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Dreamstime
Chronicle of Higher Education
Higher Education in a Time of Insurrection
Never has our commitment to understanding the truth been more vital.
By Brian Rosenberg
January 7, 2021
As I watched far too much television news on Wednesday evening, I heard
many references to the fragility of democracy. I found myself thinking,
however, about what the economist Joseph Stiglitz described in a 2018
lecture as “the fragility of truth.”
Stiglitz made the point that the systems of truth developed since the
Enlightenment, despite their contributions to our standard of living
and our understanding of the universe, are “dynamically unstable,” that
is, subject to disruption that renders them ineffective or inoperable.
This is why so many obvious falsehoods spread by demagogues and science
deniers have taken such a strong hold on the minds and imaginations of
so many people, and why the systems of truth so often and so
maddeningly break down. How is it possible that so many people continue
to deny the reality of climate change? What in the world is happening
with QAnon? And Trump: how?
Preserving a commitment to the truth is hard because lying is easy.
Truth typically requires the underpinning of evidence, on matters both
large (evolution) and small (“I could not have been in that bar because
I was at home at the time with my brother”). Truth is indifferent to
our desires. It can be reassuring or terrifying, a confirmation or a
repudiation of our most deeply held beliefs. Often it takes some time
to explain.
Lying requires no work and has no limits. It demands no proof. Like a
magic lamp in a legend, it can grant every wish and fulfill every
desire. It can bend and shape itself to fit the circumstances of the
moment. It can fit tidily within 140 or 280 characters. Told often and
emphatically enough, lies can overwhelm the truth by raising questions
about whether there is truth. It takes effort to gather and report
actual news; it takes almost none to declare all inconvenient news
“fake.”
This is why authoritarians always view education, and higher education
in particular, as a threat. The fundamental job of the college or
university is to teach students to distinguish the true from the
untrue, fact from opinion, evidence from insistence. This is not to say
that colleges do this perfectly, that all or even most important things
can be unequivocally proved, or that all people on a campus will agree
on consequential truths. But an English major as much as a physics
major, an artist as much as an economist, should, if the college is
doing its job well, learn to understand the difference between
assertions supported or unsupported by evidence.
We need more people to attend college not chiefly because our economy demands it but because our democracy depends on it.
Those who want higher education to be more narrowly focused on the
vocational or who argue that we overvalue the importance of a college
degree underestimate the profound importance of this commitment to the
understanding of truth. Thomas Jefferson is a problematic figure, but
his warning that “if a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a
state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be” is
prescient. Jefferson was not cautioning against the absence of
vocational training or even of the ability to read and write; he was
cautioning against the absence of the ability, within a broad segment
of the populace, to recognize the difference between truth and lies,
between reality and authoritarian fantasy, and the incompatibility of
this absence with the effective functioning of a democracy.
Agrowing cadre of politicians and academics has argued in recent years
that the emphasis on increasing access to college represents a kind of
arrogant meritocracy that demeans the value of those who do not attend
college. This contention strikes me as misguided, as an easy excuse for
our collective failure to make higher education more accessible. Belief
in the importance of college completion is an act not of arrogance but
of civic responsibility. We need more people to attend college not
chiefly because our economy demands it but because our democracy
depends on it.
I don’t care whether people leave college arguing for or against
supply-side economics, for or against socialism or capitalism, for or
against a particular piece of legislation or public policy; I want them
to leave college knowing how to argue. Denied that knowledge, they are,
I believe, more likely to express their frustrations by tossing a rock
through a window.
Of course, learning how to perceive the truth is no guarantee of
respect for the truth. There will always be those, like Ted Cruz and
Josh Hawley, who know the truth but abandon it in pursuit of power and
self-interest. No college or other structure in society can prevent
this. Educating more people, however, might make it less likely that
such people are elected to positions of power. There is a reason Donald
Trump, in a rare moment of honesty, proclaimed, “I love the poorly
educated.” Without them he would not be president. This is not elitism;
it is the truth.
Before November’s presidential election I described Trump as an
“epistemological hand grenade.” On January 6 the world saw that hand
grenade explode on the steps of the United States Capitol.
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