| 来源类型 | Article |
| 规范类型 | 评论 |
| An ivory tower of our own | |
| Frederick M. Hess; Brendan Bell | |
| 发表日期 | 2019-01-02 |
| 出版年 | 2019 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | It is commonly observed that politics is downstream from culture. That's certainly true when it comes to movies, music, television, and literature. But perhaps no cultural institution has more impact on politics than higher education. After all, colleges and universities are in the business of shaping public discourse. They help determine what knowledge is pursued, legitimize bodies of thought, provide a platform for cultural criticism, shape literary canons, develop policy agendas, and hold a privileged place in the public square. It can be tempting to mock academe's navel-gazing and ideological pretensions, but the organizing principles of today's culture clashes — including the left's embrace of "gender fluidity," "cultural appropriation," and "white privilege" — originated in the academy and migrated outwards. The consequences have been profound. American society, politics, and culture would be healthier if colleges and universities instead enabled a robust dialogue that reflected competing views and values. Lamentably, that is decidedly not the case today — though it may be true that most universities have long fallen short on this score. Sixty years ago, for instance, history departments were dominated by scholars of military history and great men, with little room for scholars of social movements, race, or gender. Now, the situation has utterly flipped; the American Historical Association reports that, by 2015, classes on women and gender had become the most popular subfield in history, with offerings up almost 800% since 1975. Meanwhile, course listings in economic, intellectual, and diplomatic history were reduced by more than half. Just as the academic monoculture of the 1950s was a problem, so is today's — and the problem is getting worse. In 1989, according to the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, liberal faculty outnumbered conservative faculty by two to one. Twenty-five years later, that gap had expanded to a remarkable five to one. In the social sciences and the humanities — the fields where ideology matters most in determining the questions asked, research pursued, and topics deemed important — the disparity is starker still. In their 2016 book, Passing on the Right, professors Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn note that self-identified conservatives make up only about 10% of social-science faculty and perhaps half that share among humanities scholars. These disparities affect who gets hired at colleges and universities, who enjoys the platform provided by prestigious institutions, what gets researched, and what gets taught. In response, some academics and advocates have admirably pushed back, launching speaker series, skirmishing over campus speech codes, and suing and shaming in response to especially egregious cases of institutional bias. There are organizations like FIRE and the Heterodox Academy which have called out and challenged the ideological tilt in higher education. Such efforts are important and praiseworthy. There have also been vital efforts to erect campus centers that challenge orthodoxy, as with the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton. While wholly welcome and sorely needed, these hubs are hamstrung by the reality that they operate as isolated outposts within largely uninviting institutions. As such, they provide perches for individual scholars and offer a redoubt of atypical thought, but they lack the infrastructure, critical mass, or organizational muscle to do much more than that. Read More What is needed, then, is a place where serious scholars can have the space to pursue questions and subjects that don't fit the progressive orthodoxy at today's most prestigious institutions of higher learning. We need an incubator where promising young intellectuals could pursue their research without being forced to conform to the prevailing ideology, and where they can find the scaffolding — employment, funding, networks, and publication outlets — to enable them to achieve independent viability. What is needed is an ivory tower of our own. |
| 主题 | Education ; Higher Education |
| 标签 | Academic freedom ; Higher education ; Philanthropy |
| URL | https://www.aei.org/articles/an-ivory-tower-of-our-own/ |
| 来源智库 | American Enterprise Institute (United States) |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/265176 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Frederick M. Hess,Brendan Bell. An ivory tower of our own. 2019. |
| 条目包含的文件 | 条目无相关文件。 | |||||
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