Category: Education

Bullshit Is Worse Than a Lie

(p. A17) Professor Frankfurt became best known for a single, irreverent paper largely unrelated to his life’s main work.

The paper, written in the mid-1980s under the same title as his eventual book, discussed what to his mind was a pervasive but underanalyzed feature of our culture: a form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the “bullshitter,” Professor Frankfurt wrote, is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.

Whether its purveyor is an advertiser, a political spin doctor or a cocktail-party blowhard, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. “By virtue of this,” Professor Frankfurt concluded, “bullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are.”

. . .

For all this sang-froid, Professor Frankfurt was heartfelt in his philosophical pursuits. Throughout his career, he was drawn to lines of inquiry — about freedom, love, selfhood and purpose — that he said appealed to him not only as an academic but also “as a human being trying to cope in a modestly systematic manner with the ordinary difficulties of a thoughtful life.”

For the full obituary, see:

James Ryerson. “Harry G. Frankfurt, a Philosopher Eager to Cut the Bull, Dies at 94.” The New York Times (Tuesday, July 18, 2023): A17.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date July 17, 2023, and has the title “Harry G. Frankfurt, Philosopher With a Surprise Best Seller, Dies at 94.”)

Frankfurt’s best-known book is:

Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Disenchanted Young Chinese Are “Lying Flat” or Joining the Bureaucracy

(p. A1) HEFEI, China—More than one in five young people in China are jobless. The government casts much of the blame on the job seekers themselves, insisting that their expectations have gotten too high.

. . .

The government’s guidance is ringing hollow with many young people. Growing up in a period of rising prosperity, they were told that China was strong, the West was declining and endless opportunities awaited them. Now, with the urban youth unemployment rate hitting a record of 21.3% in June, their employment frustrations are posing a new challenge to Xi and his vision for a more powerful China.

For the estimated 11.6 million college graduates in 2023, having heeded calls by the state to study hard, the prospect of resorting to the physical labor that many of their parents performed is distinctly unappealing.

. . .

(p. A10) The problem isn’t that jobs don’t exist in China. They do. With its shrinking population, China needs workers as much as ever. It is that China’s weakened economy isn’t producing enough of the high-skill, high-wage jobs that many college students have come to expect.

This is especially so after Xi’s targeting of the private sector in recent years with regulatory crackdowns on technology and other companies.

Disenchanted, many young people are opting out of the job market entirely, or “lying flat,” as many of them call it. Chinese media has recently featured articles about young “drifters” who live hand-to-mouth and pick up odd jobs as they roam the country.

Many of those who still want to work have soured on the private sector, with surging numbers of people sitting for the country’s civil-service exam for a chance at a low-paid, but stable, role in China’s bureaucracy.

For the full story, see:

Brian Spegele. “Unemployed Youth Cast Pall Over China’s Economy.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, July 27, 2023): A1 & A10.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 26, 2023, and has the title “How Bad Is China’s Economy? Millions of Young People Are Unemployed and Disillusioned.”)

Average Wages in Boom Towns Would Rise “Astounding” $8,775 If Zoning Laws Eased

(p. A13) Though some might expect areas populated by conservatives to be the most exclusionary, it is areas where highly educated liberals live that engage in the worst forms of economically exclusionary housing policy. Researchers writing in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology in 2018 found that highly educated Americans have comparatively tolerant racial attitudes but hold “negative attitudes toward the less educated.” Americans with different levels of education all have biases, they wrote, but “the targets of prejudice are different.”

Exclusionary housing practices are a linchpin in the architecture of educational inequality in America. Because 73% of American school children attend neighborhood public schools, where you live typically determines the quality of schooling. Most people who are concerned about improving education naturally focus attention on what school boards and state education officials do, but it’s at least as important to focus on what the local and state officials running housing policy are up to.

