The Problem Was Never (Just) the Ideas

Open inquiry faltered when perspectives became mandatory beliefs — and it’s faltering again as lawmakers try to ban their way out.

The last year witnessed a barrage of attacks on open inquiry in education, with PEN America recently reporting a record year of education-related “gag orders” passed by state legislatures aimed at curtailing controversial topics in classrooms. Texas has been at the forefront of the media surrounding these controversies, with faculty at Texas Tech now referring to a flowchart to ensure their classroom material complies with laws, and a Texas A&M professor being forced to abandon Plato readings that discuss race and gender. But rather than solving alleged “indoctrination” problems, these clumsy efforts to ban controversial ideas instead stifle open inquiry and redirect attention away from the true culprit of campus illiberalism: ideological conformity.

In the marketplace of ideas, controversial ideas — including those that some regard as poorly reasoned or even actively harmful — should be par for the course. The free exchange of ideas unambiguously allows for the worldviews of the Kendis, the Crenshaws, and the Butlers to be advanced. But the problem for universities occurred when certain worldviews — some which are less amenable to open inquiry than others — hardened into orthodoxy and compromised the mission of the university.

Orthodoxy was accompanied by operationalization. A cascade of cultural and administrative efforts embedded favored worldviews into campus life and beyond, from faculty hiring, to freshmen orientation, bias reporting systems, professional organizations, journal guidelines, and accrediting standards. The range of “socially acceptable” perspectives narrowed, and the consequences for perceived missteps intensified. Not because of Delgado or DiAngelo per se, but because of professional and social demands for wholesale embrace of certain views.

Now, lawmakers and cautiously (over)compliant university administrators claim to be weakening the grip that certain perspectives have on the academy. But in reality, they are weakening students’ and faculty’s freedom to engage with certain perspectives — an enduring concern that is all too familiar to many HxA members. By attempting to replace one set of ideological constraints with a differently politically-oriented set of ideological constraints and silencing faculty who step out of line, universities are continuing to fall short of upholding their commitment to the core function of the university: truth and knowledge-seeking.

The emergence of legislatively enforced ideological constraints cannot eradicate long-standing internal pressures for allegiance to a very different orthodoxy. Faculty may find themselves being wrenched in opposite directions by new external mandates and older internal orthodoxies, both of which impose artificial and mutually incompatible bounds on free thought, and neither of which cultivates intellectual curiosity among students.

We must not forget that it may be very much worth engaging with ideas that initially strike some as unscientific or even just unsavory. Certainly, not all ideas deserve engagement just by virtue of being conjured up in someone’s brain, and faculty should exercise scholarly judgment when deciding what class content is relevant and appropriate. And, despite what some critics say, viewpoint diversity does not demand that any given perspective be “balanced” by an opposite view.

However, higher education should include at least a few topics that make us pause, frown, sit back and say “... what?”

Consider the (in)famous gender unicorn, apparent archfoe of Texas A&M, and a key figure in the outrageous firing of professor Melissa McCoul. Chaos and controversy ensued after McCoul discussed gender and the aforementioned gender unicorn in her Children’s Literature class, resulting in McCoul’s firing and the resignation of the Texas A&M president.

The gender unicorn clearly touches a nerve for many people — and that’s fine! To some, the gender unicorn is a wholesome symbol that reminds us that “kids know who they are.”

To others, it is an embodiment of an incoherent worldview and sends potentially damaging messages to children. In a true culture of open inquiry, neither of these perspectives, nor the topic of gender identity itself, are off-limits.

Moreover, mere engagement with a controversial idea is not tantamount to endorsement. While certain orthodoxies make it risky for students and faculty to critique concepts such as the gender unicorn, the solution is not to ban controversial topics altogether, but to foster campus cultures where dissent and disagreement thrive.

Key to a robust intellectual exchange are the freedoms to explore new and potentially strange ideas, to ask uncomfortable questions, to push back on social norms, and to speak freely and constructively toward greater understanding. Banning discussion, mention, or education on course-relevant controversial topics such as gender identity actively harms the practice of inquiry and restricts the range of intellectual exploration.

Personally, I would welcome an organic waning of cultural and academic interest in gender identity. And for anyone who has recently stepped inside a children’s bookstore, the fact that the gender unicorn incident occurred in a Children’s Literature class is unsurprising — and, depending on one’s perspective, perhaps less than heartening. But personal convictions — whether mine, yours, or those of Texas legislators — should have no bearing on what can be discussed in a college classroom. Banning course-relevant discussions of any topic is simply antithetical to the spirit of the university.

The core mission of the university — to promote truth and knowledge-seeking — can only flourish when we engage deeply with a variety of perspectives and worldviews; legislative censorship compromises this mission.

Academic perspectives should rise and fall on the basis of evidence — not on the basis of dogma, not because equity was valued above inquiry, not due to self-censorship and silencing, and certainly not because some bureaucrat did a CTRL + F search through a syllabus in hopes of catching a naughty word.

But creating environments where students and faculty feel comfortable engaging with potentially dangerous ideas is a difficult thing to do, given the complex ecosystem of social and professional pressures. So instead of breaking down barriers to free expression, lawmakers are attempting to take certain ideas off the table entirely. And should they succeed, we will emerge collectively no more intellectually or emotionally robust than when it all began.

Through a process of genuine intellectual exploration that is unencumbered by ideological conformity — and legislative control — some ideas will endure. Others won’t. That is the natural cycle of knowledge generation, and that is what we must continue to protect.