. Academics was further weakened when the newly hired Diversity & Inclusion vice president was appointed vice provost, a position newly created and ill defined. (The near ubiquity of diversity officers now on campuses should itself be questioned, as new research finds that their presence has no effect on the hiring of other people of color on campuses where they serve.)14

Having done all this, on May 14, 2018, Bridges announced that, in service of a “leaner budget” and in order to “consolidate . . . activity across divisions,” Student Affairs would be disappeared, mostly subsumed within Diversity & Inclusion; Academics would be further weakened by the addition of yet another vice provost; and Finance & Administration would receive new leadership—none other than Bridge’s former chief of staff, who was hired without a search, thus further eroding faculty and staff voice in administrative decisions. In short, the administrative legacy of this president is to extinguish or substantively disempower three of four previous college divisions, and create three new ones of dubious value and staffed with people likely to be loyal to him personally, all while making the unverified claim that the restructuring of the administration is a response to the fiscal crisis.

Orthodoxy spreads through the proliferation of in-house bureaucrats, but also through the removal of discretion from the faculty, staff and administrators who know systems the best, and outsourcing the dirty work to anonymous others, who—at best—have generic interests in mind, and may also have perverse incentives. Consultants, for example, are unlikely to be persuaded by candidates who are skeptical of the value of consultants. It is, therefore, also notable that another trend in the college presidency is how many presidential searches are now being run by consulting firms, rather than by in-house committees. In 1978, only 44 percent of presidential searches were run by consulting firms; by 2016, that number had climbed to 71 percent15.

Subscribe now

In biology, there is a concept known as historical constraint. It provides one answer to the question of why organisms are riddled with so many imperfections. In brief, historical constraint refers to the fact that once a structure, such as an eye, is established, selection cannot act on it to make it better, if the first necessary steps in the process would make it worse. The vertebrate eye could be improved, for example, by reversing the orientation of the photoreceptors, as is the case in octopus and squid, but the improvement is left unmade by natural selection because of the blindness that would accompany the intermediate steps.

An analogy can be made between historical constraint in biology and bureaucratic constraint in institutions. Once systems are in place, especially if there are personnel involved, it is difficult to get rid of them even as they become outdated or redundant. We see calcification of once nimble and forward thinking systems, into ever more rigid and archaic ones. This is, in part, what underpinned Thomas Jefferson’s observation that, even in a democracy, rebellion need happen with some regularity.16 Even the best systems will become rigid over time and need an overhaul, and sometimes that overhaul will not be doable in increments.

Bureaucratic constraint is real, and difficult to manage. But what is happening on many college campuses in the last few decades is, like an infection, quicker to do damage. The move to increase administration effectively guarantees a difficult-to-maneuver ship, even at institutions, such as Evergreen, where there was once pride in being lean and nimble: in 1997, the anonymous authors of “The Real Faculty Handbook” wrote that academic administration consists of “a vice president/provost with three staff and five academic deans. That’s it.” The growth of administration, especially diversity officers and offices, who in the current climate will be particularly difficult to downsize or fire, creates bureaucratic constraint out of which some colleges will not be able to maneuver. The infection, if left untreated, is likely to be fatal.

Selection cannot see ahead and make decisions that will improve lives in the long term, if such decisions make things worse in the short term. But selection has built organisms that can do just that: We are one such species, the one best equipped to do so. Our ability to see into the future, to project scenarios, to predict what might happen if we do X rather than Y, is so much of what makes us human. We can predict that building up administration, and acquiescing to authoritarian faculty and protestors, will not be fiscally or academically sound for an institution of higher education. It is also quite human, however, to ignore such predictions when they don’t suit one’s narrative or, as is often the case, when one’s personal ascent requires a failure to comprehend the hazard.

Furthermore, and perhaps most alarming—both for the impact on children, and on institutions of higher ed.—Schools of Education seem to be falling particularly quickly to the religion of social justice. Schools of Education are prey to “ideological orthodoxy and low academic standards,” a trend that has been noted in the published literature for years.17 Combine this with the fact that a significant portion of college presidents emerge from Schools of Education18, and you have a recipe for top-down tolerance of mob rule. Teacher training research, which occurs at Schools of Education, is understood to be “subjective, obscure, faddish, impractical, out of touch, inbred, and politically correct.”19 And curricula in Schools of Education have been found to be unnuanced and one sided, with “narrow ideological viewpoints treated as settled fact.”20 While at Ph.D. granting institutions, only 19 percent of presidents emerge from the field of education, at two year institutions, that number rises to 68 percent.21 Given the prevalence of education degrees among college presidents, the politically correct ideology gripping many institutions now—which not only tolerates but embraces abject submission in the face of authoritarian protest—was perhaps predictable.

Share

College presidents are keepers of both tradition and progress, protectors of paradigms and anomalies, overseers of orthodoxy and heresy. There is an inherent tension here: how to distinguish between those things that show up on the horizon and represent the next shift in understanding, and those that are a flash in the pan, true only for a moment, or in fact completely wrong in all contexts?

Established disciplines once did not exist, and some that seem strong now will not exist in the future. Those who imagine that the future will look like the past will render themselves irrelevant, and surely make poor teachers as well. However: that which has come before is what has made us who we are. Let us not go back to the arrogance of the early twentieth century university, which imagined that all relevant knowledge was already gathered, and merely needed to be uploaded to the brains of the next generation. Why did real world experience loom large for the giants of industry in both the Gilded Age and the Tech Age? Because in the real world, you run into problems that you did not imagine, could not possibly have been perfectly prepared for. When that happens, you must think on your feet, in real time, to solve them. In so doing, you acquire insight and wisdom that cannot be taught directly. Tests of rote memorization assess knowledge, but they cannot assess wisdom. Institutions of higher ed generate wisdom—in their labs and studios, in the minds of those who refuse to color within the lines. Wisdom provides access to new knowledge. Orthodoxy absent heresy precludes the generation of new wisdom. College presidents, as keepers of the flame of higher ed, therefore have as their (admittedly difficult) job, to keep multiple voices alive.

College presidents must be focused on the bottom line: their responsibility is to the financial viability of their institution. They are not primarily academic officers. However, in the case of free expression on college campuses, I argue that doing the right thing financially, and doing the right thing legally and morally, are aligned. Any campus that comes out strongly and explicitly in favor of free expression and against censorship, mob rule, and an equity agenda will, I predict, see an uptick in applications and enrollment.

As increasingly dangerous and violent protests embroiled the Evergreen campus in late May of 2017, I wrote to my colleagues, including the president, to describe what I saw. I finished my letter this way:

Using oppression and fear mongering to maintain the status quo, as has happened nationally for a long time, ought be wholly unacceptable in a democracy. Using oppression and fear mongering to fight for a reversal of that status quo ought be similarly repugnant. A reversal of fortune, in which those who were in power are powerless, and those who were powerless have all the power, ought not be the goal. But it is the stated goal of at least some of the protestors and their allies.

That is not equity.

And this no longer looks like a liberal arts college.

I was wrong on one front. That is, apparently, the definition that has been decided on for “equity.” Equity has little relationship with equality. Given that, no institution of higher ed should be signing on to an “equity agenda.” It is divisive, dangerous, and anti-intellectual. It does, in short, spell the end of the liberal arts college.

Abraham Flexner, the founder of Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, wrote extensively on “the usefulness of useless knowledge,” and in 1939, with regard to Germany and Italy, wrote:

Universities have been so reorganized that they have become tools of those who believe in a special political, economic, or racial creed. Now and then a thoughtless individual in one of the few democracies left in this world will even question the fundamental importance of absolutely untrammeled academic freedom. The real enemy of the human race is not the fearless and irresponsible thinker, be he right or wrong. The real enemy is the man who tries to mold the human spirit so that it will not dare to spread its wings.22

We need look forward, rather than back, but we arrived here on the shoulders of giants, and we ought to learn from them. In 1871, at his inauguration as the president of the University of Michigan, James B. Angell, who has been credited with overseeing Michigan’s transformation into an elite public university, gave a speech that is still worthy of our consideration. Angell argued that an institution should “never insist on [the faculty] pronouncing the shibboleths of sect or party.”23 All modern institutions should heed his words well.

Share

Subscribe now

Give a gift subscription

The final line is this:

Education is about enriching the lives of students so that they may live informed, enlightened lives in which they have the curiosity to ask “why?”, the knowledge to ask “are you sure?”, and the courage to ask “is this right and good?”.

Embracing uncertainty, knowing that you do not know, and that what you think you do know may be wrong—this is foundational to a scientific approach to the world. Over the last decade, and especially since Covid, we have seen an increasing focus on certainty, and on single static solutions to complex problems. Perhaps most alarming of all, those appeals to authority, and to silencing those who disagree, has arrived under the banner of science. #FollowTheScience, we are told, when that has never been how science worked. I hope, still, that the educational philosophy that I laid out here, as a young scientist who was yet to discover most of the joys of teaching, can once again rise up in institutions of higher education throughout the land.

Share

Educational Philosophy from 2001

Education is at the heart of a functioning, democratic society.  As such, teaching is an honor, and an intellectual and creative exploration.  In teaching, as in science, process is paramount.  When students are able to derive meaning by applying their own logical, critical, and creative skills to a problem, then they have learned.

As a teacher, I aim to guide students into being:

• rigorous, intellectually honest thinkers

  • whose first inclination when confronted with a hypothesis is to attempt to falsify it

  • who do not accept “facts” as truth simply because they come from an authority

  • who are skillful in using data to derive new interpretations or hypotheses

• creative and open to new paradigms

  • who seek new ways of doing, seeing, and understanding

  • who periodically reevaluate their belief systems, as new evidence arises

• effective communicators

  • who write and speak well

  • who can use technology to enhance, but not supersede, content

• respectful of diversity, both in other people and in academic disciplines

  • who seek connections between disparate concepts

  • who maintain open minds, and do not jump to conclusions

According to my past students, my primary strengths as a teacher are that I am knowledgeable and respectful, always open to questions, and that I take discussion beyond the expected boundaries. They say that I give clear explanations, but also insist that they try to answer their own questions.  They find my classes thought-provoking, the grading hard but fair, and cite organization, flexibility, and patience as other qualities.

Students respond positively to being recognized as individuals, with needs and goals outside of the classroom.  Students who are successfully encouraged to make connections between the subject matter and their own experiences derive more lasting meaning from their education.  Increasingly, students bring diverse cultural backgrounds to their education.  With these come unique learning styles.  When I was training Rosalie Razafindrasoa, a graduate student in Madagascar, she initially assumed that, as the teacher, I was infallible, and not to be questioned.  I found a subject about which she knew more than I did—the particular herpetofauna of the island on which we were living—and encouraged her to teach me what she knew.  After this interaction, our relationship became more fluid, and much more effective.

Students, like all people, will rise, or sink, to meet expectations.  When a teacher expects consistently high quality, the students rise to the occasion.  Lowering the level of expectation to include more students in the category of “success” fails in two ways: some students will probably still fail, and those who succeed have less to be proud of for their efforts, and fewer skills to take with them into the rest of their lives.  Education should not serve primarily to make the student feel good about herself in the moment.  Education is about enriching the lives of students so that they may live informed, enlightened lives in which they have the curiosity to ask “why?”, the knowledge to ask “are you sure?”, and the courage to ask “is this right and good?”.

Share

Share

Reflection Questions Set #1

1.     Living organisms are extremely complex. Why do we nevertheless prefer simple explanations even for living things? Can you generate an example of something that is complex in nature, which has a (relatively) simple explanation?

2.     The killers in Sheldon’s story, The Screwfly Solution, are convinced by the narratives they are telling (about women, God’s wishes, etc.). Does the number of people who believe the stories, or the degree to which they are convinced, change what the underlying truth is? Is reality democratic? Is science?

3.     Dawkins specifies that he is describing what is true about how humans have evolved, rather than making a moral claim about what we ought to do (p3). Conflating these two things—what is for what ought to be—is also known as the naturalistic fallacy. Describe this in your own words.

4.     Did chimpanzees “want” to evolve into socially complex, long-lived apes? Explain your answer. (Refer to Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, chapter 2, if you don’t know where to start.)

Reflection Questions Set #2

5.     Choose a species from one of the groups of organisms discussed in lecture (e.g., Crustacea, Hymenoptera, Homoptera), and describe how one of the following things manifests in that species:

• parent-offspring conflict (Dawkins chapter 8)

• sibling rivalry (Dawkins chap 8)

• male – female conflict (Dawkins chap 9)

• group living and sociality (Dawkins chap 10)

6.     Emergence is the concept that the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. One effect of emergence, if true, is that we cannot fully understand complex systems by practicing reductionist science. For instance, knowing the genes and cell structures of an armadillo does not enable us to create an armadillo,

Read more

It was not for lack of imagination or planning, though. The chemistry just wasn’t there between the students and me that quarter, and that is where the magic happens.

The failure was due, in part, to the fact that on day two of the program, my father suffered a major heart attack that resulted in him first being placed in a medically induced cold coma, then in hospital for close to two months, where my mother and I spent many hours every week with him (this was fully one year before he died, and there is story to be told there, too). I was, therefore, not as able to engage in theory of mind with my students as I usually did. I did not come to inhabit their minds, so did not understand them very well. In part, too, the failure was due to the fact that an ambitious program that came at the end of the students’ first year of college, in which most of their college work to date had required little from them at all, was surprising to them, and many of them did not ante up. There were also a couple of provocateurs among the students; this did not help.

When I go back to the course materials that I created for this program, however, I am pleased. The curriculum stands the test of time. In every program that I taught at Evergreen, I created a First Day Handout which provided an overview. This was in addition to other handouts on that first day, including the syllabus and the covenant, a document which detailed the expectations and responsibilities of faculty and students to one another in the program.

Here, with no changes except minor copy editing and to elide out-of-date or personal information (e.g., url for the class website, the location of my office, the names of my two past students who acted as my de facto TAs in this program), is the First Day Handout that I created for Nature’s Prose, in April of 2012. Later this week I will post, for paying subscribers, several sets of the Reflection Questions that I assigned as part of Nature’s Prose.

Subscribe now

Nature’s Prose (Spring 2012, Evergreen): First Day Handout

The natural world exists with or without humanity’s interpretation of it. As observers, and users of symbols, it is easy to mistake ourselves for the creators and masters of what we are trying to explain. We will focus on observation as central to a careful, critical, and creative understanding of our world. We will learn the disappearing art of unitasking, of clear undivided focus. In this program, we will learn through direct experience of nature: we will learn to trust our own senses. Evolutionary explanations for nature’s complexity will be prominent.

Texts and Other Readings

• The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins. 2006 (orig: 1976). Oxford University Press.

• Remarkable Creatures, by Sean Carroll. 2009. Mariner Books.

• Many additional readings available on the program website.1

A Liberal Arts Education and the Creation of Learning Community

Evergreen is a liberal arts college. What does that mean, and why should we care?

To me, it invokes many things, but here are two of the most salient:

First, this is not a training ground, not a trade school: this is not where you come to acquire specific skills that you will need for some particular task in your future. You are bigger than that—you are real people, complete people, not cogs in a machine. You are here to learn creative, logical, and analytical tools which will enable you to assess the world carefully, not take things on faith, and be robust yet flexible in your convictions.

Second, this is not a business: you are not consumers, and I am not selling anything. As Mark Edmundson, in his excellent and prescient 1997 article in Harper’s magazine on what college education ought to be for, says, “university culture, like American culture writ large, is…ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images. For someone growing up in America now, there are few available alternatives to the cool consumer worldview.” I ask that you reject the consumer worldview as much as you can. Aim not to fit in, but to have conviction, to stand for something, to be passionate. Be bold, take risks, and lose your complacency.

What is it to live a good life? An investigated life? A productive and creative life?

A liberal arts education helps people to find a path that is true to them, and enables them to be able to assess claims of truth—to reject false or misleading claims on the basis of logic and analytical skills that they own within them, without having to refer to outside authorities. That said, there have been smart and able people before us, and we stand on their shoulders. We should learn from them when we can, and credit them always. What we should not do is trust that they are right simply because they are famous, or because others trust them, or because it is easier than thinking for ourselves.