For sixty years, researchers have found that the economic segregation of students. which is driven by housing policy, shapes educational opportunity even more powerfully than per pupil spending. In Montgomery County Maryland, for example, county officials pursued two strategies for raising the achievement of low-income students. In one program, starting in 2000, the school board spent $2,000 extra per pupil in high-poverty schools. In another, begun decades earlier, the county council enacted an “inclusionary zoning” law that to this day requires builders to set aside a portion of new developments for low-income families. Over time, as Heather Schwartz of RAND found in a 2010 study, what the housing authority did for students cut the math achievement gap between low-income and middle-class students in half, while the school board’s program had much less impact.

Zoning-induced housing costs also prevent workers from moving to places where they can make the highest wages, which is typically in coastal cities. Research shows that this barrier to mobility gravely damages American economic productivity, to say nothing of the aspirations of individuals and families. A 2018 study by Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko, for example, found that “restrictive residential land-use regulation” had a price tag of “at least 2% of national output,” or about $400 billion. A 2019 study by Chang-Tai Hsieh and Enrico Moretti, found that if three high-productivity cities—New York, San Jose and San Francisco—relaxed restrictions on housing supply, more workers could move to them, and average wages nationally would rise an astounding $8,775.

When people do move to higher-wage regions, exclusionary zoning laws often force them to live in the far reaches of metropolitan areas. This means longer commutes, which are associated with higher blood pressure and divorce rates, and more miles on the road, which is bad for the environment.

For the full essay, see:

Richard D. Kahlenberg. “Only Zoning Reform Can Solve America’s Housing Crisis.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, June 24, 2023): A13.

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date June 22, 2023, and has the same title as the print version. The sentences in the penultimate paragraph quoted above (mentioning 2018 and 2019 papers) appear in the online, but not in the print, version of the essay.)

The essay quoted above is adapted from the book:

Kahlenberg, Richard D. Excluded: How Snob Zoning, Nimbyism, and Class Bias Build the Walls We Don’t. New York: PublicAffairs, 2023.

The Talented, Wealthy, Ambitious, and Hardworking Vote with Their Feet Against Communist China

(p. B12) Is China reopening to the world or turning inward again?

Many would argue the latter, but in one important way, the country is still going global: Residents appear to be leaving at a faster clip than they have in years, including a significant number of the wealthy and well-educated the nation needs to keep modernizing and investing.

. . .

Rebounding emigration is also striking in the context of a declining overall birthrate, and suggests that Beijing must do far more to convince talent, both domestic and foreign, that China is a good place to put down roots if it wants to avoid a steeper growth slowdown in the years ahead.

. . .

Rising net emigration also mirrors much smaller influxes of foreign talent in recent years—another trend that threatens to slow China’s climb up the technological ladder. Foreign residents of Shanghai and Beijing numbered just 163,954 and 62,812 in 2020, according to official data, down 21% and 42%, respectively, since 2010. The pandemic is clearly a major factor. But given the well-publicized rising tensions between China and the West, slowing growth and the rising risks of detention and investigation for what used to be considered routine business by foreigners in China, a portion of that decrease seems very likely to persist.

For much of the new millennium, China has been a place where the ambitious, hardworking and lucky could often get ahead. But in today’s China—more focused on security and control, less on growth—it is no longer clear how true that really is.

Some people, at least, seem to be voting with their feet.

For the full commentary, see:

Nathaniel Taplin. “HEARD ON THE STREET; China’s Brain Drain Threatens Its Future.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, July 6, 2023): B12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date July 5, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Affirmative Action Quotas Forced Admission of the Academically Unqualified

(p. A13) As Richard Sander and Stuart Taylor Jr. demonstrated in “Mismatch,” their 2012 book on affirmative action, there are very few black students in the top academic cohorts from which highly selective colleges draw most of their students. Black high-school seniors are one-tenth as likely to be in the top tenth of college applicants nationwide as nonblack applicants. The average black SAT score in 2022 was 926 on a 1600 point scale. The average Asian score was 1229 and the average white score was 1098.

. . .

Harvard’s own research in 2013 showed that the black share of its undergraduate population would drop from 10% to less than 1% if it admitted students according to academic skills only. Harvard has the pick of the black U.S. high-school population, but even it can’t fill its desired quota without double standards.

. . .

The result isn’t a benefit to these students but a burden. Research shows they are more likely to end up in the bottom of their classes, if not to drop out of college and professional education entirely. This academic mismatch doesn’t dispel racial stereotypes; it reinforces them.

