Attention parents: The following message is going to sound alarmist. If your child is enrolled at an American college or university for the upcoming fall, they are at risk, depending on what school they’ve chosen, of being politically indoctrinated.
According to New York University professor Jonathan Haidt and at least 1,000 other like-minded educators at Heterodox Academy, a schism within the U.S. university system must soon take place. Over the course of the next few academic years, American schools will need to choose a single purpose, or telos (to use Aristotle’s term), and wholeheartedly commit to its pursuit. The options, at least in the eyes of the concerned professors, are clear-cut: Schools can either follow the model laid out by the University of Chicago, as detailed in their statement on freedom of expression, or, in contrast, take up the cause of social justice, ridding the world of all its inequities, one gender studies course at a time. Haidt joked recently that Brown University has volunteered to “take the leadership position” for institutions who choose the latter.
This difference might seem innocuous enough, but ask yourself a simple question: What kind of education is worth the obscene price tag you’ve prepared yourself to pay over the course of the next four years?
Schools like the University of Chicago pursue truth as their telos, foster genuine critical thinking skills, encourage viewpoint diversity through debate and civil discourse, and ultimately prepare your son or daughter for the complex workplace they are posed to enter after graduation. Schools in pursuit of social justice have demonstrated, through a litany of scandalous events taking place since 2014, that they are not interested in such aims. Rather, their administrators endorse a single set of extreme political beliefs, shut down debates and dissenting opinions, bar non-leftist speakers from campus, and in a brief four-year period, could seal your child in an ideological bubble so thick that their ability to function in the truly diverse and volatile world outside academia would be anything but guaranteed.
Hopefully, if I’ve contextualized the current situation clearly, you’re paying attention, but haven’t yet begun to panic. And there isn’t any reason to do so. To be clear, I do not seek to sound some doomsday alarm or defame any particular university through writing this article, but instead hope to provide information that increases parents’ awareness of the issue. Even Haidt himself has found the cause so important to the future of the university (and, more generally, democracy) that he and his cohort of professors created a tool for evaluating colleges on this very basis. At the core of the conversation surrounding this schism is genuine care for the intellectual well-being of our nation’s young people, not political partisanship.
I share that concern, and do my best to ensure that the telos of my classroom is the truth. As the administrators who align themselves with the University of Chicago believe, no idea, no matter how “offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed” it may seem, should be barred from the arena of civil, intellectual discourse.
So, if you happen to find that the school your child chose leans toward the social justice end of Haidt’s helpful metric, don’t fret. You now know what lies ahead, and that’s more than half the battle.
Michael O’Keefe is a boarding school English teacher and football coach. A native New Englander, he has worked in both northeast Ohio and the Mid-Atlantic region for the last five years.