In this program, we will not embrace reality that is virtual or primarily socially constructed. At the same time, we will create a real learning community in which every member is valuable and respected. Through shared experience and learning, through taking intellectual risks together, we can become a real community in which everyone is recognized and valued for the unique talents that they bring.

One of the things we will focus on in this program is learning new habits. From repeated doing of things—going into the field at least twice a week, and observing; learning a new skill, making or doing something we have not done before—we learn what it is that each of us values, and how to bring those things to the forefront of our lives. Our habits of body become habits of mind. Consider this: is there something that you know you enjoy doing—you actually like the work while it is happening, and you also know you feel better about yourself and about life when you are done doing it—but somehow, you rarely motivate to do that thing? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you made doing that thing into a habit, such that it became a more regular part of your life?

Field Trips                                                Program fee for field trips: $250

• Week 3: Mon - Thurs on Orcas Island, San Juan Islands (in cabins)

• Week 6: Mon - Tues at Grays Harbor, during the shorebird migration (tent camping)

• Week 9: Tues - Thurs in the Columbia River Gorge (tent camping)

The program fee covers all costs associated with the field trips: vans, lodging, and food.

Short essays

These three assignments will require students to wrestle with often complex material in a clear, concise written format. There will be strict word limits, and no late work will be accepted. Essays will be submitted on moodle, and I will return your work to you via email, with comments, before the next essay is assigned. You are expected to work independently on these essays.

Reflection Questions

Assigned on Thursdays, the five sets of “Reflection Questions” will be, like the essays, designed to help you synthesize and integrate your understanding. Your typed answers to the study questions are due in class the following Monday, when you will be discussing your answers in small groups, then all together as a class. You are encouraged to work collaboratively on these assignments, but should write individual answers.

Math & Logic (aka Quantitative & Symbolic Reasoning)

Topics will likely include but not be limited to: probability, descriptive statistics, set theory, density dependence, interpreting graphs, and game theory. Some of these workshops will result in work to be turned in.

Natural History Posters & Annotated Bibliography

Everyone will create a poster detailing the natural history of an organism native to the San Juan islands, to be displayed during our week 3 field trip to the San Juans. Everyone will also produce an annotated bibliography of the sources they used. Details on Thursday of week 1.

Natural History / Weekly Field Time: Developing a Sense of Place

Everyone will spend at least four hours alone in nature every week, observing, and from that experience, will generate meaning, displayed in both a presentation & a paper. Details following tomorrow’s field exercise.

Make or Do: Establishing New Habits & Engaging Physical Reality

Everyone will make or do something in or of the physical universe that they have not made or done before—such as prepare a bird skin for natural history collections, or bike a century. Details on Thursday of week 2 (but start thinking now about possible projects).

Presentations

Every student will give two presentations in week 10: one following from their Natural History work (on observation and the scientific method), the other showcasing the products of their “Make or Do” projects.

Student Evaluations will be based on:

• Engagement with the material (in class, this means active participation in lectures, discussions, and workshops; I will also look for evidence of time spent with the ideas presented outside of class).

• Written work (essays, Reflection Questions, Natural History poster & annotated bibliography): performance in both content and writing.

• All aspects of other program projects: Natural History field experiences, Make or Do projects, Quantitative and Symbolic Reasoning workshops, presentations.

• Contribution to the learning community: willingness to take on diverse roles (leader, team member, teacher, learner…). Interest in helping others learn, & in building strong connections.

• Participation in and contribution to all aspects of field trips.

• Attendance at and timeliness in all aspects of the program, including field trips.

The quality of your work, level of understanding, effort, and extent of improvement will all be important in your evaluation. All of your work will be compiled in a portfolio which you will turn in to me before I write your evaluations.

Share

Subscribe now

Fact-checking organizations are hanging out shingles at every on-line corner, celebrating their own awesomeness with fact-checking festivals, while fact-checking into oblivion true things that are awkward for the powers-that-be1. Universities are making up lists of Very Bad Words—words and phrases like blacklisted and insane and walk-in office hours—which should not be used anymore. Big tech is shutting down and demonetizing people and platforms that speak inconvenient truths, from Twitter to YouTube.

Even governments have gotten in on the act. In the U.K., the “Prevent” program has helpfully identified possible right-wing threats. Those nasty purveyors of wrongthink include but are by no means restricted to Douglas Murray, George Orwell, and the long-running BBC documentary series Great British Railway Journeys. In the U.S, things seem comparatively sane. The Department of Homeland Security has merely issued endless National Terrorism Advisory Bulletins, citing mis-, dis- and mal- information as central to their concerns, and created an admittedly short-lived “Disinformation Governance Board,” with an accomplished purveyor of disinformation heading it up.

And then there are the sensitivity readers. Surely this is a category that Orwell would have been proud to include in Newspeak. Given that war is peace, and ignorance is strength, perhaps censorship is inclusion. Or maybe censorship is enlightenment.

Subscribe now

Censorious sensitivity readers have been invited to destroy all manner of good things, including most recently the works of Roald Dahl. Dahl (1916 – 1990) was a prolific and immensely popular 20^th century author whose most famous works were written for children: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Fantastic Mr. Fox, among so many more. In a remarkable and exhaustive article, journalists at The Telegraph have revealed a staggering array of changes made to Dahl’s work by sensitivity readers.

Many of the changes are of a type. For instance, more than a dozen instances of the word “white” were changed. White was changed to pale, frail, agog or sweaty, or else removed entirely. Because, you know, a color can be racist.

In one book alone—The Witches—The Telegraph counted 59 new changes. These run from the banal—”chambermaid” is replaced with “cleaner”—to cleansings that appeal more directly to modern pseudo-liberal sensitivities. The suggestion that a character go on a diet, for instance, is simply disappeared. And this passage:

“Even if she is working as a cashier in a supermarket or typing letters for a businessman.”

Has been changed to:

“Even if she is working as a top scientist or running a business.”

It’s hard to know what even is believed by the censors who made these changes. Do they mean to suggest that nobody should go on a diet, or that no woman has ever worked as a cashier or a typist? And what, pray tell, is a “top scientist.” I’m guessing that none of the censors could provide a working definition of science, but that when asked to conjure a scientist up, they imagine someone with super science-y accoutrements, like a white lab coat and machines that whirr in the background. Sorry, that would be a pale lab coat.

The censors seem to believe that we moderns have perfect insight into what is good and right, and that we now live on a pure spiritual plane. Only people of the past made errors, had secrets, and believed things that weren’t true.

What the censors are revealing is how very many errors it is possible to make at a single moment in time. We are, it seems, a confused and arrogant people.

Share

Allow me a diversion into my own educational history, and what I learned from my students, many of whom, by the time I met them in college, had had a wildly different experience than mine in school.

I was one of the lucky ones: I loved school, I was good at it, and I learned from it. One or more of those conditions is missing for most people, sometimes causally so: If you can’t learn from school, you’re probably not good it, and you definitely don’t love it. And being “good at school” may mean that you love it, because you’re getting rewarded there, but that doesn’t inherently mean that you’re learning.

It is one of the great failures of modern education that most educators are either people like me in this regard, or people who were good at school without being good at learning in school. Both look like “A-students” from the outside, but we’re not really the same. It is a failure of modern education that the adults who choose to make a life there mostly come from the ranks of A-students, because many A-students can’t grasp that people who don’t get good grades are not inherently stupid or lazy.

If you’re a human of any age, and have not compelled yourself into a fury of denial stemming from ideological certainty, you will know this: kindness can show up in the most unexpected places. So too insight. And wisdom.

The fact is that some of us are better analysts than others, while others are better at creating social environments that facilitate connection. Some of us may not want to look you in the eye, but still want to interact; others of us can’t do math, but know that it’s necessary, and would rather not be lied to with it.  Some of us are always moving our bodies (or want to be); others are quite happy to sit still, calmly and quietly, while others speak for hours on end.

Given the great variety of ways that we experience the world, and given that school is inherently less diverse in its manifestation than are the students who populate it, it should be obvious that many people will not be a good fit for school. This does not mean that they are stupid. And it does not mean that they are lazy. There are surely both stupid and lazy people among those who are not good at school. As, I know for a fact, are there stupid and lazy people among those who are good at school.

“What?!” you may cry, outraged at the insult from another A-student such as yourself. “We are nothing if not smart!” Many of us are, yes. I will even go so far as to say that there will be a higher proportion of smart people among the A-students than there are among the C-students. But there are many brilliant people among the C-students, and many who are not brilliant among those who earn better grades. It is quite possible to be “good at school” without being good at just about anything else: learning to game the system, while no doubt useful, is not a strong mark of intelligence.

I hazard to guess that modern day censors—the sensitivity readers of Roald Dahl, the university Newspeakers, the fact checkers of PolitiFact—were mostly A-students. What comes next is based on that assumption.

Maybe those A-students got there the honorable way, happening to be well-suited to school-style learning, loving the process, and learning voraciously along their entire academic path. Or maybe they got there by learning how to game the system, memorize some stuff, and regurgitate back to teacher what teacher most liked to hear2. I’m thinking there is a mix of these types among the censors. But if the censors are mostly or entirely made up of A-students, there is a good chance that few if any among them actually have empathy for those who weren’t or aren’t good in school. The censors are bullying others in mental space, just as schoolyard bullies do so in the physical3.

What about the children who don’t do well in school, but are full of wonder? There are millions of these right now, and many more to come. What about the children who won’t sit still, can’t stand quiet time in class, spend more time looking out the window than at the board? What if many of them, when back home, freed from the strictures of school, find something to adore in the words of Roald Dahl? Or Laura Ingalls Wilder. Or C. S. Lewis. Or J. K. Rowling. And what if, in their adoration of the words of Roald Dahl, they have a chance of becoming educated?

Children who do fine in school may find other ways to learn about fiction and story, history and reality. Although frankly, that’s becoming ever more difficult too, given that some other large fraction of the “good students” are now populating the schools as teachers, applying their ideological wickedness directly to children. The luckiest among us, the most privileged, have houses already full of books, with the original text intact, and family and friends eager to read to children, to engage the ideas therein with both wonder and criticism. Fiction percolates.

But children who learn little if anything in school, and who do not have houses full of books to return home to, particularly need these books. They need the books as they were written, warts and all. The very people whom the censors claim to be working on behalf of—the under-served, the under-privileged, the historically oppressed—are precisely the ones whom censors are guaranteed to harm the most.

Share

There are many things troubling about the creative work of an author being changed after his death. It interferes with our understanding of our own history. We live downstream of our actual history, which did not change just because censors got ahold of our documents. Having the recorded version of history scrubbed interferes with our ability to make sense of our world.

Post-mortem revisions are also bad for art. These edits raise questions of creative autonomy. Of voice. Of what fiction is for. Fiction is not mere entertainment. Fiction educates and uplifts, informing readers about ourselves and our world, and also about the moment in time that the work was created.

The Telegraph reports that Dahl wrote in Esio Trot (his final book, published in 1990, the year of his death) that tortoises were being brought into England, “mostly from North Africa.” The censors removed the original specificity, such that now the tortoises “came from lots of different countries.”

Putting aside the outrage that may boil up—what on earth did they change that for?—consider the effect. In the original, there was somewhere new that your brain could take you: oh, are tortoises mostly from North Africa? Or was it just these particular tortoises, and if so, is there something uniquely transportable about these particular tortoises? Or did the English have an historical relationship with pet traders in North Africa? Was it illegal at the time—the importing or the exporting? Legal but frowned upon? What kinds of lives did North African pet traders have?

Curious if there was any more detail in the original, I unearthed the boxed set of Roald Dahl’s books that I bought for my own children many years ago, and had long since carefully packed away to save for their children. In Esio Trot, I was amazed to find that this section struck by the censors wasn’t in the book itself: it’s in the Author’s Note. Dahl is providing a literal description of a reality that existed, which provided one of the germinating ideas for his book. The censors have even gone after and altered the Author’s Note to his readers.

The Telegraph further reports that in the original book, Dahl mentions a “bedouin tribesman,” but in the 2022 edition this is cleansed to “local person.” I suspect, but do not know, that all mention of Africa has been eradicated from the new publication. I suspect this in part because when I found the relevant passage in the original, I was actually shocked by what I found there:

“Mrs. Silver,” he said. “I do actually happen to know how to make tortoises grow faster, if that’s really what you want.”

“You do?” she cried. “Oh please tell me! Am I feeding him the wrong things?”

“I worked in North Africa once,” Mr. Hoppy said. “That’s where all the tortoises in England come from, and a bedouin tribesman told me the secret.”

“Tell me!” cried Mrs. Silver. “I beg you to tell me, Mr. Hoppy! I’ll be your slave for life!”

When he heard the words slave for life, a little shiver of excitement swept through Mr. Hoppy. “Wait there,” he said. “I’ll have to go in and write something down for you.”

My sensibilities are prickled by this. I am discomfited. I don’t like the idea of anyone offering to be a “slave for life,” nor do I like that someone who is supposedly attracted to that person would be eager to receive such a gift. I really don’t like it at all.

If I were reading this book to a child, this would be a learning opportunity. We could discuss metaphor, and the fact that language changes over time, and that phrases that may have been common in the past can be jarring in the present. And we could discuss the broader implications—why is this jarring now? Why wasn’t it then? Does that suggest a complacency about actual slavery, or something else?

Far better that than disappear what is currently viewed as ugly. That which is driven underground often becomes stronger while out of public view. Rather than pretend that such things don’t exist and never did, we need to have them on full display. This, in part, is the value of freedom of speech and expression. Let those with actually nasty views speak, so that we may hear them, and know who they are, and remember, and learn. Similarly, let views from the past that some will find ugly today be in the public eye, so that we may remember, and learn.

In every one of these censorious cases, there is loss. Loss of detail. Loss of story. Loss of language. Loss of the past, including loss of evidence of the bigotry of the past. How are we to make sense of our trajectory, and best plan a future, if our history is smudged, altered, and erased?

Share

What follows is, first, my resignation letter, barely edited to obscure personal details. After that, I include some of what I removed from the resignation letter, a little of which will be slightly cryptic for those not in possession of the many hundreds of pages of documents that members of the Board reviewed the previous week.

Share

December 2, 2022

Dear fellow Board members,

I am resigning from the Board of the University of Austin.

I sincerely hope that the University of Austin succeeds. If I had to place a bet right now, I’d bet that it will. Many of you and the others leading the charge are uniquely qualified to bring such an institution to fruition. It is thus with a heavy heart that I have come to this decision.

I am not compelled that the vision you are pursuing is sufficiently revolutionary. To fix higher ed, UATX would need to address the root causes of academic fragility, not just treat the symptoms that threaten its vitality in the present. That, in turn, would require an embrace of the counterintuitive, and tolerance for a great deal more risk than I think there is appetite for in this group.

If I might offer you one piece of advice as I bid you a heartfelt farewell: Should you ever wish to retrace your steps to determine where the founders misstepped—should you want to know how the University of Austin ended up trapped in the next academic quagmire, the answer is in the arms-length treatment of science. Science is not an ingredient that can be added to taste in such an endeavor. It is a reliable North Star, structurally indifferent to the ebb and flow of belief that drives great institutions off the road. The casual approach to science in the formulation of UATX is both cause and effect in this story. The only process powerful enough to protect an institution from madness, not just woke madness, but every version of lunacy, is science, properly practiced. But to build that into this new institution, you would have to rescue this ancient tool from the corruptions of the modern R1 universe.

On our very first day, in May of 2021, someone joked that I was the token liberal in attendance. A year and a half on, I think it an unfortunately profound observation. It seems that others on the Board have trust in existing elite institutions, except for the relatively new and remarkably widespread problems that we can all see—the abandonment of free speech, the rise of wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing Diversity Equity and Inclusion offices, the abandonment of due process, the ascendancy of institutionally sanctioned bigotries, the bloating of administrations and staffing of them with ideologues to achieve political goals. These are serious threats. This is a genuine crisis. But these are symptoms, not etiology. The symptoms can be treated, but if the causal pathology is not addressed, the fix is assuredly temporary.

Our universities will not be effective truth-seeking institutions if we simply scrape the woke off the top. The rot is far deeper, the product of a kind of analytical immuno-deficiency: terrible ideas took over a system in which new ideas, and the discussion thereof, were increasingly rare. Higher ed needs a fundamental framework of truth-seeking, with the built-in error correction that scientific inquiry provides, if it is to evade this fate in the future.

