Justin Raphael: Facing diversity requirement with caution

Fifty-two years ago, William F. Buckley Jr., Yale Class of 1950, published God and Man at Yale, decrying what he called "the superstition of academic freedom." Today, he finds odd company here at Penn in the form of the Student Movement for Change and its American Cultural Analysis Requirement, a proposal that would require a course in "marginalized concepts of culture." Consider: "It is the goal of the [SMC] to encourage dialogue across the student body, the faculty and the administration about what aspects of humanity are essential for all of us, as undergrads, to step away with from our four years here."

This represents a tectonic shift in academic policy from limitless liberality to partial orthodoxy. The 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure by the American Association of University Presidents eschews official ideology of any kind: "The common good depends upon the free search for truth and its free exposition"; "Teachers are entitled to freedom in the classroom in discussing their subject." Accordingly, the current College curriculum requires not specific perspectives on the truth, only ways of knowing it; it has the intent of sharpening our minds but is officially ambivalent as to their content. I could study Marx or Madison; LeMarck or Darwin; Homer or Whitman; I would graduate either way.

The ACAR, however, would codify diversity as a curricular value, emphasizing and establishing the University's right, nay duty, to mandate a course of instruction from a particular perspective: "a revisionist look at American history." So as to satisfy such a requirement, it would force many departments to consider ideology when hiring faculty.

Yet the ACAR not only represents both a positive affirmation of what should be taught, i.e. diversity; it contains an implicit rejection of what should not be. If tolerance is integral to both education and graduation, is it a far step to say that bigoted instruction has no place? The University's nondiscrimination policy already says as much. Under the ACAR, revisionism would be dogma; Nazism, misogyny and homophobia, heresy.

Lest such a proposition be branded as illiberal censorship, note the implied and reasonable difference between speech and instruction. The SMC, by all appearances, does not deny the constitutional right to be a racist or make racist speech. It avers, rather, that a responsible elite university, in its training of future leaders, should not sanction bigoted instruction. This is the logic of every parent who believes that their neighbor can be a Klansman but wouldn't choose him for a babysitter.

But here the SMC would be faced with the law of unintended consequences, for if Penn can teach diversity as an essential aspect of humanity, can it not demand courses in American democracy, capitalism and ethics? (After all, the SMC asks us "how far from the reality of American society we would like to be at Penn.") Can it not conversely dismiss Marxism, fascism and amorality, like bigotry, as having no place in a proper education? Would the SMC agree with such restrictions or does its cultural and moral relativism prohibit an endorsement of these or any other values? And if so, can it in good faith hold fast to its admirable movement for diversity education?

In a sense, the SMC says that in the theater of higher education, we as the paying audience have a right to decide whether our money will go towards a screening of Birth of a Nation or Eyes on the Prize. Our public boards of education engage in this normative analysis every day, and even our own Ben Franklin recognized its necessity: "It would be well if we could be taught every Thing that is useful." The obvious inference is that some educational ideas are of higher utility than others in the cultivation of "an inclination joined with the Ability to serve Mankind," what he called "the great Aim and End of all Learning."

Indeed, Penn's motto is Leges Sine Moribus Vanae, or "Laws Without Morals are Useless," and, the SMC seems to argue, an education without a purpose is equally futile, for as Buckley observed, "It is not enough to say, 'Knowledge is wisdom.'" Lenin and Hitler were well educated, but that does not mean they were any closer to the truth; being well read is not a vaccine for bigotry.

Academic freedom is a path toward the truth. But only the recognition that democratic freedom and tolerance are demonstrably right can save us from the paradox that the end of education must be denied to save the means.

The SMC is certainly accurate that a superficial diversity and bigotry continue to exist at Penn and around the country. The question their ACAR proposes, however, is not whether diversity has educatory value, but whether an awareness of those Americans supposedly on the margins of freedom is worth a change in academic freedom. I'm not sure the SMC would say so, and while it is not always wrong to open Pandora's Box, it is undoubtedly of value to know when we are doing it.

Justin Raphael is a sophomore American history major from Westport, Conn. Uncommon Sense appears on Tuesdays.

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