For the full commentary, see:

Heather Mac Donald. “Racial Preferences Bred 50 Years of ‘Mismatch’.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, July 11, 2023): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated July 10, 2023, and has the title “Affirmative Action Bred 50 Years of ‘Mismatch’.”)

The affirmative action book cited in the passage quoted above is:

Sander, Richard, and Stuart Taylor, Jr. Mismatch: How Affirmative Action Hurts Students It’s Intended to Help, and Why Universities Won’t Admit It. New York: Basic Books, 2012.

“Harvard’s own research” from 2013 mentioned above was reported in Slate in 2018:

Mak, Aaron. “Admitting Bias; Harvard Had Proof Its Admissions Process Was Hurting Asian Americans. How Will Its Dean Explain Why He Did Nothing About It?” slate.com, Oct. 15, 2018.

“Evaluate an Argument on Its Own Merits, Not on the Race of the Person Making It”

(p. A22) In 1991, Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, began his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” with a discomfiting anecdote. A fellow professor had criticized one of Carter’s papers because it “showed a lack of sensitivity to the experience of Black people in America.” When the professor, who was white, learned that Carter was Black, he withdrew the remark rather than defend his claim. It was a reminder to Carter that many people, especially among his fellow establishment elites, had certain expectations of him as a Black man.

“I live in a box,” he wrote, one bearing all kinds of labels, including “Careful: Discuss Civil Rights Law or Law and Race Only” and “Warning! Affirmative Action Baby! Do Not Assume That This Individual Is Qualified!”

This was a book that refused to dance around its subject.

Weaving personal narrative with a broader discussion of affirmative action’s successes and limitations, “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” offered a nuanced assessment. A graduate of Stanford and Yale Law, Carter was a proud beneficiary of affirmative action. Yet he acknowledged the personal toll it took (“a decidedly mixed blessing”) as well as affirmative action’s sometimes troubling effects on Black people as the programs evolved.

. . .

An early critic of groupthink, Carter warned against “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”

In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.” This belies the reality that Black people, he said, “fairly sparkle with diversity of outlook.”

. . .

At the same time, Carter bristled at the judgment of many of his Black peers, describing several situations in which he found himself accused of being “inauthentically” Black, as if people of a particular race were a monolith and that those who deviated from it were somehow shirking their duty. He said he didn’t want to be limited in what he was allowed to say by “an old and vicious form of silencing.”

In an interview with The Times in 1991, Carter emphasized this point: “No weight is added to a position because somebody is Black. One has to evaluate an argument on its own merits, not on the race of the person making it.”

For the full commentary, see:

Pamela Paul. “A 1991 Book Was Stunningly Prescient About Affirmative Action.” The New York Times (Friday, May 26, 2023): A22.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date May 25, 2023, and has the title “This 1991 Book Was Stunningly Prescient About Affirmative Action.”)

The book praised in the commentary quoted above is:

Carter, Stephen L. Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby. New York: Basic Books, 1991.

Is Leonardo’s Ferry Moored Due to Global Warming or Due to Bureaucratic Credentialism?

(p. 4) On a recent sunny morning on the banks of the Adda River in northern Italy, schoolchildren on a class trip to Imbersago — the “Town of the Ferry of Leonardo da Vinci” — gathered next to a moored boat and listened as a guide explained how the flights of the river’s birds, the formations of its rocks and the workings of its ships inspired Leonardo’s genius.

“Why doesn’t it move?” one of the students interrupted, pointing to the ferry, which sat behind a chain and a sign reading, “Service suspended.” It looked like a deserted summer deck atop two rowboats.

. . .

. . . some of the townspeople say an Italian problem more daunting than climate change is the real culprit for the ferry’s immobility since May [2023].

“Bureaucracy,” said John Codara, who owns the gelato shop next to the ferry.

. . .

“I mean Leonardo wasn’t a moron,” he said, under a framed picture of Leonardo. He demonstrated how the ferry worked on a small wooden model made by a local pensioner — “It’s to scale; it’s worth 500 euros,” or nearly $550, and argued that low water and weak currents meant operators required elbow grease to move it across the cable connecting the two banks.

