Critical Thinking Note 30: Intellectual Courage

People generally have reasons for believing the things they believe. Sometimes those are good reasons and sometimes not. When we believe something, we typically take our reasons to be good ones. It would be hard to sustain belief for reasons we know to be bad. Perhaps people sometimes do this, but the problems with this sort of willful thinking are apparent and won’t get much comment here. The more common problem occurs when people mistake bad reasons for good reasons yet remain reluctant to testing those reasons. This is a failure of intellectual courage.

Intellectual courage consists in being willing to examine the quality of our evidence and arguments. Intellectual courage is typically exercised in a social context. It involves submitting our views and reasoning to the scrutiny of others, embracing peer review in spite of the possibility of humbling results. Left to our own devices, we aren’t so likely to spot and correct the mistakes in our thinking. We wouldn’t think the way we do to begin with if we thought it was flawed. And confirmation bias is liable to highlight evidence and reasoning that confirms our prior ways of thinking. So, without peer review from others, we are likely to become entrenched in our opinions and the reasons that support these, whether or not these reasons are well founded.

But subjecting our opinions to peer review from people who see things differently can be a frightening proposition. We risk a good deal when we do so. Not only do we risk finding that we might be wrong about something, we also risk public discovery of this embarrassing state of affairs.

Courage generally is a willingness to take risks when the potential benefits warrant doing so. Acting courageously does not mean acting without fear. It means acting in full awareness of what is at stake, including the possibility of failure. Perhaps a person who is has developed courage through a long-standing practice of reasonable risk taking won’t be phased by fear. But people will generally have to face down lots of fear in getting to that point.

People who are very concerned about what others think may inflate the risk of others discovering they are wrong. Sometimes people have powerful reasons to be concerned about what others think. We live in an age where not having the right opinions can get you kicked out of your group. Conservative former congressman Adam Kinzinger describes this as the current situation for republican politicians when he remarked on a recent Atlantic podcast (Autocracy in America) that “many people would rather die than not belong.” And so, we have the spectacle of republican politicians who can’t admit that the last presidential election was fair, even when they know better. Intellectual courage appears to be off the table for people who care more about belonging than truth and find themselves in social situations where holding the right opinion is required for belonging. Intellectual courage can remain a big ask when holding the wrong opinion merely lowers your status slightly in the eyes of some others. This, I’d submit, is the basic dynamic of groupthink. When the group in question insists on orthodoxy, this dynamic will be intellectually oppressive. The rare person who insists on thinking independently and speaking her mind in spite of intellectually oppressive group dynamics does so at a very high price, as Adam Kinzinger might attest.

A healthier environment for exercising intellectual courage would be one where people can respect each other across differences of opinion. This isn’t quite what happens when people “agree to disagree” or when they dissolve disagreement by taking people to “have their own truth.” Demanding that others agree without is obviously disrespectful. But fencing off that part of another that doesn’t agree with you isn’t so much better. It’s a defensive maneuver which involves declining to understand the other. Respecting others does involve being open to reasonable disagreement. But disagreement is only reasonable when it is the result of reasoning together. Discovering disagreement should be a starting point for critical thinking aimed at greater understanding, not the occasion for a kind of truce or avoidance.

When I meet a philosopher I disagree with, I’m eager to understand why. This is how inquiry and research proceeds in philosophy. In trying to understand a view that differs from my current opinion I stand to learn about some new evidence or argument. The payoff for exercising intellectual courage is deepening my understanding of others and learning new things, sometimes learning from my own prior mistakes. Of course, philosophy is a pretty safe space for this kind of risk taking. Out in the real world we often encounter people who aren’t interested in understanding or being reasonable. So, it is up to us to cultivate community among critical thinkers.

We are fallible beings, and nobody likes to find they are in error. So, we will always have need of intellectual courage. But we can significantly lower the stakes and make it easier for people to exercise intellectual courage by seeking to understand differing points of view and making a shared project of reasonably evaluating our respective evidence and arguments. This is one of the key goals in teaching critical thinking.

Our Latest Discord

I am constantly trying to get my students to slow their thinking down and give some thoughtful attention to how conclusions are reached, not just how they feel about the conclusions. Open-mindedness, as I understand it, is not being open to accepting or tolerating all manner of diverse ideas. There are some ideas we should not be open to because we already have compelling arguments against them. Instead, we should understand open mindedness as being open to fairly evaluating new arguments and evidence for ideas. So, let’s do that.

We’ve had some vigorous discussion on email in response to Dr. May’s recent message explaining “why the college’s leadership team and I have decided to exercise considerable restraint in making college wide public statements about external events that do not directly impact our educational mission.”

Dr May details the reasons for adopting this stance. These are worth paying attention to regardless of our feelings about the conclusions. But first, I think we’ve seen considerable distortion of the position adopted. Dr. May is not announcing a policy of institutional neutrality. He’s announcing one of “considerable restraint.” Were Bellevue to experience an event like the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville a few years ago, it would be no violation of the stated policy to issue a statement denouncing this bigotry and the adverse impact of such an event on our diverse student body. Personally, I would expect the college to take a stand, and nothing Dr. May expressed the other day would be an obstacle to this. Reaction to Dr. May’s statement hasn’t favored clarity about the position he was announcing.

Reasons were offered in support of this policy. Whatever our feeling about the policy, these deserve to be evaluated on their own merits. Otherwise, we are reacting to something we don’t fully understand. We are not in a position to fairly evaluate an idea or an argument without doing our level best to understand the position first. This is the backbone of critical thinking. The whole point of open-mindedness, thoroughness and intellectual courage is to base our evaluation of ideas and arguments on sound understanding rather than emotion, favored ideology, or personal bias. This is not easy. People of all kinds and persuasions are prone to rush to judgement. But then we wind up with discord instead of discourse. We can do better. So, what are the reasons?

