To regain trust, US HE must pursue truth unhindered by ideology

Long before the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania were forced to resign over their responses to pro-Palestine protests and a Congressional grilling, the American public had already begun to lose trust in higher education.

While Democrats’ confidence that universities have a beneficial effect on society remained high between 2015 and 2023, confidence among Republicans fell precipitously, from 56 per cent to just 19 per cent. Campuses came to be perceived as cesspools of liberal groupthink, where staff and students risk being cancelled for failing to conform to the latest standards of wokeism.

The question is how much of this perception is mere extrapolation from vivid but isolated examples. Do college students actually feel stifled in their ability to express their views? And, more fundamentally, do they still believe in the traditional academic values of free speech and open debate in pursuit of truth? Or do they, instead, prioritise the pursuit of justice for marginalised groups? 

These were the questions that we set out to study with our research teams at the Constructive Dialogue Institute and More in Common, both non-profit organisations seeking to better understand and navigate our polarised moment. The picture that emerged from surveying more than 2,600 current college students provides some clarity.

Here’s the good news: traditional academic values are still overwhelmingly embraced. The notion that “anyone can have good or bad ideas, regardless of their status or identity” is endorsed by 96 per cent of college students, an effective consensus. About 9 in 10 still believe that “we should listen to others with an open mind, including those with whom we disagree” and that “science can connect us to a shared understanding of reality”. Considered in isolation, this suggests that episodes of ideological intolerance do not reflect the beliefs of the typical college student. 

But increasingly popular, too, are a set of competing ideas that emphasise not the individual student but the privilege and power of the groups to which the student belongs. For instance, the idea that “students who are privileged should listen more than they speak” is endorsed by nearly two in three students, and similar numbers agree with the claim that “people from marginalised groups understand American society better” than others. 

To summarise, tolerance and respect continue to be expected, but a new kind of deference to group identity is increasingly being espoused. “Standpoint epistemology” is the claim that certain knowledge is necessarily unavailable to members of powerful groups because they have not shared the lived experience of marginalised communities. Related concepts such as cultural appropriation and race-based public policy also stem from this worldview, which grew at the convergence of multiple schools of 20th-century thinking, particularly postmodernism, post-colonialism and critical race theory. 

Here is why we are now sounding the alarm: today, 45 per cent of college students say they are often “afraid to share [their] opinion for fear of offending peers or classmates when in the classroom”; higher numbers say the same regarding social media. It should not surprise that nearly two in three “very conservative” students express this fear, but the pressure to profess adherence to a single perspective is felt on both sides of the spectrum: fully 30 per cent of “very liberal” students say they often feel intimidated, too. 

The progressive emphasis on power and privilege holds value as we seek to understand how our human biases leave their mark on our institutions, policies and language. But this lens should be a way to enrich our understanding of reality, adding complexity that gets us closer to the truth. In recent years, however, it has often been reduced to just another orthodoxy, pitting the oppressed against the oppressor. Such simplistic understandings of moral issues, which exclude other worldviews, give us licence to vilify those who disagree with us, to police ideas in the name of safety and to contort ourselves into betraying our own values.  

In our own case, the college classroom gave us the freedom and the permission to try on different lenses through which to see the world. One of us, Stephen, saw his initially deeply religious beliefs altered by studying the history of the ancient Middle East and learning about religion through the tools of sociocultural anthropology. The other, Mylien, conducted doctoral work on critical theory, which taught her that while science contains an objective evaluation of data, all our flaws and biases are at play when we determine what deserves to be studied and who is deemed to be credible.

This freedom to critically evaluate frames of reference against each other and to form a nuanced view of the world around us was certainly never wholly devoid of judgement, but it is the indispensable centrepiece of higher education’s mission of learning and intellectual growth. For American universities to recover their standing and properly equip the next generation, they must commit to restoring a learning environment where the pursuit of truth is unhindered by any ideology.   

Stephen Hawkins is director of research for More in Common. Mylien Duong is the senior director of research & innovation for the Constructive Dialogue Institute.