“The force of the ferry is these,” Mr. Codara said, pointing at his biceps.

What they did not need was an advanced nautical degree, he said, as he marched out of his cafe and made a beeline for a sign honoring “The Human Face of the Ferry” and its pilots over the past century. “Harvard, Harvard, Harvard,” Mr. Codara said with derision as he pointed at the names. “They all went to Harvard.”

Roberto Spada, 75, whose father was one of those ferrymen, said he helped navigate the ferry as a 12-year-old and was interested in helping out the town by doing it again as a volunteer.

“I thought with my license I could do it,” Mr. Spada told the mayor as they leaned against other signs posted next to the ferry that featured both Leonardo’s sketch and an excerpt from Dante’s “Inferno” about Charon, “ferryman of the damned.”

A retired truck driver and president of the local fishing association — which has the ferry as its logo — Mr. Spada had a boating license but seemed bewildered as the mayor explained all of the certifications and bureaucratic hoops that needed to be jumped through to pilot the ferry.

“It’s a really long process,” said Mr. Vergani, the mayor.

For the full story, see:

Jason Horowitz. “Leonardo’s Ferry Left High and Dry in a Warming Climate.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, April 23, 2023): 4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 25, 2023, and has the title “Leonardo’s Ferry Left High and Dry by Global Warming and Red Tape.”)

Xi Deflects Focus Away from Economic Stagnation by Telling Youth to “Eat Bitterness”

(p. B1) China’s young people are facing record-high unemployment as the country’s recovery from the pandemic is fluttering. They’re struggling professionally and emotionally. Yet the Communist Party and the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, are telling them to stop thinking they are above doing manual work or moving to the countryside. They should learn to “eat bitterness,” Mr. Xi instructed, using a colloquial expression that means to endure hardships.

Many young Chinese aren’t buying it. They argue that they studied hard to get a college or graduate school degree only to find a shrinking job market, falling pay scale and longer work hours. Now the government is telling them to put up with hardships. But for what?

“Asking us to eat bitterness is like a deception, a way of hoping that we will unconditionally dedicate ourselves and undertake tasks that they themselves are unwilling to do,” Ms. Li said.

. . .

(p. B4) A record 11.6 million college graduates are entering the work force this year, and one in five young people is unemployed. China’s leadership is hoping to persuade a generation that grew up amid mostly rising prosperity to accept a different reality.

The youth unemployment rate is a statistic the Chinese Communist Party takes seriously because it believes that idle young people could threaten its rule. Mao Zedong sent more than 16 million urban youths, including Mr. Xi, to toil in the fields of the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. The return of these jobless young people to cities after the Cultural Revolution, in part, forced the party to embrace self-employment, or jobs outside the state planned economy.

Today the party’s propaganda machine is spinning stories about young people making a decent living by delivering meals, recycling garbage, setting up food stalls, and fishing and farming. It’s a form of official gaslighting, trying to deflect accountability from the government for its economy-crushing policies like cracking down on the private sector, imposing unnecessarily harsh Covid restrictions and isolating China’s trading partners.

Many people are struggling emotionally. A young woman in Shanghai named Ms. Zhang, who graduated last year with a master’s degree in city planning, has sent out 130 résumés and secured no job offers and only a handful of interviews.

. . .

“To ask us to endure hardships is to try to shift focus from the anemic economic growth and the decreasing job opportunities,” said Ms. Zhang, who, like most people I interviewed for this column, wanted to be identified with only her family name because of safety concerns.

. . .

Mr. Xi “talks about the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation all the time,” said Steven, who graduated from a top U.K. university with a master’s degree in interactive design and has yet to find a job. “But isn’t the rejuvenation about not everyone engaging in physical labor?” Because of the rapid development of robots and other technologies, he said, these jobs are easily replaceable.

. . .

Now after months of fruitless job hunting, he, like almost every young worker I interviewed for this column, sees no future for himself in China.

“My best way out,” he said, “is to persuade my parents to let me run away from China.”

