Death of reason, death of culture. History has been unkind to cultures that reject facts and reason. Germany’s Nazism, China’s Cultural Revolution, and Iran’s Islamic Revolution all preferred rigid ideology to open rationality, and their nations paid (or are paying) the price. The death of rational discourse within a society frequently leads to the death of that society.
Since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, there has been a lot of conversation about American voters and their relationship to facts and reason. Indeed, the American Enlightenment may be dying with the rise of partisan media outlets, fake news, and echoing social networks.
Enlightenment rationality. In the debates about America’s political discourse, one frequently mentioned player is academia. On the one hand, academia is celebrated as a bastion of Enlightenment rationality, the champion of fact-based reasoning, and the bedrock of civil society: “Education is the anvil upon which democracy is forged,” insisted Thomas Jefferson.
On the other hand, academia is criticized for having failed in its duty to the nation. Concern about the employability of graduates has shifted emphasis from critical reasoning to job skills. Budget cuts have forced students out of classrooms and into lecture halls. Rather than educating the whole person—ethical, aesthetic, quantitative, qualitative, etc.—much higher education seeks to train students’ brains to earn more money. But job training does not produce enlightenment or elevated political discourse.
Certain Americans’ rejection of facts and open embrace of irrationality tend to disturb academics who have devoted their lives to the quest for knowledge. As a result, many professors have expanded their interpretation of academia’s function. That is, we have a deeper understanding, not only of what we do, but why we do it. Certainly, we continue to communicate knowledge, transfer skills, and train in professions. But just as importantly, we encourage our students to reason rigorously about all subjects of importance. We help them to become both skilled professionals and rational citizens.
Defending the Enlightenment, defending America. I teach at Emmanuel College, a Catholic liberal arts college in downtown Boston. Emmanuel has resisted many of the worst trends in higher education: it still educates the whole person, limits class size so that students interact directly with professors, and values such “soft skills” as ethical behavior, persuasive writing, and cooperative teamwork. But faculty there, and throughout the nation, feel newly inspired. We seek to advance the Enlightenment ideals upon which America was founded, the ideals of reason, debate, and compromise. We also advance openness—a willingness to entertain thoughts with which you disagree, a readiness to consider new evidence even if it challenges your position, the broad-mindedness to perceive the rationality of opposing views, and perhaps most importantly, the courage to change one’s mind. In this way, we raise to consciousness the intellectual values so cherished by America’s founders.
We also discuss academia’s willingness to subject all positions, traditional or nontraditional, to scrutiny: “But we’ve always done it that way" is not a good argument in the classroom, nor is it a good practice in business, as American carmakers found in the 1970s. The academic values of analysis and openness serve as the backbone of professional excellence: they help doctors to make the correct diagnosis, business leaders to make the right decision, and scientists to choose the most promising course of investigation. And it keeps all of them open to new developments in their field.
Reasonable, open debate. What does this process look like on the ground? In my case, I promote the ideals of facts and reason to my students, but I subject myself to them as well. I start the semester by asking my students, “What are the authorities in this classroom?” Almost universally they reply, “You are.” I then inform them that in academic discourse the two primary authorities are facts and reason, not the professor. If students present an argument that offers facts I have not considered, or points out a flaw in my reasoning, then I will change my mind.
Indeed, one of my greatest thrills as an educator is when students change my mind. It has happened often, because students enter my classroom with knowledge bases and experiences much different from mine. A student from Appalachia transformed my notion of “white privilege”. A combat veteran who had served in Afghanistan taught me about the schools the Army had built there and the difficulty they had defending them from the Taliban (he had lost a friend, a servicewoman, in a battle defending a girls’ school). An African-American student told me about how many classmates she had lost growing up in an impoverished area of Boston and informed me that many college students from these areas of the city struggled with PTSD. A psychology major taught me to think about religious hatred as a social contagion, an economics major illustrated how income affects church attendance, and an exchange student from India let me behind the headlines and talked about how well the students from different religions got along at her high school.
A good conversation transforms the conversants, and academic discourse is a form of conversation. Participants give themselves over to the conversation, which goes where it will, a new entity that is under no one’s control. And that conversation can change anyone, if it is conducted properly. Through this practice, I hope that my students will become better thinkers, which can only make them more successful professionals, more effective citizens, and more ethical humans.