First Dr. May takes a central part of the mission of the college to be to foster and sustain an environment where everyone can “think critically, share ideas, and develop their own perspectives.” Putting the institution’s weight behind specific views is liable to stifle this. Even when the call is easy and righteous, say publicly condemning kitten torture, the weight of an institutional position communicates to students and other members of our community that some things are a matter of authority and power, not inquiry.

This rationale does not imply that the institution will now condone, say, expressions of white supremacy as we saw in Charlottesville. These expressions can by highly disruptive to the mission expressed above. People do not feel safe thinking critically and sharing their own ideas when these are likely to get shouted down by bigots. Perhaps this is why this rationale does not support “official neutrality,” but rather counsels “considerable restraint.”

Next, it is our responsibility “to teach students how to think about complex issues” that affect us all in different ways. This is certainly in the vein of the first reason, though with a more specific acknowledgement that we experience things in different and personal ways. This means it’s going to be hard for the college’s official statements to speak to people in univocal ways. The official line won’t be heard in the same way by all of us, and there is no anticipating just when or where the official line will land sideways (as it appears to have just the other day).

The institution is not a person. There is no room for dialogue with an institution. People who don’t take the official line in the spirit intended will have little opportunity to seek clarification or dialogue. So, here is one personal example that might clarify this aspect of the issue. Suppose the college adopted the official position that all events are to be opened with a land acknowledgement. This might meet with wide approval. Personally, I would not favor this. I often find these statements mildly offensive and patronizing. It does depend on just what is said and how. And it’s not that I hear anything false or derogatory in land acknowledgments. It’s simply that an acknowledgement that we are occupying the land of Native Americans isn’t a rent check. Will I feel safe if I’m speaking against official college policy? Should I feel safe now, regardless? We shall see.

Finally, Dr. May acknowledges the weight of the responsibility of “speaking on behalf of such a large and diverse community.” He goes on to express his concern that “Institutional statements on some matters can unintentionally exclude or alienate some members of our community.”

Most of us are aware of the recent events that have led many institutions to exercise greater caution on taking positions as an institution. Many colleges and universities took official positions against the killing of George Floyd and in support of BLM. More recently, different constituencies have demanded institutional support for opposing sides of the Israel/Palestine conflict. On the one hand we have the long and ongoing history of antisemitism to contend with and on the other, the mass killing of civilians in Gaza by the State of Israel. What to do? I don’t think it is mere cowardice for the institution to decline to take a position in cases like this. Rather, declining to do so is a matter of supporting the role of this institution as an environment where diverse minded people can explore the complexities and think for themselves, hopefully trying to understand some diverse views along the way. The weight of the institution taking a side would tend to squash this. It is not for the institution to decide how we should view this conflict, it’s for us to figure out.

I encountered Dr. May in the free speech zone on campus this past spring as he watched a vigorous discussion between a few Christian supporters of Israel and a small group of students who were clearly sympathetic to the plight of the Palestinians. The exchange was a bit heated, but peaceful enough for all parties to be heard. Were hearts and minds changed? Probably not. But people were demonstrating basic human respect in the context of deeply felt disagreement. Being able to do this at all, speak respectfully person to person with someone you might otherwise deem the enemy, affords us a path, perhaps narrow and slippery, to retaining our humanity and refraining from violence or disrespect. That in itself is a worthy outcome we should celebrate. It is something that can and should happen here.

The stated policy is not a permission slip for bigots to express bigotry around our campus. Bigotry will still face the criticism of many powerful voices on campus including faculty, staff and students. I do not think that we are so feeble as to require the bolstering of institutional authority in most cases. Dr. May has not closed the door to providing institutional support where the threat to our community is disruptive to its educational mission. But he is clearly prepared to weigh this against the potential for compromising our educational mission in support diverse voices being able to share our thoughts, think critically, and learn from each other, as opposed to merely yielding to the pronouncements of institutional authority.

My aim here is not to endorse May’s statement. I haven’t thought the matter through conclusively. But the conversation about Dr. May’s message so far has gone quite poorly. Participants have pretty much ignored the reasons offered in support of a policy of “considerable restraint.” Most have uncharitably in inaccurately interpreted this as a statement of “institutional neutrality.” And many have personalized this against Dr. May, while he is representing a collaborative effort with college leadership to support our educational mission. Perhaps we should take a breath.

Update (10/ 21/2024): Evaluation

A standard critical thinking model for dealing with arguments is the SEE model (State the argument, Explain the argument, Evaluate the argument). The post I sent out last week was mainly about stating and explaining the argument offered by administration for adopting a policy of “considerable restraint” in official communications. Perhaps my explanation of the argument sounded to some like an endorsement. Not so, as I indicated at the end.

We want to evaluate the best version of an argument. Otherwise, we are prone to commit the straw man fallacy, attacking a vulnerable weak statement of a position while ignoring its clearest, strongest expression. So, I aimed to illustrate the rationales for the considerable restraint policy with some cases where these rationales apply pretty well. Now, having exercised some charitable interpretation and, giving myself some time to sit with the argument and to contemplate some of the pushback, also with charity, I’m ready to engage in some admittedly fallible evaluation of the argument and policy.

