Education for Freedom, Not DEI The dire urgency for access to alternative ideas. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/education-for-freedom-not-dei/
Two Supreme Court decisions in 2023 struck down the use of race-based admission to colleges and universities, and proscribed various proxies for race like admission essays. But just a year out, the Wall Street Journal reports, “The group Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA),” who represented the Asian-American applicants before the court, “suspects this [violation of the rules] about Yale, Princeton and Duke universities, and on Tuesday it asked the schools for information on how they chose the current freshmen who will graduate in the class of 2028.”
Having spent more than 50 years of my life in universities, I’ve had a front-row seat for observing how universities over the years have juked their admission criteria to make sure they admitted enough “protected classes,” which means anybody except white males. In my university, for example, even after California in 1996 passed Proposition 209, which forbade the explicit use of race, the admissions and hiring process still comprised numerous opportunities for evaluators to discern the applicant’s race.
The former “Affirmative Action Officer,” for example, required the hiring committee to document each member’s sex and race, as well as the applicants’. After Prop 209, the university didn’t observe the law, but merely changed the title to the “EEOC Officer,” who still gathered the same data that were inappropriate if the process was truly merit-based, while reminding everybody that the federal agency Big Brother was watching.
So those experiences made me skeptical when “Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the 6-3 majority that students must be admitted ‘based on his or her experiences as an individual—not on the basis of race’ and that ‘what cannot be done directly cannot be done indirectly.’”
But the really damaging idea connected to affirmative action came from an earlier Supreme Court decision and still remains today. Despite the blatant violation of the Constitution’s 14th Amendment and the Civil Rights Act, these race-based policies were given the Supreme Court’s imprimatur in its 1978 Bakke decision. The court didn’t, as it should have, proscribe preferences based on race, but just numerical quotas, which were easily circumvented to reach the same end––choosing by race rather than merit.
Worse, the decision legitimized a simplistic concept of “diversity” that assumed superficial race-based differences provided educational benefits to all students. But this definition of “diversity” hearkened back to the days of “scientific racism” that reduced unique individuals to skin color or other physical attributes typical of millions of people across the world.
Moreover, it made victimhood the most important characteristic of black people, since even affluent well-educated blacks are still categorized as a “protected class” of victims to be compensated with set-asides, subsidies, and other goods provided by the government. This insulting idea–––as the African proverb has it, “The hand that gives is always above the hand that receives” –– is a variation of the old racist slur that all black people “look alike” or “think alike” or “believe alike.” All these are preposterous slurs reduce black identity and humanity to a dehumanizing stereotype.
Moreover, this reductive “diversity” was created in the wake of the Civil Rights Act to serve partisan factional interests by identifying which political clients received set-asides in government contracting, and later in university admissions and state and federal hiring.
As David E. Bernstein writes in Classified: The Untold Story of Racial Classification in America,
“Modern America’s racial and ethnic classifications do not reflect biology, genetics, or any other biological source. Classifications such as Hispanic, Asian American, and white combine extremely internally diverse groups in terms of appearance, culture, religion, and more under a single, arbitrary heading. The government developed its classification scheme via a combination of amateur anthropology and sociology, interest group lobbying, incompetence, inertia, lack of public oversight, and happenstance.”
The problem with reducing identity to such crude categories like race, is that true legitimate identity includes ethnicities, nations, regions, religions, customs, cultures, mores, cuisines, folkways, languages, dialects, accents, traditions, and histories. As David Hackett Fischer documents in Albion’s Seed, if one takes into account these and many other differences among the early settlers of the future United State, our country was and remains one of the most diverse on the planet. But racialist propaganda like “white privilege,” “systemic racism,” and “white fragility” reduces those early Americans to their skin color, the better to demonize our country as a global villain responsible for all of history’s miseries and injustices.
The Bakke decision injected this toxin of “diversity” into the body politic, which over the following 46 years has mutated into today’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion metrics. These promote policies that judge and evaluate people on the “color of their skin,” not, to paraphrase Martin Luther King, on the “content of their character,” talents, achievements, ethics, actions, habits, and virtues. And this toxin has spread not just to education, but to every dimension of our society from Wall Street to Hollywood––and more dangerously, to the training of professionals such as doctors and airline pilots.
This functionally racist set of attitudes is just one of the many dysfunctions now wrecking higher education. But ignoring true diversity, reducing unique individuals to simplistic group identities, compromises the university’s responsibility not just to train competent professionals, but to develop in students the skills, knowledge and abilities necessary for living as a free citizen.
Restoring higher education, then, means providing a traditional liberal education. Now more than at any time in our history, our young are exposed to new technologies of communication and entertainment that pollute their minds with dehumanizing images and content, even as schools are dominated by curricula that are philistine as well as ideologically corrupt, making a traditional liberal education more important than ever.
Alan Bloom in his 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind, made this same point: “Picture a thirteen-year-old boy sitting in the living room of his family home doing his math assignment while wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs; he is provided with comfort and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvelous, lifelike electronic sound and image reproduction he is enjoying. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy.”
How much more do our young––whose debased cultural environment makes the late 80’s look Victorian–– need a liberal education? Bloom explains: “By liberal education I mean education for freedom, particularly the freedom of the mind, which consists primarily in the awareness of the most important human alternatives” for living a life suitable for our minds, that is, a question of human identity and its purpose.
“A liberal education,” Bloom continues,
“means precisely helping students to pose this question to themselves, to become aware that the answer is neither obvious nor simply unavailable, and that there is no serious life in which this question is not a continuous concern. . . . Liberal education provides access to these alternatives, many of which go against the grain of our nature and our times. The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.”
In other words what we can call genuine “critical thinking,” the opposite of what cultural Marxism calls “critical thought,” which ends up being propaganda for illiberal, collectivist ideologies that line what Friedrich Hayek called “The Road to Serfdom.” One of those bad ideas is the cult of victimhood and racialist identities that have corrupted our universities into finishing schools for training the subjects of tyranny.
Comments are closed.
