America's Uncertain Search for Truth and the Fate of Universities

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09/09/2022 Added

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Julia Schleck gave the first CAS Inquire talk on September 6, 2022 for the theme "Searching for Common Ground in a Polarized World."

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[00:00:03.436]Good evening. I'm Dr.
[00:00:04.738]Taylor Livingston,
[00:00:05.905]the director of the College of Arts and Sciences Inquire Program.
[00:00:09.209]Thank you all so much for coming this evening whether in person or via Zoom
[00:00:13.947]to the first installment of this Inquire lecture series.
[00:00:18.184]With the title Searching for Common Ground in a Polarized World,
[00:00:22.389]the Inquire program is structured around these lectures,
[00:00:25.392]which allows students, faculty, staff and the wider public
[00:00:29.629]the opportunity to investigate how we as individuals and society
[00:00:34.734]understand the concept of civil discourse.
[00:00:38.304]Additionally, it creates an opportunity to learn about the fascinating research
[00:00:42.876]faculty members in the College of Arts and Sciences are conducting.
[00:00:48.381]Further, it enables students to see
[00:00:50.150]the various disciplinary approaches to the study of a topic,
[00:00:53.486]as well as the necessity of multi-, trans-, and interdisciplinary
[00:00:57.957]insights to truly understand human thoughts, beliefs and actions.
[00:01:03.263]Tonight's lecture by Dr.
[00:01:04.631]Julia Schleck, associate professor in and vice chair
[00:01:08.568]of the Department of English, explores the fraught relationship
[00:01:12.639]between freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry.
[00:01:17.410]Dr. Schleck is the author of Dirty Knowledge Academic Freedom
[00:01:20.680]in the Age of Neoliberalism.
[00:01:22.649]So if you're interested in the topic tonight,
[00:01:24.951]you can buy your book available from the University of Nebraska Press.
[00:01:28.555]And she was recently awarded the National Council
[00:01:31.591]of Teachers of English's National Intellectual Freedom Award.
[00:01:35.528]Please join me in welcoming Dr. Schleck.
[00:01:40.400]Thank you so much, Taylor.
[00:01:41.734]Thank you to the college for giving me this opportunity to speak.
[00:01:48.374]So as you heard the theme of the Arts and Sciences Inquire series this year,
[00:01:53.646]searching for common ground in a polarized world.
[00:01:56.716]In this lecture, I sketch how we in the university
[00:01:59.752]might grapple with this polarization, which has had catastrophic effects
[00:02:03.756]on higher education, including the decline of public trust and support,
[00:02:08.161]the emergence of partizan, attacks from across the political spectrum,
[00:02:12.031]the targeting of individual professors and the reduction of public funding.
[00:02:17.070]A common feature of these attacks is the promise that universities
[00:02:20.573]have become politically tainted and advance particular political agendas
[00:02:24.644]instead of serving as neutral fount of knowledge and expertise.
[00:02:29.282]And in response, scholars and defenders of higher education
[00:02:33.353]reverted to and insisted upon what has become the longstanding
[00:02:37.390]core argument in favor of public support for universities that they serve
[00:02:41.594]a generalized common or public good.
[00:02:44.964]They generate knowledge and expertize, which is essentially
[00:02:47.700]apolitical and benefits,
[00:02:49.169]all irrespective of cultural identity, social position or political belief.
[00:02:54.474]Now, let me be clear.
[00:02:56.309]I believe that universities absolutely deserve public support and indeed
[00:03:00.580]that they should receive much greater public support than they do currently.
[00:03:04.651]And moreover, I hold that strong institutions of higher education
[00:03:08.221]and the knowledge that they generate
[00:03:09.756]are essential for a well-functioning and just society.
[00:03:13.660]But in this talk, I will contend that the idea that universities
[00:03:17.564]merit social resources because they serve an undifferentiated and apolitical common
[00:03:22.769]good is no longer sufficiently robust or persuasive
[00:03:26.773]to secure the broad public and political support that is needed.
[00:03:34.914]But of course, lives work will move forward.
[00:03:47.093]A. So I will open by tracing the prevailing common good notion.
[00:03:53.866]And in the next few sections, I'll show the frailty of that conception
[00:03:57.770]by sketching recent
[00:03:58.738]precipitous declines in public belief and investment in universities.
[00:04:02.675]And finally, I argue that the apolitical public good notion
[00:04:06.713]not only fails accurately to capture the complexity
[00:04:09.349]of what takes place within university walls, it also denies
[00:04:13.019]one of the critical social benefits of institutions of higher education,
[00:04:17.156]namely that universities serve as arenas for political contestation.
[00:04:21.761]Collegial, well-informed, thoroughly documented, rigorously vetted.
[00:04:26.432]Long term debates. Debates
[00:04:29.202]over what has happened and is happening in the world over
[00:04:32.205]what ways of knowing,
[00:04:33.406]generate credible knowledge and therefore deserve support over the broad
[00:04:37.410]material, social and cultural implications of particular findings.
[00:04:41.514]And ultimately over what is to be done. So part one.
[00:04:53.226]Academic tradition.
[00:04:55.295]Let's begin with a review of the conception of academic freedom
[00:04:58.064]and the role of the university in society which we have all inherited
[00:05:01.234]from past generations.
[00:05:02.869]Many of you here will know it well,
[00:05:04.270]but it may be new to our inquiry students or to others.
[00:05:08.541]So in the first few decades of the 20th century, educational reformers,
[00:05:12.412]including many who were founding members of the American Association
[00:05:15.615]of University Professors or AAUP, forged a new argument
[00:05:19.886]about the role and function of higher education in society and a new conception
[00:05:24.123]of the norms governing faculty work within universities.
[00:05:27.560]They argued that university faculty should be given very wide latitude
[00:05:31.798]in their research and teaching and protection from employment
[00:05:34.901]consequences if their choices of research projects or their courses
[00:05:38.871]angered political, religious or economic elites.
[00:05:42.642]At this time, faculty
[00:05:43.876]at other institutions were increasingly being dismissed from their positions
[00:05:47.680]for views on the events of the day, like Chinese immigration,
[00:05:51.451]the gold standard and child labor, which was still a practice at the time.
[00:05:56.556]So here at UNL, several professors, in fact, were fired for being opposed
[00:06:00.793]to World War One or for having the misfortune
[00:06:03.029]to be specialist in German literature and history at that time.
[00:06:07.233]Reformers sought to provide protections for faculty work,
[00:06:10.503]not for the sake of the faculty per say, but because the work they did
[00:06:14.707]was seen as contributing to the progress of US society as a whole,
[00:06:19.078]inhibiting their ability to think and speak freely, to hobble
[00:06:22.448]their pursuit of truth with worries over whether they would lose their jobs
[00:06:25.685]if they followed,
[00:06:26.319]where the evidence led and taught that new knowledge to their students.
[00:06:29.756]This was seen as damaging to society as a whole.
[00:06:33.459]Protecting faculty works, the reformers argued, was a necessity if our society
[00:06:37.897]wished to progress economically, scientifically, morally, socially.
[00:06:42.468]Faculty members such as philosopher Arthur Lovejoy, economist Edward Seligman
[00:06:47.073]and law professor Roscoe Pound, who went on to be
[00:06:49.976]one of UNO law school's more lustrous deans,
[00:06:53.179]helped to found the AAUP, an organization that would advocate vigorously
[00:06:57.350]for this understanding of the university and its place in society.
[00:07:00.920]The AAUP first articulated its arguments about academic freedom
[00:07:05.057]in its 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure.
[00:07:10.663]The 1915 declaration laid out the principles of academic
[00:07:13.800]freedom, as it would be understood for most of the 20th century.
[00:07:16.936]In it, they state that the importance of academic freedom is most clearly
[00:07:20.673]perceived in the light of the purposes for which universities exist.
[00:07:24.577]They list these as first to promote inquiry and advance
[00:07:28.981]the sum of human knowledge.
[00:07:31.150]To do this complete and unlimited freedom to pursue
[00:07:33.586]inquiry and publish its results was absolutely necessary.
[00:07:37.089]The authors write that such freedom as the breath in the nostrils
[00:07:40.526]of all scholarly inquiry.
[00:07:42.328]Without it, the human pursuit of knowledge is suffocated.
[00:07:46.165]The second purpose
[00:07:46.999]for which the university existed was to provide instruction to students
[00:07:50.770]based on the results of scholarly career in the past, up
[00:07:53.473]to and including the latest publication and developing ideas.
[00:07:57.276]Finally, the university existed to develop experts for the use of the community.