The reasons for considerable restraint offered by Dr. May were given in terms of pretty abstract principles about the college’s educational mission. In these we see a vision of the college as fostering an environment where diverse voices can be heard, where critical thinking about issues is supported, and where students are at liberty to think for themselves and ultimately come to their own conclusions. These, roughly, are the premises that Dr. May and college leadership are arguing from.

In inquiry, evaluation of an argument is concerned with just two things: are its premises true and do they support the conclusion. But we should note at the outset that this is not inquiry. We are evaluating a bit of practical reasoning, reasoning about what to do (or, in this case, what policy to adopt). The goal here is not to establish something as true, but to provide reasons for acting in certain ways. So, our premises are not so much claims we can evaluate for truth as they are expressions of value. This doesn’t mean they are subjective. It simple means that in evaluating Dr. May’s argument we are going to be reflecting on what matters to BCs educational mission and how to support that. In evaluating a piece of practical reasoning, we still face two analogous steps, but these are about what’s important rather than what’s true. So here, we want to consider whether the values of free and open inquiry, Dr. May cited are the values that should guide our institutional policy. Perhaps there are others values that deserve similar priority. And then we want to consider whether the policy of considerable restraint best supports those values. So, we’ll take these steps in order.

Dr. May appealed to the traditional core values of a liberal arts education. That phrase has been understood in assorted ways at different times and places. I take a liberal arts education to be one aimed at liberating the mind. One that fosters the skills and inclinations to do the sort of thing I’m attempting to do here: weigh evidence and reasons slowly and carefully in ways that let us appreciate their merits, rather than simply reacting in ways that merely reflect and entrench our prior patterns of thought.

The fetters of the mind are more often internal than external. The mind is not as directly vulnerable to coercion and domination as the body is through physical force. This is not the deny the effects of propaganda and indoctrination. Nor the more typical skewing of thought as a result of social pressure or ego. Our thinking is subject to external pressures. But even these are soon internalized and become habits of thought we can’t easily correct without careful deliberate attention. Critical thinking is aimed at building skills and inclinations that can help to free us from the domination of our own mental habits of thought, whether our biases and mental foibles have roots in social factors or are a pretty much our own.

I won’t elaborate further, but I do see great educational values in the elements of a liberal arts education May grounded his argument in. It remains an open question whether, as an educational institution, there are further values we should uphold as on par with these core values of a liberal arts education, whether these might stand in conflict with the values May appealed to, or how they can be reconciled with the core values of a liberal arts education. I won’t try to adjudicate these issues here, but I’d love to see some thoughtful dialogue on these issues happen in our community.

Next step, do the core values of a liberal arts education, fully support the policy of considerable restraint. I’m beginning to have some doubts, thanks in good measure to some of the more thoughtful contributions to the conversation on the Diversity Caucus list. In my attempt to explain Dr. May’s argument, I did consider some concrete examples, but mainly to illuminate the abstract principles offered in support of considerable restraint, not so much to challenge them. Now, let’s consider whether we can accept Dr. May’s premises without accepting his conclusion. That is, can we endorse the core values of a liberal arts education he cites without endorsing the conclusion he draws, the policy of considerable restraint.

The principles offered might support restraint on taking sides on issues, particularly ones where some may disagree. Putting authority behind endorsement of what is true or false, good or bad, is what’s at issue here. That’s what risks quashing free and open inquiry. But what is at issue with something like recognizing Juneteenth isn’t the same. We have a holiday commemorating the freeing of slaves. The point of recognizing Juneteenth is not to take a stand on point of controversy. The facts are established. The point is to celebrate a good thing that really happened, the end of some people owning other people here in America. Celebrating that moment of justice isn’t going to undermine free an open inquiry on this campus. It is hard to see how the rationales offered for considerable restraint apply against a campus wide recognition of Juneteenth from the institutional level on down. If there is a conflict here, I’m not seeing it yet.

The source of much of the anger the administration has faced on this matter may be simply that the likely impact of the policy will be to voice less support for marginalized groups at the institutional level. Dr. May explicitly appealed to values of diversity and inclusion in the rationales for the considerable restraint policy. But I’m not yet seeing the conflict between these rationales and the equity piece, where we see leadership leading a deliberate effort to acknowledge and celebrate significant steps towards greater equality.

Update: 10/26

I sent a link to this post to Dr. May after the last update. He replied with some helpful comments and a few references which I’ll relate here. Some people have complained of a lack of transparency and communication with our current administration. I hope they will read this blog post (I’m trying to boost my hits and attract some sponsors. So, please Like and Subscribe).

Dr May says the policy he has adopted is “not a full retreat into the Kalven Report position.” The position of the Kalven Report is a classic statement of institutional neutrality on political and social issues and it has been the policy of The University of Chicago since the late ’60s. Dr May’s statement announces a policy of considerable restraint. So, for instance, May endorses my point above: “Were Bellevue to experience an event like the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville a few years ago, it would be no violation of the stated policy to issue a statement denouncing this bigotry and the adverse impact of such an event on our diverse student body.”

Dr May aims to adopt a position closer to President Peñalver of Seattle University, in his statement on statements. President Peñalver summarizes his position in a recent issue of the Chronical of Higher Education which you will find quoted at the end of this post.

