Opinion | Can We Guarantee That Colleges Are Intellectually Diverse?

Erin Crust, a junior who called herself progressive, said that students in the program’s classes “tend to be about half conservative and half liberal.” She is aware of her professors’ views, but not constrained by them. “I’ve definitely written papers from perspectives that I know my professors disagree with and still gotten an A,” she told me.

Is the point of a university education simply to provide students a forum in which they can air their political views, no matter how poorly informed? Of course not — and one reason that some students are reluctant to speak in class is because they are confronted, for the first time, by information that undermines their pre-existing assumptions. So how can professors keep exposing students to uncomfortable facts — because that’s our job — while encouraging them to speak their minds and hear out arguments they find outrageous?

It would help to ditch the assumption that political labels appropriate for cable news apply neatly to academia. In some cases, conservative funders are, indeed, buying academic platforms to promote policy interests. The case of Arizona State is different. Its foundation was partisan to a troubling degree, but the outcome is a Great Books-style program that is not particularly oriented toward policy — instead, it emphasizes “old-fashioned” intellectual methods. “A big thing I like, as opposed to other political science courses I’d taken, is that they focus on teaching through classic literature, reading entire primary texts rather than textbooks or fragments of texts with other people’s analysis,” Ms. Crust said.

Like any method of studying the past, a Great Books program has shortcomings and works best if it includes dissenting perspectives. But this approach is not inherently loyal to Republican ideology and can be an empowering course of study that liberals neglect at their peril. They often forget that plenty of Great Books are among the foundation stones of their own political tradition. Progressive heroes ranging from Jane Addams to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. were indelibly shaped by Great Books educations.

Mr. Garcia, the historian who left Arizona State, said he welcomes courses in the Western canon — as long as students also have exposure to other methods of studying human experience. “I’ve taught de Tocqueville — I’m not threatened by that,” he told me. What worries him is the way that conservatives seem determined to carve out independent intellectual fiefdoms that exclude other approaches to history and literature. At Arizona State, he said, “they were the ones who were actually hostile to diversity.”

It’s crucial that we teach students how to compare different intellectual methods, to assess the strategies that people use to interpret evidence about the past and present — strategies that may or may not correlate with political commitments. This is intellectual diversity done right, and it is the way to avoid the hazard of false equivalency between arguments that really are not equivalent. Not all ideas deserve admission to academic discussion on equal terms, if at all. I would never allow students to cite a book by the amateur Christian historian David Barton or the anti-vaccination activist Jenny McCarthy as reliable scholarly sources — not because of their politics, but because they misrepresent evidence.

Shifting the conversation from political labels to the methods people use to learn and argue about the world requires liberals to scrutinize themselves, too. “We need to be more precise with our terms, and ask for definitions,” Mark Urista, the Linn-Benton Community College professor, told me. “You often hear, ‘We need to do X because it’s an issue of equity.’ I say, ‘Can you define equity?’ And people can’t do it. We need to be upfront about some of the conceptual frameworks we use in our discussions and pedagogy. I’ve noticed that diversity workers on our campuses use a ‘power, privilege and oppression’ framework that comes out of critical race theory. I’m fine with using that lens, but it’s not the only lens.”