[00:08:01.481]They write that if there is one thing that distinguishes the more recent
[00:08:04.851]developments of democracy, it is the recognition by legislators
[00:08:08.621]of the inherent complexities of economic, social and political life
[00:08:12.558]and the difficulty of solving
[00:08:13.759]problems of technical adjustment without technical knowledge.
[00:08:17.230]The recognition of this fact has led to a continually greater demand
[00:08:21.067]for the aid of experts
[00:08:22.201]in these subjects to advise both legislators and administrators.
[00:08:26.138]The training of such experts has accordingly in recent years
[00:08:29.041]become an important part of the work of the universities.
[00:08:34.180]To ensure that the faculty were able to accomplish these three goals.
[00:08:37.316]A rigorous set of procedures and protections would be slowly codified
[00:08:40.520]and regularized into what is usually referred to as tenure and due process.
[00:08:44.590]Advocates of tenure and due process justified these extraordinary employment
[00:08:48.160]protections by grounding them in the value to society of the work done by faculty
[00:08:53.065]and making it clear that such work could not be done properly without them.
[00:08:57.336]This is usually expressed in the insistence that faculty work and research
[00:09:00.473]and teaching is done for the common good or for the public good.
[00:09:04.744]In order for this knowledge to be as true or as high quality as possible,
[00:09:08.281]it must be generated under the freest possible conditions.
[00:09:11.350]They argued, unaffected by fear of offending someone and losing one's job.
[00:09:15.855]Furthermore, the development
[00:09:17.023]of expert knowledge and expertize must be solely in the hands of experts
[00:09:20.793]who are the only people in a position properly to evaluate it.
[00:09:24.130]At the same time that faculty argued for the necessity
[00:09:26.933]of employment protections that would keep non-experts
[00:09:29.502]in positions of power from censoring work they didn't like.
[00:09:32.672]They argued for passing this control to the faculty themselves
[00:09:36.042]who would peer review and self-regulate the work produced in their fields.
[00:09:39.645]Thus, control of knowledge production was passed from political
[00:09:43.182]and economic elites, ultimately to a cadre of professionals
[00:09:46.686]rapidly organizing into self-regulated disciplines.
[00:09:51.190]So while academic freedom is commonly
[00:09:53.159]thought of today as a kind of free speech for professors,
[00:09:57.063]it was in fact grounded in the function that the university
[00:10:00.533]was thought to play in society and the necessity of protecting that work.
[00:10:05.037]There are other significant differences between academic freedom
[00:10:08.374]and our constitutionally protected
[00:10:10.076]right to free speech, which are also worth noting, particularly
[00:10:13.212]since so many of the battles playing out in our society more broadly
[00:10:16.716]take the form of fights over free speech when they occur on university campuses.
[00:10:22.121]Most simply, free speech is a political right,
[00:10:24.890]ensuring that the government will not persecute its citizens for their speech.
[00:10:29.028]This severely limits
[00:10:29.996]the cases in which an individual can incur legal penalties for speech.
[00:10:33.466]For example, things like treason, libel, that kind of stuff.
[00:10:37.570]And employers, on the other hand, of course, regularly
[00:10:41.140]punish their employees for speech.
[00:10:42.742]They find problematic, whether uttered on the job or in someone's off hours.
[00:10:47.847]You might remember this woman who expressed her negative opinion
[00:10:51.484]of the president as he passed by in the park in his motorcade.
[00:10:55.888]She was not arrested by the government, but she was fired by her employer.
[00:11:02.061]In contrast, academic freedom is not legally protected.
[00:11:06.132]Its legal status, at least not by statute.
[00:11:08.934]It's legally legal status has not been well developed,
[00:11:11.704]and it tends to show up parenthetically in most legal cases,
[00:11:15.441]in a footnote or in an exception to a ruling , for example.
[00:11:19.478]However, it is a very strong norm within higher ed
[00:11:22.381]and one that most academic employers strive to respect
[00:11:25.618]if they wish to be taken seriously as an institution of higher learning.
[00:11:29.321]Internal rules of process, usually called bylaws, protect
[00:11:32.858]the academic freedom of the faculty and to some extent, students as well.
[00:11:37.496]So in some ways, free speech is primarily a political protection,
[00:11:41.333]while academic freedom is primarily an employment protection.
[00:11:45.971]There's a subtler difference as well, one that has to do with expertize,
[00:11:49.809]intellectually speaking, as legal scholar Robert Post argues.
[00:11:53.813]Thinking of academic freedom as just a kind of free speech on campus
[00:11:57.883]but quote, essentially enforce the premise explicit within First Amendment doctrine
[00:12:02.588]that there is an equality of status in the field of ideas.
[00:12:06.158]That's a quote. In other words, legally speaking, all speech utterances are more
[00:12:10.463]or less equal in terms of the protection they warrant, regardless of their content.
[00:12:15.501]Post notes that this is out of step with the ultimate judgment,
[00:12:18.704]with the scholarly methods of knowledge production,
[00:12:21.407]which require a careful assessment and an ultimate judgment
[00:12:24.643]on the superiority of certain ideas over others within the Academy.
[00:12:29.048]All ideas are not equal.
[00:12:31.050]Or rather, all ideas may be equally expressed, but that's only the first step.
[00:12:35.321]After that, they'll be subjected to rigorous scrutiny,
[00:12:38.057]and some will be rejected as flawed or inadequate.
[00:12:41.393]Academic speech is aiming at creating knowledge,
[00:12:43.929]and it relies on the collective judgments of experts to sort through
[00:12:47.233]which ideas are the weight and which are the chaff.
[00:12:50.669]This understanding of the purpose of higher education in society,
[00:12:53.606]which we inherited from the progressive era, was predicated upon a deep faith
[00:12:58.210]in the idea that intellectual expertize would assist US society to progress.
[00:13:03.682]In this story, academic work is seen as critical to our country's
[00:13:07.019]collective success.
[00:13:08.420]Freely articulating new ideas, then assessing, rejecting, and ultimately
[00:13:12.124]selecting for publication or oral communication.
[00:13:15.161]New knowledge in a variety of fields.
[00:13:17.496]All of this was regarded as important to our nation as a whole.
[00:13:21.167]University expertize was trusted and valued.
[00:13:29.875]For two public opinion today.
[00:13:41.053]So I'm not sure whether that vision
[00:13:42.822]of the university's place in society was ever fully realized historically,
[00:13:47.726]but we are definitely in a very different place now in 2019.
[00:13:52.631]The Pew Research Center released a poll
[00:13:55.668]surveying the public on their views of higher education.
[00:13:58.871]In that poll, only 38% of the public continues
[00:14:03.108]to say that colleges and universities are going in the right direction.
[00:14:07.947]A New America poll released just this year puts
[00:14:10.950]the percentage of Americans who believe institutions of higher education
[00:14:14.787]were having a positive impact on the country more like 55%.
[00:14:19.625]But it also showed that support goes going down over time.
[00:14:23.162]The same poll last year put positive responses of 58%
[00:14:26.699]and 69% in early 2020, just before the start of the pandemic.
[00:14:32.638]Other polls consistently replicate the general numbers.
[00:14:37.676]So the fact that at best, only slightly over half of Americans
[00:14:41.614]feel that universities contribute positively to our society
[00:14:45.417]should give us serious pause.
[00:14:47.620]If the goal of university work in our classrooms
[00:14:50.256]and our research programs is to serve the public good,
[00:14:53.659]the public is clearly not feeling it.
[00:14:56.362]If this were a course where the assignments
[00:14:58.530]were based on persuasively demonstrating our commitment to the public good,
[00:15:02.401]we would be failing this class.
[00:15:05.104]So this negative view of the university's work is not uniform
[00:15:08.407]across the political spectrum, a point that is frequently highlighted
[00:15:11.977]by news organizations that report on such polls.
[00:15:15.915]Confidence in the good effects of universities on society
[00:15:18.684]has plummeted among people who identify as Republican.
[00:15:22.454]Over the last ten years, coinciding with the widespread adoption
[00:15:26.058]of attacks on higher education among leading politicians on the right.
[00:15:30.262]But while growing skepticism within the GOP is definitely driving the swift
[00:15:34.066]downward slide, support from liberals isn't exactly off the charts .
[00:15:38.137]Coming in at 67% and concern over the cost of higher
[00:15:42.074]education is nearly universal.
[00:15:46.178]Its polls are matched by popular rhetoric.
[00:15:48.747]Popular communication channels on social media, podcasts
[00:15:51.884]and minor online media sources are filled with critiques in which
[00:15:55.721]not only does the university expertize, whether originating on campus
[00:16:00.459]or ensconced in the halls of government, not contribute to the public good.