Peñalver’s contribution to the Chronicle describes a predicament faced by college presidents that Dr. May did not relate in his “considerable restraint” message. College presidents are frequently asked to make statements by various campus constituencies. The causes are generally worthy. But each request granted sets up an expectation that other worthy requests will also be granted. Refusal to grant some requests then leads petitioners to feel perhaps discriminated against, or perhaps that the college president just doesn’t care. The president that grants requests to make statements as a matter of routine risks turning their office into megaphone for campus groups with causes to advance. A college president may well feel personally inclined to support some or all of the causes that come to their door. But college president is a fiduciary role. The president’s role is to support the mission of the college. This calls for a measure of discretion that is often incompatible with a more activist role. In light of this fiduciary role, it could be an abuse of the power and authority of the president’s office to adopt positions on social or political matters.

There is power and authority in the voice of a college president. We should frankly acknowledge that parties who request statements from college presidents are seeking to harness that power and authority. Perhaps there are good reasons to do so in some cases. Many on this campus would argue that dismantling entrenched systemic injustices requires deploying countervailing power. I suspect that Dr May’s statement announcing a policy of considerable restraint in making public statements has led to some deeply felt disappointment that our college president might not feel that dismantling entrenched and systemic injustice is an appropriate use of his power and authority. I’m not sure this is the case. The policy of considerably restraint in making statements seems a rather thin data point for making that inference. Dr. May might feel that countervailing power is appropriate for dismantling systemic injustices, but that considerable restraint is called for in his role as college president reconciling the broader imperatives of justice with his role serving the educational mission of the college. This, I think, is what a closer reading of his statement of considerable restraint suggests. That statement is buried in our inboxes somewhere. Here it is again in full, followed by the previously mentioned quote from the Chronicle by the President of Seattle U:

 Dear BC Community,
 
One of the beautiful parts of what makes Bellevue College the institution that it is are the people who study and work here. With about 100 languages spoken, multiple religions practiced, and countless cultures celebrated, our community is rich and vibrant. Open-access education brings people from all walks of life together under the shared purpose of learning. We are all here to teach and to learn together.
 
Because of this, we also recognize that Bellevue College is not a single voice. That is why the college’s leadership team and I have decided to exercise considerable restraint in making college-wide public statements about external events that do not directly impact our educational mission. This approach is based on several important considerations.
 
First, our mission is to foster an environment where every member of our community can think critically, share ideas, and develop their own perspectives. By refraining from taking a stance on national or world events, we allow space for the diverse voices of nearly 20,000 students, staff, and faculty to have their own views, unencumbered by a single, overarching institutional position.
 
Second, the events that shape our world – whether they be political, social, or environmental – are deeply personal, and they affect us all in different ways. As an academic institution, our responsibility is to teach students how to think about these complex issues. We are committed to providing learning opportunities for everyone to explore these issues and events, to share their perspectives, and come to their own conclusions.
 
Finally, speaking on behalf of such a large and diverse community is a great responsibility. While we may each feel great moral clarity about certain events, I believe that institutional statements on some matters can unintentionally exclude or alienate some members of our community. Instead, our focus will be on ensuring that Bellevue College remains a space where all voices can be heard, and where open dialogue and academic freedom are protected.
 
However, there will be times when I will speak on behalf of the college regarding issues that impact our educational mission or require us to reinforce our core values. As president, it is crucial for me to address these matters and reiterate our commitment to student success, equity, and fostering a safe, inclusive learning environment for all.
 
Bellevue College’s core values—student success, pluralism, collaboration, shared decision-making, creativity, and innovation—reflect our commitment to nurturing a diversity of thought. Pluralism embraces the idea that strength lies in our differences, including our cultural, religious, and intellectual perspectives.  Making single statements on regional, national, or world events, political decisions, or news headlines in the name of such a diverse community could conflict with that value and stifle the free and critical exchange of ideas that is central to our educational mission.
 
While there are many challenges and much to celebrate in the times we live in, one thing is clear: Bellevue College’s mission is to be a student-centered, comprehensive and innovative college, committed to teaching excellence, that advances the life-long educational development of its students while strengthening the economic, social and cultural life of its diverse community. We do this best when we invite every voice to be a part of the conversation about important and challenging issues and provide the space for that to happen.
 
I thank you for being here and look forward to the academic year ahead and the conversations we will share.
 
David May, PhD

President Eduardo Peñalver of Seattle University

Over the past decade, presidents have faced increased demands to issue statements on topics of all kinds, many having little to do with the university itself: natural disasters, presidential-election outcomes, Supreme Court decisions, or — most recently — the conflict in Israel and Gaza. While it can be tempting to give people what they want, especially when the issue is not controversial (or at least, not controversial on your campus), every statement comes at a cost.

Statements center the president’s voice at the expense of others. Each one contributes to a self-reinforcing expectation that the university (and the president) should weigh in on issues large and small. This expectation is both inappropriate and impossible to satisfy, and the president’s inevitable silence on some issue or other is guaranteed to cause anger or hurt among those for whom that issue is particularly important.
Issuing statements implicitly establishes a college orthodoxy, narrowing the range of permissible viewpoints and undermining the kind of robust debate we need to sustain our research and teaching missions. In that sense, some requests for statements are not that different from efforts to deplatform speakers or to punish students or faculty who give voice to controversial views. In the short term, statements enhance the power and visibility of the president, but at the cost of a more-inclusive campus conversation. It is both telling and troubling that, this past spring, one of the most ubiquitous demands of pro-Palestine activists on campus was for presidents to issue statements endorsing their perspective on the conflict.

Two years ago, I sent a message to our community that I refer to as my “Statement on Statements.” I said that I would limit university statements to issues and events that have some direct bearing on Seattle University. The result would be a diminished voice for the president but greater space for others. Although this precommitment did not prevent activist demands for a statement this past spring, it did forestall the argument that — in declining to speak — I was doing so because of their specific viewpoint.