Nearly everything from early 21st century universities could be reimagined to good effect. The two most pressing issues that I see are the need for science (for everyone, not just those who think of themselves as scientists), and for new thinking on curriculum and pedagogy (in part to help realize the potential of the vast number of brilliant students who are ill-served by traditional academic settings, but also to better educate everyone, especially in science, which is particularly enfeebled by standard approaches). I have spent decades enmeshed in these topics, including dedicated focus for a year shortly before UATX was formed, on the Beringia Project. Along with Bret Weinstein, the other co-founder of that project, we made considerable progress identifying additional deep flaws that would need to be addressed to reach the next phase of higher ed. A full restructuring of the modern university would include but not be limited to reconfiguring faculty hiring and firing, treatment and role of adjuncts, faculty autonomy, governance, administrative structure, admissions, residential life, tuition, grades, accreditation, academic departments, majors, library, and study abroad. Unfortunately, between that model and the one being planned for UATX lies too substantial a valley to be crossed. And that is why, despite believing that UATX will be a better school than most or all of what currently exist, I must leave the project.

I hoped, back in May of 2021, when the University of Austin was but a glimmer in a few people’s eyes, that it could be revolutionary, that it could successfully take on the problems facing modern universities, and therefore the world. After a year and a half of pushing unsuccessfully in that direction, I am throwing in the towel. It is better to separate myself from the University, than to have my name be attached to an institution that does not represent my scientific and pedagogical values.

I truly do hope that you succeed in creating this new university, one that attracts faculty, staff, and students alike, one in which discussion is not tamped down by censorship, explicit or otherwise, and one in which the excesses and confusions of the “Diversity Inclusion and Equity” movement are shut down. These things need to happen. But they are far from sufficient.

With respect,

Heather

Subscribe now

Additional Context – Some of What I Removed from the Resignation Letter

The ability to think scientifically is critical for individuals, and for an educated populace. By this I do not mean that everyone needs to know how to run a PCR, or even what PCR is, or its limitations, or its implications. Rather, the scientific thinking that is critical for educated people to engage in includes observation, pattern recognition, recognition of bias and assumption, hypothesis generation, and experimental design, even if just at the theoretical level.

Every educated person needs to be able to take an idea that they think is true, identify what would constitute evidence that it’s not, and figure out how they would go about attempting to falsify it. Epistemology—the study of how it is that we make claims of truth, and what constitutes evidence for and against them—should be a core pursuit in a university that claims to be about the pursuit of truth. Every scientific endeavor, and therefore a great number of human endeavors, should begin with: How do I know what is true, and how will I assess claims of truth going forward?

In part because math and science are generally taught badly in the K-12 system, by people who don’t understand the creativity and joy to be had in those topics, most smart children end up believing themselves to be bad at math or science, and therefore most smart adults believe the same thing about themselves. This is largely an effect of the educational system; it is not intrinsic to the children. College is not too late to reinvigorate scientific thinking. Scientific thinking awakens in us a sense of wonder and of awe, of discovery and of exploration. There are still many things new under the sun to discover. Scientific thinking lights in us a sense of the possible. What if?

But in institutions of higher ed, the sciences are effectively Balkanized—the students who aren’t “studying science” don’t learn the fundamental power of scientific thinking, and the science faculty are ever more remote from the rest of the professoriate, in part because they are given release time from teaching and governance as they bring in more and more federal grant dollars. In an era when interdisciplinarity is a buzzword that resonates for nearly everyone, and generalists, not specialists, will be the key to solving most of the problems that now seem intractable, we instead have the rise of the specialist. Scientists are doing ever-less science-y things—following protocols and algorithms, leading with data rather than hypothesis—yet still have the imprimatur of science. Sometimes they are trotted out with the trappings of science—a lab coat! A relevant PhD! Fancy instrumentation and jargon and math-heavy visuals!—to make pronouncements. And most of the non-science-types believe that they have no choice but to receive the wisdom of the scientific authorities. They’re doing science, after all. What could go wrong?

The last three years have revealed example after example of what could go wrong when credentialed authorities are blindly trusted, but the rot is far older than that. I worked in the academic grants office on a University of California campus for a year in the early ‘90s, between receiving my BA in Anthropology and beginning my PhD in Biology. Even then, the ability of federal agencies to direct what research was funded, and therefore what questions were asked, and even what answers were publicized or even arrived at1, was evident. The problem has only gotten worse. Scraping the woke off the top of a standard issue research university’s tenets and systems addresses but a tiny fraction of what needs to be fixed.

The censorship pervading campuses which everyone involved in the University of Austin can see, is nothing compared with the censorship within disciplines, and between academics, which serves to maintain the status quo, and restrict or utterly stop progress.

Share

Another deep and abiding problem that needs to be fixed in higher ed is pedagogy. Both “sage on the stage” lectures from on high2, and seminar-style discussions, leave many students in the dust. And even for those students for whom these traditional modes of instruction appear to function, those students rarely end up educated through these means.

To be educated requires more than that you have read books and responded to them. Education requires doing actual things in the physical universe; attempting to solve problems that appear intractable, or for which you do not feel that you have the right tools; becoming the kind of person who is independent and self-sufficient, and also capable of collaboration when that is called for.

The world’s elite schools are producing graduates who don’t know how to think, can’t solve problems, and have not done anything outside of narrow, academically prescribed “work” that is the very definition of make-work. Having students stew in their own uncertainty, their own confusion, their own dashed assumptions, forces awareness and capability in nearly all of them.

The rigorous, difficult and uncomfortable, and also joyous, exploratory, and serendipitous, education of undergraduates, is possible. I did it for a long time. To accomplish that, you need professors who know something real, and believe in the humanity of their students. And you need a curricular structure that provides time, space, and freedom.

Time with the students. Optimally, this mean full-time programs, where the faculty actually come to know real things about their students: what drives them, how they think, where they refuse to think, what their assumptions are. Time to put an idea in their heads one day, and return to it the next, and the next. Time spent informally, getting to know one another—breaking bread together, sitting around campfires together. Time to develop ideas, to go down wrong paths, to discover their errors and yours, time to return to the last place where you stood on firm analytical ground and investigate anew.

Space to explore—pedagogically, analytically, geographically. Here are some examples:

• Pedagogically:

  • Have students “learn a skill” over the course of a quarter, in which the primary goal is not that they learn the skill, but that they learn how to learn, and learn what their own developmental and motivational barriers to success are. Repeat.

  • Do the unexpectedly relevant: In a program on human behavior and evolution, have weekly physical computing labs. Discuss.

  • Drop students alone in the forest for two hours and ask them to write down every question that occurs to them; return to those questions soon thereafter, and have them generate hypotheses from them, predictions, tests. Some of those will then turn into research projects that those same students do, from start to finish.

• Analytically:

  • Provide detailed hypothetical scenarios, and have students predict what else will be true in those systems, backing up their thinking with theory and published empirical research.

  • Present to the student an assumption in a system. Ask them: What happens if it isn’t true? What else collapses? What other possibilities open up? Repeat with all of the assumptions, across many systems.

• Geographically:

  • Take the students elsewhere, outside of the classroom, as much as possible. Do this early in knowing them. Go on a field trip somewhere without internet or cell service (it is still possible), and pose questions there, where nobody can google the answer. It is much more difficult to deny reality—to be in the throes of the woke—when in the Columbia River Gorge, than in a comfortable classroom. It is even more difficult to deny reality in the Amazon.

Freedom to do so. Freedom of speech is a given, but freedom to think and to teach—to teach how and what is best suited to the material and the faculty and the students—is also necessary. Faculty autonomy is critical in a functioning university. Have faculty yahoos too often take over faculty Senates and university administrations and changed universities for the worse, spreading a thick layer of woke on everything? Yes they have. The solution to that is not to remove autonomy from yet-to-be-hired faculty at a brand-new institution. The solution is not to hire yahoo faculty in the first place—and when they show up despite the best efforts of the hiring authorities, to fire them quickly.

The censorship that is highly visible to many, due to its cartoonish and public explosions, is but one manifestation of censorship in academia, one that goes far deeper, one that stops progress in its tracks, and is always interested in the status quo. We need to escape from the networks of influence that drive most modern academia. Again: scraping the woke off the top won’t be sufficient.

I have written more extensively about higher ed here (Higher Ed needs a Reboot), as well as here (The Twin Virtues of Trust and Uncertainty), and, with Bret, in the “School” chapter of A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century.

Share

2

Those unfamiliar with this phrase—sage-on-the-stage—will immediately understand it at one level, but the implications are deep: It implies an infallibility of the professor, an authority granted by their degree and their placement at the front of the room, rather than by whether or not they actually know anything that is true, and can communicate it effectively to the students. I imagine featherless baby birds, open-mouthed, beaks to the sky, in a nest, waiting eagerly for the placement of perfect and nutritious nuggets from their parents. This is not a model that serves any student best, although it does serve some faculty best, if their goal is to spend as little time as possible navigating the actual classroom in which they have landed, rather than a hypothetical group of undergraduates who could be swapped for any other.

Subscribe now

Protest is American. It’s at the heart of a democratic society. But the protests on college campuses today are not what they seem.

In Portland, Oregon, in February of 2018, a panel on diversity was disrupted by protesters when the biologist — that would be me — made the outrageous claim that, anatomically and physiologically speaking, men and women are different.

That is a factually accurate description of what happened, but it is misleading, and obscures the most troubling part of the story.

A two-minute clip of the disruption has been widely circulated, and is excerpted from the hour and a half video of the entire event, below, which has considerably more nuance. Andy Ngo, the graduate student organizer, wrote about the run-up to the panel in the Wall Street Journal a few weeks ago, in which he noted that violence had been threatened; as a result of that threat, there was considerable police and other protective presence on site.

The event, titled “We Need To Talk About Diversity,” was headlined by James Damore, author of the “google memo.” That was enough to prompt protest. James and the other panelists — Peter Boghossian, a philosopher, and the moderator; Helen Pluckrose, a scholar and critic of intersectional feminism; and myself, an evolutionary biologist — planned to engage ideas in a public forum, to take difficult questions and discover both points of agreement and disagreement.

I think that we did that, but the protesters who walked out, breaking the audio equipment as they left, weren’t around to listen. Outside, unbeknownst to those of us on the panel, the individuals who left said things like, “even the women in there have been brainwashed!” and “Nazis are not welcome in civil society.”

When banal observations like “men and women are different heights” prompts the accusation that I’m both brainwashed and a Nazi, it’s clear that this was not good faith protest.

Share

It is true that the authoritarian-left is denying biology, but the deeper truth of the situation is perhaps even more concerning. The incoherence of the protesters’ responses and the fact that the walkout was scheduled in advance suggests something darker: the protesters are “read-only,” like a computer file that cannot be altered. They will not engage ideas — they will not even hear ideas — because their minds are already made up. They have been led to believe that exposure to information is in and of itself dangerous.

Scientists, philosophers, and scholars of all sorts have effectively been accused of thoughtcrimes before it is even known what we’re going to say. The very concept of thoughtcrime, as Orwell himself well understood, is the death knell to discourse, to discovery, to democracy.

One thing I argued, after the protesters had long since left, to which I would like to hear a nuanced objection, was this: Google, like the entire tech sector, has a very skewed sex ratio among its software engineers. It’s something like 4 to 1 — nearly 80% of software engineers are male. At first pass, that sounds wrong, egregiously far off the sex ratio in the population which, for well understood evolutionary reasons, tends to be 1:1. But not everyone in the population is suited to or interested in being a software engineer. If we are interested in detecting hiring bias at Google, we should compare Google’s 4 to 1 ratio not to the entire population, but to the population likely to be seeking these positions. As a first pass, perhaps the population of people seeking employment at Google as a software engineer is comprised of people earning degrees in computer science. It’s not perfect, but it’s a better match than “everyone on the planet.” 

Tellingly, the sex ratio of people earning degrees in computer science has hovered, for years, right around 4:1. This suggests that, at the very least, Google is hiring software engineers at the same sex ratio at which they are being produced by the universities — hardly evidence of rampant discrimination against women at Google. In fact, it’s the ratio we would expect if applicant quality was independent of sex, and Google’s hiring process was sex-blind.

As recent protests go, the walkout at Portland State University was minor. While there were threats in advance, the actual damage was slight, and the number of people directly involved tiny. Yes, we need better science education and literacy1. But more important — more fundamental — we need to reinvigorate the concept of education itself. Those who are truly educated are also educable, which means taking in new information throughout your life, and being willing to re-investigate, and throw out, even your most cherished beliefs. If our schools and universities are not prepared to do this job, we must ask ourselves: where shall our next educational structures be built?

Bonus: One of my favorite moments from the event at PSU in February 2022, at 1:28:26: “If you don’t believe that there’s an objective reality, I’m not sure we can get very far.”

Here is a brief précis of what happened1:

A pedagogically innovative, public liberal arts college, in which students of myriad backgrounds were able to do rigorous, creative, analytical work, was undone by the collaboration of a new president with a cabal of faculty and staff who insisted on their vision of “social justice.” Videos of protests2 that engulfed the campus in May of 2017, taken by the protesters themselves, were but one tiny piece of the madness that took over a once remarkable institution.

In the months leading up to the protests, President Bridges pandered to the protestors; privately blamed lack of action on his provost (while his provost was equally certain that it was the president who needed to act); and tried to silence dissent within the college by offering goodies to those who were speaking out in exchange for their silence. Furthermore, he empowered “social justice” faculty by allowing them to push through policy changes, silence dissent from their colleagues, and make slanderous claims against other faculty, with no correction or follow-up. For months social justice faculty wrote nasty and often epithet filled emails directed at Bret Weinstein because he questioned the way the college was being run, after which several dozen faculty demanded an investigation of him for the mortal sin of accepting an invitation to appear on FOX News. They had become faculty trolls hiding under Bridges.

Once the protests broke out, the president hired a public relations firm to spread false narratives, and ordered the police to stand down while protestors hunted car-to-car for “particular individuals” on campus, barricaded buildings, and held people hostage. In a private meeting with upper administration and protesters (which was filmed and uploaded to the web by protesters), Bridges said of those not supporting the college’s equity agenda that “They’re going to say some things that we don’t like, and our job is to bring them on, or get ‘em out . . . bring ‘em in, train ‘em, and if they don’t get it, sanction them.”

In that same meeting between activists and administrators, the activists asserted that science faculty are the worst offenders. But what is the offense? The claim is that the offense is racism. The claim is absurd. Racism has, of course, been a scourge on humanity from time immemorial. But at the societal level, we were moving in the right direction. People were becoming more tolerant of, and less bigoted against, those who looked or sounded different from themselves, or who had different histories and cultures. Evergreen was perhaps the most progressive college in the country; tolerance and compassion were cherished ideals. Thirty years earlier, Bret had stood up against truly racist practices adjacent to his own undergraduate institution. In 2017, he was standing up against divisive and racist practices at Evergreen, and for this he was himself called a racist. No actually racist events were ever described or discovered at Evergreen3. But that didn’t stop the mob.

Factors contributing to the extravagant, fantastical, and wholly unnecessary events at Evergreen in the Spring of 2017 are many and diverse. Some factors appear to have been central—such as the long history of racist policies and actions at American institutions—but were actually strawmen, weaponized by those who prefer division over solution-making.

Other factors were in fact key, but are largely invisible to most observers: Science has come to be funded largely by federal grants; because colleges and universities get a substantial percentage cut of all such grants, institutions of higher ed are increasingly dependent on researchers who bring in large grants; this in turn privileges Big Science—long-term projects that require expensive equipment and massive teams, in which both accountability for most individuals is lower, and there is less emphasis put on individuals being able to actually do complete science, from beginning to end. The way that science is now funded has thus created a tremendous number of highly trained, highly credentialed, cogs, who know one piece of a puzzle, or one methodology, very well, but are not good at hypothetico-deduction, or indeed, much of the logic inherent to the scientific method. Such scientists are more likely to expect to be treated as authorities simply because they have credentials, because if you ask them to explain complex ideas simply, or to consider the evidence for the claims they are making, they often cannot. This, in turn, leaves a populace that is simultaneously smitten with the idea of science—look at all it has done for us!; intimidated by the complex jargon and technology that seems to be necessary to do it, so often inclined to just trust the authorities; and also justifiably suspicious of yet another privileged class who receive goodies (like reductions in administrative tasks at their professor jobs) that other professors can only dream of, while acting arrogant and entitled with those who don’t share their credentials.

