|
September 19, 2005
Conservatives complain about lefty professors making certain political aims essential to the disciplinarity of humanities and social-science disciplines, and the way they have institutionalized their liberal politics. This has impoverished the intellectual life of the campuses of our universities. The key issue is not acorrecting lefty bias with a conservative one. It is defeding critical thinking.
A quote from Amy Gutman writing in the US Chronicle of Higher Education:
For two decades, I taught a course on ethics and public policy that dealt with the controversial topics of our time, such as terrorism, abortion, affirmative action, and bioethics. My students knew that agreeing with me on a given issue would have no bearing on how I treated or graded them. Those who brought solid evidence and original thinking to bear on their arguments, and who responded effectively to the strongest counterarguments, earned the highest grades.
These are the kind of courses that ought to be taught in Australian universities as part of an education for citizenship. It is the way that they are taught that is the key.
Gutman continues:
For their part, instead of making their case through reasoned arguments in academic forums, some critics of higher education are promoting legislation to regulate professors. In doing so, they are violating the spirit of academic freedom and threatening to poison the collegial atmosphere of robust and respectful debate that has enabled American universities to contribute so much to our democracy. By demonstrating our steadfast commitment to protecting the freedom of faculty members and students to engage in vigorous discourse across the political spectrum without government interference, we can prevent the threat of a chill from becoming a devastating frost.
That is a good defence of philosophy as a form of critical thinking. It is what is fading away in our universities.
|