[00:16:04.697]It is precisely these experts
[00:16:06.565]who have caused the country to fall from a prior greatness
[00:16:09.802]and who helped to inflict suffering on the population.
[00:16:13.138]Suspicion of elite decision making, which has not benefited
[00:16:16.642]the public at large, now extends to condemnation of the expertize
[00:16:20.512]provided to them by the highly educated.
[00:16:23.515]Unsurprisingly, some of this populist rhetoric is conservative.
[00:16:26.986]They argue that academic elites are betraying traditional values
[00:16:30.222]that must be preserved and protected.
[00:16:32.191]We may be progressing, they concede, but not in the right direction.
[00:16:36.195]And we are leaving behind too many important things.
[00:16:40.099]Some of this populist rhetoric is coming from the left.
[00:16:42.901]They argue that university experts are serving an elite
[00:16:45.871]rather than the people at large, and therefore that academic work
[00:16:49.641]mainly buttresses a class structure in which the majority of Americans are
[00:16:53.579]suffering increasing economic deprivation and misery as austerity politics fight.
[00:16:58.917]They insist the technocratic
[00:17:00.152]progress is worthless unless it enacts broader social uplift.
[00:17:04.356]Note that neither of these strands of critique
[00:17:06.592]are based in a skepticism about our competence,
[00:17:09.595]but over the uses to which our expertize is being put.
[00:17:13.332]They're based not in technical, but in political considerations.
[00:17:17.403]They don't debate our skill.
[00:17:19.038]They question whether the university is on their side as they struggle to survive.
[00:17:24.543]We might take some cold
[00:17:25.511]comfort in the fact that we're not alone in losing the public's trust,
[00:17:29.348]that we have the best interests of all members of society at heart.
[00:17:33.118]This year's Pew poll on trust in scientists
[00:17:36.488]and doctors groups that have a place in the university
[00:17:39.758]but also work in private enterprise, makes clear
[00:17:42.828]that scientific and medical expertize is also starting to suffer a little.
[00:17:47.099]Overall, just under a third of U.S.
[00:17:49.201]adults say they have a great deal of confidence in medical scientists
[00:17:52.404]to act in the best interests
[00:17:53.539]of the public, down from 40% who said this in November 2020.
[00:17:58.210]Negative views are also growing.
[00:18:00.212]Similarly, the share with a great deal of confidence in scientists to act
[00:18:03.816]in the public's best interests is down by ten percentage points from 39 to 29%.
[00:18:09.088]So generally speaking, scientists and doctors do far
[00:18:12.591]better than most authorities there.
[00:18:14.560]They're clearly crushing the politicians, for example.
[00:18:18.564]And indeed, these ratings place them at the top of the list
[00:18:21.633]of the nine institutions and groups that were included in the survey.
[00:18:25.737]The same is true for universities as compared to other social institutions
[00:18:29.374]and positions of authority such as the media, business and government,
[00:18:33.779]higher education as well compared to other of our nation's institutions.
[00:18:38.350]And we should be happy with that.
[00:18:40.919]But we should be aware that trust is consistently going down.
[00:18:44.656]It's clear that those who have been entrusted to act in the public interest
[00:18:48.560]are losing the faith of the public that we're actually doing so.
[00:18:56.101]Part three. Funding knowledge.
[00:19:02.641]It's tempting to blame the decreasing trust in higher
[00:19:05.544]and the goodness of our role in society on sheer partizan rhetoric.
[00:19:09.982]Attacks on higher education by right wing media and politicians have been rampant
[00:19:14.386]and increasingly high profile in the last decade, and the insistent
[00:19:17.990]repetition of such claims is surely having some effect on the populace.
[00:19:21.693]Indeed, the polls indicate that pretty clearly,
[00:19:24.930]but searching for common ground requires, at a minimum,
[00:19:28.167]taking our critics seriously, at least when they're not
[00:19:31.236]obviously seeking to cast spurious claims for political gain.
[00:19:35.407]We should surely model the best of academic argumentation here,
[00:19:38.777]which includes not simply dismissing as uninformed or invalid
[00:19:42.347]the heartfelt frustrations felt by a significant number of people.
[00:19:46.385]We must not enact the dismissive elitism of which we are accused.
[00:19:51.623]Moreover, high profile right wing political attacks
[00:19:54.226]do not explain the critiques coming from the populist left
[00:19:57.062]who would not be unmoved by conservative rhetoric.
[00:20:00.232]Nor does it account for the ways in which those criticism often
[00:20:02.935]align with arguments made from within the Academy itself about the need for reform.
[00:20:07.673]Many of the issues they raise here are rooted in changes
[00:20:10.509]in the funding of higher education in recent decades,
[00:20:13.545]which has resulted in significant changes in its operations and its social effects.
[00:20:19.685]So since the 1980s,
[00:20:21.253]the Overton Window in the US has been pushed steadily rightward,
[00:20:24.156]with the result that regardless
[00:20:25.657]of which party is in power, tax cuts which shrinks the government's
[00:20:28.860]available funds have pretty much been the order of the day.
[00:20:33.131]One of the effects of the resulting austerity has been less
[00:20:35.867]federal assistance for cash strapped states and smaller state budgets overall.
[00:20:40.772]States desperately seeking for ways to cut their budgets,
[00:20:43.809]have seen higher education as an easy target.
[00:20:46.545]In the last several decades, state support for public universities has plummeted.
[00:20:51.183]And here, for example,
[00:20:53.785]are the drops from 2008 to 2017.
[00:20:58.957]This is a spending per student.
[00:21:02.394]Note that Nebraska is way, way down the bottom where others are.
[00:21:05.831]It's kind of a blurry slide, but we're second from the bottom there.
[00:21:09.801]And we, in fact,
[00:21:12.971]did not drop spending, but even potentially increased it a tiny bit.
[00:21:18.343]So kudos to us and to our state legislators
[00:21:22.247]and to the president's office, which regularly makes our case
[00:21:24.950]to the legislature.
[00:21:28.053]But over time, higher education everywhere has taken a real hit.
[00:21:31.923]In 1988, students provided around one third as much revenue
[00:21:36.795]to public colleges and universities as state and local governments did.
[00:21:40.532]Today, on average, students provide nearly
[00:21:43.235]as much revenue as state and local governments.
[00:21:46.571]They do this even as real wages for workers, and thus household incomes
[00:21:49.875]have stayed flat or in some analyzes, decreased over time.
[00:21:53.745]In short, cuts in government revenues have resulted in cuts
[00:21:57.215]to higher education, which has shifted the cost of educating our populace
[00:22:01.053]from our society more broadly to individual students and their families.
[00:22:05.590]The shift is, unsurprisingly, hit lower income families the hardest and has had
[00:22:10.128]a disproportionate impact on working families of color.
[00:22:13.332]According to a 2015 study published by New York
[00:22:15.767]University, researchers quote, All else equal.
[00:22:18.870]$1,000 tuition increase for full time undergraduate
[00:22:22.040]students is associated with a drop in campus diversity of almost 6%.
[00:22:27.646]It's not surprising that as the cost of education are shifted
[00:22:31.049]to increasingly strapped families, they scrutinize with a more critical eye
[00:22:35.053]the activities of the institution, which is costing them so much.
[00:22:38.724]Graduates with tens or hundreds of thousand dollars in student
[00:22:41.793]loan debt certainly do the same.
[00:22:45.664]Some of those graduates are academics who have chosen to study the university.
[00:22:49.434]And one of the things they've highlighted as especially problematic
[00:22:52.904]is the shortfall in public funding and the resulting increase in private funding.
[00:22:57.876]Without state dollars, where is the university
[00:23:00.412]supposed to find the money to continue to pay its faculty and staff?
[00:23:04.049]Run the massive facilities and the specialized equipment
[00:23:06.651]they house and shoulder other regular operating costs?
[00:23:10.088]I mean, you can only raise tuition too much before no one will come here.
[00:23:14.659]So without public options, universities have turned to private ones.
[00:23:19.131]In addition to raising tuition for private donors, private foundation
[00:23:22.868]funds, partnerships with corporations and the patenting and monetizing
[00:23:26.772]of university research whenever possible have been some of the techniques
[00:23:30.108]universities have developed to continue to keep the lights on.
[00:23:33.912]The study by CU Trust in 2019 showed public university revenues
[00:23:37.849]coming in at about a third, government funding a third private sources,
[00:23:42.287]including self-sustaining operations like corporate partnerships and patents.
[00:23:46.558]And about a third tuition and other sources.
[00:23:50.462]This has, in turn, reshaped universities from the inside.
[00:23:55.333]As researcher Sheila Slaughter and Gary
[00:23:57.169]Rhodes write in their study, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy.
