On the first day of school, as newly christened juniors shuffled into their chairs, my U.S. history teacher remarked, unapologetically: I am liberal. I am opinionated. I have prejudices. This course is going to reflect my biases, and you ought to get used to it. So, as the school year comes to an end, I reflect on Ms. Potter's declaration, on academic freedom, on personal truth and on public dissent -- ideas clearly congruent with the general direction of this site. Dissent, after all, is fundamental to democracy, and all that jazz. What an appropriate end to the school year!
I am very pleased with how this paper turned out. This site, I suppose, does a nice job of chronicling my development as a writer and thinker. If you have ten minutes, consider reading In Defense of Bias:
Archibald MacLeish, American poet and minister of propaganda during World War II, said in 1954, that, "The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself."[1] MacLeish said these words knowing very well the repressive power of the social herd. He said these words knowing very well that more than the size of America’s guns or the tenacity of its Army, the bravery of its dissenters, the men and women willing to cast aside the warm comforts of intellectual conformity, is the most important defense against encroachments on beloved freedoms and ways of life.
Truth, the goal of the dissenter, is a peculiar concept. It is stubborn and uncompromising, yet elusive and unsettled. Bias too is truculent in its certitude, but forever unresolved. The distinction between the two – truth and bias – is no one’s job to determine. That’s the beauty of a marketplace of ideas, of pluralism of thought. Recent legislation, including the “Academic Bill of Rights” pushed by conservative intellectual David Horowitz, intends to broaden the ideal of “academic freedom” to mandate “intellectual diversity” on university campuses. The aim, simply, is to eradicate bias. However, in the process of eradicating bias, the locus of regulatory control is shifted to the student body. The uncomfortable student gains the prerogative to destroy truth labeled as bias, and the dream of higher education, the dream of answers, is subverted, only to be replaced by the dreary acceptance of political correctitude. In the quest for “intellectual diversity,” students gain new weapons to attack the dissenter who – if only momentarily – leaves the herd to think for himself.
The history of academic freedom is the history of liberal thought. It is no coincidence that the rise of academic freedom as a stated initiative paralleled the upsurge of free expression in Europe. The liberal outlook on knowledge states that all truth is questionable in various degrees, and from there, that the most important safeguard against myopia and bigotry is pluralism of thought. The protection of academic free thought thus facilitates the quest for knowledge in the liberal sense. Liberalism makes no judgment about the veracity of dissent; instead, it pits dogma against dogma, prejudice against prejudice, and truth rises to the top of the intellectual free-for-all. The function of academic freedom, broadly, is to protect this clash of ideas and values. Continue reading here.
[1] Lewis Lapham, Gag Rule (New York, New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 1.
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