Thoughts on Jonathan Rauch

The Chronicle interviewed Jonathan Rauch here. The headline was, "Higher Ed Has a Credibility Problem."

My theory – my critical institutional theory (CIT) – is that the loss of credibility is but a symptom of a greater problem. And that is that higher education, much like other long-established, important institutions, has lost its way, basically abandoned its core values and traditional mission, in favor of pandering to a large and growing number of ‘diverse’ minority groups.

Fifty years ago, the term ‘political correctness’ could garner a few laughs as to the cult-like, sheepish behavior of people trying to virtue signal, yet now the joke is on us. Laugh today at someone who is acting in a politically correct fashion, and you can get cancelled, doxed, fired, or simply shamed out of the institution, primarily for pointing out that the emperor has no clothes.

These large, established institutions, the very ones who dishonestly claim (more virtue signaling) that all the other institutions have long engaged in “institutional” or “systemic” racism – it’s always the other institution, not their own institution – have appropriated ‘diversity’ and twisted it into a wholly (and holy) politically correct concept to appease various, splintered, intersectional special interests.

Academe is not alone in this. This also goes for political institutions, the healthcare industry, the Catholic Church, the judicial system, and the mainstream media. Yet academe is probably the biggest or at least one of the biggest offenders, and they have done this through trying to establish higher education as a right, regardless of the quality of the education or the qualifications or motivation of the students. College, to the pols, the mainstream media, and the university elite, needs to be affordable and accessible to all, with a special effort to promote racial and minority diversity as a noble and necessary calling, while ignoring the critical nature of and commitment to core, common values. When a college places their commitment to diversity, inclusion, and equity above their commitment to knowledge, the school has certainly lost its way. Worse, they expect and demand that someone else pay for their follies, and they burden indentured students with predatory loans only to later claim reparations for the bad decisions made by colleges and students. When Lawrence University claims that it is “striving to be an anti-racist institution,” they are not only offering the lowest form of virtue signaling, but they are also implicitly acknowledging their own history of racism.

And this new assertion of “equity” in outcomes is not only impossible to achieve (i.e. it is highly unlikely that even among a relatively small group, that the group would reach a condition of equity, where all members simultaneously arrive at equal outcomes and if by chance they did, that condition would never be a stable state) and it negates the foundation of social justice established in the American Constitution and in American core values, where equal opportunity and equal treatment before the law are the key rights, and also the same rights that guarantee that there will never be equal outcomes, given the diversity of abilities, attitudes, values, skills and motivations of Americans.

The United States is looking more like the former Yugoslavia every day. And it does not help that few people recognize – and few schools teach students – that America is a republic, and not a pure democracy, that terms like “winning the popular vote” in a presidential election is a meaningless yet promoted concept. This is because America was designed around a set of core values that make the country and system of governance work, and unless those values are taught, known, embraced and practiced, we end up with the number of new ‘rights’ claimed by special interest and minority groups, that divide the country into tribes and can lead to the political and economic bankruptcy of the country. The United States must reaffirm and restore attention to its core values, starting with “like, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” working to “serve the general welfare,” and pay attention to the Bill of Rights, and not succumb to the multiple claims for positive rights (i.e., the Bill of Rights articulates negative rights, basically things the government can’t do to toy, while positive rights describe claims on economic benefits).

Following (in italics) is an excerpt from the interview; it's a critical point of difference with my theory.

Is there a risk that an emphasis on viewpoint diversity de-emphasizes racial and ethnic diversity?

They’re both important. What’s really going on here is that people want to assert that racial and ethnic diversity should supersede viewpoint diversity. I think it should be possible to have both. A lot of people want one without the other.

Rauch is unwilling to place viewpoint diversity ahead of racial diversity; he’s just against having the latter supersede the former. He claims, “it should be possible to have both.” That’s his view and he has a right to it, but it’s a cop out and it’s not good enough. It’s rhetoric we could expect from a college president, but it is not even a conceptual solution, let alone a practical solution.

For universities, we have discussed all of this before: Fifty years ago, the Free Speech movement was an effort to promote diversity of thought; today, free speech is considered a crime against diversity. Universities must return to core values as to the development and transmission of new knowledge and stop trying to be a social experiment with other people’s money. In seeking ‘truth,’ they must teach evidence-based critical thinking through open, informed inquiry and freedom of speech, and not just cater to each minority group’s own “truth.” Until they do, credibility is an impossible goal.