[00:24:00.972]Universities now use the remaining state resources
[00:24:03.809]they're given to reorganize traditional department structures
[00:24:07.212]to include an increasing number of what they call interstitial organizations
[00:24:11.616]that bring the corporate sector inside the university.
[00:24:14.686]They develop new networks that intermediate between the public
[00:24:18.290]and the private sector, and they expand managerial capacity
[00:24:21.726]to supervise new flows of external resources and investment
[00:24:25.831]infrastructure to market institutions, products and services to students.
[00:24:30.535]This expanded managerial capacity is also directed towards
[00:24:33.772]restructuring faculty work to lower instructional costs.
[00:24:38.109]Lowering instructional costs
[00:24:40.345]has severely damaged the academic freedom of the faculty.
[00:24:43.381]A point that I discuss at length in my book
[00:24:46.518]and Taylor already gave me a plug, so I encourage you to read it
[00:24:51.356]if you're interested in hearing more about that point in particular.
[00:24:56.027]So as a result of changing funding patterns,
[00:24:58.663]the universities have added lots of new administrative offices
[00:25:01.700]and administrators, new data tracking programs and new centers, institutes
[00:25:06.538]and other non-departmental structures heavily funded by private money.
[00:25:10.942]Avenues of faculty research which draw private money have the possibility
[00:25:14.579]of being monetized directly or otherwise whole profit making potential
[00:25:18.183]for the university incentivized departments and research programs
[00:25:22.053]that do not receive waning institutional support.
[00:25:25.957]Fields and products which with direct, practical ways connecting
[00:25:29.561]to the current economy, thus fare better institutionally than those without.
[00:25:34.065]The point that hits especially hard at a college like Arts and Sciences,
[00:25:37.903]which supports many humanities and pure science departments.
[00:25:41.540]The idea that the university
[00:25:43.041]seeks to promote inquiry and advance the sum of human knowledge
[00:25:47.078]has taken a bit of a backseat to research that can help pay the bills.
[00:25:52.717]Students seconded this trend towards viewing most favorably
[00:25:56.521]the majors and minors they feel intersect most directly with economic opportunity.
[00:26:01.293]This is unsurprising
[00:26:02.327]given the debt burdens that most of them will bear immediately after graduation.
[00:26:06.298]The pressure of this economic reality for students and their families has
[00:26:09.568]resulted in market shifts in their views on the social role of higher education.
[00:26:14.606]Harvard researchers recently published a study tracking the differences
[00:26:18.109]between how students and parents conceive the primary function of college
[00:26:21.813]and versus how faculty and administrators do
[00:26:25.684]in the real world of college, what higher education is and what it can be.
[00:26:29.955]The authors found a significant misalignment between students largely
[00:26:33.491]transactional view of college and all.
[00:26:36.628]Look forward to hearing from students in Inquire Serious next Tuesday.
[00:26:40.432]If this aligns with your understanding by which they mean.
[00:26:46.538]As a place to gain and train the qualifications for a job,
[00:26:49.908]as well as acquire some experience on the resume
[00:26:53.178]versus the somewhat different view
[00:26:56.247]the faculty administrators understanding of college as a transformational place.
[00:27:01.186]They see college as the opportunity for students to grow,
[00:27:04.255]to consider their own beliefs and values, and to change as a result.
[00:27:08.426]So while those who run the university and its courses largely believe
[00:27:11.830]that their social function is to encourage positive growth in students who are part
[00:27:16.167]of our citizenry, students and parents generally remain focused squarely
[00:27:19.804]on the individual economic benefit that will accrue from a college degree.
[00:27:24.009]What common good might emerge from an education is less clear
[00:27:28.079]when the purpose of college is seen to be job preparation and an income boost.
[00:27:33.351]These are the signs and symptoms of neoliberalism
[00:27:36.154]a shift from the commons to individualism, a move from state
[00:27:39.724]funding to privatization, unrelenting austerity,
[00:27:43.228]and subjecting to the values of the market, things that were previously
[00:27:46.231]considered to be outside the realm of financial calculation.
[00:27:49.701]Together, they've made the idea of a common good, difficult to see
[00:27:53.171]and even to conceive, much less how higher education might contribute to it.
[00:27:58.043]We're in something of a spiral here in which loss of collective social
[00:28:01.813]funding through tax cuts results in cuts to higher ed,
[00:28:05.316]which then rises in tuition and a need for universities to seek
[00:28:09.421]funding from private sources
[00:28:10.822]and become more profit oriented generally if they wish to survive.
[00:28:14.492]This results in institutions that attend more to the priorities and projects
[00:28:18.163]of major corporations, grants and wealthy donors or research
[00:28:21.599]that can be monetized rather than research
[00:28:23.735]that might address the needs and concerns of ordinary families
[00:28:27.372]or the health of our democracy, or some other non lucrative thing.
[00:28:31.910]Those individual students and families who are now paying as much as the state
[00:28:36.381]in terms of covering the costs of higher ed, see its value
[00:28:39.451]primarily in terms of financial payback, and have become understandably uncertain
[00:28:43.755]that universities are, as the polls put it,
[00:28:45.924]generally on the right track or having a positive effect
[00:28:49.127]on the way things are going in the country these days.
[00:28:51.863]This attitude is, of course, hardly conducive to voters
[00:28:55.033]pushing representatives to reverse course on declining state
[00:28:58.436]funding of higher education. And things continue to.
[00:29:05.543]So part for the dirty secret.
[00:29:10.815]So far, one of the main responses to the situation
[00:29:14.152]by those who value higher education has been pretty nostalgic.
[00:29:19.991]If only we could return to the times when, as I outlined in the first section,
[00:29:24.229]everyone believed in university expertize and believed that
[00:29:27.332]it was helping our country to move forward in a positive way.
[00:29:30.401]Perhaps they posit this is just a misunderstanding.
[00:29:34.272]We believe that what we're doing is contributing to the common good.
[00:29:37.509]And so perhaps we just need to be communicating that more effectively.
[00:29:41.312]Perhaps this isn't more of a public relations issue.
[00:29:45.283]If the people could just see better what we are doing here.
[00:29:48.219]They would agree that we are contributing to the common good
[00:29:51.689]and be willing to extend to us their trust and support once again.
[00:29:56.661]This is a really nice idea
[00:29:58.429]and it is echoed across
[00:30:02.400]the media of the reports on higher education.
[00:30:05.737]And a lot of recent books and organizations have been centered
[00:30:10.575]around this phrase the common good or the public good.
[00:30:15.213]And so I feel like it would certainly simplify matters if that were the case.
[00:30:19.818]But the problem is it's predicated on something of a myth.
[00:30:23.621]If there's one thing we know about the common good,
[00:30:27.926]it's that nobody agrees what it is, and they never have.
[00:30:33.031]Thus the idea that our knowledge
[00:30:34.866]and teaching contributes to some universally recognized good
[00:30:39.270]for our society cannot be accurate and therefore it's not actually helpful.
[00:30:44.876]The problem with the idea of the common good is twofold.
[00:30:49.080]First, it assumes agreement on the biggest question
[00:30:52.584]societies face and debate over time.
[00:30:55.587]And is everyone with the slightest awareness of human history
[00:30:58.923]or current events well knows that's honestly just not realistic.
[00:31:02.794]Human beings have never agreed on what constitutes the best way
[00:31:05.930]to govern society, to distribute resources, to handle disputes,
[00:31:10.535]to define humanity or human morality, or to understand the world around us.
[00:31:15.707]We argue about these things vigorously in many ways, and the spectrum
[00:31:19.410]of what constitutes an acceptable
[00:31:21.212]or mainstream view on these matters may change that over time.
[00:31:25.250]But to flatten that all into some self-evident, universally agreed
[00:31:28.653]upon idea of what kind of knowledge and ideas are good for everyone in society
[00:31:33.958]is simplistic, unhelpful and just flatly inaccurate as a description of our world.
[00:31:40.265]There is no one common good,
[00:31:42.600]and it's worth remembering that the people who first articulated
[00:31:45.570]this idea in the early decades of the 20th century
[00:31:48.840]lived and worked in a university system and a political system
[00:31:53.011]that pretty much excluded everyone but upper class Protestant white men.
[00:31:58.316]So perhaps it was easier to imagine reaching a consensus with such a narrow,
[00:32:02.620]homogenous section of the population allowed to weigh in on that question.
[00:32:07.125]These days, debates over what is good for everyone have gotten more
[00:32:10.261]fractious, in part because everyone is a much more expansive group.
[00:32:15.433]There are many things that many different people consider to be good and bad,
[00:32:20.772]and that places debates over the common good firmly in the realm of politics.