Most people who have participated in protests, riots, or mobs on campuses or in the streets these last few years are unlikely to be aware of the changes described in the last paragraph. But some things are obvious to nearly everyone. We have increasing disparities in wealth and opportunity between those at the top and those at the bottom, with increasingly little space in the middle. Young people feel acutely the lack of opportunities they are facing. How can they pay for college, much less ever buy a house, and what meaningful work will be available to them in their lives, in this 21st century world?

Into that landscape, enter demagogues who offer simple sounding solutions. Demagogues like Robin DiAngelo (author of White Fragility) and Ibram X Kendi (author of How to be an Antiracist), who preach division and encourage suspicion and hatred between people who look different from one another. And solutions like the BlackLivesMatter (BLM) movement, and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) offices and officers. These “solutions” use so many glorious words, you would have to be crazy or evil to disagree with anything they propose—or so they would have us believe. Inside these movements and organizations we find, however, the policing of speech and behavior, encouraging spying on one’s peers and reporting unacceptable behavior, and discouraging the open discussion of ideas and solutions that don’t sound like the currently fashionable thing. This “equity agenda,” to use the language of Evergreen’s president, is a fast-tracked orthodoxy about which you are not allowed to disagree.

The weaponizing of the anger and angst of young people for personal or political gain became all the more polarizing when one of the country’s two major political parties took up the mantle of BLM and DEI. Those who have no interest in addressing economic disparities can divide and conquer by focusing on immutable characteristics—race and sex—and insist that those are the primary characteristics that predict outcomes today. Furthermore, the election of Donald Trump, which did not mark the beginning of the divisive political rhetoric, but certainly marked an accelerating point, further polarized nearly everyone. For a while, it seemed that even the usually clearest headed among us were adamantly, vociferously, rabidly, even, either anti- or pro-. The hatred that accompanies such tribalism is delicious, and deadly.

At a more local level—at Evergreen as elsewhere—opportunistic activists who were LARPing as scholars and academics indoctrinated students rather than educating them, whipping them into a frenzy of misplaced anger. Young people everywhere and throughout time can be enticed to such frenzies: passion, self-righteousness and groupthink are intoxicating in the moment. It was but a handful of faculty and staff at Evergreen who created the frenzy, but their reach was far indeed.

And the success of the Evergreen LARPers was secured by a few more factors: a college president who worked hand-in-hand with the activists to foment dissent among the faculty, and the fact that the vast majority of the rest of the faculty and staff abdicated all responsibility for what was happening. The adults left the room, or revealed that they had never been adults at all.

Share

There are several details of what happened—both in late May and early June of 2017, when Evergreen was at fever pitch and violence always seemed imminent, and also in the early Fall of the same year, when Bret and I were in mediation with the college—that we have not discussed publicly.

One is that one of the men who marched with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, a civil rights activist, community development leader, and a black man himself, whom I am not mentioning by name only because I did not have time to ask him if I might, contacted us to say: Please allow me to come march with you, and to bring with me some of my civil rights activist friends, on the Evergreen campus. He said: these people who have taken over your campus, they are destroying King’s dream.

We were considering his offer, when a new round of violence on campus made it too dangerous to proceed.

After classes ended for the year, we were in a holding pattern. The college ignored our legal requests to sit down and discuss what had happened for the entire Summer—we were ultimately told by one person inside the administration that president Bridges, apparently exhausted from his grueling experiences being a hapless fool who encouraged his own abduction, had taken vacation for the entire month of July. We were in purgatory—were we still tenured professors, or weren’t we? Our hometown had become unpleasant at best. The college did find time, that Summer, to hire some of the most egregious student actors, the ones who had helped incite the protests, into paying positions at the college. Up was down, black was white, and through the looking glass we went.

In the middle of that endlessly surreal Summer, a Public Records request that I had made many weeks earlier came through. Just as then-Police Chief Stacy Brown had suggested they would, the files I had requested revealed some of the actual violence that student activists were being allowed to enact on other students. But the most interesting thing about the request was that it arrived in our mailbox with a hand-written note from Evergreen’s Public Records Officer, whom neither Bret nor I had ever met. Her note was kind and human, striking a tone that had been lacking from nearly anyone at Evergreen since May 23 of that year. In it, she told us that she was thinking of us, and that she appreciated what we were doing, and hoped that we were staying strong. This stranger took the time—and the risk—to reach out to us and connect. It meant a tremendous amount to us. It should not matter, but the author of the note was also a black woman4.

We finally sat down to mediation with the college after our contracts for Fall of 2017 had already begun. We were due to begin teaching full-time programs within two weeks, in programs that were overfull, which was always true of our programs.

Mediation did not go well. We sat in two separate rooms—us in one room with our lawyers, and the representatives of the college in another with theirs—separated by a wall from people whom we had known for years, one of whom had been at our home just weeks before. Through the mediator, we were asked to apologize to the college. We gaped. We were still fighting for our lives at Evergreen at that point, a college whose mission we loved and whose experimental curricular structure is extraordinary, when it works. We offered to organize a conference at Evergreen, one with a truly diverse and inclusive roster of speakers—from that same 1960s civil rights activist, to modern day heroes and scholars of free speech and education. The college responded that they saw no need for such a conference, and they offered us panic buttons to have in class.

Share

There was no hope for reconciliation. The college wasn’t interested in reconciliation. The college was, in fact, proud of its insanity. They continued to double down.

The mediation resulted in a monetary settlement and a promise to never seek employment at Evergreen again. The college also hoped that we would agree not to talk about any of this, but of course we would not. Totalitarianism rarely makes spectacular leaps and bounds, although such events are best remembered and most likely to be recorded in our histories. Rather, totalitarianism generally creeps. Self-censorship is one of the primary methods by which totalitarianism creeps in and flourishes. We would not agree to silence ourselves.

It was after midnight following a grueling day of mediation that we signed the settlement papers. For no discernable reason other than to twist the knife further, we were given just 48 hours to clear out of our offices. At the college where we had spent 15 years of our lives, where we were two of the most successful and popular professors, where our programs were often highlighted on the college’s website, and where none of our own students ever turned on us, we were given two days to clear out and turn in our keys, or have the locks changed on us, losing access to whatever we might have left behind.

I spent the next two days packing up my things, finding so much memorabilia along the way—notes and gifts from students, itineraries for domestic field trips and for study abroad, drafts of curricula for upcoming programs that now would never happen. I was filled with outrage, to be sure, but mostly what I felt was empty and shocked. I was in despair. How could an institution that I had loved and trusted so much behave this way? And how could it stand to betray its own students? Knowing that, within hours of handing in my office keys at the end of the week, I would also lose access to everything electronic at Evergreen, I wrote an email and sent it to the students in all of my past programs. Mostly, probably, the emails disappeared into the abyss—they went to Evergreen student email addresses that had largely ceased to exist. But a lot of them reached their mark. I know because I heard back from many students whom I had not heard from in years.

Here is the email that I sent:

September 13, 2017

Dear former students of mine at Evergreen,

Please excuse the mass email. I am writing to past students—many of whom I have heard from individually already in these past few months—to let you know a few things. Reaching out across space and time, in that tentacled way that modernity allows, and tapping you all on the shoulder. Remember when? 

I am about to lose access to my Evergreen email, indeed, access to all that Evergreen is. When that happens, I will lose contact information for most of you. So I’m writing now, quickly, in boilerplate, to whole classes that haven’t been living, learning communities for many years. 

Our learning communities were flawed, weren’t they, but they were rich. We had real disagreement, and discussion, and we learned, all of us. We also, usually, built trust. I am devastated to find your alma mater, the college that I have loved and called home for so many years, acting in bad faith, dismantling trust, shutting down dissent. I am, by turns, heart-broken and livid, and feel deeply betrayed by the college. But I have not regretted the work that I did there. It was worth it. You were worth it. 

I loved being an Evergreen professor, in part, because it allowed for deep, personal connections with so many amazing, unique people. Perhaps you are skeptical—for one thing, you and 25-75 other people are reading these identical words, and that’s not counting all the other programs I’m writing to with the same words…but it’s true.

I have long held that the low bar that should be set for Evergreen faculty is that they a) fundamentally respect students as real human beings and b) have something real to offer, know something true about the universe. Apparently, it’s harder than it seems. It takes real time to have actual compassion for the differences that make us human, and the differences that reveal us as individuals—our varied developmental histories, our wounds and scars, our triumphs and confidences. And it takes some of the same compassion to not descend into tribalism, in which we judge each other on the basis of demographics.

Tonight I found myself having to clear my office, quickly, before my keys are taken away, and I found so many amazing reminders of you. The hand-written notes; the Dr. Pirandello doll5; the watercolors and pen-and-ink and wood cuts and other amazing art that you made for me; the molas from Panama; the picture of six of you, whom I will not name here, doing animal behavior, beautifully, while rowing on a lake in the San Juans. I was moved to tears. Most of you know me well enough to know, or at least to imagine, that I am not easily moved to tears. I still believe in the Evergreen model, and I know that it has served so many people so very well. Many of us have been enriched by the opportunity to learn in unexpected ways in community, in the field, in the classroom, in the lab, late at night after everyone else has gone to bed and there are just two of us, five of us, eight of us, talking, over a wooden table, or a fire, or a game of cribbage, or a guitar, in the Amazon, in Bocas, on the Oregon coast, in Sun Lakes.

[I then spent two short paragraphs advising former students how they might get in touch with me.]

I have fifteen years of Evergreen students whom I look back on so fondly, with gratitude and respect. Truly. Thank you for being among them.

-Heather Heying

your former professor

now, believe it or not, on twitter @HeatherEHeying

When I reread this email now, I am once again brought to tears. I still cannot believe it. I know that, given how it was possible for people and an institution to behave, it is better that I know. I would rather know who people are, and what they are capable of, than not know. And the people whom Bret and I now know, in the wake of Evergreen, are so abundant, and fascinating, and truly diverse across all of the usual dividing lines, demographic and otherwise. Just as in our classrooms for 15 years, we enjoy talking with and learning from people who are not like us: conservatives, for instance; and those with little formal education; and those who have deep faith.

My 18-year-old son Zack and I recently found ourselves in Warrenton, Virginia on a muggy Saturday morning. On the main road into town, there were competing protests: BlackLivesMatter on one side of the street, AllLivesMatter on the other. The BlackLivesMatter people look more like us—they look more likely to be eating locally-grown organic food, and finding pleasure in outdoor pursuits—but the ideology they are promoting is one that we have seen in full destructive glory in our hometown of Portland, Oregon, and before that, at Evergreen. Still, we probably see the world through many of the same lenses, and agree on issues like reproductive rights, and the urgency of protecting the environment.

The AllLivesMatter people reminded us less of ourselves in some ways, but that is not supposed to be a barrier to conversation among modern people. The AllLivesMatter protestors were on the side of the street that we happened to later be walking on, so we talked to a couple of them. They framed their objection to BlackLivesMatter with a religious lens, and quoted scripture at us by way of argument. I’m not any more compelled by actual scripture than I am by pronouncements from politicians or public health authorities who bark at us to #FollowTheScience without ever referencing any science. In both cases, rather than reason or our shared humanity being invoked, we are asked to put faith in an authority. I choose not to do that, or at least, to be highly cognizant of it when I see no alternative to doing so.

We humans, I am confident, have the capacity be good to one another while we logic our way through problems. I say that I am confident of that, but I admit that my confidence is flagging. The extraordinary breakdowns of rationality and decency at, first, Evergreen, and then during the Covid pandemic, have revealed more tears in the fabric of society than I had previously noticed. Once you see them, though, you can’t unsee them. Nor should you want to, should you be given the choice. Never choose the life of the lie.

Some but hardly all of the vast coverage of these events are here:

Writings:

• Bonfire of the academies (Bret’s and my most complete version of events that we have put to paper, published December 12, 2017, in the Washington Examiner. No longer available on that site, so this link goes to another site that has reprinted it.)

• The campus mob came for me—and you, professor, could be next (Bret’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal May 30, 2017)

• First, they came for the biologists (Heather’s op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, October 2, 2017)

• On college presidents (Heather’s article in Academic Questions, Spring 2019, which is excerpted at the beginning of this post)

• The coddling of the American mind (Lukianoff and Haidt’s excellent 2018 book which does a fine job of summarizing and interpreting what happened at Evergreen, among many other things).

Videos:

• The devils of Evergreen State College (Mike Nayna’s three-part documentary on what happened at Evergreen, on YouTube, January 2019)

• Let it all hang out: The Evergreen story (Benjamin Boyce’s 24-part documentary on what happened at Evergreen. Benjamin was a student at Evergreen when it blew up)

• No safe spaces (feature-length documentary, by Dennis Prager and Adam Carolla, 2019)

• Bret’s testimony before Congress, June 2018

• My presentation at the Department of Justice, September 2018 (written transcript of published in Public Discourse, here).

• Five years later, with Bret Weinstein (Benjamin Boyce and Bret talk about the five-year anniversary of the Evergreen blow up; I have not yet watched this.)

Subscribe now

Read more

These questions are from an “Earth workshop” that Bret (Weinstein) and I wrote for our year-long, upper-division science program, Evolution and Ecology Across Latitudes (2015-2016), which included an eleven-week study abroad trip through Ecuador, spanning several ecosystems and cultures, both ancient and modern.

To answer these questions, we had students begin by working individually, using just their own brains, to figure out how much they already knew, or could deduce from other things that they knew. We asked them to aim to be able to explain as many of the questions as possible at a level that a very smart, scientific sixth grader could understand. Then they joined forces with one another, working in small groups to expand their knowledge, filling in their own gaps, and filling in the gaps of others.

Then we discussed many of the questions as a whole class—50 students, and two professors. And finally, both Bret and I gave lectures—again, highly interactive—on some of the subjects raised with these questions. This was all part of one week early in the Fall quarter of the program. Some of the questions are simple and straight-forward; others, not so much. We did not fully answer all of the questions, nor did we aim to, nor even did we claim to be able to.  But we modeled the process—and had the students themselves model the process—by which a person can come to understand things with logic, first principles, observation, and discussion. And over the course of the program, students saw that such an approach tends to result in a deeper and more lasting understanding than if they had simply googled the answers.

Today’s post has somewhat more than half of the questions from that 2015 workshop. Tomorrow, for paying subscribers, I will post the remaining questions. Paying subscribers also have the ability to comment, and this might be a fun post to comment on. I am away from the internet this week, but look forward to engaging with the comments when I return.

Subscribe now

• What is the Sun? What is the Earth? What is the moon?

• What is a day? What is a year?

• What is a lunar eclipse? Can a lunar eclipse occur with a crescent moon? What time of day do they happen?

• What is a solar eclipse? Can a solar eclipse occur with a crescent moon? What time of day do they happen?

• Why does the moon have “phases”?

• When the moon is full, at what time of day is it highest in the sky?

• When the moon is “new,” where in the sky is it at midnight?

• Does the moon have a permanently dark side?

• What is a season? What do seasons have to do with the “angle of the sun”?

• What and when is the equinox? How frequently do they occur?

• What and when is the solstice? How frequently do they occur?

• Why are days (the length of the photoperiod) longer in the summer and shorter in the winter? Why is the equator an exception to this rule?

• What is a tropic?

• What is a polar region?

• What is a temperate zone?

• Why are temperate zones so hot in the summer and cold in the winter?

• What is a volcano? An earthquake?

• Why is there liquid rock inside the earth?

Share

In all human cultures, therefore, the transition to adulthood exists, whether formally recognized as coming of age, or not. Formal moments of transition are common enough—from bar and bat mitzvahs for 13 year old Jewish children, to quinceañeras for 15 year old girls in Mexico and, to some degree, elsewhere in Latin America. Rarer—but also more reflective of the fact that one does not in fact become an adult in a moment, but rather over years of observation and experience—are the traditions that take months or years. The Amish tradition of rumspringa, for instance, is that period in a young Amish person’s life when the rules are relaxed, when they “run around,” after which they must choose between returning to the church, with all of its restrictions and protections, or leaving it entirely1.

