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Intellectual Diversity

Feb 6, 2004
Author: Jay Bergman

"Intellectual Diversity"

Remarks at ACTA Conference (ACTA website: http://www.goacta.org)
February 6, 2004
Jay Bergman (Professor of History, Central Connecticut State University)

For me, intellectual diversity is a no-brainer. Students attend college in large part to acquire the information and the skills they need to make reasoned and informed judgments about the issues they face once their college education is completed. They cannot do this if their professors present only one point of view, or a limited range of views, on these issues. Universities, to fulfill their mission, must be what John Stuart Mill famously called a free market place of ideas. Universities that do not provide their students such a marketplace of ideas are in fact infringing on the freedom of students to be exposed to a variety of opinions. Far from being mutually exclusive, intellectual diversity and academic freedom are, in fact, complimentary and mutually reinforcing values. Indeed, universities that do not provide intellectual diversity are in my opinion guilty of academic malpractice.

Now, the dirty little secret in academia - which most or all of you are privy to - is that most colleges and universities today are not only oblivious to the necessity for intellectual diversity, but are positively opposed to it. And ironically, those who are most hostile to intellectual diversity on college campuses are the loudest in proclaiming the virtues of racial and ethnic diversity. The inference is inescapable that what those faculty who favor diversity really want are universities where everyone thinks the way they do.

That there is a lack of intellectual diversity on my own campus is undeniable. In the thirteen years I have been at CCSU, not once has an academic program or department sponsored a speaker opposed to abortion, gun control, or racial preferences. The Women's Studies Program openly proclaims itself "an arm of the feminist movement," and blithely excludes from its concerns the female students who are not feminists, or who do not espouse the radical feminism it favors. Only last April did the Women's Studies Program see fit to include on a program they sponsored a speaker - Candace de Russy, who is here today - who has publicly criticized the kind of radical feminism it promotes. In addition, in November 2002 the African Studies program at CCSU sponsored a day-long program on reparations for slavery in which all seven speakers favored reparations. This past March, just before the war in Iraq began, the art and philosophy departments passed formal resolutions calling on faculty to discuss the war in their classes, obviously for the purpose of generating opposition to it. I quote from the resolution of the art department:
We urge our colleagues to bring discussions of the war into the classroom - and to join in mass legal, peaceful protests against the war. Artists and educators have a special responsibility to envision a better world. We intend to use our talents to help replace the madness of war with the great creative act of peace and human solidarity.

Finally, there is at CCSU a reigning orthodoxy on the Middle East in which the only democracy in that region of the world, Israel, is regularly singled out for condemnation while transgressions in the Arab world, such as the persecution of Copts in Egypt, the oppression of Christians, women and homosexuals in Saudi Arabia, and the enslavement of black Africans in Sudan, are mostly ignored. In the summer of 2002 CCSU sponsored a week-long institute on the Middle East for secondary school teachers in Connecticut; at the institute all of the speakers condemned Israel to one degree or another, while none of them defended it, and activities included a field trip to a mosque in Hartford, where the teachers were told about Islam in only the most anodyne and complimentary terms.

In the face of all of this, I, on behalf of the Connecticut Association of Scholars, an affiliate of the National Association of Scholars, circulated a petition, which was signed by twenty-two others, most of them members of NAS. The petition, which I sent to the trustees of the Connecticut State University system, of which CCSU is a part, requested of the trustees that they issue a statement endorsing the principle of intellectual diversity and prescribing that when faculty sponsor programs and speakers on issues of public concern, they do all they can to ensure that a full range of views is represented. The petition also requested that any statement the trustees issue include the requirement that professors refrain from using their classrooms as vehicles for advancing their own political views.

Responding to the petition, the Chancellor of CSU stated that if the trustees endorsed the principle of intellectual diversity, they would be "invading academic freedom." In the face of this, I then sent the petition and the Chancellor's response to a newspaper, the Journal Inquirer in Manchester CT, which ran a story on the whole matter. In the story, the chairman of the African Studies Program at CCSU and one of his colleagues in the program were quoted as follows:
The protests against reparations stand on the same platform that produced apartheid, Hitler, and the KKK. Bergman and his colleagues' cloaked-daggered statements suggest that blacks do not have the intellectual capacity to decide what is best for them and how injustices should be remedied. It is unfortunate that the blind rage of hatred against black skin holds so many minds captive both in academic gowns and pinstripe suits, as well as white hoods.

How did the CCSU Administration respond to this kind of character assassination and intellectual thuggery? With complete public silence. While the President of CCSU expressed in private emails his high regard for my integrity and character, he has yet to express one word of criticism of the professors' outrageous and defamatory accusations. Instead, he said that requiring intellectual diversity was a violation of academic freedom and that professors like myself who sought intellectual diversity were free to invite to campus speakers expressing underrepresented viewpoints - as if it was my responsibility as a single faculty member to provide intellectual diversity for the more than 12,000 students at CCSU. Among the faculty, only one professor had the decency to condemn the professors publicly. And the absence of intellectual diversity on the issues mentioned in the petition continues.

What conclusions do I draw from these events? That for the foreseeable future university faculty will remain so beholden to the leftist orthodoxies that reign supreme in academia, and university administrators will be so fearful of defying them, that this lack of intellectual diversity will continue. For this reason, it seems to me that colleges and universities will change only as a result of external pressure from groups like ACTA, NAS, concerned students and parents, and, in the case of public universities, legislators and elected officials. However tempted I might be to support it, I do not favor affirmative action for conservatives, even though they are far more underrepresented on college faculties than are blacks and Hispanics. But I do believe that legislatures have the right, and indeed the obligation, to oversee what goes on at public universities and, if necessary, to step in when these universities violate their mission, as they do by refusing to practice intellectual diversity. I believe that professors should be required - yes, required - to present a full range of viewpoints on matters relevant to what they teach, and that they should be prohibited - yes, prohibited - from using the classes they teach as a vehicle for advancing their own political agenda. Professors can, and are, required at most universities to hold office hours and to pass out syllabi to their students. They can, and are, required to teach the subject matter they were hired to teach; professors of history cannot teach mathematics, and professors of mathematics cannot teach history. So why should they not also be required to practice intellectual diversity? Unless and until they do, universities will remain institutions not of education, but of political indoctrination.

Reprinted with the permission of the author.

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