Fifteen Ivy League professors have published an open letter for young people who are headed off to college. Their advice? “Think for yourself.”
Believe it or not, some Ivory Tower academics are tiring of safe space culture and monolithic thought. While hive-mind-syndrome is easy to fall prey to, it’s not in a student or faculty member’s best interest, say the Yale, Princeton, and Harvard professors.
The “vice of conformism, yielding to groupthink” is all too easy when certain ideas are so overwhelmingly popular that “only a bigot or a crank could question them.” This concept is what John Stuart Mill called “the tyranny of public opinion.”
“Since no one wants to be, or be thought of, as a bigot or a crank, the easy, lazy way to proceed is simply by falling into line with campus orthodoxies. Don’t do that. Think for yourself,” the professors plead.
In a climate rife with group think, thinking for oneself is no easy task. According to the professors, it demands self-discipline and courage to explore unfavorable viewpoints. However, the 15 professors maintain that true academic inquiry and the marketplace of ideas is the best way to combat bigotry — not suppression of ideas.
They write, “Thinking for yourself means questioning dominant ideas even when others insist on their being treated as unquestionable… The central point of a college education is to seek truth and to learn the skills and acquire the virtues necessary to be a lifelong truth-seeker. Open-mindedness, critical thinking, and debate are essential to discovering the truth. Moreover, they are our best antidotes to bigotry.”
The Atlantic nicely summarizes the professors’ letter:
“Open-mindedness, critical thinking, and debate” are “our best antidotes to bigotry”; that a bigot is a person “who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices”; and that the only people who need fear open-minded inquiry and robust debate “are the actual bigots, including those on campuses or in the broader society who seek to protect the hegemony of their opinions by claiming that to question those opinions is itself bigotry.”
With over 20 million enrolled in college this Fall, it’s hypercritical that students across the country learn these lessons.
“Whether you in the end reject or embrace a view, make sure you decide where you stand by critically assessing the arguments for the competing positions,” they conclude.
