In my last free post, about the relative paucity of depoliticized education, I wrote:
Then there was the time I was on a panel as the sole liberal voice, alongside two professors from evangelical colleges. They were complaining about ideological conformity at state universities. And I said, “But you have ideological conformity, by design, at your schools. You make professors sign a state of Christian faith, and expel students who are apostates. How is that any better?” One replied, “But that’s our stated mission. State schools aren’t supposed to be like that.” To which I replied, “But what’s good for one student is good for another. Either we want students to learn diverse viewpoints, or we don’t. Either we want a diverse student body, or we don’t. It’s not clear why you think UC-Berkeley students should learn from a diverse faculty, but your students shouldn’t.” As I recall, he had no good answer.
A shrewd reader of mine pushed back, writing:
I was a bit surprised in reading your piece that the representative of the conservative college didn’t have a good answer to your challenge. It seems obvious to me that public institutions into which all members of the society pay they their taxes, about half of whom will be conservative, should at least be able to provide an education which represents multiple viewpoints and does not anathematize half the people funding them and a similar percentage of their potential students. Whereas a private institution founded on ideological grounds and funded by people who believe in specific things has the right to teach whatever it wants however it wants. That goes for private progressive schools too. As an Orthodox Jew, and a Zionist, and a cultural conservative, I cannot imagine that I would be willing to send my children anywhere but YU for university, and that's a pity. Most schools are obviously, forthrightly, actively hostile to me and my beliefs. I would much prefer my children become plumbers. And I’m an open minded Modern Orthodox guy with a degree in philosophy from [an elite private college]! I'm open to my kids experiencing contrary ideas, but four years of indoctrination against me at my own expense is something else. And I shouldn’t have to pay taxes to support such institutions either. Given that almost all state funded schools lay hard to the left, trying to create one which leans right does not seem unreasonable to me, though the hostile takeover thing is definitely not “nice.”
I think there is one good point here, and a few bad points.
First, the reader is correct that public universities have an obligation to be capacious and broad-minded in a way that private schools do not. In truth, I misremembered my own point on that panel. I was defending private colleges, like Harvard, against the demand that they be “non-ideological.” I was basically saying, “Why do you want Harvard and Yale to be even-handed and centrist, when your school is totally in the tank for Jesus?”
They seemed to want to tie the hands of any private school they saw as left-wing, while preserving a space for private right-wing schooling under the heading of “religious” (I recognize that many religious schools are not right-wing). But obviously they have a point that public schools probably have a special obligation to be relatively even-handed. I’m just not sure that private secular schools do; if they want to give themselves over to the religion of the Enlightenment, or of Ibram X. Kendi, that’s their business.
But that’s where the discussion begins, not where it ends. Because what I am really more interested in is the question of what makes a good education. And if the claim is true that a secular, public school—let’s say UC-Berkeley—should be even-handed and diverse-in-viewpoint because students should learn diverse viewpoints, not as a matter of their parents’ preferences or their pastors’ indoctrination but because that is the best way to learn, then it would also be true for students at Notre Dame, Hillsdale, or Yeshiva University. If learning diverse viewpoints is a pedagogical good in itself, then schools that fail to give diverse points of view are, in at least one way, offering inferior educations. There’s no special opt-out for religious schooling from a normative claim about what makes for good Bildung: if a secular kid from Arkansas should become fluent in liberal and conservative points of view when she attends the University of Arkansas, because it’s good for her to learn that way, then the same is true for a Christian boy whose parents send him off to John Brown University in Siloam Springs, Arkansas (to pick one evangelical school I know).
Obviously, not everyone thinks this way. In the debates over Hasidic schools in New York, one unspoken assumption on the part of many of the schools’ defenders is that Hasidic schooling inculcates children in a particular way that would be undermined if they learned diverse points of view. As Hasidic youth, they have a particular destiny, which is to be Hasidic adults, and that destiny requires a different education, one with less diverse viewpoints; at the same time (this line of thinking goes), public schools, because they are educating secular children for a secular destiny, should not be “woke,” or “Christian,” or whatever—they should be ideologically diverse, or neutral, not just as a matter of church/state separation, but as a matter of formation. Public-school children (they believe) have a destiny to be secularists, and so should get one kind of education, whereas the better education for a Hasid is a Hasidic education.
There is nothing logically fallacious about that point of view, but if that’s what you believe, you aren’t actually making an argument about what constitutes a good education for a child; you are making an argument about why it’s good for society that certain groups should be able to opt out of secularism, and raise children to reliably opt out of secularism. You aren’t making an argument about good pedagogy, which you believe can, in certain cases, be highly biased and tendentious, when it’s for your preferred reasons.
Whereas I think that, at the university level, anyway (say, post-age-17), all students are stultified if they aren’t trained to appreciate opposing points of view. Put another way: what’s true of Christian (or Jewish, or Quaker) primary school, that it might well favor parents’ biases toward child formation, and that’s okay, even good, is less true of Christian or Jewish university.
Also, final point to my cherished reader: I fear we must, and ought to, pay taxes to support all kinds of things that we don’t believe in (war, ugly paintings, corn subsidies). Taxation by à-la-carte menu would not work.
As ever, hit me up at markoppenheimer@substack.com.