Column: Academic serfdom

Many recent studies have highlighted the failure of colleges to educate its graduates. College graduates in alarming numbers are unable to manage their money appropriately, grasp written intellectual arguments, or even have basic literacy skills. This represents a failure of universities in their ability to educate.

It isn't hard to see why this is so. The misuse of "academic freedom" as a bludgeon to impose academic serfdom is one large reason. The selective application of academic freedom to allow for unsupported claims to be dictated as truth from the classroom and the prevention of any discussion of alternative ideas has atrophied students' minds.

One expects a lack of intellectual diversity in non-academic departments like Gender and Women Studies, but entire intellectual disciplines have turned from scholarly work to political partisanship. For instance, the sociology course "Social Perspectives on the Family," used a textbook when I took it called "Public and Private Families" by Andrew Cherlin. It began unapologetically that the traditional definition of family is no longer sufficient and redefined it to be "anything you want" with an emphasis on including gay marriage. No reason for this was given; it was simply claimed as a fact that no one could dispute.

The idea that it is OK that there are no conservatives in sociology because there might be a conservative in engineering is absurd. If blacks are underrepresented in any program, that is proof-positive of a crisis. Suddenly, when conservatives are involved, the standards change. You can't have it both ways, definitions of correlation and causation aside. Undergraduate education should expose students to a wide range of ideas, not a wide range of like-thinking personalities.

Academics pat themselves on the back for parroting out each other's ideas while slamming their minds shut to all that could shake their faith. This is the behavior of a prelate, not a professor. The intelligent design debate remains the best example of this. Instead of talking about intelligent design, the acolytes of Darwinism engage in character assassination.

Academic freedom should be confined to two areas and two areas alone. First, the researcher should be free to explore ideas without having pre-planned conclusions. Second, students should be free to explore the wide range of ideas and determine for themselves what is sound. Academic freedom should not be a right of classroom instructors to turn their podiums into pulpits. Their role is to present information, not preach it. Diverse instructors should be hired to present all reasonable positions within the disciplines.

At the end of the day there are two ways this can be fixed. The best solution is for the academy to reform itself and begin to tolerate diverse points of view as well as intellectually engage with them. This would be the academy living up to the ideal it paints itself to be.

The second is that conservative professors and individuals will form their own institutions and begin directly competing for students and grant money. This way students can choose who they'll be best served by and grant agencies can choose who will provide the best research. This is dangerous because it will not only create ideologically separate universities, it will provide a barrier to real dialogue. Even though conservative thought is by far intellectually superior, it can learn from liberal thought.

In the end, the ones with the most to lose are the left-wing professors. Not only has liberalism not come up with a new idea in decades, it has alienated itself from an overwhelming majority of the rest of the nation.

By going down this road it will force conservatives to form their own institutions and finally close the doors on liberal ones. In the end, liberal academia needs to engage with the world and ideas around it, or we will close down these bastions of failed thought. The choice is yours.

John Bambenek is a graduate student and digital janitor. His column appears on Wednesdays. He can be reached at opinions@dailyillini.com.