...In 1951, William F. Buckley Jr. warned in God and Man at Yale of his alma mater’s inability to prepare its students for the real world. Its subtitle, The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom”, hinted at the already existing tendency for administrators to hire academics who only teach ideas they deem acceptable. Scepticism was banished: to Buckley, political radicals were subverting American society by indoctrinating their students with atheism and collectivism. Yet he remained an “epistemological optimist”, hoping that sense would prevail both in the Ivy League and across the nation.
...It was with these issues in mind that, last week, I taught five classes on freedom of speech at the new University of Austin. UATX is intended to be a free-thinking, free-speaking alternative to existing universities, and our summer school was aimed at attracting current undergraduates from precisely those places. But while one could have forgivingly expected at least some of these students to be scared of questioning progressive orthodoxies, the reality couldn’t have been more different.
These students were hungry for knowledge, eager to learn and to excel — and yet many of them hailed from established institutions such as Dartmouth, Brown, Berkeley. Others came from overseas: the Sorbonne in Paris and the University of British Columbia in Canada. My class was an equally diverse group of students: three women, one transgender person, and seven men. One student was of Moroccan origin, another of Indian ethnicity. On paper, they were a diversity, equity and inclusion officer’s dream.
However, far from protesting that the US was a “structurally racist” society oppressive to supposedly marginalised communities, the students I met were eager to be of service to their country, culture, and society at large. Not one was in the slightest bit woke.
Yet what they taught me in the five sessions we had together was the near-absence of critical thinking and free inquiry in their respective universities. Even the Frenchman said there was very little debate in the Sorbonne. The American students suggested that most of their peers were just like them: eager to learn, debate, and compete — all in a civil manner. What they worried about was a minority of students, professors and administrators who spoil the experience of college for everyone by grandstanding, virtue signalling, and enforcing the tenets of progressive orthodoxy. Those in student government and student media certainly didn’t represent the majority, they said. Their union policies and mantras spoke only to the small group inside their autocratic bubble....