For the full commentary, see:

Li Yuan. “THE NEW NEW WORLD; China’s Grads Struggle to Find Work. Xi Shrugs.” The New York Times (Friday, June 2, 2023): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary was updated June 1, 2023, and has the title “THE NEW NEW WORLD; China’s Young People Can’t Find Jobs. Xi Jinping Says to ‘Eat Bitterness.’”)

California Democratic Leaders Are “Shook” that Voters in Their “Liberal Bastion” Prefer Merit Instead of Affirmative Action

(p. 1) The 2020 campaign to restore race-conscious affirmative action in California was close to gospel within the Democratic Party. It drew support from the governor, senators, state legislative leaders and a who’s who of business, nonprofit and labor elites, Black, Latino, white and Asian.

The Golden State Warriors, San Francisco Giants and 49ers and Oakland Athletics urged voters to support the referendum, Proposition 16, and remove “systemic barriers.” A commercial noted that Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator, had endorsed the campaign, and the ad also suggested that to oppose it was to side with white supremacy. Supporters raised many millions of dollars for the referendum and outspent opponents by 19 to 1.

“Vote for racial justice!” urged the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California.

None of these efforts persuaded Jimmie Romero, a 63-year-old barber who grew up in the working-class Latino neighborhood of Wilmington in Los Angeles. Homelessness, illegal dumping, spiraling rents: He sat in his shop and listed so many problems.

Affirmative action was not one of those.

“I was upset that they tried to push that,” Mr. Romero recalled in a recent interview. “It was not what matters.”

Mr. Romero was one of millions of California voters, including about half who are Hispanic and a majority who are Asian American, who voted against Proposition 16, which would have restored race-conscious admissions at public universities, and in government hiring and contracting.

The breadth of that rejection shook supporters. California is a liberal bastion and one of the most diverse states in the country.

. . .

(p. 12) Valerie Contreras, a crane operator, is a proud union member and civic leader in Wilmington, where half the voters were against the referendum. She had little use for the affirmative action campaign.

“It was ridiculous all the racially loaded terms Democrats used,” she said. “It was a distraction from the issues that affect our lives.”

Asian voters spoke of visceral unease. South and East Asians make up just 15 percent of the state population, and 35 percent of the undergraduates in the University of California system.

Affirmative action, to their view, upends traditional measures of merit — grades, test scores and extracurricular activities — and threatens to reduce their numbers.

Sunjay Muralitharan is a voluble freshman and a leader of the Democratic Party chapter at the University of California, San Diego. A Bernie Sanders supporter, he favors universal basic income, a higher minimum wage and national health care.

In 2020, as a 16-year-old, he joined the campaign against race-conscious affirmative action in California. Afterward, he and friends applied to elite private universities outside California and were often surprised by the rejections, reaffirming his view that Asian students need higher grades and scores to gain admission.

“There were lots of students of Indian and Chinese descent who had to settle for schools not of their caliber,” said Mr. Muralitharan, who grew up in Fremont, a predominantly Asian middle-class suburb of San Jose.

. . .

Kevin Liao, a consultant and former top Democratic Party aide, . . . was not surprised, . . ., that many Asian Americans balked. “The notion that you would look at anything other than pure academic performance is seen by immigrants as antithetical to American values,” he said.

For the full story, see:

Michael Powell and Ilana Marcus. “The Affirmative Action Vote That Divided California Democrats.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, June 11, 2023): 1 & 12.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 5, 2023, and has the title “The Failed Affirmative Action Campaign That Shook Democrats.” The online version says that the print version had the title “California Vote Exposed a Divide Amid Democrats” but my national print version had the title “The Affirmative Action Vote That Divided California Democrats.”)

Defending Free Speech as “Our Salvation From Intellectual Mediocrity and Social Ossification”

(p. B11) Robert J. Zimmer, a mathematician who as president of the University of Chicago championed diversity not only quantitatively, in the recruitment of students and faculty, but also by protecting free expression on campus with a protocol that was later embraced by dozens of colleges across the country, died on Tuesday [May 23, 2023] at his home in Chicago.

. . .

