Saving the Idea of the University
5 min read
As students return to college campuses across the country and reunite with friends and classmates, I am struck by the number of my own Ivy League classmates who will not return this fall. Three of my newly minted presidential peers, to be exact: University of Pennsylvania’s Liz Magill, Claudine Gay of Harvard, and Columbia’s Minouche Shafik. These losses have caused me, as president of Dartmouth, to reflect on the very purpose of a university as a home for intellectual inquiry and debate, and on what leaders can do to preserve that purpose.
Universities must be places where different ideas and opinions lead to personal growth, scientific breakthroughs, and new knowledge. But when a group of students takes over a building or establishes an encampment on shared campus grounds and declares that this shared educational space belongs to only one ideological view, the power and potential of the university dies—just as it would if a president, administrators, or faculty members imposed their personal politics as the position of the institution.
This isn’t just my opinion. As a scientist, I prefer to rely on the data—and this is what the research tells us.
In the 1950s, the social psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of experiments that showed how easy it is to quash the differences of opinion essential for advancing knowledge. In one experiment, Asch brought groups of college students together to take a simple perceptual test with two possible responses, one right, one wrong. The catch: In each group, all students were instructed to say in turn the incorrect answer—except for one unsuspecting student, who went last.
The results were stark. Three-quarters of the unwitting students went along at least once with the incorrect answer that the majority had given. When asked why, the hoodwinked students typically articulated a fear of ridicule and said they doubted their own knowledge. In short, conformity won.
But when Asch ran a modified version of the test, the results looked very different. If even a single other student gave a dissenting, correct answer, the unbriefed student chose the consensus view only a quarter as often.
This finding provides the basis for a clarion call that higher education needs to hear if we want to build educational environments where different ideas flourish. That task is especially urgent because ideological diversity is already in short supply among administrators and faculty at many colleges and universities. Even though the students themselves typically have a wider range of views than their teachers, they tend to feel pressured to censor any contrary opinion.
Instead, students, faculty members, even university presidents should feel able and willing to speak out and break with uniformity when good evidence compels it.
At Dartmouth, our faculty members do exactly this. For years, our Jewish- and Middle Eastern–studies programs, for example, have defied the trend toward ever more siloed courses and taught bold, interdisciplinary classes such as “Politics of Israel and Palestine.” Our teachers stick to the facts and provide a model for how to listen, learn, and disagree respectfully, rather than conform. This faculty tradition has proved crucial to the Dartmouth Dialogues initiative’s ability to have civil discourse about the Middle East over the past year.
Outside the classroom, Dartmouth strives to use data to make informed policy decisions rather than simply sticking with the status quo. So when some of our economics and sociology faculty analyzed the university’s admissions data and found clear evidence that making tests optional actually hurt the chances of applicants from the most disadvantaged backgrounds, Dartmouth became the first Ivy League school to bring back testing as part of the admissions process. At the same time, we continue, as part of our hiring process, to ask prospective faculty members to speak to the power of diversity—in the broadest possible sense—in their job-application materials, even as other universities are ditching more narrowly defined statements. This is because we follow the data rather than the trend, which clearly show that a variety of viewpoints, ideologies, and experiences lead to better academic outcomes.
If one conclusion from Asch’s experiments might be that groupthink is human nature, another interpretation—the one I prefer—is that it takes only a single well-informed dissident to break the conformist mindset. That’s why Dartmouth is determined to preserve the humanities, elsewhere in decline across academia, because students’ ability to push against the status quo will be stunted if we lose these courses. The humanities can give students the tools to think critically, ask the right questions, improve themselves, and, in turn, challenge conventional wisdom. As the scholar Eric Adler put it in his book The Battle of the Classics, “American higher education requires both humanitarianism and humanism—the drive to improve the material conditions of the world and to improve oneself.”
In our polarized America, where what people will accept as fact is based as much on tribal affiliation as on evidence, universities have an opportunity—indeed, a duty—to be an illuminating objective force. To achieve that, their presidents must be willing to make decisions based on rigorous thinking, data, and evidence, even when the results are unpopular or contrary to consensus.
As Asch’s work showed, being willing to stand alone can be very difficult, especially when one looks around and sees the consequences that can come with a failure to conform. Appeasement can feel safe and easy—if that means giving in to the demands either of student protesters or of vocal donors. But when the future and credibility of American higher education is at stake, university leaders have no choice but to be laser-focused on the academic mission of their institutions, even when doing so prompts discord and disagreement. It’s the engagement in argument that makes universities great.
