Think Colleges/Universities Are Leftist? Work At One!
Suggesting that David Duke, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as “…the most recognizable figure of the American radical right, a neo-Nazi, longtime Klan leader and now international spokesman for Holocaust denial.” come to campus caused the president to look at me like I’d grown a third rail-head. Perhaps some would say his response reinforces the belief that colleges and universities are open to leftist bias. Others would simply ask, if I was crazy. My thought - would not such a forum give students a unique learning opportunity? - was not just naïve, it was ignorant of the degree to which culture and politics impact learning.
You see, or perhaps you already know, learning and education are two very different things. Therefore, to think the only thing colleges and universities do is grant certificates and degrees misses the reason for battles over education in the United States for centuries. As evidenced by politicians and school boards falling all over themselves to defend parents fight from the mythical Critical Race Theory. And the most recent public lambasting by politicians, media personalities and most anyone with access to social media who do not hesitate to put colleges and universities in the crosshairs of the country’s culture wars.
You Say Indoctrination, I Say Learning
Going back to the first schools in Boston, backed by Puritanism, education in the U.S. has a long history of being conduits for indoctrination. From then until the IRS revoked private non-profit institutions’ tax exempt status because they were using religious dogma to support racial discrimination in their admissions standards tax payers have been funding indoctrination. Even if that meant indoctrinating students to white supremist beliefs. Bob Jones University v The United States of America (May 24, 1983), the university initially supported by President Reagan, resulted in a landmark ruling against public funding discrimination in college admission.
Now, I mention Reagan here for a reason. In many ways, the belief that colleges and universities are breeding grounds for liberal ideologies and antigovernment sentiment is traced back to him. In Reagan’s California gubernatorial campaign, in the midst of the tumultuous 1960s, he railed against “beatniks, radicals and filthy speech advocates on college campuses as well as the professors and administrators who didn’t crack down on student dissent.” https://boulderweekly.com/opinion/the-student-debt-mess-grew-out-of-reagans-war-on-intellectual-curiosity/.
That is the perspective Reagan promulgated throughout the Republican party, many of whom still deify him. It was also the basis for values that informed his policy actions: (that) “the state had ‘no business subsidizing intellectual curiosity.’” Thus, with several strokes of the pen Reagan caused colleges and universities to go from being institutions of public good to being institutions where students are monetized; faculty’s often became unionized; and guardrails informed by political interests shaping what students learn.
Now, interestingly, indoctrination, “the process of repeating an idea or belief to someone until they accept it without criticism or question.” (Cambridge Dictionary) is what education does in any society. So why people fall for the “don’t let them indoctrinate your children line” is amazing to me. As if proof is needed, I was taught that U.S. history and sciences began when Columbus “discovered” America. Better that they had taught me the words of the great Prime Minister Winston Churchill, “History is written by the victors.”
All Education Is Local, Learning Is Not!
When Minister Louis Farrakhan’s spoke to a crowd of about five thousand at the University of Pittsburgh’s Field House on a chilly night in November, 1985, many feared indoctrination. Farrakhan, a prominent Nation of Islam leader, is seen by many as a Black radical and anti-Semite. To many in the Black community, however, Minister Farrakhan speaks truth to power. His visit to me was an opportunity to learn.
Pitt (affectionately called) wasn’t timid about having controversial speakers on campus. Hawkish Reagan appointee Jeane Kirkpatrick, the first female U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., serve as commencement speaker the year my doctorate was granted. The same Jeane Kirkpatrick who had justified, many felt, the rape and murder of three U.S. nuns by El Salvadoran militants by saying, “The nuns were not just nuns.” We protested, silently, by turning our backs on her. The right to protest, a Constitutional right affirmed by the university as long as there were no disruptions.
It’s said, learning does not really happen in classrooms, learning happens in the lives of students. Which is why colleges and universities provide spaces, experiences, programs and activities giving students opportunities to develop life skills, nurture their values, and practice ways of being that empower them to make choices determining how they want to live their lives in a democracy. The view being; what good does it do to educate people who know little of the world?
Leadership For The Times
Ironically, Dr. Wesley Posvar became chancellor of a debt ridden University of Pittsburgh the same year as Reagan became California’s governor, 1967. Although their regard for the role of colleges and universities could not have been so very different.
Hippies and “free love” movements were gripping the country from San Francisco’s Haight Asbury district to New York City’s Greenwich Village. It was the same year an armed Black Panther Party marched into the Sacramento (CA) capitol. A year later Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. A more militant mood gripped the country. Angela Davis was jailed, and freed. Vietnam war protests would spring up almost anywhere. Four Kent State students were shot by the National Guard.
Unrest was palpable! So much so that the appointment of Dr. Wesley Posvar caused significant distrust within the university. After all, he was a Rhodes Scholar, Harvard PhD, West Point graduate and Brigadier General. His connections to the military industrial complex were fodder for urban myth.
However, Dr. Posvar understood what it seems many these days do not, that college and university leaders have positions of influence not absolute power. He also knew that diverse views not only need an outlet, that they are capable of expanding learning and possibilities. Politics can swirl like swift currents around any leader or decision. The depths of which define success and failure in ways that seemingly attend more to culture than reason.
As Dr. Posvar, himself, noted, during an address to the university’s faculty senate, saying that it was easy for any university or college leader to be criticized by the far left or the far right, “If he was particularly adroit, he can even manage to be criticized by both of then - simultaneously.”
Al Fin - From Public Good To Public Pariah
“College boy” was what the community called me as I walked into the party being given by one of our neighbors. The name was a tease, and a source of pride for them. And for me! They were my elders. “College boy” was an affirmation, an endearing respect, that me doing better in my life meant they had done well in raising me. Their expectation, as was true for many like me during that moment in time, was that my success was their success. That their lives of struggle had not been in vain.
What my community did not know is how greatly college was helping me to be responsible. Learning that did not occur only in the classroom. By going to a historically Black college (an HBCU), my African origins, and that of my community, was revealed in ways positive that had never been revealed to me before. What my community also did not know was that I would, beginning at the University of Pittsburgh, spend thirty five years in a variety of roles in colleges and universities, including seven as president.
A digression
Malcolm X had been assassinated three years before my freshman year in college. By my sophomore year, a group on campus had formed a Black Panther Party chapter. And though I didn’t join that effort moving the college to name a building after Malcolm X was something I supported. It was also a move college administration agree with. So, we decided to take over the administration building until the college acquiesced. What we forgot was there was a state police academy about three miles from campus. When the bus load of state police recruits, all white, arrived on campus the realities of disruptive protest and poor planning proved to be a very valuable learning experience.
Learning is not about acquiring knowledge; it is about developing a deep understanding and the ability to apply that knowledge.
Howard Gardner, developmental psychologist and professor of cognition and education at Harvard University