[00:32:26.611]Which brings us to the second problem with insisting that the university's work
[00:32:30.548]contributes to an unexamined, universally recognized common good.
[00:32:35.019]It attempts to place knowledge
[00:32:36.454]production outside of this realm of political contestation,
[00:32:40.625]rather than seeing the work done at the university as an extension
[00:32:44.162]of the arguments happening in society over these big questions.
[00:32:47.932]It seeks to move our work into an apolitical space
[00:32:50.868]where untouched by these large questions and social debates.
[00:32:54.739]The knowledge produced is somehow pure and its very existence is good.
[00:32:59.711]In short, the story goes we
[00:33:01.312]work in an ivory tower that is above politics.
[00:33:05.183]The story often deploys the language of facts.
[00:33:07.652]Everybody agrees on all the time and discoveries that are in themselves,
[00:33:11.723]widely perceived by the public as having no political content.
[00:33:15.393]Like a new sub particle or a mathematical theorem
[00:33:19.797]one, a discovery that clearly does have political ramifications
[00:33:22.967]that even the layman cannot ignore.
[00:33:25.203]Let's say the magnitude of the impact the 20th century
[00:33:28.906]redlining had and continues
[00:33:30.408]to have on the intergenerational wealth of black families.
[00:33:33.511]Then the research is decried as overtly political and therefore illegitimate.
[00:33:38.549]The professors who publish such work are called out for being political,
[00:33:42.954]and their work is condemned as tainted or biased.
[00:33:46.491]This places the public the public bar
[00:33:48.893]for real research that contributes to the common good.
[00:33:52.997]Somewhere between too complicated for someone outside the field to understand.
[00:33:57.568]And this benefits me or agrees with my politics.
[00:34:00.371]So I perceive it to be good.
[00:34:03.808]Instead of continuing to promote this idea of a universal common good,
[00:34:08.446]I propose that we articulate the role that university knowledge, production
[00:34:12.750]and dissemination plays in our society to something
[00:34:16.087]more honest and more persuasive.
[00:34:19.223]In short, the university is not outside of society
[00:34:23.394]and the complications of its big debates, but as deeply divided and deeply invested
[00:34:28.533]in the question of what constitutes
[00:34:30.201]the right way forward for our world as anybody else.
[00:34:33.838]The university is not a space apart from these fights,
[00:34:36.841]but a space of intensified debate.
[00:34:39.544]We are a place unlike anywhere else in our society and that we are filled
[00:34:43.081]with people whose life work is to think about these questions
[00:34:47.018]and articulate, nuanced stances based on years of research,
[00:34:52.256]no one provides as long or as detailed
[00:34:55.526]a set of arguments on the big questions as we do.
[00:34:58.863]No one takes more seriously every little aspect of the topic
[00:35:02.300]or researchers that more thoroughly people in society as a whole
[00:35:06.070]maybe fighting with each other over these issues or some subset of them .
[00:35:10.007]The universities are more like a cage fight, with hundreds of contenders
[00:35:14.312]in an all against all combat where the door isn't unlocked until you retire.
[00:35:19.650]So is this hyperbole? Sure.
[00:35:22.720]But all the professors here know how seriously we take our research
[00:35:27.325]and how big the stakes seem to us,
[00:35:29.694]even when everybody around us really can't see it
[00:35:33.231]. The grounds on which we fight are in public presentations, publications
[00:35:38.436]and performances that constitute our formal research and creative activity.
[00:35:43.107]But they go way beyond that, too.
[00:35:44.976]Although we're fighting on intellectual grounds.
[00:35:47.478]We're all well aware of the role that material support
[00:35:50.481]plays in one's ability to make a good argument when it.
[00:35:54.619]So we argue for resources to be allocated
[00:35:56.821]to our little corner of the world, the place where we set our flag.
[00:36:00.858]The thing we think is most important
[00:36:02.860]for people to know and understand and accept about the world.
[00:36:06.764]The thing that does the most to make our world comprehensible,
[00:36:10.301]that will best prepare us to take proper action, that will enable us as a society
[00:36:15.206]to live more comfortably or safely, more justly or humanely or beautifully.
[00:36:21.846]We are deeply devoted to our cause
[00:36:24.382]and we fight hard for the resources that keep it alive and help it thrive.
[00:36:29.187]This is what I mean when I say our work is deeply political
[00:36:32.790]because of these deeply held commitments.
[00:36:34.959]We argue over resources like hiring new faculty.
[00:36:39.030]Which subfield will be prioritized and ranked hiring requests?
[00:36:42.700]Which departments will get more lines for any lines?
[00:36:46.504]Which college will get authorized to hire?
[00:36:48.506]And will those hires be tender line or non-tender line?
[00:36:52.310]We argue over graduate students.
[00:36:54.478]Which graduate students will be admitted to a program?
[00:36:56.847]To whom will they be allocated as research assistants?
[00:36:59.617]Who will their advisors
[00:37:00.551]be and through them continue to exert an influence on the field?
[00:37:04.288]We argue over undergrad students, which fields will be included
[00:37:07.792]in general education requirements and which will be excluded?
[00:37:11.229]Which classes will be required for the major or minor?
[00:37:14.298]How can we increase the number of students in our major and minor?
[00:37:17.168]How many are taking classes in our disciplines or niche area within it?
[00:37:21.405]We also fight for research funds within the university and outside it.
[00:37:25.276]We argue over who will have editorial control
[00:37:28.446]for journals, book theories, performance theories, disciplinary organizations,
[00:37:32.950]award and fellowships, selection panels, grant selection panels, and on and on.
[00:37:37.989]In this way, we fight constantly over what is most important in society
[00:37:43.394]and where we should allocate our collective resources.
[00:37:46.731]We are in this way profoundly political.
[00:37:51.502]We take the political questions being debated in society at large
[00:37:54.905]and not only consider their face value, but the questions and principles
[00:37:58.909]that lay behind them, sometimes way behind them as well.
[00:38:03.047]We fight for our sides on the level of speech
[00:38:05.516]and on the level of material support,
[00:38:07.418]and we do so over years, decades, our whole careers.
[00:38:11.589]Describing the university as a forum
[00:38:13.758]for intense, long form social and political debate has the benefit
[00:38:18.262]of being entirely accurate as a description of how we operate.
[00:38:23.334]It also has the benefit of monitoring what people see when they look at us
[00:38:27.505]from the outside, when we pretend that we're somehow apolitical.
[00:38:32.209]It makes sense that when someone takes a look at our work and perceives
[00:38:35.680]the implicit or explicit politics governing our choice of products,
[00:38:40.117]our study designs, our courses, our published work,
[00:38:43.354]our performances, they understandably cry foul.
[00:38:46.824]Hey, they say our channel is supposed to be just producing neutral knowledge.
[00:38:51.796]It looks to me like you're playing politics.
[00:38:54.532]If they don't like the implied politics, they attack the project
[00:38:58.069]as illegitimate and pound that out to critique the university as a whole.
[00:39:02.807]The university is supposed to be working for the public good, they say.
[00:39:07.845]But in my eyes, this clearly isn't good.
[00:39:11.315]Conservatives see the work that attends to the priorities
[00:39:14.218]and supports the arguments of liberals and socialists,
[00:39:16.854]and they object denouncing universities as a whole.
[00:39:20.624]Liberals see the products and fields that support clearly conservative agenda,
[00:39:24.662]and they proclaim it
[00:39:25.463]unacceptable in a university context and demand to be rooted out.
[00:39:29.867]Socialists see the work that supports corporate military agendas that they see
[00:39:33.671]as oppressing the poor and the workers, and they turn away in disgust.
[00:39:37.842]This breaks trust.
[00:39:40.244]Now, that's a big problem, one that not only results in bad polls
[00:39:44.048]and falling state contributions to higher ed, but to an ability
[00:39:47.785]to find sufficient agreement to work together as a society
[00:39:51.188]or even conceive ourselves as one community.
[00:39:54.458]As historian of science, Steven Chapman writes, quote,
[00:39:57.328]Our knowledge of what the world is like draws on knowledge about other people,
[00:40:01.732]what they are like, a source of testimony, whether and in what circumstances
[00:40:05.870]they may be trusted and quote, as highly educated researchers, university
[00:40:10.608]faculty or particular type of people occupying a specific role in our society,
[00:40:15.446]we generate information.
[00:40:16.680]And that information is often
[00:40:18.015]used by leaders in government, business and other places of authority, making
[00:40:22.286]decisions that structure and condition the lives of most of the populace.