This is not to say that presidents should never weigh in. But we should do so judiciously, and only when there are clear institutional imperatives. Over time, the choices we make can help us to avoid creating expectations that no leader can possibly satisfy.

Chronicle of Higher Education
Oct. 8, 2024

	

A note on AI for my Students

So, I’m starting to see some students use AI to write their assignments. Of course I’m not giving credit for this. So far, AI writing is surprisingly easy to catch. this is because there is such a thing as style. It is easy to get AI to write in a technically expert style, but this is not how my students write. This is not a diss. I don’t expect my students to write analytically flawless essays. They’d have little need for my class if they could. When I have my suspicions, they are easily confirmed by one or another of several decent AI detectors freely available on the web. So far, my suspicions have been pretty reliable.

My primary objection to using AI to do your work in college is that it defeats the point of you being here in the first place.

The day you can get AI to go to college for you is the day your potential employers can get AI to do the job you are able to do.

Personally, I have zero enthusiasm for being a cop. I teach to help people who want to learn and grow. So, in the hope of avoiding some enforcement drudgery, I’d like to ask you to think some about why you are in college to begin with. Of course, you probably want to get a decent paying job. I hope you also want to learn how to think more clearly and effectively. Indeed, I suspect the later will become more and more crucial to getting a decent paying job as AI advances. Still, for your own sake as a human being, a being with a mind, it is good to think well. This is simply a matter of health and vitality for beings like us. I can help with this, but only if you are willing to engage in the process of learning to think clearly and effectively. This is always a process of learning from one’s mistakes. To learn to think better, you will have to exercise the courage to make your own mistakes, recognize them through critical feedback and your own developing critical thinking, and adapt and grow accordingly. If you can manage to develop a life-long habit of doing this, you will become wise, even if you are not super-smart. If you don’t, even being super-smart won’t help you so much.

Reading and writing are crucial to learning to think clearly and effectively. It is worth meditating some on just what these activities amount to. Reading is thinking in tandem with someone else. If you are reading lots but mostly the rantings of fools, that’s the sort of thinking you will be practicing. Expect the writing of clear and effective thinkers to be challenging for a while. If you are like most people, you probably aren’t used to delving into evidence, ideas and arguments in depth. Reading the work effective critical thinkers will take some patience. For your mind, this may feel like the difference between a casual stroll and a session with a personal trainer. But you know which of these produces fitness results. If you go to the gym regularly, you’ll also know that you can acquire a taste for making the effort that makes a difference and produces growth.

Writing is organizing your own thinking on paper (or digitally). It is good to work with a trainer when you read, but the ultimate goal is to build your own ability to think well. Writing is where you practice this. In college, you have the opportunity to think for yourself as you write and get some coaching on your efforts from your professors. This is not the same as working with a personal trainer, who guides you every step of the way. You are thinking for yourself when you write, but then you can benefit further from reflecting on some critical feedback. I hardly get to help you correct every misstep in your thinking through writing, but I will offer a paragraph of so of commentary when I can find useful ways to do so on key issues.

Think of a writing assignment in my class as an invitation to a conversation. I’ll ask you to explain something, you’ll do your best to organize your thoughts, I’ll reply with some suggestions for clarification, then maybe you’ll come to office hours, and we’ll continue the conversation. Or perhaps we just do so through more writing. The invitation is open ended. I don’t expect your best effort to be perfect. It is always good to give it your best effort. I’ve trained with very fit minds, and I continue to do so. I share my own practice of thinking about ideas as clearly as I can through things I write for my students. And I’m always ready to help you up your game and become a more active interesting member of the community of critical thinkers. AI can’t yet do this for you.

In Defense of Perfection

We tend to be subjectivists about perfection. But that is hardly the obvious view. It would have struck Descartes and most people as obviously false up until pretty recently. We may have our different tastes and this may bias us so that we have different ideas of perfection. But that’s just variation in our perceptions and opinions. Perfection might be very real and objective in spite of our differing opinions of it. 

It’s not hard to think of cases where some things are objectively closer to perfection than others. People might have a pointless debate over whether Taylor Swift is a better musician than Beyonce (as if either holds a candle to Joni Mitchell). But all these women are far closer to perfection as musicians than I am. I don’t think anyone doubts the objective truth of this comparison. If some things are objectively closer to perfection in some way, that would imply a standard of perfection that makes this so. None of us have a clear idea of just what that standard is, but that’s only because we are limited an imperfect. The idea that there is no perfection because we can’t quite imagine or define it is self-defeating since it presupposes that we have minds perfect enough to understand perfection.

Academic Freedom isn’t what Pamela Paul thinks it is

Opinion | Colleges Are Putting Their Futures at Risk – The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Pamela Paul takes universities to task for failing to promote open ended inquiry and knowledge seeking in the editorial linked above. She blames misuses of academic freedom whereby academics short-cut inquiry on a rapid path to conviction, advocacy, and activism, generally of a left-wing sort. But Academic freedom isn’t quite what she thinks it is. Most of our professors are adjuncts, they are contractors hired to teach a course that won’t run without adequate enrollment. A professor who would prefer to eat and pay the rent can only teach what students are willing to sign up for. Open-ended inquiry requires patience, perseverance, and intellectual humility that is increasingly hard to find in our culture. Logic and critical thinking are hard. Too many people want the satisfaction of feeling they know what is right, and the quicker the better. Not so many people are interested in the hard work it takes to actually know what is right. So, the easy to comprehend melodrama of social justice sells with students. The patient hard work of learning how to reason well doesn’t.

