HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, DIVERSITY EDITION: Reach For Your Culture: A new university provides intellectual nourishment—and hope for the future.
UATX’s forbidden courses program, which brought together undergraduates from leading colleges and universities, lived up to its name. Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s course analyzed “key foundations of critical thinking, argumentation, reasoned debate, and freedom of expression, as these pertain to some of the most controversial issues of our day.” Students studied logical argumentation and read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty in preparation for exploring theses like “Islam is a religion of peace” and “transgender women are women” from opposing perspectives. Kathleen Stock’s course on varieties of feminism examined “what kind of metaphysical and political subject is being implicitly conjured in the background under the heading ‘woman,’ and whether it is a coherent one.” Writer Thomas Chatterton Williams introduced his class to the “pain, rage, and hope of America’s most loyal critics,” including Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, Booker T. Washington, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin. McCloskey’s course asked whether capitalism has been a tragedy or a triumph. Historian Niall Ferguson led an examination of free and unfree societies in the twentieth century.
Energized by these and other courses, students uniformly expressed their eagerness to obtain more intellectual nourishment. The discussions sparked during the morning seminars continued as casual but deep conversations through lunch and even dinner. One student noted that, during bowling one evening, “it was a running joke that we were all missing our turns because we were so engaged in conversation.”
The disarming power of culture was palpable. Students who had learned to hold their tongues in college classrooms poured forth their souls once the cork of wariness was unstopped. They attended workshops and discussions with Nadine Strossen, Bari Weiss, Peter Boghossian, David Mamet, Edward Luttwak, and Arthur Brooks, among others. Stock, a lesbian feminist with teenage children who was hounded out of the University of Sussex for her belief that “we should be free to debate the trans lobby’s growing demands that we recognize a person’s ‘gender identity’ rather than their biological sex,” and McCloskey, a world-class economist whose 1999 book Crossing details her social and surgical transition from male to female, engaged in a riveting public debate about sex, gender, and identity that modeled vigorous but respectful disagreement. (Stock said that this was the first time any transgender individual had been willing to debate her in public.) The benefits of this event were immediately apparent. During the discussion period, students followed the example of the speakers in posing hard questions and frankly sharing their opinions.
Well, that’s got to be nipped in the bud.