On Tuesday, August 8th, the School of Public Service posted to its Facebook account a link to an article written by Professor Scott Yenor in The Daily Signal. The decision to post the article was not an attempt to endorse Professor Yenor’s opinions or arguments, but rather the result of a decision rule that our Facebook administrator highlight the published work of faculty across the School. “Content neutrality” is a fine guideline in principle, but it masks the broader dilem...ma facing higher education today. We encourage our faculty to engage in important public discussions and to help inform those debates with their disciplinary knowledge because we think that public higher education promotes core democratic values. Additionally, and as importantly, we strive to be an inclusive campus in which students, staff, and faculty are welcomed, respected, and valued. As we prepare students to be effective participants in a diverse democracy, we recognize that intolerance undermines core democratic values and indeed does violence to our community. The vast majority of the time, these two values are mutually reinforcing. But in this case it is clear that they are in conflict.
I deeply appreciate the phone calls and emails I have received and the comments posted to the School’s Facebook account. It saddens me that our alumni, students and others are disappointed in the University and have been made to feel demeaned and further marginalized. I sincerely apologize that by drawing attention to Professor Yenor’s piece we have given the impression that we are in agreement with his perspective and worse that we do not value or respect the diversity of our students, faculty, and staff. To be clear, the School of Public Service does not endorse the opinions expressed in Professor Yenor’s piece in The Daily Signal or the scholarly writing upon which that piece is based. Our core values as a School include the statement that “collegiality, caring, tolerance, civility and respect of faculty, staff, students and our external partners are ways of embracing diverse backgrounds, traditions, ideas and experiences.” As has been pointed out by several people in their communications with me, the particular language employed in the piece is inconsistent with that value.
But at the same time, I am not willing to condemn Professor Yenor’s scholarship and writings or worse, agree with those posters who question why university faculty should be engaging in public debates at all. In talking with faculty and staff from diverse political perspectives across the country I worry deeply about the contemporary political environment and the chilling effect it is having on discourse at public universities. Middlebury’s reaction to Charles Murray’s visit in March is one example. Murray was invited to campus by Political Scientist Allison Stanger who wrote in the New York Times that her “willingness as a liberal to grill Charles Murray face-to-face was deemed entirely unacceptable” by the campus community which ultimately shouted down the event. And I am acutely concerned for those faculty around the country, and in particular for those at Boise State, who have been targeted by alt-right organizations and activists for their resistance to the policies of the current administration in Washington and in many cases silenced by their own administrations. As the New York Times put in a recent OpEd, college campus should not be in the business of providing a smooth passage across an ocean of ideas. Instead, the truth emerges from a "contest of perspectives and an assault on presumptions."
The School of Public Service was created in part to promote meaningful community engagement and civil discourse and to serve as an objective and unbiased resource for citizens and decision-makers. The vast majority of our faculty are empirical social sciences whose work is relevant to contemporary policy debates. Their research and expertise have been utilized by a variety of public and private sector organizations and entities who rely on their intellectual and methodological rigor and commitment to objectivity. And several of our colleagues are public scholars who draw upon their academic training to engage in what is sometimes called scholarly activism. In my view, it would be a mistake to encourage these colleagues to retreat from the public arena and I am loathe to do so in an environment in which the value of public education has been questioned and public reason has been derided.
As Sociologist and public intellectual Todd Gitlin wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education this spring, “Dishonesty, non sequiturs, and distortions of fact (the president prefers the term "truthful hyperbole") are the disorders of the day…. This virulent state of affairs calls for a revival of democratic life, but also a course correction on the part of higher education. The university cannot content itself with the sort of cultivation that takes in walled gardens. It must also engage with the miserable state of public reason.”
We need to encourage our faculty to voice their ideas and opinions whether popular or not. And we need to encourage a robust discussion around those ideas that embrace the value of public reason. To that end, we continue to encourage a full and critical discussion of Professor Yenor’s writing. While I regret the manner in which we created the forum for that discussion, I hope that members of our campus community will find this to be a respectful setting for their free expressions. And I hope that over time we will regain the trust of our alumni and students.
The staff and faculty of the School are meeting this week and we will begin reevaluating our approach to social media. I do welcome the perspective of others in how we can balance these two values when they do come into conflict.
- Corey Cook