Of course, we still advertise and give lip service to critical thinking. But then look at the class schedule at your local college and count the number of sections of courses in logic or critical thinking. Now compare that to the number of sections offered in sociology or cultural and ethnic studies. Social injustices are relatively easy to comprehend, and the naive inquirer has a much shorter path to the satisfaction of resolving doubts and justifying convictions.

None of this is to accuse my colleagues in the social sciences of left-wing political bias. The injustices addressed in class are typically grounded fact, and Pamela Paul does open-ended inquiry a disservice if she means to suggest that it needs to make room for contorted denial or rationalization of things like systemic racism. And that is pretty much what the countervailing political pressures are demanding. Ron Desantis isn’t demanding attentive fact-based open-minded inquiry on matters of race or LGBTQ issues. He is simply demanding that that academics not reach the conclusions such inquiry leads to. Either that or shut up.

Open-minded inquiry doesn’t place us under any obligation to entertain disingenuous both sides-ism. Open mindedness doesn’t require neutrality between competing views when some views are well supported by evidence and argument and others just aren’t. Open-mindedness requires that we be open to fairly evaluating the evidence and argument. When the evidence and argument clearly favor one among the competing views, we should have the degree of confidence warranted by the evidence and argument. This is often sufficient to settle the issue. When an issue is politicized in the broader culture and people on one end of the political spectrum don’t like the conclusions reached by a fair-minded evaluation of the evidence and argument, it’s not professors that are being politically biased. It’s the people that are having a hard time with the facts and the conclusions these support. We’ve seen this happen with climate change for decades. Now we see it happening with contemporary culture war issues like race and LGBTQ rights.

More perspectives on campus won’t fix this. At this point it would just ignite more conflict on campus. More focused and dedicated instruction in how to reach conclusions, how to analyze evidence, formulate and evaluate arguments, seriously entertain objections without begging the question, identify and filter out fallacies; all of this would help enormously. Now try to get your student to sign up for that class. Critical thinking is challenging. Your student might not get an A.

Higher education in the US is in a sorry state. We still do pretty good at STEM. Moneyed interests demand this, after all. But we are badly failing to prepare students for participation in a free and open society. Many competent professors are doing the best we can. But there is more to the problem. We are up against a culture of instant gratification where education is routinely approached with a consumer mindset, political polarization that undermines critical thinking about the most important issues we face, and debilitating anxiety among students who vaguely get that things are not well with the world. Who is to blame is not a pertinent question. There is plenty of that to go around.

This said, colleges and universities could do better. General education courses that focus deliberately on critical thinking skills, the skills required for patient, open-ended, open-minded inquiry, should not be in competition for enrollment with courses that offer satisfying conviction, even where this is warranted. Courses focuses on the methods of open-minded inquiry should be pre-requisites for the others. Courses like logic and critical thinking need to be supported by degree requirements. This is something colleges and universities could do. It would help enormously to restore the credibility of our institutions and it would better prepare our students for the sort of open-minded inquiry needed a free and open society.

Critical Thinking Note 30: It’s not about Buying and Selling

Arguments are commonly regarded as tools of persuasion. Seen this way, arguments are sales pitches for believing something. In our consumer society, we are all skilled at negotiating the constant onslaught of sales pitches. Our default is the hard no. Any of us would soon be broke without rejecting the vast majority of sales pitches. And yet, we buy often enough. Whether we buy, consider, or reject a sales pitch, we make this determination in reference to ourselves, what we want, what matters to us. We are passive in our mode as consumers. We accept the sales pitch, or we don’t. Perhaps we step back and do some research when the stakes are high. Sellers would generally prefer that we not. And typically, there is no need to reach beyond ourselves, to actively engage the world beyond our needs and wants. We know how to operate as customers, it’s a comfortable space for us denizens of late-stage capitalism. It also misses the point of argumentation.

When we treat arguments as tools of persuasion, our default stance is to resist persuasion. Persuasion, after all, feels like an assertion of someone else’s will, which we will naturally want to resist unless it aligns with our own will. In such self-referential assent or dissent, our will is engaged in reactive mode. But reaction is not the same thing as exercising agency.

Our general reluctance to change our minds about things is known as epistemic conservativism. Perhaps without a healthy dose of epistemic conservativism, we’d be changing our mind all the time and wind up confused (or confusing). A degree of epistemic conservatism can be a healthy thing. But it is healthy only when we are reluctant to give up beliefs that are themselves rigorously examined and well supported by evidence and argument. Otherwise, epistemic conservatism leads straight to confirmation bias, the tendency to endorse or reject arguments on the basis of how we already feel about the conclusion.

How are things different for the critical thinker? A distinguishing mark of the skilled critical thinker is that she treats arguments as instruments of inquiry rather than instruments of persuasion. An argument is a set of premises offered as a reason for thinking some conclusion is true. We should find good arguments persuasive simply because it’s good to believe things that are true. What is operative for the critical thinker, though, is inquiry, the active search for truth and understanding. Not the passive consumer’s role of being persuaded, or “buying” the conclusion. The critical thinker may still want others to find her arguments persuasive, but only if they are good arguments. For the critical thinker, the desire to persuade is conditional on the quality of her reasoning being good, not on her own will.

Critical thinkers aren’t just concerned with determining whether the conclusion of an argument is true. Rather they are more broadly concerned with what can be learned from the argument. This starts with aiming to understand the viewpoint embodied in the argument. We aren’t in a good position to evaluate and argument without first clearly understanding what it says. Beyond this, learning from arguments often takes the form of learning from our mistakes. When the critical thinker finds a flaw in an argument, she will straight way consider whether is signals a compelling countervailing argument, or whether that flaw points the way to a better argument. Whether the conclusion of an argument is true or false is not the primary concern for the critical thinker. The primary concern is to see how the argument can help us get closer to understanding and truth, even if this only amounts to recognizing that some line of argument is a dead end.

