Intellectual Diversity and Questioning (Book Notes: God's Defenders)

It's common to at least pay lip service to the values of intellectual diversity and challenging one's beliefs. How many people actually accept, respect, and defend these values - even when their own beliefs are being challenged? Not enough, sadly. This contradiction has driven many attacks on universities, both from the left and the right.

In God's Defenders: What They Believe and Why They Are Wrong, S. T. Joshi writes about some of the earliest attacks on academia by religious conservatives:

[William F Buckley Jr.’s] God and Man at Yale is a priceless buffoonery. In it, Buckley announces that “during the years 1946 to 1950, I was an undergraduate at Yale University. I arrived in New Haven fresh from a two-year stint in the Army, and I brought with me a firm belief in Christianity and a profound respect for American institutions and traditions.” Accordingly, he looked to Yale “for allies against secularism and collectivism.” He was, of course, bitterly disappointed, and the rest of his treatise — condemning the prevalence of godless secularism and lack of respect for religion — alternates between a whine and a rant.

To someone of Buckley’s way of thinking, it would certainly not do to have one’s religious, moral, and political presuppositions disturbed by a college education. Why, at that rate, one might actually be exposed to new ideas and, accordingly, come to believe that one’s earlier views were wrong! No, it was hardly to be countenanced. It is beyond Buckley’s capacity, then or now, to imagine that he could be mistaken about anything — either his religion or his politics. And so, when he finds professors at Yale whose views do not chime with his, can only assume that they are not merely wrong, but evil.

Why was Buckley looking for “allies” from the university as an institution? Perhaps he was so convinced that he was right, it never occurred to him that the mission of the university might be to educate him about new things and challenge him to think more carefully about what he already believed. Instead, he assumed that the university existed to reinforce and support what he already knew to be true — after all, since what he believed was certainly “true,” it’s inconceivable that a university would teach anything different, which would by definition by “false.” Challenges and questions from any quarter will, in such a context, be treated as attacks and threats to one’s well being.

It’s undeniable that liberals have suffered from the same problem, but there is an important factor at work which makes the conflict a bit more likely when it comes to conservatives: as institutions, universities are almost designed to challenge received wisdom and question what people believe. Universities simply aren’t in the business of making people feel comfortable with what they already believe. This will sometimes cause conflict with liberal beliefs, naturally, but I think it’s a bit more likely to cause conflict with conservatives. After all, the basic principle of conservatism is to “conserve” traditional institutions, beliefs, values, etc.

 

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