Let’s start with the easy part. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, was wrong to harangue Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson at her Supreme Court confirmation hearing about books allegedly used to teach critical race theory at the Georgetown Day School, where Jackson serves on the board of trustees. It had nothing to do with her suitability for the court and everything to do with Cruz’s attempts to smear Democrats and — not incidentally — to draw attention to himself.
But subsequent reporting about Georgetown Day — an expensive private school in Washington — has revealed that it’s hardly the left-wing indoctrination factory that Cruz imagines. To the contrary, it makes explicit efforts to expose students to multiple points of view.
That’s a lesson our institutions of higher education could all stand to learn, especially right now. Too many of our colleges and universities are afraid to engage ideas that might challenge or upset the dominant wisdom on campus, especially around race. And that inhibits knowledge and learning, for all of us.
Responding to Cruz’s charges of liberal propaganda at Georgetown Day School, student president Aidan Kohn-Murphy, a senior, noted that eighth graders are required to create a group project about a contested constitutional issue and to invite speakers with different perspectives on it.
Kohn-Murphy’s group chose to study affirmative action and invited conservative strategist Edward Blum, who spearheaded the recent lawsuit against Harvard University alleging anti-Asian bias in its admission policies. (Citing her service on Harvard’s board of overseers, Jackson pledged to recuse herself from that case if she is confirmed to the Supreme Court.) But it’s hard to imagine any major university hosting a speech by Blum or by any other leading opponent of affirmative action.
Look no further than the imbroglio last fall at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which revoked an invitation to University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot. Abbot was scheduled to give a talk about climate change, his academic specialty. But he had also a co-written an op-ed in Newsweek advocating a “Merit, Fairness, and Equality” framework for university admissions, whereby applicants would be “treated as individuals and evaluated through a rigorous and unbiased process based on their merit and qualifications alone.”
That would mean an end to legacy and athletic admissions, Abbot wrote, not just to those based on race and ethnicity. But in the white-hot caldron of contemporary campus politics, any open criticism of race-based affirmative action has become taboo. On social media, students and alumni decried Abbot as a racist. So if MIT sponsored his speech, it would be complicit in racism as well.
“Totally unacceptable and sends a message to any student that isn’t a white man that they don’t matter,” one MIT graduate posted. Another alumnus wrote: “Imagine being a student/employee of color in an environment where someone like this is rewarded w/ one of the most prestigious platforms to speak.”
Never mind that 74% of Americans believe that companies hiring employees “should only take a person’s qualifications into account when making these decisions, even if it results in less diversity,” according to a 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center. And never mind that African Americans are less likely than white progressives to support affirmative action. The new rule is clear: If you don’t support affirmative action, you’re not welcome here. Period.
Imagine if the Georgetown Day School had followed MIT’s lead. The school is justly proud of its anti-racist history: Dating to the Jim Crow era, it was started by Black and Jewish parents who wanted a racially integrated environment for their children. But if it adopted the dominant dogma on our university campuses, it would never have invited the conservative Blum to speak. Doing so could have been construed as a racist act that threatens to do harm to minority students.
That patronizes the students, all in the guise of protecting them. And it certainly doesn’t reflect the philosophy of Judge Jackson, who embraces difference instead of hiding from it. At a recent academic conference, a friend told Jackson she was going to leave because she was annoyed by the views of some of the speakers.
“This is why I don’t come to these things,” the friend scrawled on a notepad. Jackson wasn’t having it. “This is why you have to come to these things,” she replied.
This is why we have to go to school: to encounter views other than our own. Shame on our universities, for losing sight of that.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author, with cartoonist Signe Wilkinson, of “Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn.”