Critical thinking is not really about figuring out what views to “buy” or “not buy.” It’s about building a robust understanding of the world and each other. It’s about getting clear on all sorts of issues, from those our well-being depends on to those that simply engage our wonder (though I’d argue that the latter is itself an aspect of well-being). The critical thinker is actively engaged in the project of building a mind that focuses and clarifies her understanding generally, including her understanding of herself, her interests, and values. The skilled critical thinker is not a consumer of arguments, ideas or beliefs. She is a gardener, cultivating her own mind, producing her own intellectual sustenance and delight, and nourishing her own community of fellow critical thinkers. Our ability to act in ways that realize our considered interests depends on engaging inquiry actively. In this regard, critical thinking replaces reactivity with agency.

Where is the value?

People don’t appreciate ideas they don’t understand. This is quite natural. On what basis could you value ideas you don’t understand? Part of our job as educators is to cultivate the kinds of understanding that pave the way to valuing things in a new light. Sometimes that job is not as hard as getting the chance to do it.

Our students come to us well aware of the value of a roof over their head, financial stability, reliable transportation and such. A young adult needs a healthy appreciation for the value of the basic necessities of life. But a life driven exclusively by necessity is one that lacks agency. Part of the role of higher education is to cultivate agency. This is built into the very concept of a liberal arts education. A liberal arts education is one aimed at freeing the mind from the necessities of custom, dogma, intellectual manipulation, and other forms of ill-considered opinion.

This kind of liberty can look like a luxury to people who feel trapped by the imperatives of life in a highly competitive materialistic society. That perception is often encouraged by people who relentlessly focus on the ROI of higher education. Specifically, the value higher education as job training. These people will be eager to find shortcuts through general education requirements. College in the high school comes to mind as an easy way to cut the financial overhead of education and get young people “more efficiently” into the workforce.

I’d submit that such efforts demonstrate an implicit lack of regard for young people as people. Further, its disregard young people won’t protest because they are simultaneously denied the opportunity to understand the value of college level inquiry into, say, history or philosophy. (Quick note here, I’m highly skeptical of the ability of any institution of higher learning to ensure that college level inquiry will happen in a high school classroom. In my own discipline, philosophy, I can pretty much rest assured that it won’t).

And thus, we can shortchange young people and they will never be the wiser (quite literally). This might seem quite clever from the perspective of policy makers and administrators who are acting like managers for a private equity firm. But that would presume that the decision makers understand what they are doing in diluting a liberal arts education. And this, ironically, would be uncharitable towards them. What’s more likely is that even as decision makers in higher education act like unscrupulous managers for a private equity firm, its good intentions all the way down. Higher education is expensive after all. We need to look out for the interests of tuition paying parents and taxpayers. And, of course, students just want to get a good paying job.

Value that isn’t understood is value that doesn’t get realized. And, of course, its value that is never missed. So, what’s the problem? Apparently, none. But you know what they say about appearances.

I’m hosting a rebuttal from Michael Reese in below:

My Gen Ed Journey

I find myself leading an effort to reform General Education at BC. How I got here is worth some mention. It is hardly out of a love for General Education assessment. I have long history of sporting a bad attitude when it comes Gen Ed assessment at BC. To the degree that I’ve participated actively it has been out a sense of duty to the college. I wound up serving on FACT (our Faculty Assessment Coordinating Team) when Magie Harada asked me to serve some six or seven years ago. I had just been awarded full professor status, with a nice pay bump. And I was coming off of a stint as chair of the Tenure Review Committee. Maggie caught me at a moment when I felt obliged.

Around that time, we were just implementing our system for assessing campus wide General Education outcomes (all 18 of them) at the direction of accreditation. The data analytic tools were impressive. My task was mainly to help faculty learn how to input student learning data based on the assortment of rubrics we had associated with our Gen Ed outcomes (all 18 of them). I didn’t really understand how all of this was supposed to be useful to us as educators or useful to our students. I tried to figure it out. I can be quite dogged at trying to figure things out. Several years later, at the end of Spring Quarter, 2022, I’d come to the conclusion that we were generating lots of useless data, mainly because we didn’t really understand just what we were trying to measure.

At this point, I was determined to get off FACT and spend the remainder of my career having as little to do as possible with Gen Ed and assessment. That fall, however, we had a new dean, and we were entering the last of a 3-year assessment cycle. Dumping Gen Ed assessment on a new dean and some hapless faculty colleague in the final and crucial year of a project that matters for accreditation seemed a rather nasty gift, and so I decided to stay on FACT for one more year. Carl Freeburg, who had chaired FACT for several years, had just retired. And so, that fall of 2022 FACT was without a leader. And nobody wanted the job. We were working under a couple of accreditation recommendations including one that asked us to use Gen Ed Assessment data to improve our delivery of Gen Ed instruction and inform our academic planning. I was convinced that there was no way this could happen since we faced a serious “junk in” problem with our assessment data. Like so many of my faculty colleagues, I was skeptical and cynical about assessment. And my cynicism was rational. My bad attitude was based on careful study and diagnosis of the assorted ways our program of General Education didn’t work.

