Steven Pinker's Five-Point Plan for Saving the Universities

Countering the politicization and censoriousness of the modern academy

Universities have been having a hard time lately. Once a trusted institution, the last decade has seen a steady erosion in trust. Much of this has been self-inflicted, as universities have become increasingly politicized and censorious. What can be done to stem the tide? In a recent essay in The Boston Globe, Harvard professor of psychology Steven Pinker set out his five-point plan for saving the universities. Here are some excerpts from the essay.

Free speech. Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom… Deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. Outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn’t want to hear “hate speech”…

Institutional neutrality. A university does not need a foreign policy, and it does not need to issue pronouncements on the controversies and events of the day. It is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. When a university takes a public stand, it either puts words in the mouths of faculty and students who can speak for themselves or unfairly pits them against their own employer. It’s even worse when individual departments take positions, because it sets up a conflict of interest with any dissenting students and faculty whose fates they control…

Nonviolence. Universities should not indulge acts of vandalism, trespassing, and extortion. Free speech does not include a heckler’s veto that which blocks the speech of others. These goon tactics also violate the deepest value of a university, which is that opinions are advanced by reason and persuasion, not by force. And they bring further discredit to the institution: Parents and taxpayers wonder why they should support, at fantastic expense, students being forced to listen to political propaganda from other students when they should be learning math and history from their professors.

Viewpoint diversity. Universities have become intellectual and political monocultures… Many university programs have been monopolized by extreme ideologies, such as the conspiracy theory that the world’s problems are the deliberate designs of a white heterosexual male colonialist oppressor class…

Universities should incentivize departments to diversify their ideologies, and they should find ways of opening up their programs to sanity checks from the world outside.

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers…

An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

You can read the full Boston Globe piece here.

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