I contend that the more
courses that are heavily ideological and biased in advocating a particular
ideology that a university has, the higher the chances that a university will
eventually suffer from a lack of educational legitimacy and perhaps even
have to close down for want of students. Even great American universities such
as Harvard and Yale are not immune. Their huge endowments could even function
as organizational slack enabling a particular ideological bent to percolate throughout
the universities for a long time with impunity due to the sheer amount of money
in the universities respective invested wealth. When I was a student at Yale, I
worked part-time at the Development Office calling alumni to give to the already-wealthy
university. I had no idea at the time that being rich could actually harm a
university, or allow for educational decadence with impunity. At Harvard in 2024,
there was some indication that the students’ freedom in selecting some of their
courses was serving a good purpose in putting biased-ideological courses out of
business for lack of sufficient enrollment. The student marketplace could
substitute for compromised university administration in its educational
oversight function. Adam Smith would be proud.
Early in the Fall 2024
semester, Harvard University cancelled over 30 courses, with the History and Literature
departments especially being adversely affected. A Harvard administrator chalked
this up to five lecturers who “either departed or chose to do something else.”[1]
Even so, a clue to yet another reason unstated by Harvard lies in the fact that
at St. Joseph University in Pennsylvania, multiple sections of the university’s
diversity course, Inequality in American Society, were cancelled for the Spring
2022 term “due to under enrollment.”[2]
That is to say, at least some of the cancelled classes at Harvard may have been
cancelled because too few students had enrolled in the courses. Furthermore, it
is possible that Harvard students in general were more interested in obtaining
knowledge than an ideological platform at university. To be sure, overlap
between the two exists especially in humanities courses, and professors are
only human so their personal opinions do slip out from time to time even in the
best, most academic circumstances. Such a limited extent is hardly blameworthy.
Those lecturers or professors
who feel the instinctual urge to go further in promoting an ideology, however,
are indeed culpable, for they misuse their educational platform to indoctrinate
students. Speaking at Yale in 2024, a professor at Arizona State University unabashedly
and without any sense of shame admitted that she used her courses to promote
her ideology because its cause “is too important” to be left out. Every
ideologue views one’s ideology as important; this is almost a truism. We want
to be happy, moreover, so we like those things that make us happy. In other
words, humans have wills.
The courses cancelled in September,
2024 at Harvard include “Marx at the Mall: Consumer Culture & Its Critics,”
“Global Transgender Histories,” “Indigenous Genders and Sexualities in North
America,” “The Making of Race across Latin America,” and “Global Histories of
Capitalism.” Had the last one been offered, I might have tried to audit it
because my research then was on the ethical and theological status of
self-interest, which stems teleologically from self-love, in Adam Smith’s
theory of the competitive-market mechanism.
I would not have sat in on “Global
Transgender Histories” because its syllabus indicated that students would “become
familiar with some of the global vocabulary of gender identities beyond the
binary and . . . the historical impacts of phenomena such as racism,
imperialization, and [the] medicalization on gender identities.”[3]
Knowing the vocabulary used in other countries may not be very important,
especially given the opportunity cost in terms of other knowledge that is not
being learned in taking another course, such as one on comparative cultures
more fundamentally. Additionally, bringing racism and imperialism in can be
said to be needlessly ideological, as resentment, and a stretch from the ostensible
topic of the course: gender as a social identity. It may be that there was not
yet enough knowledge on transgender identities to fill an entire course. If so,
then social identities could be a topic in a sociology course rather than the topic
of a stand-alone course.
Regarding the course on race
in Latin America, the ideological temptation may be to castigate the Caucasian race
as the reason for teaching the course. Similarly, the slant in the “Indigenous
Genders and Sexualities in North America” could have been to interpret the “foundations
of settler colonialism” in terms hostile to the European settlers while
ignoring the scalping of women and children by the American Indians.[4]
Grasping from texts “the anxieties,
joys, and power that arise when Indigenous people embrace their bodies” is loaded
with ideologically-tinged terms, such as indigenous and embracing
their bodies, as if the mind cannot be wrong in deciding that its
associated physical body is wrong rather than the mind itself. I would wager
that this point is rarely if even made in teaching a course on gender as being
apart from the biology, the distinction of which could itself be an
ideologically assumption.
Courses that are repeatedly or
widely taught in a one-sided way in terms of knowledge are, I submit, suspect
academically. This realization is probably not lost on the intelligent people
whom Harvard selects to study at that university. I experienced such a course on
Christian ethics at Yale’s divinity school in 2024. The young professor told
the class that monogamy “violates Christian ethics because [monogamy] oppresses
other legitimate gay lifestyles.” After that class, a student bristled when I
suggested to her that the professor should have included the other side. That
student replied that the students had already heard the arguments in favor of
monogamy and that hearing them again would be traumatizing for some students.
