Fareed Zakaria, Higher Education and Freedom of Thought
Yesterday, as I drove back and forth between Potsdam and
Russell, NY, I listened to the weekly installment of Fareed Zakaria, GPS. As is often the case, Zakaria offers
exceptionally astute analysis of the world, the American democratic experiment
and current events. His “What in the
World” segment each week is akin to Paul Harvey’s “The rest of the story …”,
illuminating a part of the world or American society that is often poorly
understood or in need of reformation.
This week’s segment was precisely that kind of brightness brought to a
trend in American society that we need to be much more aware of. The following, is a transcript of that
segment, in its entirety, which I am posting here because I could not agree
more or make a more erudite analysis. I
encourage us all, especially those of us who are a part of Academia, to read
this, think carefully about its implications and be prepared to take the right
course:
“ZAKARIA: Now for our "What in the World" segment.
We're at the height of commencement
season and across the nation people are imparting their words of wisdom to
newly minted graduates. To name just a
few, Joe Biden was at Harvard and Cornell, Oprah spoke at Skidmore and I was
honored to give the commencement speech at Bucknell this year.
But at Notre Dame, where Vice President Mike Pence was
giving the commencement address, the ceremonies were interrupted when about 100
students turned their backs on Pence and walked out in protest. A few weeks earlier, U.S. Secretary of
Education Betsy DeVos was booed while giving the commencement address at
Bethune-Cookman University.
I talked about this issue at Bucknell and I wanted to share
those thoughts here. American
universities these days seem committed to every kind of diversity except
intellectual diversity. Conservative
voices and views, already a besieged minority, are being silenced entirely.
The campus talk police have gone after serious conservative
thinkers like Heather McDonald and Charles Murray, as well as firebrands like
Milo Yiannopoulos and Anne Coulter. Some
were disinvited, others booed, interrupted and intimidated. It's strange that
this is happening on college campuses that promise to give their undergraduates
a liberal education.
The [word] liberal
in this context has nothing to do with partisan language but refers instead to
the Latin root pertaining to liberty.
And at the heart of the liberal
tradition in the Western world has been freedom of speech.
From the beginning, people understood that this meant
protecting and listening to speech with which you disagreed. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said that when we
protect freedom of thought, we are protecting freedom for the thought that we
hate. Freedom of speech and thought is
not just for warm, fuzzy ideas that we find comfortable. It's for ideas that we
find offensive.
There is, as we all know, a kind of anti-intellectualism on
the right these days, the denial of facts, of reason, of science. But there is also an anti-intellectualism on
the left. An attitude of self- righteousness
that says we are so pure, we are so morally superior, we cannot bear to hear an
idea with which we disagree.
Liberals think they are tolerant but often they aren't. In 2016, a Pew study found that Democrats were
more likely to view Republicans as close-minded. But each side scores about the same in terms
of close mindedness and hostility to hearing contrarian views. And large segments on both sides consider the
other to be immoral, lazy, dishonest and unintelligent.
This is not just about tolerance for its own sake. The truth is, no one has a monopoly on right
or virtue. Listening to other
contradictory views will teach us all something and sharpen our own views. One of the greatest dangers in life whether it
be in business or government, is to get trapped in a bubble of group think and
never ask, ‘what if I'm wrong?’ ‘What is
the best argument on the other side?’
As I said at Bucknell, there is also a broader benefit to
society. Technology, capitalism and
globalization are strong forces pulling us apart as a society. By talking to each other seriously and
respectfully about agreements and disagreements, we can come together in a
common conversation, recognizing that while we seem so far apart, we do
actually have a common destiny.”[i]
[i] FAREED ZAKARIA GPS, “The
President's First Overseas Trip;Discussion of U.S. Understanding of Africa.; A
Look at Increasing Interest of U.S. Students in Science; Remembering the
Victims in Manchester”. Aired 10- 11a ET,
28 May 2017, copied and edited from http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1705/28/fzgps.01.html,
accessed on 29 May 2017.
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