Perhaps the most famous invocation of coming of age is by Margaret Mead, who in 1928 wrote of her understanding of youth in the South Pacific, in Coming of Age in Samoa. While it has come to light2 that at least a few of Mead’s informants were less than honest with her, making some of the material in the book less ethnography than wishful thinking, her direct observations of culture are telling. She observes, for instance, in a chapter on dance, that “Dancing is the only activity in which almost all ages and both sexes participate…..In the dance there are virtuosos but no formal teachers. It is a highly individual activity set in a social framework.” A few pages later she argues that “The significance of the dance in the education and socialisation of Samoan children is two-fold. In the first place it effectively offsets the rigorous subordination in which children are habitually kept. Here the admonitions of the elders change from ‘Sit down and keep still!’ to ‘Stand up and dance!’ The children are actually the centre of the group instead of its barely tolerated fringes.”3

This fluidity between being central and being peripheral, the transition from neophyte to expert, the ability to learn and display knowledge individually, but within a “social framework”—all of this feels familiar to the modern reader who is thinking about what it means to become an adult.

When I was a college professor, I was required to teach my fair share of first-year students. That’s “freshmen” to most of us, and while my classes often included more women than men, they were indeed fresh—new to the world, and in the world. I was there to inspire and educate them, to expose them to new ways of thinking, to reveal to them that not only are there things that they do not yet know, but there are things that we do not yet know, we the humans, we who would often seem to have it all figured out. Yes, there are new things under the sun, and there always will be. Yes, dear freshmen: there is much for you to do, to discover and invent and create and produce, should any of those things be your path.

My job was all of those things, and my job was also, unlike what is possible or perhaps even recommended in most college classrooms, to build community among the students and between us all, through demonstrable respect for the humanity of everyone in the room, and through shared experiences which bond people—field trips to places with no access to the virtual world, where we broke bread together and sat around campfires and looked at the night sky, full of stars.

This job was tremendously satisfying, by and large, and yet when I taught all-freshman classes, I inevitably became somewhat frustrated. Because of the way that Evergreen was structured, the curriculum that I created, and my delivery of it, were, while the students were in my programs, the entire extent of their academic world. And yet  it was hardly their entire college experience. Their academic world was, for many, but a tiny part of their life. And in some ways, what I delivered was less important to many of them, and for them, than what they were learning elsewhere.

When I would grow exasperated with the freshmen in my care, wondering at the lack of discipline or passion or appreciation, at the bleary eyes and at the showing up late or not at all, I had to remind myself of this fact: I would not have wanted to have me as a student when I was a freshman in college, either.

I had been an excellent student in high school, and it came easily to me, and I would become an excellent student again soon enough, but for that first year of college, academics wasn’t primarily what I was thinking about. There was, I will simply say, a lot of experimentation going on4.

College is not a random walk through ideas, exactly, but it can be—and I believe often should be—a haphazard one. A person may enter college with ideas and plans, but those ideas and plans should be capable of changing with exposure to the wide world of intellectual activity that an institution of higher ed offers.

As Rutgers undergraduate Eric said to anthropologist Michael Moffatt in 1984, “When I came here, all I wanted to do was major in business and become an accountant, and I just took the courses I had to. Then, in my sophomore year, I started to get dissatisfied. I realized I was cheating myself. College should do more than just get you ready for a job in life. It might be the last time you have in life to try new things, to experiment, to really broaden yourself.”5

The haphazardness, in the undergraduate’s haphazard walk through ideas, is an intrinsic part of the value. It’s like finding a book in the stacks at an actual library, and then walking down the row while keeping your eyes open, turning right, then left, then left again, until you are in a wholly different section, but your eyes are still open, and you find something you did not know that you were looking for. In the 21st century, electronic search is ever more common than physical search, so our algorithms do much of our work for us. But algorithms are quite the opposite of haphazard. They point you to what, on the basis of your past, they think your future should hold. Algorithms are restricted and narrow, and are no match for the expansive, infinite curiosity of the human mind.

Modern college too often prescribes the walk that you take through ideas: maybe you get to take a year or two to declare your major, but you spend that time getting your other requirements out of the way, and then the major itself ever narrows your scope. Modern college thus has a tendency to canalize, in the language of genetics and neurobiology: it facilitates you taking a particular pathway, which then further deepens over time. Positive feedback and reinforcement make it ever harder to leave the path. The longer trod the path, the less likely you can even see over its sides, and be reminded that there is actually a great big world out there to be experienced6.

Similarly, college can be understood as a haphazard walk through a social world. The more elite the institution, the less haphazard the walk, the more prescribed by others from the start. But there are still choices to be made, and the possibility to engage with people who don’t remind you of yourself at all. You can come to know people in college who have not had your experiences, do not know your family, are from a different culture or ethnicity or religion or class—all of this is priceless. Perhaps you meet people who had fewer opportunities than you did, but are accomplished in cross country, or robotics, or chess, worlds about which you know nothing—but now you can learn. Or you may meet people who had more opportunities than you, but have a more difficult time than you in constructing careful arguments based on first principles rather than authority. And there is something to be learned there, too.

Share

Linguist John McWhorter recently wrote, in a New York Times op-ed, that high school and college have both experienced mission creep, and that we ought to rethink whether everyone should be expected to go to college. Almost one hundred years earlier, Mead made a similar point in Coming of Age in Samoa, arguing that the “continual raising of the age and grade until which schooling is compulsory ensures a wide educational gap between many parents and their children.” Compulsory schooling itself has a long and fraught history7, and increasing the time that children are required to spend in school  may serve the financial interests of parents (allowing both mothers and fathers to join the labor force), and the interests of some employers (facilitating the rise of a compliant and complacent work force), but, at least as generally instantiated, it rarely serves the interests of the actual children and young adults being schooled.

At the very moment that McWhorter was attending Rutgers as a scholarly and diligent undergraduate, anthropologist Michael Moffatt was conducting anthropological research in the Rutgers dorms. The resulting book, Coming of Age in New Jersey, describes what Moffatt learned while engaging in participant observation—first in 1977, while early in his career as a professor at Rutgers, when he pretended instead to be an undergraduate, living in the dorms, partaking of college life. The ruse of it lasted only a few days, a week maybe, but he stayed in touch with the freshmen he had met then, and returned to the dorms as an anthropologist for a day and a night every week the following academic year, and he did so again six years after that, in 1984, when McWhorter was there.

I read both of these books—Mead’s classic and Moffatt’s then new tome—in a cultural anthropology class while I was in college myself in the early 90’s. This was in my second half of college, having spent a year away, and having recovered my academic bent. I could by then reflect with some distance on my freshman year in the dorms, and I found much recognizable in Moffatt’s ethnography. In a culture that is so heterogenous that there are nearly no shared norms, among many of those who do attend residential college, there is a commonality: college is the first moment of freedom from the watchful eyes of the family.

We might talk endlessly of the delaying of maturity, of the pushing ever later that moment when our children are expected to become adults, but it is nevertheless true that, as formalized by the early- to mid- 20th century practice of in loco parentis, colleges have understood their role, in part, to be taking the reins from parents. It is thus to be expected that the students understand their role, in part, to be resisting the reins. There is transition there, the coming of age being inevitable, but many young people are pushing against something that they can’t even quite find or name. Without the clear boundaries established by, say, the Amish church, around rumspringa—after this, you make a choice, and it is absolute: you stay, or you leave—the endless choice of modern Western civilization becomes a hazard in and of itself.

And yet. Allow me to end with a final quotation from Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead’s words that were published nearly 100 years ago, revealing a prescience that was perhaps too far ahead of its time to be well understood then.

For it must be realized by any student of civilisation that we pay heavily for our heterogeneous, rapidly changing civilisation; we pay in high proportions of crime and delinquency, we pay in the conflicts of youth, we pay in an ever-increasing number of neuroses, we pay in the lack of a coherent tradition without which the development of art is sadly handicapped. In such a list of prices, we must count our gains carefully, not to be discouraged. And chief among our gains must be reckoned this possibility of choice, the recognition of many possible ways of life, where other civilisations have recognized only one. Where other civilisations give a satisfactory outlet to only one temperamental type, be he mystic or soldier, business man or artist, a civilisation in which there are many standards offers a possibility of satisfactory adjustment to individuals of many different temperamental types, of diverse gifts and varying interests.

This question was posed to Bret and me on the DarkHorse Q&A livestream on December 4. I came back to our audience the following week (livestream #108) with a list I had compiled, which is repeated below. There are many caveats, of course.

The first is that I recommend our book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, because I do think it is both important and timely, but it’s not on the list.

The second is that I recommend many many many books that aren’t on the list. You can find some other book lists at my Patreon. History and Politics, Memory and Resistance, which I posted in November 2020, is perhaps the most apropos, and is available to everyone without subscribing. This is some overlap between that one and the present one.

The third is that this list contains no fiction, although I am nearly always reading fiction, and indeed, read more fiction than non-fiction. Now that I think of it, I’ll add one novel to the bottom of this list, something I did not share on DarkHorse.

The final caveat is: What is meant by “important?” All of the books I have chosen seem important right now in some regard, relative to the situation we are all collectively in. I believe that they all provide some understanding or tools by which we might emerge whole.

I made this list by scanning first the bookshelves in my office, and then in the hallway in our home that we have lined with books. One of the first to jump out at me—Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem—was important to me when I first read it in the late 1980s. It helped me understand the strange power and draw of Hollywood, and of LA more broadly, the city and culture in which I had come of age. But I haven’t reread Didion’s book in a while, nor do I think that it is specifically important right now. So it, like so many others, does not show up on this list.

Share

The List

1. The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction, by Matthew Crawford (2015).

   • “Extending themes of his acclaimed Shop Class as Soulcraft, Crawford shows how the short-order cook, the welder, the carpenter, the pipe-organ builder all achieve a free individuality by submitting to the authority of mentors who discipline their minds for full engagement with the complexities of the external environment. Those who never mature into this valid individuality, Crawford warns, disappear into a distracted crowd of mindless consumers unable to recognize the distinctions that sustain a vibrant democracy. Worse, such stunted psyches are easy prey for the corporate strategists who hide their predations behind the faux freedoms of the shopping center—and the casino. A cultural inquiry of rare substance and insight.” –Booklist (starred review)

2. An Anthropologist on Mars: Seven Paradoxical Tales, by Oliver Sacks (1995)

   • “Neurological patients, Oliver Sacks has written, are travelers to unimaginable lands. An Anthropologist on Mars offers portraits of seven such travelers– including a surgeon consumed by the compulsive tics of Tourette’s Syndrome except when he is operating; an artist who loses all sense of color in a car accident, but finds a new sensibility and creative power in black and white; and an autistic professor who has great difficulty deciphering the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior.” – from the book website.

3. Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, by John Taylor Gatto (2010)

   • “Gatto demonstrates that the harm school inflicts is rational and deliberate. The real function of pedagogy, he argues, is to render the common population manageable. To that end, young people must be conditioned to rely upon experts, to remain divided from natural alliances and to accept disconnections from their own lived experiences. They must at all costs be discouraged from developing self-reliance and independence.” -from the publisher’s website

4. Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, by Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (1999)

   • “In her nuanced, stunningly original interpretation of the relationships between mothers and fathers, mothers and babies, and mothers and their social groups, Hrdy offers not only a revolutionary new meaning to motherhood but an important new understanding of human evolution.” - from goodreads

5. The Emperor of Scent: A True Story of Perfume and Obsession, by Chandler Burr (2004)

   • Excerpt from this incredible book about science, smell, and scent, featuring scientific maverick Luca Turin:

   • “Quraysh has a synthetic oudh at eleven grams for eight hundred rupees, or seventeen dollars, so it’s one-eighteenth the price of Abdul Aklur’s, but it’s also one-eighteenth the smell. No comparison. Quraysh says he can’t figure out what they’re putting in this thing. He studied three years of chemistry in Bombay, ‘but it’s not enough for this,’ he says, regretful.

   • “’A lot of perfumers know no chemistry at all,’ says Turin, supportively.

   • “’ I make my perfumes by trial and error,’ admits Quraysh somewhat forlornly.

   • “’That’s how they all do it,’ Turin yells. The Indian looks at him sharply, wonderingly. Turin raises both eyebrows, grins, nods. ‘Those guys in their big gleaming expensive labs in Switzerland and France, they gas-chromatograph everything, and then in the end they just try sticking everything with everything else and smell it all. And that’s it.’”

6. The Tyranny of Metrics, by Jerry Z. Muller (2018)

   • “This book is the best available general introduction to the effects of numerical indicators on the central institutions of modern societies….[Muller] has synthesized an unusually varied range of existing scholarship into a genuinely interesting and thoughtful narrative that moves easily through compact examples of the difference metrics have made for universities, schools, corporations, the military, philanthropy, policing and medicine. In each case, he gives the topic more drama and suspense than one would normally expect.

   • “The title suggests that metrics oppress judgement more than they illuminate it….” – from review published in The British Journal of Sociology (Newfield 2019)1

7. Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, and How We Can Fix it, by Ben Goldacre (2012)

   • The author’s words from a blog post after publication: “I wrote this book because we need to fix a set of problems that have been allowed to persist in my own profession (medicine) for far too long. Trial results can be withheld from doctors and patients, quite legally; trials are often poorly designed, or biased towards the sponsor’s product; doctors are misled about which treatments work best; and so on. These problems have a real impact on patient care, because we don’t have the information we need to choose the most effective treatments for patients. Often, we tolerate actively misleading information.

   • “I’ve spent a long time, as a doctor, wondering why these problems have been able to persist for so long, especially since they’re all routinely documented in the academic literature, and they’re all perfectly fixable. Drug companies could easily turn a profit, without misleading doctors, or hiding unflattering data….

   • “Once you get into the detail, it’s easy to see how the problems described in Bad Pharma have persisted, because they exploit the small incentives in peoples’ everyday lives….

   • “But more than that, these problems have persisted because there haven’t been enough people from outside medicine, peering in and asking us the embarrassing questions. Time and again, at public events and over email, people have asked me: why are people allowed to withhold trial results, and why didn’t I know about this before?”

8. Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America, by Robert Whitaker (2010)

   • “Anatomy of an Epidemic investigates a medical mystery: Why has the number of adults and children disabled by mental illness skyrocketed over the past fifty years? There are now more than four million people in the United States who receive a government disability check because of a mental illness, and the number continues to soar. Every day, 850 adults and 250 children with a mental illness are added to the government disability rolls. What is going on?

   • “The astonishing increase in the disability numbers during the past fifty years raises an obvious question: Could the widespread use of psychiatric medications–for one reason or another–be fueling this epidemic? Anatomy of an Epidemic investigates that question, and it does so by focusing on the long-term outcome studies in the research literature. Do the studies tell of a paradigm of care that helps people get well and stay well over the long term? Or do they tell of a paradigm of care that increases the likelihood that people diagnosed with mental disorders will become chronically ill?” - from the book website

9. Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents, by Rod Dreher (2020)

   • The title of Dreher’s book is taken from Solzhenitsyn’s essay of the same name. Per this review in The Federalist, Dreher’s book argues that “those who don’t fall in line with the cultural and political elite’s prescription for acceptable thought are deemed backward-thinking, unenlightened barbarians, opposed to the politically correct god of science. Live Not By Lies is Dreher’s prescription for how Christian, and even non-Christian, dissenters should respond in a world that is increasingly antagonistic and oppressive toward them.

   • “It’s important to note that such antagonism and oppression come not merely, or even primarily, from the state but from what Dreher calls ‘intellectual, cultural, academic, and corporate elites … under the sway of a left-wing political cult built around social justice.’ Add to that what former Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff has termed ‘surveillance capitalism,’ and Dreher says that many Western liberal democracies are swiftly sliding down a slippery slope into a ‘soft totalitarianism’ by which ‘data harvesting and manipulation can and will be used by woke capitalists and social justice ideologues in institutional authority to impose control.’ – from a book review by Cheryll Magness in The Federalist (10/30/20).

