Alec Ward | Mind over market

Talking Backward | Penn is right to affirm open expression, but whence the need to do so?

By Alec Ward 08/25/15 10:52pm

In my two years so far at Penn, I don’t think I’ve ever had my spirits lifted by the receipt of a blast email from a senior administrator. That is, until yesterday morning, when I found a note from Penn’s provost, Dr. Vincent Price, waiting in my inbox.

“As our richly diverse community of scholars reassembles on campus for the new academic year,” the note began, “this is a fitting time to reaffirm our shared commitment to freedom of thought, inquiry, and expression.” The note went on to plug Penn’s upcoming “Campaign for Community” which, according to the note, “will aim to help us discuss and confront issues that are often avoided because they may seem ‘controversial’ or intractable.”

I found this email so heartening because, as attentive readers will doubtless know, the past half-decade has been something of a dark age in terms of unfettered expression on campus. Beginning around 2009, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education — a campus watchdog group founded by a Penn professor — has cataloged dozens of cases of students and faculty being sanctioned for expressing unpopular or controversial ideas.

This phenomenon got a good deal of play in the media this summer, with articles like “My Title IX Inquisition” in The Chronicle of Higher Education, “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me” in Vox and “The Coddling of the American Mind” in this month’s Atlantic Magazine being widely read. This may, I suspect, have played a part in Dr. Price’s decision to send his note.

I was thrilled to see Penn’s provost repudiating intellectual intolerance in a campus-wide communique. I hope the community does reaffirm this commitment. But I have a counter-challenge for the provost and all those who make important decisions at Penn: As we push to have vibrant, tolerant, difficult discussions, consider how it became difficult to do so in the first place. One common theme that this summer’s articles stressed was that unlike past bouts of resistance to academic freedom, today’s “war on hurt feelings” was driven largely by student demands — in other words, it was bottom-up. Students asked their universities to shield them from ideas they found distasteful, by means of trigger warnings and punishments for giving offense, and universities obliged them.

Why they did this merits close scrutiny. I have a hypothesis, which I invite Penn’s leaders to consider. At some point in the not-too-distant past, perhaps driven by increased competition, universities in general stopped thinking like the mission-oriented principled institutions that they are and started thinking like businesses, which they aren’t. The big questions stopped being “How can we enable our communities to search for the truth? How can we foster curiosity and promote the life of the mind?” and began being “How can we attract more applicants? How can we draw top students away from peer institutions and toward us?” Students became clients, and any business owner or economist will tell you that in order to thrive, a business needs to give its clients what they want. Businesses are not principled. They respond to consumer demand.

Institutions, on the other hand, are guided by principles. Hospitals are supposed to heal, churches to save, universities to educate. When any of these starts thinking like a business, they stray from their purpose and betray their values in a messy rush to meet demand. They build better dorms instead of better classrooms, fund concerts instead of lectures, embrace censorship instead of toleration.

And although 21st-century Penn has maintained a clean record as far as open expression goes, it has not stayed completely free of market-actor thinking. It has — from time to time — strayed from the essential goals of education into the lesser, unprincipled goals of demand-satisfaction and peer competition.

And so, as we reconvene this year, I invite the movers and the shakers of Penn to reaffirm their own commitment to the principles of the academic endeavor. When you build a new building, or fund a new program or launch a new initiative, question your own motives. Does this advance the search for truth? Does it foster curiosity and promote the life of the mind? Penn has always tried to be a leadership institution. It’s time to lead on to a better academic future.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.