Civil Discourse on Campus
Spectrum Street Epistemology at Williams College
In this Spectrum Street Epistemology (SSE) session, we asked students if they would like to moderate the conversation, and one brave student stood up—she was a natural! The conversation centered on whether Williams College should remain politically neutral as opposed to taking sides on issues du jour.
It was interesting to listen to students grapple with cultural fads, like land acknowledgments and reparations, as well as the broader question of whether Williams College should invest in political movements and weapons of war.
This is what college should be about: students in a classroom, civilly discussing and thinking through complex, culturally significant issues that affect society. But no. Instead, campuses have been indoctrination mills for identitarian leftists. Consequently, of course, public trust in our academies is at an all time low.
This interaction made me reflect on today’s disruptive and performative campus protests. While activism is a protected right, fostering environments where students can think critically and engage in open dialogue is even more important. In this way, one’s epistemology can precede and guide one’s actions. That is, one should know that one is an activist for the right thing.
Freedom of Assembly and the First Amendment are cornerstones of a functioning society, but so is civil discourse. We need to equip students with tools for critical thinking—and this is where SSE shines. When students learn to think critically, they can become the drivers of social change that we ought to have.
Our academic institutions are broken. I have argued that they’re irredeemably broken. Yet, we still need the next generation to contribute to society in a meaningful and productive way. They may not get this through universities in the near future, but teaching them how to communicate, collaborate, and solve problems through SSE is one way we can help them do that now.
I suggest, in any discussions of the transgender diagnosis, that the abusive animal studies funded by the NIH be brought up as facts you can't ignore. My post has the history of Premarin, a now out-of-favor exogenous estrogen, which is derived from Pregnant Mare Urine. You'll like this one, Professor! Male monkeys were given estrogen and possibly had surgeries, then the level of HIV transmission examined. Oops! HIV is Human Immuno-deficiency Virus and not Primate IV, monkeys do not get it. There's more, here's the link:
uteheggen.substack.com
The entire existence of politics on-campus altogether is the problem... never mind conducting the discourse appropriately. The purpose of educational institutions is accumulating knowledge and disseminating it, also acting as repositories of cultural record.
Since the generation of '68 the institutions have been co-opted to instead be rookeries of political activists who get paid for basically generating ideology rather than engaging on good-faith research, and proselytising that ideology instead of teaching. The Humanities need a complete cleanout of material whose validity is based on nothing more that "I reckon..." of the author (supported by citations of "I reckons" of others). Descriptive and prescriptive require complete separation.