[00:40:26.724]If people look to the university for an apolitical set of facts
[00:40:29.927]or information and instead find lots of work that seems to them
[00:40:33.230]to be political, they will increasingly reject our work as unreliable,
[00:40:37.568]and the universities is no longer fulfilling a useful social function
[00:40:41.172]as going in the wrong direction.
[00:40:43.908]They will then turn to other sources of knowledge
[00:40:45.776]they feel are more worthy of trust when seeking to think about, deal
[00:40:48.879]with or act upon the increasing number of crises that are threatening
[00:40:52.516]our population collectively and individually.
[00:40:55.719]They'll turn away from university expertize to something new,
[00:40:58.789]something they think is more trustworthy, and beliefs that seem
[00:41:03.127]simply crazy to those of us who still believe in university expertize.
[00:41:07.531]Our unfortunately becoming more widespread.
[00:41:10.067]Such people view those of us who still believe
[00:41:12.603]in expert knowledge as deluded, blue pilled or duped.
[00:41:16.874]Because we at the university, in the course of our work
[00:41:19.410]regularly experience new insights, discoveries or important results.
[00:41:23.781]It's easy to feel that finding new knowledge is a solo
[00:41:26.951]or a small group thing.
[00:41:28.853]But the truth is, if that insight or discovery is going
[00:41:31.622]to be of use to our society, we need others to acknowledge it as such.
[00:41:36.126]Even if many individuals believed what they asserted about the world to be true,
[00:41:40.164]we would still need, in Chapin's words, to attend to the complexities
[00:41:44.335]of notions like authority and trust and the socially situated norms
[00:41:48.606]which identify who is to be trusted and at what price.
[00:41:51.675]Trust us to be withheld.
[00:41:53.511]Quote If we want to slow the increase in chaos,
[00:41:56.714]we have to regain a place of trust in the community.
[00:42:00.818]You might say that if we want to find anything like common ground again
[00:42:04.588]and have that common ground involve a central place for the university,
[00:42:08.058]we must, as the saying goes, agree to disagree
[00:42:11.595]as we have have to see the university as a place where those disagreements
[00:42:16.166]play out on a grand but nonviolent scale.
[00:42:19.904]Usually if instead of looking to us
[00:42:23.040]to provide only something they perceived as apolitical knowledge,
[00:42:26.911]people look to the university in order to see the important debates play out
[00:42:30.447]and to find evidence articulated to support the arguments they'd like to make.
[00:42:34.652]They won't be disappointed.
[00:42:36.487]People on all sides of pressing
[00:42:38.188]contemporary debates can find proponents within the university.
[00:42:42.159]Do we have left wing professors?
[00:42:43.928]Yes, we do. But do we have right wing professors? Yes, we do.
[00:42:48.065]But more specifically, beyond just party politics,
[00:42:51.268]we have professors working together with the fossil fuel industry
[00:42:54.872]to more efficiently extract and burn oil and gas for energy.
[00:42:58.542]And we have professors who provide evidence that such activities
[00:43:01.779]are resulting in increasing climate chaos and will result in generally ultra
[00:43:05.583]manageable levels of natural and social destruction .
[00:43:09.186]We have professors working to develop and patent new and improved types
[00:43:13.324]of genetically modified seeds
[00:43:15.326]with the backing of companies that will profit by them.
[00:43:18.028]And we have professors providing legal arguments against patenting life.
[00:43:22.633]We have professors who document and present a nonfiction or fictional form.
[00:43:26.470]The impact on small farmers and rural life of such patented seeds.
[00:43:30.641]Professors who show the resulting decline in important insects
[00:43:33.844]and general ecology and soil benefits. Soil health.
[00:43:37.715]There are professors who show how these seeds increase
[00:43:40.851]food yields and farmer profits.
[00:43:43.053]Professors who show the maldistribution of that food within our society.
[00:43:46.890]And those who show that that imbalance follows lines of racial prejudice.
[00:43:50.361]And so on. For all the pressing matters of the day and beyond.
[00:43:55.232]So let's stop pretending that any of this is somehow above and outside of politics.
[00:44:00.404]Let's not only agree to disagree, but a great of a damn good fight
[00:44:03.774]over these issues to argue over them passionately and deeply
[00:44:08.012]and with all of our wit and knowledge and intelligence and skill.
[00:44:12.249]And let's agree that in addition to generating knowledge, being a place for
[00:44:16.153]debate is one of the most important things that the university provides to society.
[00:44:21.325]If we do contribute to a common good, it is in part by providing a forum
[00:44:25.462]where such vigorous debates can play out and strong contenders to do it.
[00:44:30.934]The College of Arts and
[00:44:31.635]Sciences has a particularly strong stake in this redefinition.
[00:44:35.806]Traditionally, we have the disciplines that do not intersect as well with
[00:44:39.576]corporate partnerships, grants, patents or other revenue generating techniques.
[00:44:44.381]We host to the pure sciences, the humanities and social sciences.
[00:44:49.053]Aside from teaching students who pay tuition and some grants.
[00:44:52.723]We don't have a very strong financial generation profile.
[00:44:56.427]David The Dean would disagree with me,
[00:44:59.363]but we do have a very strong and important social function
[00:45:02.766]and the university's role as a forum for debate.
[00:45:06.336]If we reduce higher education primarily to the disciplines and products
[00:45:10.240]that intersect with and attend to the interests of the corporate sector,
[00:45:13.944]we suppress alternatives and critiques of their activities
[00:45:17.614]that would subvert the university's social function from housing
[00:45:20.951]vigorous, multifaceted debate over the major issues of the day,
[00:45:24.822]and instead just reduce us to being like the R&D arm of industry.
[00:45:29.860]And this would have a profoundly negative effect on the universities walls.
[00:45:34.298]Our fights may seem merely academic sometimes,
[00:45:37.468]particularly when they are deep in the details looking for that
[00:45:40.804]proverbial devil, or flying high into the realm of abstract and principle.
[00:45:45.576]But they are always developing evidence and argumentation for people outside
[00:45:49.780]the university's walls to draw upon in their thinking and in their own fights,
[00:45:54.618]where decisions are made, at least temporarily, about how society will move
[00:45:58.822]forward on a whole host of issues that affect our collective lives.
[00:46:02.659]So arguments developed within universities are used
[00:46:05.763]by politicians, think tanks, business leaders, activist groups,
[00:46:09.666]nonprofits and individuals
[00:46:11.468]as they make decisions about how we're going to structure our society
[00:46:15.072]and how to talk about our shared world in the immediate future.
[00:46:18.442]The ideas and evidence generated within universities have a profound effect
[00:46:22.646]on how debates about resources outside the universities play out.
[00:46:26.917]And if you're skeptical about that point, just ask the Koch brothers,
[00:46:30.587]who fund university institutes all over the country, including here,
[00:46:34.625]in order to ensure that their views are advanced within university debates.
[00:46:40.130]If we shrink the scope of debate inside the university,
[00:46:43.433]the arguments for those positions outside also become weaker, and the robust
[00:46:47.437]exchange of ideas on which democracies thrive starts to wither away.
[00:46:51.875]Our democracy would continue its drift towards oligarchy
[00:46:54.945]and frustrated proponents of the positions which are being ignored or suppressed.
[00:46:59.349]We'll stop considering argumentation as a viable way
[00:47:02.085]to resolve disputes and achieve resolution of grievances,
[00:47:05.389]and we'll instead start looking to other, more violent means to make their case.
[00:47:10.460]So as a professor at this university, I'm ready to argue hard
[00:47:14.765]for what I believe is good, and to insist
[00:47:18.135]that others can and should do the same.
[00:47:21.205]We should also make clear that when we do that,
[00:47:24.074]we are fulfilling our role as professors, not undermining it,
[00:47:28.645]and providing a profoundly good service to our community.
[00:47:32.749]In this way, when inevitably some people
[00:47:35.552]read my work or hear me speak and passionately disagree with me
[00:47:39.122]rather than feeling alienated,
[00:47:41.091]they can trust that there will be other faculty at UNL
[00:47:44.094]who will articulate views they feel
[00:47:45.762]are more in line with their own values and goals for society.
[00:47:49.433]And this is the point.
[00:47:51.101]The university supports people arguing on many different sides of the debates
[00:47:55.005]that are currently rocking our world and our disciplinary norms for evidence
[00:47:58.909]ensure that the case we make for our side is as strong as it can be.
[00:48:02.980]Moreover, we can serve as a model for one way
[00:48:05.816]disputes can be handled and arguments passionately made
[00:48:08.919]without ever losing the ability to actually function as a community.
[00:48:12.890]So let's openly embrace this as a positive thing
[00:48:16.026]and a good we offer our society rather than seeking consensus.
[00:48:20.564]I say bring on the debate.
