The Future of Education

This paper deals with the teaching of free speech and scientific truth in American higher education in the face of an aggressive identity politics that often challenges the liberal paradigms. My paper leans on research as well as experience with using Timothy Garton Ash’s 2016 book Free Speech in the university classroom, directed at primarily arts students in an American private college setting. I argue that, despite much-celebrated support from luminaries like Barack Obama and Bernie Sanders, freedom of expression is undergoing a very real crisis in American universities due to a combination of sometimes unrelated forces: the commercialization of American higher education, student grievance culture, and a (sometimes understandable) unwillingness on the part of faculty to be custodians of the liberal and democratic tradition. The result of this situation is that much of the concept of free speech, and with it, academic and scientific freedom, has by now become associated not with the 1960s Free Speech movement out of Berkeley, California, but with a martyrized political Right. The paper sketches out some ideological solutions that are not only to do with a much-needed tolerance and awareness but also urges courage to uphold a pluralistic and liberal tradition and, in terms of practical solutions, an conscious intervention into the curriculum the form of a direct and necessary confrontation with the illiberal forces and ideologies that seek to stifle debate. 

Keywords: Free speech, University, Identity politics, Democracy, Liberalism;