My jaw dropped. Perhaps in not wanting to traumatize students of theology, the
professor intentionally omitted the counterarguments that include why both Paul
and Augustine would object to the claim that monogamy violates Christian
ethics. The professor was not about to say that “other gay lifestyles” can
be said to be ethically inferior to monogamy because emotional intimacy in a romantic
relationship suffers when extramarital sex occurs.
Consider the emotions that
naturally go with the realization that, he may be having sex with another
man right now instead of with me. The fear and hurt that emotional intimacy
might be a part of the “open” sex with another man, which could eventually
result in being replaced by the other man can be argued to render the open
relationship unethical, for there is harm resulting from it. I am not claiming
that every open relationship, gay or straight, necessarily occasions the fear
and hurt, but I do think that there is a loss of emotional intimacy between two
people in a relationship if sex is occurring outside of the relationship because
sex necessarily involves closeness, even if just in touching another person’s
body.
In being so extreme
ideologically, Yale’s divinity school could be said to be a cult rather than a
school within a university. Because Yale was so prestigious as a university at
the time, the lack of oversight of its administration over the divinity school is
perplexing. In the 1990s, Yale’s President Levin wanted to move the school
geographically to the center of the campus from a half-mile up Prospect St, and
the Provost wanted to close the school because it was accepting 70 percent of
those who apply (in 2023, that figure was 50 percent), but Levin said, “As a
Jewish man, I’m not going to be the president who closes Yale’s Christian
divinity school.” Meanwhile, some students at the divinity school were
complaining that moving to the central campus would immerse them with relativists,
and Hitler, they said, was a relativist. The school was able to stay put, with
the rest of the university unaware, at least as of 2024, of the resulting cost
to the university as a great university.
To be fair, Harvard was not
without its own ideologically limited courses in 2024. The course, “Queering
Education” included studying the “’hidden curriculum’ in American schools which
privileges heteronormativity, cisnormativity, and ‘gendered identities’.”[5]
Besides making up ideologically-laced words such as heteronormativity and
cisnormativity, the latter unilaterally imposing “cis” on “binary” (i.e., no
transsexual) people, the charge that a curriculum is hidden, as if it could be
found only in playing a song backwards with the word Satan being only then
recognizable, is dubious as well as biased (given the added word, privileges)
because of course in studying a culture or society in which the vast majority
of people are heterosexual and “cis,” things done by those people are naturally
going to make up a sizable component of the knowledge that is imparted in the
classroom. A course on the influence of trans-gendered Founders of the United
States is not going to run very long before it runs out of material. Furthermore,
that most (or all) of the delegates at the Constitutional Convention were heterosexual
is much less important than learning the political (and economic) substance of
the debates as reported by James Madison in his Notes. Once again, there
is an opportunity cost in terms of the knowledge that is foregone in focusing
on tertiary matters.
When I was a student at Yale,
I took a course called “American Schools” in the teacher-preparation program in
Yale College; I had to spend one afternoon a week sitting in on classes at local
high schools. At one, the civics (government) teacher bragged to me that the
textbooks were in the school’s basement because his course consisted of a
series of films on immigrants because he was an immigrant. “Once a semester I
have Rosa Delorio [the Congresswoman] visit the class to talk about the
American system of government.” That was it because the vast majority of the
class time was devoted to the teacher promoting his own political ideology in
favor of immigration. The knowledge that he minimized is in my view very
important in a civics class, especially since one function of public education
in Connecticut is to prepare the kids to be voters who at least
understand the system of government in which they live. That an ideological
agenda in teaching can be so blind as to the opportunity cost should be a
warning, or “red flag,” to us concerning just how illegitimate (and dangerous,
cognitively) having heavily (and biased) ideologically-oriented courses can be
in a school. Political campaigning and teaching knowledge to students are
distinct activities, so they should not be conflated or allowed to substitute
for the each other.
1. Dave Huber, “Harvard
Cancels over 30 Courses; Far-Left History & Literature Classes Hardest Hit,”
The College Fix, September 28, 2024.
2. “Diversity
Course Enrollment Drops After School Stops Ordering Students to Take It,”
The College Fix, December 13, 2021.
3. Dave
Huber, “Harvard
Cancels over 30 Courses; Far-Left History & Literature Classes Hardest Hit,”
The College Fix, September 28, 2024.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