[00:48:24.067]Thank you. Thank you so much.
[00:48:34.845]So if you have questions, Ethan is going to circulate with a microphone
[00:48:38.649]and he'll find you.
[00:48:39.883]And for those of you on Zoom, you can just put them in the Q&A.
[00:48:44.221]So I already have one for you on Zoom.
[00:48:48.158]So this is from Dr.
[00:48:49.459]Wehrum, who's also part of the series.
[00:48:51.228]So she says you mentioned the deeply rooted
[00:48:55.432]disagreements over what are the facts versus what is political spin.
[00:48:59.937]To what extent do you think that this is about actual disagreements about facts?
[00:49:04.875]E.g., The climate is changing, income inequality is rising,
[00:49:08.812]as opposed to the unwillingness of people to differentiate
[00:49:12.149]between what is real and what they think ought to be real.
[00:49:17.387]And if that is a key contributor to how the general public perceives
[00:49:21.658]what universities do, how can we make the best of it at the university level?
[00:49:28.665]So I think the latter part of that question is
[00:49:33.904]answered by much of the general thrust of my talk.
[00:49:36.740]I think we should proudly proclaim what we're doing here
[00:49:41.011]as a big debate, a big debate that covers
[00:49:44.314]a broad spectrum of potential positions.
[00:49:48.285]In terms of the question about whether this is really
[00:49:52.556]a disagreement on the facts or whether
[00:49:56.493]this is people kind of willingly ignoring them or wishing them
[00:50:00.530]to be a certain way and therefore believing them to be that way
[00:50:04.634]in some respects,
[00:50:07.804]you know, that that points to the problem, right?
[00:50:10.173]That we have lost the trust of people to be arbiters of
[00:50:14.044]how knowledge is developed.
[00:50:16.613]And so, you know, that is largely what I'm pointing to here, is that,
[00:50:21.151]you know, people no longer are using the same authorities
[00:50:25.322]to guide their understanding of what those facts are or how we come to them.
[00:50:30.560]You know, the process of knowledge production
[00:50:34.031]is shifting to some degree as people stop
[00:50:37.634]trusting traditional institutions of expertize and traditional methods,
[00:50:43.673]therefore, of gathering information which included consulting those expertize,
[00:50:50.747]those experts, and instead are saying, no, those experts are untrustworthy.
[00:50:55.952]And therefore, I've got to find some other way to find the real facts.
[00:50:59.723]And so, you know, they're engaged in kind of other modes of information
[00:51:04.661]gathering, ones that we may not find legitimate at all because we're invested
[00:51:08.799]in a very particular kind of mode of knowledge production.
[00:51:12.869]But for them, they're looking for, you know, revelation
[00:51:18.375]for guidance from religious authorities,
[00:51:21.978]which may be more trustworthy for them than university expertize.
[00:51:27.451]So they're looking to other sources of information.
[00:51:31.254]And there's a way in
[00:51:33.857]which our politicians have not felt
[00:51:38.395]the way that expertize is regarded in our society by, you know,
[00:51:43.767]for at least the last 20 years, kind of referring to like facts and alternative
[00:51:47.971]facts, the reality based community and those who are not within it
[00:51:52.142]as of highlighting that there are options for you out there.
[00:51:56.246]And so, you know, that's fractured what used to be a general agreement
[00:52:00.884]on how we would come to an under shared agreement
[00:52:05.021]on how one finds facts or develop stocks or as well as how we interpret them.
[00:52:20.003]I was just thinking as you were speaking that
[00:52:23.473]as faculty, I think we sometimes an implicit
[00:52:27.144]and reflective, snobbish way like to think of ourselves
[00:52:29.613]as very different from, say, K-through-12 educators.
[00:52:34.151]And that might be harming us because we really have a lot in common
[00:52:38.889]with what educators are going through, especially now.
[00:52:43.126]And I was thinking about this story that's been in the news
[00:52:47.430]locally in the last couple of weeks, where
[00:52:51.034]student journalists in Grand Island had published in the spring
[00:52:55.839]a student newspaper issue that was basically included
[00:52:59.643], editorial content that was friendly towards LGBTQ people.
[00:53:05.081]And there was some kind of ensuing complaining.
[00:53:08.952]And the school administration responded by
[00:53:11.655]shutting down the entire journalism program of the school.
[00:53:14.858]And who who wins there?
[00:53:18.261]You know, I mean, because at the end of it,
[00:53:19.996]the students are deprived a whole realm of education.
[00:53:24.267]And nobody thinks the school did a good job.
[00:53:28.238]Even the original people complaining don't.
[00:53:31.107]And it's all because the administrators, not the teachers or the students,
[00:53:35.145]but the administrators have zero tolerance for discomfort
[00:53:39.382]or anything that smells like politics or controversy.
[00:53:43.386]And instead of learning how to embrace that as part of the vibrant
[00:53:48.225]identity of a place of education, they are literally,
[00:53:53.063]you know, ruining their own educational programs.
[00:53:56.866]And to me, from a bird's eye perspective, where all of this has
[00:53:59.769]the effect of doing all of this destabilization and mistrust in education,
[00:54:04.808]it serves a particular political agenda in Nebraska.
[00:54:08.445]We're one of the few places that don't have vouchers
[00:54:10.947]for privatized education that could change at any moment.
[00:54:14.217]And it's more likely to the more people
[00:54:17.420]view schools as places that would throw LGBT kids to the wolves
[00:54:22.559]or throw their journalism department or, you know, all across the spectrum.
[00:54:26.196]And I'm wondering if you are seeing connections
[00:54:30.467]between K-through-12 and higher ed or what
[00:54:34.471]kinds of maybe messaging or solidarity
[00:54:38.475]we could look at as far as we go as educators with with,
[00:54:44.080]you know, people teaching in other sectors of education?
[00:54:49.052]Yeah, that's a big a big problem and a big question.
[00:54:53.256]Thank you. So I certainly agree that,
[00:54:56.326]you know, there has to be this kind of continuity in education,
[00:54:59.929]you know, K through 16 and that, you know, if we thought of ourselves
[00:55:04.734]more in solidarity with teachers who are teaching on the K-12 level,
[00:55:10.507]then I think that would help them and also help us.
[00:55:14.311]And so certainly, you know, that's that's something to pay attention to. And the
[00:55:20.250]so the attacks on K-12 are
[00:55:22.218]kind of an extension of what it started as attacks on the university, right?
[00:55:26.756]I mean, it's not that those are new on K-12 per se,
[00:55:29.759]but it does seem like there was a wave of criticism of higher
[00:55:34.631]ed for being politicized and then a wave of K 12
[00:55:39.102]for being equally so in ways that some people found objectionable.
[00:55:43.273]And so I do think it's you know, I haven't thought about this argument
[00:55:46.876]in a K-12 context, but it would be interesting to do so.
[00:55:49.779]Right. Is there a way in which education as a whole
[00:55:53.249]should be something where, you know, education and schools are the places
[00:55:57.954]where you have these debates and that we understand that, you know,
[00:56:02.759]your position will be represented, but so will other people's positions.
[00:56:08.264]And that's got to be okay.
[00:56:09.599]You know, that we need to trust that having a wide spectrum of people
[00:56:15.305]arguing over these these issues is actually the most beneficial
[00:56:19.409]way to get through them.
[00:56:21.277]And so certainly, you know, I think that.
[00:56:25.582]It could be useful to have these conversations
[00:56:29.185]with teachers in K-12 and
[00:56:31.821]think about whether this would be persuasive on that level as well.
[00:56:35.358]You know, there are complications with childhood development and with our
[00:56:39.429]I don't know if we have any faculty in those departments,
[00:56:41.931]but it would be really interesting to to have that conversation.
[00:56:45.301]Yeah. Thank you.
[00:56:47.570]So relatedly, a museum.
[00:56:49.572]It's one thing to get a university community to buy into this idea
[00:56:53.877]that there are going to be disagreements over everything
[00:56:56.846]and that it's a good thing.
[00:56:58.314]But how do you get the public at large to buy in and accept this
[00:57:02.619]when they're already becoming increasingly skeptical?
[00:57:07.090]Well, I think partly, you know, we need to stop pretending
[00:57:10.093]that we're apolitical. Right.
[00:57:11.895]You know, that and and that, you know, if we stop doing that and say, yes,
[00:57:16.633]in fact, you know, like we are having political debates,
[00:57:19.669]we are human beings with political commitments.
[00:57:21.938]They have influenced what we have chosen to do in our fields.
[00:57:25.875]And, you know, for some people, it's very evident, you know, like that
[00:57:28.845]we think that, you know, this particular discipline
[00:57:32.682]is the one that is most necessary and most helpful for the world. Right.