It’s one thing to see how Gen Ed Assessment at BC failed. But then what would a functioning Gen Ed program look like? And beyond keeping accreditation happy (which is important if we hope to keep serving our students at all), what would it look like for a program of General Education to serve students? What’s put me in the leadership role for General Education reform at BC, as opposed to comfortably coasting towards retirement, is that I began to see a path to benefiting our students through pursuing new approach to General Education. One where we clearly communicated to our students, their future employers, and the public at large, just what it means to get an education here at BC. One where we got clear amongst ourselves what our General Education outcomes meant and had realistic plans for delivering on the Gen Ed promises we make.

So, I took the job nobody wanted because I thought I saw a path to better serving our students through a redesigned program of General Education. Is there such a path? Was I just delusional when I accepted the role of FACT chair (now Gen Ed reform lead)? These are reasonable questions. Any interested party can judge for themselves if they read the small collection of brief working documents the reform effort has generated over the past year. The dozens of colleagues that have collaborated on this effort have helped to articulate and clear that path. We do have a worthwhile opportunity to better serve our students through Gen Ed reform. And to better define our institutional educational mission and please accreditation along the way.

An opportunity, however, is just that. An opportunity is not yet a reality. And we face assorted obstacles to realizing the promise of this path. As I reach out beyond the circle of collaborators I’ve worked with this past year, the chief obstacle I see on this path is the very bad attitude I sported until little over a year ago. It remains widespread among my faculty colleagues. And understandably, since our best efforts at Gen Ed Assessment over the course of several decades has felt like confusing, pointless, soul killing bureaucratic busywork.

But we are done with that. Gen Ed at BC will no longer just be futilely trying to measure what-have-you or what-not. We are clearing a path to a program of General Education that focuses on what we want our students to learn and figuring out how we can best support their learning. A new program of General Education that serves students well requires a new attitude.

Why Gen Ed Reform?

The college curriculum looked quite different a couple generations ago. When my mother attended the University of Redlands in the early 60s, the standard practice was for all students to take shared core-curriculum classes before they move on to their majors (pathways?). This approach to higher education created an institutional sense of community founded on a shared learning experience. Many small liberal arts colleges continue the tradition of community building through campus wide shared core-curriculum. There were real problems with the core-curriculum of my mother’s generation. It was usually built around “Western Civ” and a canon of works by dead white males. General education at this time was culturally myopic and ethnocentric. So, we had good reasons for doing away with the canon and the traditional “Western Civ” approach.

At public colleges like our own, what has emerged in the wake of the core-curriculum has been a sharp paring back of required courses and the replacement of a core-curriculum with what we now know as the infusion model. On this model, what it means to get an education at a particular institution is defined by a set of learning outcomes that are to be taught across the curriculum. No longer would the defining features of a college as a community of scholars and students be the purview of a couple of disciplines who had authority over a core-curriculum. Rather, ideally, the infusion model would invite continual collaboration across a diverse community of educators, negotiating amongst themselves to define what an education at their school means.

I participated in some of this at Bellevue College some twenty years ago when we routinely devoted entire college issues days to articulating our 18 Gen Ed outcomes. There were working groups that outlined the content of these Gen Ed outcomes in significant detail. We haggled at length over definitions, what specific points to include and what to leave out. Over the years, most of this work got lost. A thorough search of our online archives leaves a full third of our 18 outcomes lacking even one sentence definitions. In terms of what we communicate to students, our legacy Gen Ed program is represented by one page in the course catalog where we give a nice statement from the AAC&U about what it means to get a liberal arts education and then simply list the 18 Gen Ed outcomes by name. Students hear nothing about the 18 in their classes. They have no idea which of their classes claim to teach which of these 18 outcomes. Instructors are often not aware of the outcomes claimed by the courses they teach.

In the place of continual campus-wide collaboration that builds a community of learners around a clearly defined set of General Education outcomes, we have lapsed into departmental silos where, solely for the purposes of assessment, as required by accreditation, we claim a few of the 18 that seem somewhat related to what we teach in our disciplinary silos, interpret these in ways that suit our standing curriculum, and fill out the forms we are told are necessary to keep accreditation happy.

As it turns out, accreditation is not happy. The recommendations continue. On FACT (the Faculty Assessment Coordinating Team), where I have served for the better part of a decade, we diligently implemented one fix after another in response to different recommendations, trying the patience of our colleagues who had to keep relearning what is expected of us in doing assessment. Having doggedly done the best we can to get the old machine to run, it’s become clear that this is just not going to happen. The fundamental problem is that we cannot assess what we don’t understand. And at this point, we lack any meaningful shared understanding of our 18 General Education outcomes. We can’t learn from our past performance if we can’t meaningfully assess it. This is where our legacy program of Gen Ed gets stuck. This is where accreditation has called us out.

It is understandable, given this history, that many of us have lost sight of the point of an institution-based program of General Education. Which makes this an ideal time to refresh our perspectives and consider anew the value we can realize for our students through our program of General Education. We can build community among our diverse learners through a shared educational experience. We can foster in our students the skills and qualities required to participate in a free and open society. We can help our students better navigate the rapidly changing world they are entering with robust transparent instruction in things like communication, cultural diversity, critical thinking and sustainability. We can better equip students with the basic skills and abilities that are valued by employers. We can build a distinctive brand for the college by clearly articulating what it means to get an education at Bellevue College. The degree to which we realize some or all of these goals depends on us and our willingness to thoughtfully and collaboratively engage in building a meaningful, transparent, assessable program of General Education.

We don’t have to realize all of this all at once. For now, it will be enough if we get started with a Gen Ed framework that allows us to learn from our mistakes and adapt accordingly.