To the Editor:
Re “Colleges Have to Be Much More Honest With Themselves,” by Greg Weiner, the president of Assumption University (Opinion guest essay, March 30):
Mr. Weiner is absolutely correct when he criticizes colleges and universities for encouraging students to conform to liberal ideologies. However, he misses the mark when he suggests that college professors should avoid political topics unless they are specifically relevant to the course material.
He writes that “there is neither conservative chemistry nor progressive calculus.” But, in fact, the production of scientific knowledge is itself inextricably linked to social and political forces. The research questions scientists pursue and the methods they use to do that research are intertwined with both societal and personal values.
Instead of ignoring politics, all professors should address it in a way that encourages healthy disagreement and respect toward differing opinions. Scholars of all disciplines should be aware of how political biases may affect their work.
By promoting one ideology, universities do a disservice to their research — but by suggesting that politics are irrelevant to the sciences, they open up their research to similarly persistent, though less visible, bias.
Sarah Schoeneman
Buffalo, N.Y.
To the Editor:
Greg Weiner asks higher education to take an honest look at itself but unfortunately doesn’t engage with the “left” ideas he decries, referring to them as “incomprehensible” and admitting that he is relying on “a caricature” and “cartoonish extremes.” What he casts as meaningless are actually courses on racism, homophobia, sexism and the history of these parts of our culture.
History shows us how the argument that “a caricature is an exaggerated portrait of something real” was used to justify violence against leftists, gay people and Jews in decades past. As students are grabbed off the streets by masked ICE agents, this history should not be dismissed so blithely.
Matthias Regan
Chicago
To the Editor:
Greg Weiner writes that colleges should retreat from politics, but that claim doesn’t make any sense. Every dimension of life, whether it’s assigning housework in a family, choosing how to allocate billions of dollars in grants for scientific research or determining the legitimate scope of an academic curriculum, is political. Politics helps us articulate the tension between the powerful and the powerless, and it’s always the people claiming we need to sterilize politics from our discourses who misunderstand these historical struggles.
For example, Mr. Weiner expresses shock that 40 percent of academics would not want someone who is concerned with “anti-white racism” to teach undergraduates. Yet he cites this statistic without reference to the larger debate between historians, social scientists and humanist scholars who rightly point to a history lousy with the violence of white-dominant racism — which leads us to today, when an executive branch justifies authoritarian policies with the rhetoric of white Christian nationalism.
It’s easy to cherry-pick a statistic and claim that our concern with politics is “extraneous material.” The truth is always more complicated, requiring more analytical nuance, and that’s exactly why our institutions of higher education should continue embracing the complex political discussions that traverse most disciplines.
Peter Gilbert
Ventura, Calif.
To the Editor:
Greg Weiner is right to argue that colleges should promote dissent in their classrooms; encouraging the free exchange of ideas is what makes them crucial to a democratic society. But privileging “enduring ideas” over “transient events” seems like a false dichotomy.
Enduring ideas stand the test of time as long as we keep testing them. And Shakespeare endures because of the way he continues to be relevant — with cross-dressed heroines enabling audiences to imagine the rewards of transgender identities and ideas about climate change getting aired when deforestation is tied to the shipbuilding driven by imperialism. Shakespeare always leans into contemporary politics, and learning about him — or any other writer — gets diminished if it happens in a vacuum.
Elizabeth Mazzola
New York
The writer is a professor of English at the City College of New York.
The Rich and the Rest
To the Editor:
That multibillionaires cannot understand why average Americans worry about Social Security checks, grocery prices, health care, government services, their federal jobs, the effects of tariffs, clean air and water, and our country’s relationship with our allies is not remarkable. Since they possess more money than they could spend in a hundred lifetimes, it is no surprise that they can’t relate to the 99 percent.
But about half the voters feel that these insensitive folks actually have their best interests at heart.
Now that is remarkable!
David Gluck
Walnut Creek, Calif.
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