[00:57:38.121]As an English professor, I'm committed to story right to language
[00:57:42.091]and the way that that shapes our world and has the potential to shape our world.
[00:57:45.795]That's partially why I chose this field for other people.
[00:57:49.232]You know, if you're in mathematics, it might be the world
[00:57:51.901]is actually structured by underlying mathematics.
[00:57:54.771]And if we only understood those better, that would enable us to act
[00:57:59.209]in a more positive way, would enable us to kind of see the world more accurately
[00:58:03.913]and therefore kind of lead to better action for us overall.
[00:58:08.251]More safety, more appreciation for even the beauty of the world. Right.
[00:58:12.755]And that that is the critical thing to understand.
[00:58:15.492]And so, you know, like when I say politics, it's not just like the the
[00:58:22.398]pressing partizan politics of the day.
[00:58:25.301]It is these really deep commitments to the things that, you know,
[00:58:30.073]we should pay attention and give resources to in our world.
[00:58:34.210]And I tend to think of this time my mother was an elementary art teacher,
[00:58:38.281]and she was constantly concerned that, you know, they would cut art
[00:58:42.819]from the elementary program because it just wasn't seen as useful or important.
[00:58:47.290]And, of course, you know,
[00:58:48.091]now we see this playing out, you know,
[00:58:49.792]in the university, the next major series of cuts come through.
[00:58:52.962]Which departments get the ax right.
[00:58:55.298]You know, and that's an argument, right?
[00:58:57.500]Like which which of these areas of
[00:59:00.436]knowledge are important and which are expendable to us?
[00:59:04.841]You know, who gets more resources?
[00:59:06.976]And and that's like that's essentially
[00:59:10.013]an extension of what people are doing out in the world, too.
[00:59:13.516]They're arguing over
[00:59:14.350]who gets resources, what questions, get our attention and time.
[00:59:18.488]You know what things get our money.
[00:59:20.690]How do we handle that?
[00:59:22.091]You know, how does the government distribute it or not?
[00:59:25.461]And so, you know, those big questions,
[00:59:27.697]I think if we if we made clear that that's what we're doing
[00:59:32.035]here, is we are providing you with evidence for your position.
[00:59:35.905]Come check it out and find ways to kind of make that more visible.
[00:59:41.110]You know, I think
[00:59:42.378]we don't tend to take a step back and think about why we're arguing over
[00:59:47.684]why we're taking the stance we are the position
[00:59:51.387]that we do in these very broad terms.
[00:59:53.756]But we could and then once we articulated it to ourselves,
[00:59:57.260]we could think about how to articulate it more broadly out in the world.
[01:00:01.731]So, you know, to some degree, where I think there are
[01:00:04.701]structural issues involved here, as I indicated through,
[01:00:07.937]you know, talking about funding for higher up from public sources,
[01:00:13.076]you know, I think the first step can be a communications one.
[01:00:16.679]You know, it can be work within the institution and then shifting
[01:00:21.684]what we say to people outside so that we stop getting the like,
[01:00:26.723]you know, like so-and-so, you know, like publish something
[01:00:30.059]or said something on their faculty bio or, you know,
[01:00:34.163]at a talk where they got filmed during their classroom
[01:00:36.733]where I had a camera on them and it was political right.
[01:00:40.236]And that's wrong and that's bad.
[01:00:42.605]And so, you know, if we can just say, you know, actually that's good
[01:00:47.176]because now, you know, like the people
[01:00:49.445]in that class or in that audience or that are reading that thing
[01:00:52.715]now have evidence for, you know, a particular side of an issue.
[01:00:57.720]And I don't know about you, but I still read and are interested
[01:01:01.858]in the arguments made by people that I violently disagree with.
[01:01:05.662]Like, I want to know I want to know what they're arguing,
[01:01:09.198]you know, so that I can make a better argument, if nothing else.
[01:01:13.102]And that seems important, too.
[01:01:15.338]And so, you know, if we are making that case that it's
[01:01:18.574]a good thing to have these views articulated
[01:01:22.645]for students, for the public, for readers, for ourselves,
[01:01:26.849]no matter if you agree with them or not,
[01:01:28.918]you should you have an investment and having them articulate it,
[01:01:32.488]because that'll make for better debates , that'll make for better decisions,
[01:01:36.292]that'll make for, you know, a population
[01:01:39.595]that might look to us to provide some of that information again.
[01:01:44.133]And I don't know, maybe that that is.
[01:01:46.936]Too optimistic given where we are right now.
[01:01:49.238]But I feel like we've got to start somewhere and we have we are losing trust.
[01:01:53.476]And I think that this is a way to regain some of it. Hi, Julia.
[01:02:00.016]Thank you so much for such a wonderful, in-depth lecture.
[01:02:03.586]Really, this is just.
[01:02:06.022]This is just something that came up when you were discussing learning. Right.
[01:02:09.659]And one of the quotations talked about the environment
[01:02:12.695]and environmental disruptions, if I have that right.
[01:02:16.365]I'm just curious, are the vocational arts or the community colleges?
[01:02:23.840]Are they in conversation with your research here?
[01:02:27.777]I ask the question and I'm probably totally
[01:02:30.580]just off the mark here, you know, where your research is.
[01:02:33.616]But it prompted me to think about this, given
[01:02:38.321]the video made by Michelle Obama, right.
[01:02:43.626]To go to college. Go to college. This.
[01:02:45.728]And what came to my mind when I was watching that video, I,
[01:02:49.932]I was quite troubled by it
[01:02:53.703]because there was no mention about if you don't want to go to college,
[01:02:58.241]then find your vocation, find your art.
[01:03:03.146]If you work with your hands, that kind of thing, you find that.
[01:03:07.350]And so many times, you know, the vocational arts, arts
[01:03:11.187]and sport classes get pushed to the side and they work.
[01:03:14.123]They were pushed aside in the seventies when this whole thing to go to college
[01:03:17.894]just came up. Right.
[01:03:19.495]So I'm just wondering, wondering
[01:03:21.931]for conversation
[01:03:23.666]are the vocational arts, the community colleges,
[01:03:25.935]are they in conversation with what you're doing?
[01:03:29.572]So in terms of like, have I had conversations? Not yet.
[01:03:35.444]And I'd love to.
[01:03:36.879]So I should, you know, anyone
[01:03:40.416]that I'd like to to reach out and be able to
[01:03:45.588]present or give some talks or just, you know, hear what they think.
[01:03:49.258]But in terms of just the the nature of the vocational arts
[01:03:53.663]in general, I would say they are absolutely included in here.
[01:03:57.633]Like it's we get used to thinking somehow of ways of engaging with the world
[01:04:03.606]only through our brain, but of course, like that.
[01:04:06.776]That is not true.
[01:04:07.510]Even even here. You're right,
[01:04:09.045]you know, I mean, like, there's plenty of experimentation and
[01:04:12.949]modes of learning and research products that are based on, you know, one
[01:04:16.986]skill with one's hands as well as one's eyes and and mind.
[01:04:22.458]And that is that certainly kind of moves into modes of being in the world
[01:04:28.598]that value things like facility, beauty, craft, tradition. Right.
[01:04:33.369]And so that's another way of arguing for the most important thing in the world,
[01:04:39.008]you know what I mean?
[01:04:39.642]Like and that's certainly actually an argument
[01:04:41.143]going on, you know, touch grass, like get off line, you know, like do something,
[01:04:46.282]you know, when the pandemic hit, what did everyone do?
[01:04:48.417]They went and baked bread, right?
[01:04:50.253]You know, like it was it was like suddenly the moment when everyone
[01:04:53.422]went back to, like, traditional arts and crafts somehow
[01:04:56.792]because they felt that it was healing, that it was comforting,
[01:04:59.595]that it created a community that had suddenly been cut off somehow,
[01:05:03.633]and that that points to the the value that we still have in those arts
[01:05:09.906]that are very usefully taught in our community colleges.
[01:05:13.910]And so I would absolutely kind of think of them as participating
[01:05:17.346]in these kinds of topics.
[01:05:20.917]Thank you. There are no more questions.
[01:05:31.427]Thank you so much for coming and I hope you will join us next month.
[01:05:36.933]On October 4th, when actually more we'll be talking
[01:05:41.771]about partisan polarization and the need for civic respect.
[01:05:46.142]We can just have another applause
[01:05:47.977]for Dr. Julia Schleck.
[01:05:52.415]And thank you again for coming to the series
[01:05:57.586]and I hope to see you on October 4th. Have a good evening.

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America's Uncertain Search for Truth and the Fate of Universities

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