There was a brief debate yesterday via Campus Progress email that’s worth a blog entry or two. David Horowitz recently wrote an article for The Weekly Standard in which he—surprise!—attacked “the politicization of higher education.” He’s mad that the American Association of University Professors argued in a recent report that students should be taught whatever is “accepted as true within a relevant discipline.” If this is the standard, he’s saying, then any politically motivated group that gets its own “discipline” can proceed to teach whatever it wants as the truth.

Though I disagree with almost all of Horowitz’s specific claims in the piece, which are typically alarmist and misrepresent what goes on in college campuses, I couldn’t help but admit that he makes a couple of valid points about academia. To wit:

It is a slope slippery in more ways than one. The doctrine of “truth within a relevant discipline” opens the university to political factions. Suppose antagonists of Darwin's theory of evolution were to establish the academic field of Intelligent Design Studies. What academic principle would prevent them from teaching their contested theories as truth? The same would apply to 9/11 conspiracy theorists, or animal rights activists, or racists--in fact, to any ideology that was able to take control of a university department and structure its curriculum as a new academic “discipline.”

This brought back an annoying memory from my time at the University of Michigan. I took a couple of comparative literature seminars, and in one of them I found myself to be the only person (I think) in a seminar of 12 people or so defending the idea that there are inherent, nonsuperficial differences between men and women that exist independent of culture. It’s something that any biologist or neurologist could tell you is true (for example, the “average” male brain and the “average” female brain will show different sorts of activity when exposed to the same stimuli), but the kids in my class, all of whom were quite intelligent and several of whom I’m still in touch with, were stubbornly refusing to accept an empirically verified reality because it clashed with their political viewpoint. Now this viewpoint—that men, and in particular white men, have for most of history held far too much power and have wielded it cruelly and irresponsibly—is completely true. But whether or not men and women are psychologically or physiologically identical and whether or not that should be treated as equals are two separate issues, and no one was willing to make this distinction.

This is just one anecdote, of course, but at U of M there was plenty of overlap between women’s studies, comparative literature, and a few other humanities departments, all of which had tendencies toward postmodern viewpoints in which science is simply another human endeavor that has no potential for grasping “truth” in any real, supra-human sense. As someone who wanted to be a scientist but wasn’t smart enough (well, good enough with numbers at least), I’ve always found this viewpoint troublesome. Something being “true” in chemistry is not the same as something being “true” in a humanities course. So while I agree with a good chunk of what the average women's studies department teaches, that doesn't take away from the fact that Horowitz happens to be right that, especially when it comes to anything involving cultural studies (a ridiculously complicated subject that is not easily reductive), it's easy for departments to set up echo chambers and start bouncing nonsense or near-nonsense back and forth. Anyone who disagrees should read about the Sokal affair.

I’ve already rambled a bit, but the point is that I can sort of see why Horowitz is perturbed by the “accepted as true” formulation. It works fine when applied to fields with established methodological means of creating and testing new hypotheses, but cultural studies operate in a different way, so there shouldn’t be a “one size fits all” approach to what should be taught. Something else is needed for non-science classes. (Thoughts?)

Of course, this is more or less all just rumination, because I disagree with Horowitz’s base claim that indoctrination in the classroom is a major problem. But it is interesting to talk about some of the epistemological differences between the “hard” sciences and the humanities. Well, it is if you’re a nerd like me.

Some disciplines are more open than others. In math or physics or chemistry, there are very few “sacred truths.” Nothing is off-limits—rather, anyone who makes an extravagant claim simply has to prove it and have their proof survive the peer review process. I would argue that cultural fields like comparative lit or women’s studies have a higher number of sacred truths. In a sense, they have to. Since they deal with subjects—human beings and the power relationships they establish—that are far more complicated and resistant to reduction than, say, a molecule or a chemical bond, there’s no way for them to have the same methodological framework as a hard science. But this also means they’re more susceptible to the echo-chamber effect, and have to be more careful to allow dissenting viewpoints. Politicization is a problem in every discipline, but it’s a more serious problem in disciplines that are inherently political.