Mr. Zimmer, who presided over the university from 2006 to 2021, was instrumental in shepherding what became known as the Chicago Principles, a set of guidelines recommended by the Committee on Free Expression, a faculty group he appointed in 2014.

Those guidelines have become a bulwark against what critics perceive as the stifling of academic freedom by colleges where students are able to insulate themselves against discomforting viewpoints — practices that are often lumped together as “cancel culture.”

“Concerns about civility and mutual respect can never be used as a justification for closing off discussion of ideas, however offensive or disagreeable those ideas may be to some members of our community,” the faculty committee concluded.

In August 2016, during Mr. Zimmer’s presidency, the university informed incoming freshmen: “We do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual safe spaces where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”

. . .

As a private institution, the University of Chicago was under no obligation to abide by the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech. But, Bret Stephens wrote in a New York Times opinion essay in 2017, the real crux of Mr. Zimmer’s case for free speech, offensive or not, was that it was “our salvation from intellectual mediocrity and social ossification.”

According to Mr. Stephens, Mr. Zimmer balked at the notion that unfettered free speech would jeopardize the cause of inclusion because it might upset, among others, some of the people who were seeking to be included.

“Inclusion into what?” Mr. Zimmer had wondered in a speech that year. “An inferior and less challenging education? One that fails to prepare students for the challenge of different ideas and the evaluation of their own assumptions? A world in which their feelings take precedence over other matters that need to be confronted?”

For Mr. Zimmer, the mathematician, that kind of education wouldn’t count.

For the full obituary, see:

Sam Roberts. “Robert J. Zimmer, 75, Who Protected Free Speech on Campus, Dies.” The New York Times (Saturday, May 27, 2023): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date May 24, 2023, and has the title “Robert J. Zimmer, Who Promoted Free Speech on Campus, Dies at 75.”)

Universities Should Teach Students to Want to Hear Their Opponents

(p. A21) On April 8, 1991, when I was a sophomore at Brown University, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia came to campus to speak. Conservatives allegedly existed at Brown, but the school was as true to its left-leaning reputation then as it is now.

. . .

That April evening of Scalia’s talk, I lined up with my anti-Helms T-shirt on. I barely made it into a back row of the packed auditorium, where I awaited what would surely be a triumphant Q. and A. session. Once Scalia finished and we the righteous had a chance to speak truth to the evil one, we would rip apart his so-called originalism, his hypocrisies, his imperiousness. We were champing at the bit to have our say.

And then he wiped the floor with us. In answer to our indignant questions, he calmly cited rebutting cases. We fulminated and he reasoned, and when we seethed he lobbed back with charm. Within the hermetic bubble of my liberal upbringing and education, it had never occurred to me that even when finally presented with The Truth, someone from the other side could prevail. I’d been certain we would humiliate him. Instead, I left humbled.

. . .

According to “Brown University: A Short History,” by Janet M. Phillips, Vartan Gregorian, the school’s president when I attended, “bucked the trend of ‘political correctness’ to keep the Brown community hospitable to a wide range of views.” He invited not only Scalia but also the left-wing academic and activist Angela Davis, to “ensure a steady flow of diverse views and intellectual debate.” Gregorian, who died in 2021, Phillips wrote, “prided himself on the fact that during his tenure no speech, however controversial, was cut short by protest.”

We know universities can do a better job of preventing one form of speech from inhibiting another. The harder task, but perhaps the more important lesson, will be teaching students not to want to do so. They shouldn’t avoid opportunities to hear other perspectives but should actively seek them out and reckon with the humbling fact that what they already know — or think they already know — may not be all there is to know. Isn’t that, after all, precisely what learning is about?

For the full commentary, see:

Pamela Paul. “The Biggest Loss on Campus? Listening.” The New York Times (Friday, March 31, 2023): A21.

(Note: ellipses added. In the original last paragraph, the words “want” and “all” are in italics.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 30, 2023, and has the title “The Most Profound Loss on Campus Isn’t Free Speech. It’s Listening.”)

The book on Brown University mentioned above is:

Phillips, Janet M. Brown University, a Short History. Providence, RI: Brown University, Office of University Relations, 1992.