10. The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, by Eric Hoffer (1951)

    • From the book: “This book deals with some peculiarities common to all mass movements, be they religious movements, social revolutions or nationalist movements. It does not maintain that all movements are identical, but that they share certain essential characteristics which give them a family likeness.”

    • Later in the book: “A rising mass movement attracts and holds a following not by its doctrine and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness, and meaninglessness of an individual existence. It cures the poignantly frustrated not by conferring on them an absolute truth or remedying the difficulties and abuses which made their lives miserable, but by freeing them from their ineffectual selves—and it does this by enfolding and absorbing them into a closely knit and exultant corporate whole.” – excerpts and very good overview at Reason and Meaning

11. The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe (1979)

    • A now classic and inspiring tale of courage, competition and prowess. From a NYT review: “…unlike the airbrushed portraits in the Life magazine articles and in the astronauts' own self-serving autobiographies, Wolfe's depiction of these intensely competitive men—who worried more about making a pilot error than that their rockets might explode, and who were more concerned about the respect of their peers than the adulation of the public—makes the Mercury seven more human, while in no way diminishing our admiration for their courage. Furthermore, Wolfe's voice, his mélange of technical jargon, test pilot shop-talk and whiz-bang hyperbole, is the perfect foil for the cool, laconic West Virginia drawl of those True Brothers in the cockpit.”

12. Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, by Sebastian Junger (2016)

    • “Combining history, psychology, and anthropology, Tribe explores what we can learn from tribal societies about loyalty, belonging, and the eternal human quest for meaning. It explains the irony that-for many veterans as well as civilians-war feels better than peace, adversity can turn out to be a blessing, and disasters are sometimes remembered more fondly than weddings or tropical vacations. Tribe explains why we are stronger when we come together, and how that can be achieved even in today's divided world.” - from the book website.

13. Bonus Book: Daemon, by Daniel Suarez (2006)

    • Bret’s and my friend Jordan Hall gave us this novel many years ago, and I only just now read it. I know, I know—for all of you who have been long familiar with this book, and its sequel, I’m late to the game. Still: It quite literally gave me nightmares.

    • Here’s a review on amazon that I resonate with: “Five stars are really not enough for a book like this. The plot and character development are not outstanding, but the story idea is so original that it alone is worthy of a Hugo or Nebula award. There are plenty of science fiction scenarios about a computer taking over the world; this story explores the more realistic and plausible scenario of not an actual computer, not an actual artificial intelligence, but simply a cleverly written program that can infect the world's computers and take them over. It's also a story that makes you stop and think about how every aspect of our lives is now impacted by computerized technology, and how easy it is for rogue actors to control that technology and thus control us. If that happens, will we resist, or will we submit to the Daemon? Before you answer, consider the technology that controls your bank account, your medical and employment records, your very identity. You might be surprised at how quickly you surrender to the Beast.”

    • Let this book not be prescient, or more prescient than it already clearly is.

    • Read it and do not weep.

Read all the books on this list, and do not weep. Read them and figure out how to act.

Subscribe now

Education looks like people standing at the edge of a precipice in eastern Washington, looking out over a harsh and unforgiving landscape, and considering: What forces made this? They discuss what they think might be true given both what they can see, and what information they brought with them to the precipice. They do not google the answer.1

Education looks like a three-hour lecture period in which questions are posed by the professor, and the students coalesce in small groups to discuss possible answers before coming back together as a class. Students move around, forming fission-fusion groups, questions are posed that are not immediately answered, and they are reframed and refined as new information comes in.2

Education looks like three-day field research projects in the Amazon—on topics ranging from ant foraging strategies to fern biodiversity to the calls of howler monkeys—which, upon completion, are to be presented to the class. But a rainstorm on the corrugated metal roof is so loud that the presentations cannot happen. Education looks like wandering off into the steamy jungle night, armed with curiosity and caution, headlamps and rubber boots.3

Education looks like a lot of things, but too often, institutions of education—both higher ed and K-12—are failing to educate. The problems with the modern academy are many. Virtual space is replacing real space. Many faculty inflict information dumps on their students, inspiring compliance rather than independent thought. Perverse incentives have corrupted not only the way we do science but also the kinds of questions that get asked. Universities have been captured by malevolent forces.

What follows is a discussion of many of these problems, followed by the hint of a new initiative that stands a chance of resolving them.

Modern Higher Education

The standard modern educational model—a sage on the stage, with students in rows taking notes—works for some disciplines, sometimes. But it is not the best model for all disciplines, and it may not be the best for any. Engaging ideas and people in real time, over shared physical space, is utterly necessary for some kinds of learning. Some subjects and material can be successfully, and perhaps most efficiently, learned on-line, but not all.

True things can be gleaned and incorporated into one’s pre-existing model this way. But while, to some extent, learning what to think can be accomplished via on-line courses, or standard sage on the stage delivery from faculty directly into the brains of students, learning how to think cannot. Fact-checking yourself is best done by engaging directly with other people, in real time and space, and allowing them to challenge you.

We are losing physical libraries and quads to the virtual sphere, a process that accelerated in the last two years. Those who would assure us that nothing is lost are surely working from a reductionist, metric heavy understanding of what education is, what cognition is, and what humans are. Metrics are all well and good, as a first pass, and for simple systems. But education, cognition, and humans, are all complex systems. Human cognition is embodied, changed by physical activity and place in the world. Furthermore, physical spaces allow chance meetings, with ideas or with people, and can open up entirely new worlds.

The modern university also tends to cordon off disciplines from one another. This is to appease faculty egos, and draw territorial lines, and because it’s the way it’s always been done (which is not, in fact, true). Its effect is to reduce the opportunity for discovery, creativity and analysis, by faculty and students alike.

And as much as one of the hottest educational buzzwords for many years now has been “interdisciplinary,” how this is instantiated is all too often very narrow.

Interdisciplinary, sensu stricto (in the narrow sense), might involve two researchers from different but compatible disciplines collaborating on a project. Interdisciplinary, sensu lato (in the broad sense), can mean so much more. Instead of training only specialists, who get narrower and narrower with every year of school they endure, we ought not just allow generalists, but expect them. We need generalists who can, within a single brain, cross disciplinary boundaries. Furthermore, undergraduate students, who have even less reason to be trained narrowly than do grad students, ought be encouraged to take dives that are by turns both deep and broad, to come up for air frequently, and to dive again.

Rather than imagining the progress towards a university degree as a linear process, with a clear goal and established checkpoints, we might recognize that at least some of our goals for college graduates are themselves archaic, and need an update. We have created a world in which the rate of change itself is so swiftly changing, that even an incoming first-year college student cannot know what world they will graduate into at the end of four years. In this environment, exposing students to enduring human truths and values, demanding that they engage those things with people with whom they disagree, introducing them to an analytical framework that allows them to work from first principles to discriminate between fact and fiction, rather than relying on authorities to do the math for them—all of this would make for an educated 21st century person. A truly interdisciplinary education would integrate these topics and ways of understanding the world, rather than separating them into four credit classes, in which students learn to parrot the professor in front of them, even when it is diametrically opposed to what they parroted in the last hour.

Meanwhile, the universities themselves are making decisions based on their bottom line rather than their values. Future students are courted with promises of resort-like grounds, facilities, and amenities, as if they are potential customers, mere consumers of a product rather than our future leaders and creators, discoverers and explorers, healers and communicators. Education is not a consumer product, although things that pass for education can be. Meanwhile, graduate students solve an immediate problem for their universities by providing cheap labor, but they may not yet have the academic chops to put students through their paces, to do anything but repeat conclusions and lists, rather than engage in, for instance, the scientific process with their students. Furthermore, after finishing their educations, newly minted PhDs find that too many people with degrees just like theirs have been produced, and jobs are scarce. A tenure-track position is an ever-rarer bird, while cobbling together enough to pay the rent as an adjunct or lecturer is a likely fate for most of those who will do much of the teaching at most schools.

Share

How Science Is Funded

An even deeper problem is the way that science is funded, which itself creates two intertwined, deeply troubling issues for both science, and the modern university.

Across Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM), particularly in the natural sciences and medicine, research is largely funded by external agencies. In the public sector, the primary agencies funding science are the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Department of Defense (DoD). Faculty write grants, at which point they are called Principal Investigators (PIs). The budgets for scientific grants may include equipment and materials required to do the proposed research; pay and benefits for personnel, from undergrad assistants through postdocs and researchers who are entirely dependent on such “soft money”; and summer salary for the PIs, among other things.

The university takes a percentage, the overhead, from any grant that a faculty member brings in. The overhead, or indirect, rate is set individually by each university, and varies somewhat by type of grant, even within a university, but is generally between 50% and 70% for on-campus research4. The overhead doesn’t leave individual PIs with less money than they budgeted, as it is factored into grant applications, but it does leave universities with an income stream that is massive, and which, if it were to dry up, would leave those institutions in a very tight situation. The bigger the science, the more money it brings in for the universities. Research 1 (R1) universities are those that give the highest priority to research, and receive the greatest amount in federal grants. R1 universities are often considered the most elite institutions of higher ed, but if “elite” is a proxy for “wealth,” we should reconsider why we value the elite, and what we might value instead5.

As an undergraduate, I was the research assistant to one of the greatest living biologists (Dr. Robert Trivers, who was then at UCSC, the University of California at Santa Cruz). Trivers was a force of nature—still is—and wholly unimpressed with the sorts of social indicators and niceties that many of his peers felt constrained by. Furthermore, his work was not expensive to conduct. Much of it was theoretical, requiring only time and space, really—paper and pens and freedom to think and an excellent library. The work was facilitated, it turned out, by a research assistant who was capable of sourcing a seemingly unending stream of primary literature from the library, back before the internet made wandering through the stacks for journal articles a luxury rather than an obligation. Trivers also had an on-going research program in Jamaica, which was also low tech, and where Bret Weinstein, then my boyfriend and now my husband, worked as his research assistant for a quarter. That work also cost very little to do.

It was thus not until I spent a year working in the academic grants office at UCSC (between finishing college and beginning grad school), that I came to understand how unusual Trivers was for a modern, academic scientist. UCSC, despite its crunchy reputation, is an R1 institution. But Trivers had few grants, none of which were gigantic. His work neither demanded nor qualified for such grants. This may partially explain why the university administration did not seem as eager to please him as it did other science faculty—whose work cost, and therefore brought to the university, rather a lot more money.

STEM faculty are cash cows for their universities, much more so than are humanities or arts faculty, or even than those in the social sciences. Administrators who want to facilitate the procurement of grants—entirely separate from an analysis of whether the science that demands big grants is the most interesting, or valuable—do so by making their STEM faculty’s lives easier. For most faculty positions, there are broadly three categories of job expectation: research, teaching, and governance. Governance refers to committee work and the like: serving on hiring and admissions committees; assisting the ombudsman and student affairs staff; facilitating re-accreditation; budget work, including prioritizing hires, technology, and upgrades to the physical plant. Governance can also include the power to make fundamental changes to the hierarchy of the institution, remaking the org chart that describes who answers to whom, sometimes changing it to enhance—or disrupt—functional systems. Such changes often come in the language of progress—we are updating!—but time and again, that which is regressive or authoritarian can be snuck in under the banner of progress.

Governance is thus both critical to the functioning of the university, with tremendous potential for power, and also widely understood by faculty to be something to be avoided if they can. It takes time away from research and teaching, both of which are more in line with what faculty imagine they will be doing when they go into academia. Furthermore, at most universities, faculty are specifically and explicitly focused on research (at liberal arts colleges, there is typically a little more slack given to those who would focus their attention on undergraduates). Given that university administrators have more money to work with when their faculty bring in more grants, and that science faculty are the most likely to bring in large grants, it is perhaps inevitable that, without explicit prohibitions on this sort of horse trading, big-grant-getting scientists will be gifted with release from some or all of their obligations regarding governance and teaching. Many scientists thus become grant writers more than actual science doers. Those who do so most prolifically rise quickly through the academic ranks—which should not be conflated with doing the best science—and thus have little interest in upsetting the status quo.

Meanwhile, the teaching of science to undergraduates is funneled to grad students and adjunct faculty, and the governance of the institution is concentrated among the non-science faculty, a growing percentage of which are deeply confused about the very nature of reality and objective truth (on which, more below, under The Woke Revolution).

The second of the intertwined, deeply troubling issues for both science and the modern university which is facilitated by the way that science is funded, is that the granting agencies, and those who staff them, control not just what particular grants do and do not get funded, but more broadly, and more insidiously, they control the direction of research itself. They can upregulate some research programs, and drive others extinct. Individual faculty and students not being free to speak their mind is an ever more widely recognized problem on university campuses. More cryptic, though, and more influential, is that entire lines of research can be edited out of existence by the granting agencies that pay the bills.

The scientific method would seem to allow ideas to compete on an equal playing field, allowing us to distinguish between the true and the false, the promising and the not so promising. But if before any science can even be done, the gatekeepers of science step in and decide what questions can be asked, science has taken a huge hit. Society has also taken the hit, as have all those interested in free inquiry and the pursuit of truth. This intrusion of the market on the scientific method then becomes so embedded in the ethos of academic science, that even many scientists forget what it is that they are supposed to be engaged in. Having accepted the financial incentives of mass processing large datasets, for instance, having effectively thrown out hypothesis in favor of data, many scientists are now scientists in name only.

Grant-driven science will always, for instance, favor empirical science—which often relies on expensive instrumentation, and tends to collect lots of data—over theoretical science, such as that which Bob Trivers achieved recognition for. When the scales tip that way—loosely, favoring “data driven” over “hypothesis driven” research—predictive power is lost, scientists turned into cogs. Bending the arc of science to the easily measured is beyond foolish. Bending the arc of science to those who think data collection or modeling are the pinnacle of the scientific endeavor is more dangerous yet. We need scientists who value hypothesis and prediction above grant money and tenure.

Science is a process by which observations are made; hypotheses and predictions generated then tested; and those hypotheses that are not falsified are, over time, understood to be the best fit for the evidence. Science is not the conclusion; it is the process. The scientific process allows us to distinguish truth from fiction—not perfectly, but over time, increasingly well. Therefore, having people involved in university governance who themselves live and breathe the scientific process, will be necessary for universities to function.

If I may be forgiven for quoting myself, here is how I expressed a related thought when invited to speak at the Department of Justice in 2018:

The search for truth and beauty, in its many forms, is what higher education is for, and about. The Enlightenment opened up our world, and gave us, among other things, the beginning of a formalization of the scientific method. One of the great strengths of the scientific method is its ability to reduce the role of bias and emotion in what we understand to be true. It is, at its core, a method for reducing bias. But in an era of information overload, when it seems that nothing can be trusted, many are reverting to trusting their own feelings above all else. It is ironic that, as people have come to lose faith in our system, they have run from science6, and not toward it. For while scientists themselves are humans, and therefore fallible, rigorous application of the scientific method is the best cure for human fallibility ever devised7.

If we are to be free, we need the scientific process to be free. Instead, money is driving what questions get asked. As a result, some research that passes for science is not worthy of the name. And other research, which would be science had it been allowed to happen, never gets done. This is perhaps the largest problem of all at modern universities.

The Woke Revolution

Into this environment arrived an ideology, which quickly became so widely adopted that it can now justly be called a revolution. As science and scientists were being bought by market forces, the door was left open for more patently craven forms of anti-intellectualism.

Flying under the beautiful-sounding banner of “social justice,” embodied by growing legions of “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” officers and administrators, it is most succinctly called “woke.” What social justice aspires to—or claims to aspire to—is the adoption of policies that recognize past and on-going bias in society, reduces such bias going forward, and helps those who have been negatively affected by it. In practice, though, it is authoritarian, dogmatic, illiberal and mean. As linguist John McWhorter writes in his new book, Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America, this ideology directly blocks the ability of people who adhere to it from getting ahead.

Of the movement’s three key words—Diversity, Equity and Inclusion—only one is an accurate representation of what the movement stands for. The woke do not embrace or pursue diversity: they are on a mission to reduce human experience and thought to a single note, one that agrees with the conclusions that they have already arrived at. And the woke are not inclusive: indeed, they would exclude all those who disagree with them, to the point of deplatforming and preventing dissenters from speaking.

