By David Pan · Wednesday, April 24, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative  Columbia University president Nemat Shafik’s recent testimony to Congress indicates an important shift in our conception of academic freedom. While affirming the legal principle of free speech, she clearly accepted limits on academic freedom by stating that calls for genocide have no place at the university. Since at least one issue would disqualify someone from participating in Columbia’s educational project, she opens up the question of the limits of academic freedom and the duty of a university to enforce such limits through decisions on hiring and dismissal of faculty as well as suspension of students. While the American Association of University Professors seeks to criticize such restrictions on academic freedom, its 1940 statement on academic freedom stipulates that “[i]nstitutions of higher education are conducted for the common good and not to further the interest of either the individual teacher or the institution as a whole.” The congressional hearings have demonstrated that the common good may require restrictions on academic freedom, and such restrictions indeed are already part of the way universities see their mission.
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By David Pan · Wednesday, July 5, 2023 In spite of the divided opinions concerning the Supreme Court’s ruling against affirmative action in college admissions, there is still solace in realizing that there is an underlying consensus that racial discrimination has no place in U.S. society. The primary dispute is about the means of achieving a society without racism.
The majority opinion of the Court is that discriminating by race not only is unjust but reinforces the discrimination that it is meant to eliminate. Rather than overturning precedent, as the dissenters claim, the Court reaffirms the idea of the injustice of discrimination established in a series of Supreme Court judgments. Judge Roberts cites one such case that affirms: “‘Distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.’ Rice v. Cayetano, 528 U. S. 495, 517 (2000) (quoting Hirabayashi v. United States, 320 U. S. 81, 100 (1943)). That principle cannot be overridden except in the most extraordinary case.” Evaluating people by their race is clearly contrary to the idea of equal treatment established in such previous cases, and the majority opinion uses this long-held principle as the guide for its judgment.
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By John Croce-Renard · Monday, March 13, 2023 When the Supreme Court rules in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, it will surely declare that the use of racial preferences in higher education admissions violates the U.S. Constitution. There is some uncertainty about the precise shape its arguments will take, and their scope, but the basic outcome is clear enough. Here are seven reasons to welcome it from the standpoint of some traditional concerns of Telos.
First, a ruling against race-based affirmative action will diminish the material interests at stake in racial identity politics. It will thereby undercut the racialism that lies at the ideological heart of the liberal managerial establishment. Individual good intentions notwithstanding, the Tories of the managerial class use this insidious set of principles and rhetorical moves to justify their power and to bludgeon the working- and private sector middle classes.
Second, the ruling may enable colleges and universities to overcome the morally degrading culture of lies that the existence of racial preferences has spread throughout higher education, beginning in the elaborate charade that all applicants for admission or employment are judged by common criteria. It will help individual members of those communities to live in truth.
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By Telos Press · Wednesday, February 8, 2023 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with David A. Westbrook about his article “From the Ivory Tower to the Football Stadium: A Rueful Response to Michael Hüther,” from Telos 200 (Fall 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss Michael Hüther’s claim that the decline of truth at the university is due to moralization and economization; the traditional conception of the university that forms the background for Hüther’s critique and the function it played in society; how the role and function of the university today is different from that earlier conception and the reasons for this shift; how has university research moved from being a form of science to a form of investment; the political function of the university today; whether the ideals of merit and inclusion contradict each other; and how the university compares to a church. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 200 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By Telos Press · Monday, January 23, 2023 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Greg Melleuish and Susanna Rizzo about their article “Universities: Truth, Reason, or Emotion?” from Telos 200 (Fall 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 200 are available for purchase in our online store.
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By David Pan · Thursday, December 15, 2022  As the teaching assistant strike at the University of California extends into its fifth week, it seems that education has increasingly merged with activism. In fact, J. E. Elliott argues in our podcast interview that the development of the humanities in particular has moved so far in this direction that activism has become the explicit focus and attraction of majoring in the humanities for college students. As he lays out, such activist-oriented education is not a form of resistance but a result of the corporatization of the university, which involves not just links between corporations and universities but also the way in which college education has developed into a mass market commodity. The expansion of higher education, in promoting the admission of larger proportions of the population into college, has diluted the elite character of the college degree, making it into a more purely professional qualification and forcing colleges to devote more effort into justifying the value of their degrees for the job market. Because the ideals of inclusion and of merit are inherently contradictory, integrating more students into college has devalued the degree credential and therefore colleges must design their programs with an eye toward different segments of the higher education market. Consequently, the humanities at U.S. universities have evolved to establish “Brand English” to compete with “Brand STEM” and “Brand Business” by promoting social activism as its main distinguishing characteristic.
Without the traditional literary and intellectual canons, the focus of humanities education has shifted toward promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, which have become in many respects code words for identity politics, socialist-inspired redistribution, and college for all as entry into the job market. But because these three policies are partisan positions that have been enshrined as overarching truths (or in Elliott’s terms, “truth-posits”) for higher education, college humanities have to a large extent abandoned genuine debate about the origins and consequences of different ideas in favor of activist promotion of such ideas. The strike itself foregrounds the focus on equity without, however, considering the consequences of such a policy.
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