A couple of days ago, I overheard a conversation at a nearby table in a restaurant in which one participant said “Colleges and universities shouldn’t be political, they should be focused on the truth.”
It prompted two thoughts. The first, was advice I received during my first year as president, “You need to be political, but you can’t be partisan.” The second is a realization that we have entered an era in which much of our lives are being shaped by the politics of truth.
I was recently interviewed by Daniel Myers, President of Misericordia University, for an upcoming podcast called Higher Edification. Early on, Dan asked my thoughts on the recent escalation of assaults on higher education. I replied that I believe there is a concerted effort to discredit experts and scholars, because they are dedicated to seeking and articulating the truth.
In recent years, we have heard so much about alternate facts, and we have been subjected to a seemingly endless stream of commercial pundits generating infotainment in the guise of expertise. This is the result of contemporary media abandoning the sage advice of Calvin Coolidge: “Editorial policy and news policy must not be influenced by business consideration; business policies must not be affected by editorial programs.”[1]
Alternate facts, are not facts. As Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,”[2] What are we to do with facts and erroneous counterpoints when both are presented as the truth? That is why we need academic scholars. It is their calling to discern and contextualize the truth.
In his landmark speech (and one of my touchstones), The American Scholar, Emerson defined the mission of the scholar:
The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by showing them facts amidst appearances… He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history. Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours, has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions, — these he shall receive and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat pronounces on the passing men and events of to-day, — this he shall hear and promulgate.[3]
Emerson was saying that scholars are called to make our world better by observing, interpreting, and articulating the truth. Epistemology matters: what is fact, what is opinion, what do we know, and how do we know it? Academic experts do this homework every day so that they can serve as sentinels and broadcasters of the truth.
Every day last week, at least one comic strip or the editorial cartoon in our newspaper featured some version of 2023 as an old man warning 2024 as a baby that it was an election year. Also, each of those days featured an editorial letter proclaiming that this election year will pose an existential threat to democracy. Those proclamations came from both sides of the political aisle, and all wrapped their arguments in statements of diametrically opposed “facts.”
More and more, objective facts are labeled as ideological. This seems to be a technique to discredit or toxify inconvenient truths. Nothing seems to be above factiousness, but if we can’t agree on a set of fundamental truths, democracy really is in trouble.
Our nation’s and our world’s greatest challenges should not be partisan minefields. They should be the things we all roll our sleeves up and work on together. For the things that really matter, we can’t be committed to the outcome having winners and losers. If we do, we all lose.
This is why we need to protect the academy. Colleges and universities are far from perfect places — thank goodness. We wrestle with ideas, we experiment, we make mistakes, we create, we debate, we often disagree, but at our core, we seek the truth.
[1] Coolidge, Calvin: Address to the Society of American Newspaper Editors, 17 January 1925.
[2] In a column in the Washington Post, 18 January 1983.
[3] Ralph Waldo Emerson: The American Scholar. 1837.