The movement that claims to advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion is, therefore, both anti-diversity, and exclusionary. What may be surprising to those not already immersed in this landscape, however, is that the woke revolution really is about equity. The disconnect is that equity doesn’t mean what you probably think it means.

The concept of equity has been around since at least 1981, when it was included in the first Principles of the American Society for Public Administration. The ASPA had this to say about a key distinction8:

Equality: “citizen A being equal to citizen B”

Equity: “adjusting shares so that citizen A is made equal with citizen B.”

Most people, when they hear the word “equity,” synonymize it with “equality.” We 21st century WEIRD people broadly—nearly universally—value equality. We are all equal under the law, and we ought defend that fiercely. Equality refers to having equality of opportunity. Equity, in direct contrast, promotes equality of outcome. This is a dystopian idea that was brilliantly satirized in Vonnegut’s short story Harrison Bergeron, wherein those with greater ability are handicapped in order to bring society into full compliance:

“The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.”

Subscribe now

The Vigilance of the Agents of the Handicapper General

Here in 2021, the movement to handicap those with privilege is strong, and those who adopt the woke ideology are often dependent on it for their entire livelihoods. Whole academic fields have emerged that depend on an anti-diverse, exclusionary, equity-focused assessment of human behavior and society. These fields have been dubbed “Grievance Studies” by Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose9, whose exquisitely biting, hilarious, and accurate reveal of the inanity behind such work includes a paper they wrote positing that dog parks are “rape-condoning spaces and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against ‘the oppressed dog’ through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured.” This paper was not just accepted and published in the academic journal Gender, Place & Culture, but was honored as one of “twelve leading pieces in feminist geography” before being discovered as a hoax, and retracted.

Meanwhile, supposedly serious contributions to these fields gin up fear and confusion with claims-sans-evidence like “education policy is an act of white supremacy”10. Asking for evidence of such a claim is, apparently, an assault in and of itself, and there is jargon to prove it: epistemic exploitation.11 Add to this that asking for evidence of racism is itself evidence of racism, and we have a fully gameable, authoritarian, and anti-intellectual climate. That is what is becoming of our campuses12.

The woke takeover has been made possible, however, by the business model of the modern university, which privileges currency over contribution. No matter how elite and aspirational to a life of the mind the institution might be, if it is in the habit of ignoring the ways in which granting agencies steer what research is allowed, while rewarding the biggest grantees among their faculty with freedom from teaching and governance, and if it, additionally, gives even an inch to the woke mob, those aspirations will die on the vine.

The new ideology has taken a few direct aims at science: some readers will remember #ShutDownSTEM, in June 2020 (which we discussed on DarkHorse), and the too-stupid-to-be-true (but it is) kerfuffle over whether 2+2 does in fact equal 4. Mostly, though, science is falling to more indirect forces. Scientists are either too busy writing grants, too freed from the workaday concerns of the university to have noticed a hostile takeover, or have training that is too specialized for them to recognize that the machinations happening in other parts of the university affect them too. What happens in Grievance Studies does not stay in Grievance Studies.

Two friends of mine—highly successful entrepreneurs in the tech sector—see the problems this is causing from the other side. They regularly hire young people, often from the most elite schools—MIT, Stanford—with training at those schools in fields—e.g. engineering—that one might expect to be immune to the problems of the modern university. Woke ideology is even making inroads into STEM, but it is the pre-existing rot in higher ed that is most to blame for the persistent problems in STEM fields. The highly credentialed young people whom my entrepreneur friends keep hiring too often prove incapable of thinking independently, or of problem solving. It is becoming nearly impossible to find recent graduates who are up to the task.

That is an anecdote, a story. But that story is being repeated all over the country. We need liberal arts institutions that educate and inspire young people to challenge their own preconceptions, reflect on the old, imagine the new, and think from first principles as much as possible. Graduates of such institutions will be inspired to problem solve and to explore and understand, and thus, graduates of such institutions will be inspirational to others. Our current institutions of higher ed are failing to produce such inspiration. Higher education is not dead, but it is dying. Long live higher education.

The University of Austin

The University of Austin was launched two weeks ago, on November 8, 2021. I am one of five founders, along with Pano Kanelos, Joe Lonsdale, Bari Weiss, and Niall Ferguson. We each bring unique experience and insight to the project. Pano was most recently the president of St. Johns College in Annapolis, is dedicated to the liberal arts, and is a Shakespeare scholar. Joe is a tech entrepreneur, investor, and CEO, having co-founded Palantir, and founded Addepar. Bari is a journalist who was an editor at Tablet, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times before launching her own platform, Common Sense. And Niall is an historian, author, and filmmaker, who holds senior fellow appointments at both Stanford and Harvard. I am the only liberal among the founders, the only natural scientist, and also the one with the most extensive experience educating undergraduates.

This new university has as one of its core values freedom of inquiry. The founders share that value, along with many others. We disagree on other things. Of course we do. That is to be expected in a system in which discussion is not just accepted, but required. That said, the founders have written the following op-eds, with which I largely agree:

• Pano Kanelos in Bari Weiss’s Common Sense: We Can't Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We're Starting a New One.

• Niall Ferguson in Bloomberg Opinion: I'm Helping to Start a New College Because Higher Ed Is Broken

• Joe Lonsdale in the New York Post: Why I’m Co-founding a New University Dedicated to Freedom of Thought and Study

• Heather Heying (that’s me) in The Spectator: Can the University of Austin Spark a New Enlightenment?

Share

What College Faculty Need To Be Capable Of

My presence in this nascent institution might seem to be due to the very public eruption at The Evergreen State College, which my husband Bret Weinstein and I experienced in 2017. The attempt of a mob to cancel us, which backfired dramatically, was called, by Lukianoff and Haidt in The Coddling of the American Mind, a “most dramatic portrait of what can happen when a witch hunt is allowed to run its course.” As college dustups go, it was well over the top.

If you don’t know the story, you can read our telling of it here, watch Mike Nayna’s excellent three part documentary here, or watch Benjamin Boyce’s exhaustive, entertaining, and somehow still not comprehensive (but man is he getting close) set of documentaries here. In very brief:

We were two of the college’s most highly ranked professors. We were both tenured. Our students did not turn on us. A mob of other students, organized by activist faculty and staff, arrived at Bret’s classroom on May 23, 2017, with claims of his racism, which then morphed into claims of his and my racism. As it turns out, we’re not racist. We checked. Furthermore, the claims of widespread racism and “white supremacy” across the campus were also utterly unfounded. One of our students, who is Afro-Caribbean on one side of her family, was called a “race traitor” for—wait for it—studying science. The library and the science labs were vandalized. Books and scientific inquiry were quite literally under attack. Baseball bat wielding students battered other students if they showed resistance to the new world order. Public shamings occurred. Bret was targeted, hunted. The campus police chief told Bret to stay off campus, and to stay off his bike anywhere in town, for his own safety. The president of the college told her—the police chief—to stand down her entire force. This was the same college president who was kidnapped in place, forced to remain in his office with his abductors. This was also the same college president who then responded by publicly and exuberantly celebrating the mob.

All of that is true. It was horrifying to live through. But the fact that I and we did live through it is far from the most interesting or valuable thing that I bring to this new university. The avatar of publicly-cancelled-but-not-dead-yet college professor at some out of the way public liberal arts college is just that: an avatar. Having been at ground zero of one of these events does not, in and of itself, mean that a person has anything of note to say about higher education.

As it turns out, though, both Bret and I were, for a decade and a half, exploring and creating new ways of educating students to great effect, using the unique model afforded by Evergreen. We thus do have uniquely valuable insights on higher education.

I have discussed some of these insights in an essay that I posted here last week (The Twin Virtues of Trust and Uncertainty). I also celebrated risk in education yet more briefly in a New York Times op-ed (Nature Is Risky. That’s Why Students Need It.). And we also touch on it in the “School” chapter of our co-authored, NYT bestselling book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century. I, and we, know how to reach people, and how to teach them.

Why were Bret and I two of the most popular professors on campus, despite being called “challenging” and “tough but fair” by our students? In part, it was because we were challenging. People actually crave challenge—21st century students included. It is also true that our nearly diametrically opposed experiences in school ourselves, and knowing each other as well as we did, prohibited us from making the kinds of assumptions that many do of “the other side.” I had always been an ace student—but not because I was a bootlicking sycophant who dutifully repeated back to professors what they wanted to hear. Bret had always been a terrible student—but not because he was lazy or stupid or uninterested. Having theory of mind is necessary to be an excellent educator—and not just theory of minds that look like yours, but theory of all the minds.

Another way to characterize what we were doing as successful educators is to take it back to basics. We were successful educators for three broad reasons:

1. We knew real things, and therefore had real things to teach. We used our classrooms (and labs and field trips and all of the educational interstices between) to continue to build the model of human evolution that we had begun to frame as undergrads, then as graduate students, and then as professors. Our book, A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, is an encapsulation of the model—and is something we were asked to write by many of our students. In the acknowledgments of that book, we thank our students at Evergreen, and we mean it. They pushed us. They pulled us. We thought harder because of them, and our thinking is better because of it.

2. We learned how to communicate those real things. It is insufficient to know true and important things if you cannot communicate them. Bret and I taught in very different, but (mostly) compatible ways. I architected detailed and creative curricula with explicit space for exploration, for the unexpected, for serendipity. I created fictional organisms and social systems and environments and asked my students to tell me what else would likely be true of those imaginary systems, given all that we had learned of evolution and ecology and animal behavior. I imagined into being, organized, and orchestrated elaborate study abroad trips, first in Panama, later in Ecuador, leading students not just through biology but also history and pre-history, language and narrative and awe. Bret also led field trips, and voyages both literal and metaphorical that embraced discovery. He led his classes on wild rides full of ideas, the likes of which you can barely imagine if you have not experienced it.

3. We fundamentally, always and without fail, saw the individual human in every one of our students. Not every single one of them was up to the task that we presented them with: that of showing up with openness, with preparedness, with eagerness to learn and question and push and change their minds when it was called for. Not every single one of them was up to that task, but the vast majority of them were. These were students from every academic demographic: from top of the class 4.0+ GPA students, to students who had been told since elementary school that they were incapable of learning. Our students also spanned all the other demographic markers, which made our classrooms and field trips richer places, but on which basis we did not discriminate.

Thus, if college faculty are to be granted the opportunity to educate, my simple rubric for what need be true of them is this:

1. Know real things.

2. Be able to communicate those things.

3. Fundamentally believe in the humanity of your students.

It seems a low bar, this rubric, but it’s one that many faculty do not meet. The reason for this is many fold, but part of it is that there is little incentive to devote any analytical or creative effort to education, if your discipline is something else—like, for instance, evolutionary biology.

Here is perhaps the even more difficult thing to grasp. Number one—knowing something real—is necessary, but not inherently because that thing is what students need to know. History majors generally do not become historians; philosophy majors generally do not become philosophers; biology majors generally do not become biologists. There are exceptions—and in grad school, the rules and expectations are different. But undergraduate students are learning to have a life of the mind, to engage honestly and carefully with the world so that they can make it, and themselves, better. Thus, knowing something real is in some ways more about coming to grips with epistemology—how do we make claims of truth—than it is about the particular content being taught and discussed.

How I Ended Up at Evergreen

I was lucky, when I took the job at Evergreen in 2002, to have a choice. I was offered two tenure-track jobs at the same time, both of them at liberal arts colleges. The choice was difficult, as the faculty at the other school welcomed me during the multi-day interview with such enthusiasm and warmth that I already felt at home. They also offered considerably better pay and benefits than did Evergreen, including far more generous sabbaticals, during which time research can occur unimpeded by other expectations, such as teaching. But I chose Evergreen, in part because I wanted the opportunity to reach all students, not just rich ones. The other school at which I was offered a job was private, and was largely collecting students from the kind of elite prep school that I myself had gone to, and that Bret had gone to.

By that point, I had already decided not to pursue a career at an R1 university, despite expectations in many corners that I would do just that. But the life of a researcher that one finds at an R1 university in the 21st century is not the only way to have a life of the mind. In fact, the life of a researcher at an R1 university seems increasingly to be at odds with a life of the mind.

Research grants, as I discussed earlier in this essay, are expected of science faculty at nearly every institution of higher ed, regardless of whether the science they are driven to do is inherently expensive. But I was a recently minted PhD scientist who did not want to join the hamster-wheel of endlessly chasing research grants.

In fact, that choice was so clear in my own head that, when I was asked in my final job interview at Evergreen, “When do you intend to apply for your first NSF grant?” I answered, “I am not interested in playing those games.”

As soon as those words left my mouth, I knew that I was sunk. What an impossibly stupid thing to say in a job interview, when I was under consideration for a tenure-track job on the science faculty at a 21st century institution of higher education.

And yet they hired me. Evergreen prided itself on prioritizing teaching over research, which meant that if you integrated your research with your teaching, it was win-win. You didn’t have to gin up ways for your research to be expensive, and pursue grants, and publish papers, to prove your worth. You could innovate both in your field, and in your pedagogy.

All of which worked beautifully13, until it didn’t. Evergreen got gamed by a handful of activist faculty and staff who indoctrinated a crew of unfortunately hapless young people (some of whom have probably grown out of it by now), in which the administration was complicit, or worse.

Subscribe now

Seeking the Extraordinary

Some extraordinary minds are well suited to standard metrics, and are discoverable with such metrics. Are you a compliant and organized enough young person to sit still and turn in neat, copy-edited work by deadline, thus earning yourself the freedom to excel in all the academic places that appealed to you? I was. I tested well and earned good grades and was both smart and presentable, and although yes, I was always itching to go outside, I also took pride in putting together careful, well-presented work that expanded my own thinking.

But I have known hundreds—perhaps thousands, but easily hundreds—of extraordinary people who were so utterly failed by school that they never got access to the freedom to explore and excel. English courses where Dostoyevsky and Solzhenitsyn are on the reading list are reserved for the “good students.” Everyone else has to diagram sentences. Math classes where the beauty and connections in math are on full display are, similarly, reserved for the “good students.” Everyone else gets fed abstract repetition and memorization of mnemonics. In both cases, uninspired curricula and pedagogy practically guarantee failure.

We need universities that expand the human mind. We are all born inquisitive, observant, and curious. All too often, the modern university is where people learn to conform, make social connections, and game systems. But universities should and can and must be where we learn to hone our questions, expand our intellectual repertoire, and distinguish between good answers and bad. In order to solve the problems that we face in the 21st century, we are going to need such universities, very, very soon.

I planned to share a new piece this week on higher education, in the wake of the launch of the University of Austin last week, but it wants more work, more consideration, before I make it public. Next week, probably. In the meantime, I am sharing instead this piece that I wrote in 2018, about the experience of teaching, and learning to teach, the extraordinary people who were my students at Evergreen. It was posted originally on Medium.

Share

In my first conversation with Dave, I learned that, before becoming my student, he had spent many years as a small town police chief. But he had fallen in love with wolves, and had come back to school to study them. He would go on to spend several Winters in Yellowstone photographing them, integrating our work on evolution, ecology and compassion with his artist’s eye. Later in my 15 year tenure teaching undergraduates, I met a young man who had grown up so poor his mother had often served roadkill stew, playing “name the meat,” which piqued his interest in biodiversity. There were, too, the Russian animator, the woman who brought her legally concealed firearm to a tour of the Grand Coulee dam not too long after 9/11, the backcountry firefighter. People who took carefully constructed gap years, or more haphazard gap decades, single mothers, people who had been homeschooled or unschooled, veterans of Afghanistan and of Iraq. There were, of course, also many students who fit the more standard academic mold, having been in school since they were five, arriving in college straight from high school. Among them, the developmental diversity was perhaps more subtle, but no less important.

These remarkable students were at a public, liberal arts college, not an elite institution. It is imagined that elite colleges, being selective in who they accept, are inherently better places at which to get an education. I will argue here that selectivity in admissions does not inherently make for a better educational experience, for anyone. Classrooms full of “good students” tend to be predictable places, where rules aren’t broken. They’re easier for faculty, I suppose, but learning ought to include the unexpected, and often.

