Over the past few decades, trust in academia and higher education has been on a steady decline. Public sentiment about academia seems to only grow more hostile, as the institution’s image is tarnished by accusations of propagating radical ideologies while neglecting the pursuit of objective truth and knowledge.
Some parents even hesitate to send their children to college, fearing that they’ll come home for their first Thanksgiving break as America-hating radicals.
What else is the public supposed to believe when they learn of radical academics like UC Irvine lecturer, Matthew Goldman? Goldman recently seemed to endorse violence against MAGA influencer Nick Shirley, allegedly writing on Instagram, “Someone can do the funniest thing just before the Kirkiversary,” and later adding, “Lmao abolish ICE. only good ICE agent is a dead one.” It certainly seems unbecoming of an academic to encourage flippant attitudes towards death and violence.
Cal State LA professor Melina Abdullah is also doing academia no favors – during an event last week, she doxxed an ICE agent and seemed to implore the crowd to attack him. “The killer ICE agent, who we got on good authority, is right down the road at the Hilton Garden Inn in Oxnard. His name is Brian Palacios … We’ll show you a picture of his pig ass … you see the devil right there, f– him up.”
It’s easy to understand how parents who see academics behave in this way may be hesitant to send their children to be molded by them and these public outbursts are precisely why the public thinks academia is filled with extremists.
For those who look upon the behavior of these academics in horror and lament the state of our universities, I have good news: the presence of radicalism in academia has been greatly exaggerated. Contrary to appearances, most academics are not Marxist activists looking to spark a proletariat uprising against the excesses of capitalism.
Most university professors would never encourage violence against those with opposing views and most have no interest in indoctrinating students into sharing their preferred political views.
As a fellow PhD, I spent many years within academia interacting with countless of these well-read people and am happy to report that the overwhelming majority are just hopeless nerds who dedicate themselves to studying the minutiae of the most esoteric fields of human inquiry.
Rather than salivating at the chance to politically groom incoming freshmen, your typical biology professor will be more concerned with how environmental factors influence dormancy in certain species of crustaceans.
You won’t find the typical economics professor churning out social justice warriors, because they’re wondering how “sentiment-driven stochastic equilibria exhibit monetary non-neutrality, even when the fundamental equilibrium is unique and monetarily neutral.”
Why would a physics professor be concerned with the same things as a communist bomb thrower when the “Intrinsic phase-locking of terahertz auto-oscillations in the easy-plane antiferromagnet Mn2Au” is so much more interesting?
During grad school, my entomologist roommate was too busy staring at whatever bugs happened to call our backyard home to corrupt the minds of the youth.
Even in fields that deal directly with ethics and politics, it has been my impression that professors do their best to encourage critical thinking and debate, while presenting opposing views.
Academics do not tend to believe dogmatically because their professional training always involved the careful consideration of the evidence and arguments at play for any given question. Dogmatic thinking is necessarily incompatible with academic training, which is why professors refrain from instilling dogmatic tendencies in their own students. These are at least the ideals that faculty strive for, if not always successfully.
University faculty do tend to have left-leaning views, but research has not established that a largely liberal faculty substantially influences the cultural and political attitudes of students. Some research indicates that a university education may have a small liberalizing effect in some domains while instilling right-wing attitudes in others.
Of course, it’s not too difficult to find academics with vicious attitudes – academia is a human endeavor after all, and all human institutions will have a contingent of morally and intellectually irresponsible individuals. As with most areas of public discourse, social media has a tendency to amplify the voices of the most extreme minorities.
A cursory look at political posts on social media would cause one to believe that there are nothing but dogmatic extremists at both ends of the political spectrum and a similar mechanism has caused unreasonably pessimistic attitudes toward academia.
To whatever extent political activism usurps the pursuit of knowledge in academia, faculty are keen on identifying such problematic trends and self-correcting. Indeed, universities are forming commissions and writing reports about how such trends may be countered even though the academy is still largely geared towards discovering truths.
Society’s confidence in academia is important because universities are where expertise is created. These experts are what drive the innovation that has consistently elevated standards of living across the world and enriched our understanding of the universe.
All human institutions will have a few bad actors, but there are few institutions whose decline would have worse effects on society than the decline of our engine of progress.
After spending so much time in academia, I find concerns about universities being overrun by extremists unwarranted. As I think back to all of my interactions with fellow academics, it’s also mildly humorous.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He recently received a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.