1/ The shameful incident at Stanford Law School happened because SLS, like so many other academic institutions, has become an ideological echo chamber. Such incidents can be prevented, but only by enhancing viewpoint diversity, especially among faculty and administrators.
2/ The core of the problem is that Woke students, being constantly confirmed in their beliefs and not having them regularly challenged, come to suppose that they are self-evidently true to any reasonable and decent person, and that anyone who doesn't share them must be a bigot.
3/ Suddenly hearing someone challenge their beliefs, or even knowing that someone is present on the campus who challenges their beliefs, is perceived by them as an outrage, a personal assault, an attack on "our" community and its most cherished values.
4/ Because ideological dogmas have hardened into orthodoxies, critics of those dogmas are regarded as heretics--and heretics, by questioning beliefs and challenging values that are sacred in the minds and hearts of the faithful, do "harm." They deny the gods of the city.
5/ And not only to they "deny the gods of the city," they threaten to "corrupt the youth of Athens." The fear is that heresy will spread, that students will be led astray into "harmful" beliefs. It seems urgent to the faithful to stop this from happening--by any means necessary.
6/ None of this has to be. If students regularly encountered and engaged not only fellow students but also faculty representing a range of beliefs, including perspectives that strongly challenged their own, no one would be shocked to hear dissent. Learning would happen.
7/ Does achieving viewpoint diversity require giving "preferences" or "extra points" to conservatives (or other dissenters from campus orthodoxies) in faculty hiring? Not at all. Just stop discriminating in favor of some people or against others based on ideology or viewpoint.
8/ What Cornel West and I said in this statement (later joined by several thousand others) in 2017 remains the advice I would give today to anyone who wants academic institutions of any type to be the best they can be:
jmp.princeton.edu/statement
jmp.princeton.edu/statement
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