There was a wild and woolly experiment in education happening at The Evergreen State College for several decades, and while the college appears to be intent on destroying itself, and I am no longer a part of it, the experiment was an amazing one. The combination of full-time programs, in which there was time for everyone to actually come to know each other; faculty autonomy to teach creatively and uniquely; and a self-selecting group of students who ranged from top-of-their-academic-class to still-considering-whether-to-get-their-shit-together, could be, and often was, magical.

Some readers will wonder how I can possibly defend a student body that produced the riots of the Spring of 2017. That story is for another time, but for now I will say this: the protests were instigated by people behind the scenes, and the number of students participating in those protests was actually quite small.

Evergreen is not selective — it accepts more than 95% of its applicants — but that doesn’t mean that many of its students aren’t extremely capable. Many of the students whom I knew there — and many whom I did not — have made it clear that they do not appreciate having their degrees devalued by the antics of a few. So please, dear reader, assume that most Evergreen students are what I saw, repeatedly and reliably, right up until the mob was allowed to take over last Spring — students who were eager for a challenge, finally, after having been coddled for too long. I am confident that there are many more people out there, raised on the academic equivalent of ice cream — easy and pleasurable, but long-term, not satisfying — who upon being offered a rich and succulent meal of, say, stew and salad, find that, without knowing it, they were craving the full meal all along.

Under such circumstances, imagine a professor setting out to destabilize students’ preconceptions, to make them uncomfortable with what they think they know, and to force confrontations with self, with perception, with authority. In a classroom that is truly diverse, along spectra of not just race and sexual orientation, but also geographic origin and socioeconomic background, and relationship with and beliefs about school, family, country, and religion, exposing students to ideological diversity requires only creating enough trust in the room that everyone feels safe to speak. “Emotional safety” is a much abused concept on campuses now; in the context of my classrooms, feeling safe to speak meant that we do not conflate words with the person speaking them: disagreement with words does not imply dislike of the person speaking.

Creating such trust might well be impossible to do in a lecture hall of 400, but in classes of 25 or 50, it was easily enough done. Creating trust does not turn out to be difficult, if the faculty believes, fundamentally, in the humanity of their students. Show people respect, and trust builds. Once trust is established, risk taking is possible, and with intellectual risk comes expansion of worldview. My job was perhaps made easier by the fact that, as an evolutionary biologist and animal behaviorist, both population and individual were already live concepts in my classrooms. Understanding populations — how to describe them and infer pattern from them, both scientifically and statistically — is important, but ultimately, we must treat people not as representatives of populations, but as individuals, with untapped potential.

Evergreen students are expected to reflect on their own work when programs come to a close. I was always heartened to find an embrace of uncertainty in those final thoughts from my students. One young woman, who had been an exemplary student her entire life, wrote “I tend to take the same path over and over, even if it’s not the most efficient, just because it’s the one I’m used to.” Now, however, for the first time, “I felt like I was in a free-fall, because I had no idea what I was doing and I was grasping at anything that looked like a handhold. It was refreshing though.” While breaking old habits that were constraining her, she did ever more thoughtful, rigorous, and creative work over the many quarters that I worked with her.

“I feel lost, and more than a little bewildered,” begins one young man’s self-evaluation. He goes on to explore the role that video games have played in his life, and how he hopes to mitigate their primacy moving forward. This particular man is on the autism spectrum, incisive and brilliant, but sometimes unaware of the social concerns of others. He writes, “How many times have I referenced a tidbit of evolutionary knowledge outside of class?…I have found my ancestors, and the wisdom they offer me. I can deduce the meaning behind my behaviors, physical traits, social quirks, and maladaptations, and that has helped me greatly. I discovered a group that shares my passions; we seek to nurture them into the future.” And he’s right — he did find a social group who shared his passions. And while he often spoke out of turn, and tended to go on at length, and I developed hand gestures specifically to signal him, which the entire class came to recognize, he was respected by his peers as someone who brought insight. He brought insight in part because he was a smart autodidact, but he also brought insight because he was not like his peers, and they were open enough to learn from him.

As each of them, in turn, were not like the others in some way. Nearly everyone in a classroom has something to teach the rest of us. By learning from individuals, we can delight in our messy diversity; by categorizing and learning to define and recognize pattern, we can revel in our shared humanity. Half of us are women, and some are Latin American. Some of us are short, and a few are trans. Some are physically adept and dyslexic, some are first-borns and risk-averse. Some grew up on the streets. Some are trying to kick various habits — and at this, some are successful, and some are not. Some come from family wealth, from fundamentalist churches, from the South.

A Native American student, who had never before been outside of the Pacific Northwest, said of his time in Panama with our class, “my most memorable moments were my long days alone in the woods with my snakes.” Wrote another student, a woman in her mid-20s, “this quarter has been about recognizing flaws in my cognitive journey and giving myself grace before moving past them.” Because we were in educational community together, their intellectual journeys became part of their peers’ educations as well. Not all of their peers may have signed up to learn about snakes, or self-forgiveness, but learn about them they did, without me explicitly including such lessons in the curriculum (although, truth be told, I did tend to include snakes in the curriculum).

Most people are too comfortable with what they know. This puts them at considerable risk — of being gamed, of getting angry, of becoming incoherent — when the world does not look as they have been led to expect.

Knowledge is everywhere, streamed continuously from every technological portal, and in such a world it might seem foolish to exist in a state of not-knowing. We are taught in school that if you don’t know, you should rectify that fact, or hide it. But not knowing, and persisting in not knowing, is actually a better route to becoming a rigorous, logical thinker, than is filling your head with easily looked up facts.

The problem is: insight and growth do not happen when you are comfortable with what you know. You can add knowledge to your foundation, like bricks in the wall of a house you are building, and when you are done, your house will look pretty much like what the foundation implied. For most of us, though, that foundation that we arrived on the cusp of adulthood with is not necessarily the base of the intellectual house that we want to live in.

Those bricks in the wall — they kill off creativity. They kill off curiosity. Their existence makes it seem like starting from scratch, perhaps with no blueprints or foundation at all, is impossible. They keep us comfortable, those bricks. It’s easy to keep piling bricks up, higher and higher.

The brick-in-the-wall model creates minds that are all alike, minds that are ever less capable of generating or considering strange new ideas, minds that are outraged by confusion, and by uncertainty.

Nearly every student I taught was, in the end, game to be challenged, actually challenged — told when they were wrong, when I was wrong, and told that they needed to learn to pose real questions and then sit in the not-knowing for long enough to figure out how one might figure it out. One “easy” way to reveal this is to take students places where there is no internet, and no library — the scablands of eastern Washington, Kuna Yala in Panama, the Ecuadoran Amazon. For instance. Once there, questions can be posed — How did these rocks get here? How do the local people catch fish? What are those parrots doing? — which are answerable, but the students will need to learn to use logic, first principles, and rigor to do so. Once they can do that, they are becoming educated. And they are, increasingly, educable.

What is it to see, I would ask my students after they had spent two hours sitting still in nature, observing. How much did you actually see, I would ask them, and how much did you think you saw, your inference about meaning overlaid on the actual world almost before your senses even picked it up?

This exercise was one that I gave at the beginning of nearly every one of my undergraduate programs, whether the students were first years or seniors, people intent on becoming scientists or those who were scared of science. It entails taking students out to a natural place, and depositing each of them out of sight of anyone else, with the promise of return two hours later. Students have a notebook and a pen, but nothing else. And they are asked to observe, focusing on that which is outside of their own head, with the recognition that their brains will be yelling for attention most of the time. Then they write down questions — optimally, twenty questions — that they have about what they observe.

Later, the class reconvenes and, in small groups, they cull and categorize their questions. For questions that are mechanistic (how does it work?) or adaptive (why is it the way that it is?), students generate hypotheses that might explain the observations, and tests that could distinguish between alternative hypotheses. The all-class discussion that follows is always messy and contentious, some people wanting quick answers to questions, others feeling ownership of their hypotheses, nobody fully confident that they’ve got this one in the bag. It’s not possible for an individual to know even a small fraction of the explanations for the patterns one can observe in nature. This, in and of itself, is a revelation: We know much, and there is much that we do not know. Both things are true. The scientific method provides us a beautiful toolkit for understanding the world, but applying it is something of an art. Before they know it, students are hip deep in epistemology, trying to sort out not just what is true, but on what basis we make claims of truth.

The fact of science being a messy and creative process, even as it aspires to order, logic, and quantification, comes as a surprise to most students. They are generally not surprised to learn that statistics, when used correctly, help reduce error in the human interpretation of data. But when asked how hypotheses are derived, even after doing the 20-questions exercise, they imagine there must be a formula. But as great mathematician and philosopher of science Henri Poincaré wrote over 100 years ago, “It is by logic we prove, it is by intuition that we invent.” Hypotheses are inventions of human brains — some of which turn out be true.

How, then, do we educate students to hone their intuitions and be experienced enough in the world to reliably recognize pattern, return to first principles when trying to explain observed phenomena, and reject authority-based explanations?

It takes time together, to build relationship. Extended time — as on field trips — is a particular luxury, which not all faculty have. It takes being willing to say to students who may have been told all their lives that everything they do is commendable, “no, that’s wrong, here’s why.” It takes being willing to be wrong yourself, to look foolish, to take risks and sometimes come back to the class later and fix your own errors. Modeling for students the actual process by which ideas emerge, are refined, are tested, are rejected or accepted, allows them to move away from the linear models of knowledge acquisition that most of their schooling, and nearly every textbook, has inculcated in them.

We did read in my classes — the primary scientific literature, books of many types, essays, fiction — and some of what we read contradicted other things we read. But building a toolkit, educating minds to assess the world actively and with confidence when new ideas or data arrived, that required getting away from texts. We went outside and engaged with the physical world, and its myriad evolved inhabitants. Louis Agassiz, one of the 19th century’s preeminent naturalists, urged people to “go to nature, take the facts into your own hands, and see for yourself.” By creating opportunity to go into nature — regardless of what your discipline is, and what you are trying to teach — you allow students to begin to trust themselves, rather than taking other people’s words for what is true. And with a broadly diverse student body, the questions that students ask of the world will be richly varied as well.

Focusing on developmental and life history diversity sounds like something that colleges and universities are already doing — there are offices, initiatives, and grants to support first generation college students, low-income students, historically underrepresented students, and ever more accommodations for students with learning differences. Put aside for the moment whether or not those offices are actually effective at helping the populations they claim to be helping. Even if they are, they aren’t changing much about what happens in classrooms. Faculty, for the most part, teach the way they were themselves taught, and change is slow. Most faculty, even at liberal arts colleges where teaching is supposed to be paramount, do not apply their creative and intellectual chops to truly reaching students. There isn’t enough time, and great teaching is rarely rewarded. Administrators have a far easier time finding money, and starting new initiatives, than they do wrangling faculty into doing new kinds of work.

Share

Education should be about teaching students to find meaning and motivation within themselves, to find their tastes and passions, such that they cannot stop themselves from pursuing more insight into what they are now passionate about.

But the youth, especially the first-year students straight from high school, they may show up scared, breathless, and cooler-than-thou. In classrooms they sit, idle, waiting for life to happen. One of the last times I taught an all-freshman class, things did not proceed as smoothly as I had become accustomed to. Nearly all of my students were not just new to college, but also fresh from American high schools. Early on I thought, wrongly, that I knew them. I assumed that they were there, in my classroom, on my field trips, in college, to figure out who they were, and who they wanted to become.

“You must be looking for your passions,” I presumed aloud, mid-quarter, to the class.

“Naw,” one of the girls replied. “We’re good.”

“What are you doing here, then, in college?” I persisted. I was, by then, a bit exasperated. They had signed up for a field- and observation- intensive program that required that they spend a lot of time in nature, let their senses tell them what to focus on, and let their brains tell them how to interpret what they were experiencing. Then they would use scientific tools and methods to figure out how they could distinguish their own biases, the lies their brains told them, from reality. You might imagine that this is where we got hung up — that they weren’t yet able to discriminate between hypotheses and predictions, to separate independent from dependent variables, but no. We hadn’t gotten that far. We were hung up on the fact that many of them weren’t bothering to go outside when it was time to do so.

“Why are you here, in this program, if the first and most fundamental activity that is required of you is something you’re unwilling to do?” They squirmed in their seats. I was at a loss. I had never before, and would never again, have a program that failed to gel like this one had. My carefully architected curriculum didn’t have a critical mass of students who were participating fully. Too few students were willing to play, so the rest weren’t able to observe how it was done, the playful, logical, conversational back-and-forth in which ideas are generated, honed, rejected. Meanwhile, the administration was alerting faculty to the reality that enrollments were falling, and that we had a “retention problem.” This was the moment that I advised my students to drop out of college.

“If you can’t tell me what you’re doing here, in college, you aren’t yet ready to be here,” I told them. That got their attention.

The first words I had given my students in this program were these: “The natural world exists with or without humanity’s interpretation of it. As observers, and users of symbols, it is easy to mistake ourselves for the creators and masters of what we are trying to explain. We will focus on observation as central to a careful, critical, and creative understanding of our world. We will learn the disappearing art of unitasking, of clear undivided focus. In this program, we will learn through direct experience of nature. Evolutionary explanations for nature’s complexity will be prominent.”

Even though the program was not coalescing as I had hoped, we had spent many days and nights together on field trips. After we searched for tailed frogs in the Columbia River Gorge, or watched birds migrating up the Washington coast, or climbed Mount Constitution on Orcas Island, we also played Frisbee together, ate together, sat around camp fires and shared stories together.

So when I told my class of a couple dozen 18 and 19 year olds that they should seriously consider dropping out of college, they listened to what I had to say next. What they didn’t do, however, was drop out of college. None of them. Every one of them enrolled the next Fall, no mean feat on a campus where attrition was high.

The speech that I gave the students was this:

“You are wasting your time here. The opportunity cost of being in college is high. If you dislike what we are doing, if you find it mundane or uninteresting for whatever reason, that would be one thing. But you tell me that this is not what is going on. If instead, you are not internally motivated enough to take advantage of the curriculum, why pay tuition — or have your parents pay tuition, or force your later self to pay off your loans for years? College should be an active choice, not your default position, and there is no shame if it is not the right one for you. Life isn’t going to show up in front of you — you have to pursue it.” They listened, silent. I continued.

“It is risky to claim passion, when your peers may mock you for caring too deeply. Many of you seem wrapped in your protective cloak, grasping for social currency but not, for the most part, grasping for meaning. What is the point of education if it is not a search for meaning — of self, of the universe, of anything and everything in between?”

When you teach a small number of students, intensively, for two or three quarters at a stretch, as I did, education becomes personal. I told students things they did not expect:

We need metaphor to understand complex systems.

You are not here as consumers, and I am not selling anything.

Reality is not democratic.

And I did not accept generic responses from them in return. I poked and prodded them, intellectually. They were forced to stretch, because repeating material back to me wasn’t going to cut it, and I wanted to know something about every single one of them, so that I, too, could learn from them.

Why on Earth are we training students to be cogs? Another professor once told me, without irony, that he saw it as his job to teach the students to be cogs, because, after all, that was their fate. With beliefs like that in circulation, one sometimes has to give up on fellow faculty. They should know better. With students it’s different. Seduction and education are etymological sisters. Students may think that they want to be seduced, led astray by false praise, as it feels good in the moment. But most whom I met wanted to be educated, led forth from narrow, faith-based belief, into intellectual self-sufficiency, where they could assess the world, and the claims in it, from first principles, with respect and compassion for all.

In a classroom at an elite institution, nearly everyone already knows how to play the game (and those who don’t may have a particularly difficult time figuring out the rules). Compare that to my classrooms. One of them included a heroin addict who couldn’t kick the habit, but wrote a lucid and deep analysis of the evolutionary history and function of human laughter. She had never before been told by a professor that actually, she was damned smart and capable. She sure didn’t know the rules, but that doesn’t mean she was incapable of playing the game. Her peers watched her succeed, intellectually, even as many of them knew what she was wrestling with in her personal life. They learned from her about nuance, and about character. In her case, I lost touch, and I do not know her fate. Many other past students I know still, however, know that they are living engaged, creative, productive lives, full of richness and the potential of being alive, of being human.

Subscribe now

Subscribe for free to receive posts to your inbox every Tuesday. Paying subscribers can comment on Tuesday posts, receive audio reads of the Tuesday posts, and also receive occasional other ramblings.