The Courage to Disagree in Academia

Challenging the academic status quo

Education

THE COURAGE TO DISAGREE IN ACADEMIA

Challenging the academic status quo

Miriam E. Thompson

If a college education doesn’t teach students to disagree constructively with status quo opinions and perspectives then then it’s not fulfilling its mission. Yet too often this is precisely what happens. Colleges and universities were established on the premise of open inquiry, critical thinking, discovery, and invention. The courses students take typically expose them to new, unfamiliar topics and ways of thinking. Students who are open and curious often find that these exposures trigger questions, including questions about the disciplinary status quo that they are being taught. If colleges do not honor students’ openness and curiosity and encourage their questioning of the status quo, then they are not properly performing their function.

Challenging the academic status quo involves asking questions and introducing new perspectives or explanations that interrogate and even threaten dominant ideologies or frameworks. For example, is racism always the reason for racial disparities in academic achievement among students? Or, how does one determine which, if any, aspects of school curriculum are so influenced by white supremacist ideology that they require “decolonization”? Asking such questions does not indicate condemnation or dismissal, but rather the motivation to develop a critical, multifaceted understanding of these and other issues.

I’m a professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I’m a proponent of the work of Dr. Craig L. Frisby, Professor Emeritus of School Psychology at the University of Missouri, because it challenges the orthodoxy that has saturated school psychology research and practice. In his book, Meeting the Psychoeducational Needs of Minority Students, he addresses how contemporary school psychology research is focused on portraying racial and ethnic minority students as individuals who are endlessly victimized by racism, microaggressions, discrimination, and systemic oppression in schools at the hands of educators and administrators. Although these are certainly real forces that affect some students, an extreme emphasis on these particular topics reflects an ideological and political bias of many researchers. The dominant perspective in school psychology risks doing a real disservice to the very students it purports to help because it encourages all minority students to see themselves as helpless victims with no control over their lives. The problem is that this “in essence absolves them from any personal responsibility or accountability for life outcomes” (p. 34).

The courage to question, and more importantly, the courage to disagree with dominant approaches is important. For instance, professionally and personally, I disagree with the notion that impact matters more than intent. All people are fallible but most people are well-intentioned. Most people who make mistakes do not intend to do so, and this includes mispronouncing someone’s name, accidentally referring to someone by the wrong pronoun, or mistakenly referring to someone by the incorrect race. These sorts of mistakes become problematic when they become enduring behavioral patterns (e.g., not bothering to learn how to pronounce someone’s name), but to dismiss an individual’s positive intentions denies them an opportunity to learn from their mistake. It makes the experience of making a mistake shameful for them, perhaps discouraging them from taking risks in interpersonal interactions in the future.

Disagreement and critical inquiry are productive, healthy cornerstones of academia, which is why tenure exists for college and university faculty. According to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the purpose of tenure is to protect the academic freedom of faculty who conduct research and teach at colleges and universities. Hundreds of professional associations and societies have endorsed the AAUP’s 1940 Statement on the Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure, which underscores the role of tenure in protecting the academic freedom of faculty. Clearly, tenure benefits faculty, but the security that tenure provides also benefits students, by allowing the people who teach and mentor them to pursue knowledge fearlessly and express themselves honestly, including through dissent. Moreover, as the AAUP explains, tenure is good for society as a whole because it ensures a high quality of teaching and research, which protects the integrity of colleges and universities. If faculty are pressured or threatened by political, business, or other organizations to refrain from disseminating certain information or research results then the integrity of their work becomes questionable.

Additionally, to quote the AAUP, “if faculty members can lose their positions for what they say in the classroom or for what they write in an article, they are unlikely to risk addressing controversial issues.” For example, it would be productive to have conversations discussing the pros and cons of such controversial issues as:

• the removal of historical statues

• defunding the police

• slavery reparations

• gun control

Such exercises would be beneficial because it would allow students to hear different viewpoints, particularly viewpoints that they may disagree with, have little understanding of, or have never encountered. Certainly, there are ethical considerations to take into account in facilitating conversations on controversial issues. Examples include setting speaking guidelines, such as communicating one’s opinions respectfully, refraining from ad hominem attacks and denigration of particular groups, and so on.

Unfortunately, there are countless instances that demonstrate the reason why faculty need academic protection (academic freedom and tenure) to conduct their research and teach. Here’s one example.

In an Opinion piece for The Washington Post, Assistant Professor of English, Lucía Martínez Valdivia (who survived her ordeal and is now Associate Professor), spoke about her experience teaching a first-year humanities course in 2016 at Reed College. Several times a week, Valdivia was met by throngs of students in her classroom with signs protesting her course, specifically describing it as “anti-black” and labeling the faculty “white supremacists” for teaching Aristotle and Plato. Valdivia described the cognitive and physiological impact the student protestors had on her wellbeing—difficulty focusing, loss of appetite—yet she remained committed to teaching even if it meant enduring the abuse. This was brave, considering that Valdivia was untenured at the time. In fact, she reported that many untenured faculty described these conditions as “impossible” to work under. Valdivia explained that faculty and administrators at Reed College permitted the student protests in order to uphold ideals of open dissent and inquiry. Yet it is important to note that these students’ right to speak freely should not be conflated with their right to disrupt instruction or suppress others’ voices.

Valdivia’s experience led her to several valuable conclusions:

1. “No one should have to pass someone else’s ideological purity test to be allowed to speak.”

2. “[Educators] teach people not what to think, but how to think.”

3. “Nuance and careful reasoning are not the tools of the oppressor…[but] tools [that] can help prove what those who use them think—or even what they feel—to be true.”

Valdivia’s unfortunate ordeal reminds us of the eternal validity of a quotation by Evelyn Beatrice Hall (which is often incorrectly credited to Voltaire): “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” I think this is a fitting motto for colleges and universities, which are or at least should be built on the premise of academic freedom. I also believe that everyone—regardless of how passionate, knowledgeable, or experienced—would benefit, in the words of Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, from “practice[ing] intellectual humility,” which helps remind us that our thinking is prone to flaws and biases, and alternatives to even our own most fervently held beliefs may have much to recommend them. Developing more intellectual humility would also allow us to engage in politics in a more productive manner, which could help bridge the deepening ideological and social rift in this country.

As I reflect upon the state of academic free speech, I am reminded of a comment that a colleague once made to me early in my career as a professor: “As professors, our job is to think.” That comment deeply resonated with me. Most of our days are taken up with teaching, service, and publishing, but the core of our job, our real job, is to think objectively and critically about topics that concern our field. Objective, critical, and of course intellectually humble thinking allows us to ponder the multitude of ways in which an issue can be solved while simultaneously being open to the reality that we could be wrong. Although it can be scary to do so in an academic environment that is very much politically lopsided, we owe it to ourselves and to our students to have the courage to disagree and the courage to challenge the academic status quo.

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Miriam E. Thompson is an Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Counseling, Clinical, and School Psychology and Director of the Mind and Behavior Assessment Clinic at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She trains graduate students on how to conduct standardized psychological assessments and write comprehensive psychological reports. In addition, she teaches several assessment courses on personality, neuropsychological, psychoeducational, and cognitive functioning. Her new line of scholarship focuses on constructive disagreement, critical thinking, open inquiry, and viewpoint diversity in psychology. In fact, these new interests inspired her to write this essay in the Journal of Free Black Thought. Furthermore, these developing interests also motivated her to develop a seminar course for first year undergraduate students called “The Psychology of Ideas and Beliefs,” which she will be teaching for the first time this year at UCSB.