CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Dodging Dogma: Moving to Higher Ground in Higher Education

Image by Nathan Dumlao.

Do universities need to foster more intellectual diversity among professors? Should there be affirmative action for conservative thinkers in disciplines such as sociology and social work? Asked less often, but just as relevant: Should business schools and economics departments hire a few socialists?

This long-running debate intensified in Trump’s second term, as MAGA forces ramped up attacks on any challenge to right-wing populist politics. Unfortunately, a principled question about the appropriate mix of ideologies in a faculty has been twisted to advance political goals.

Rather than offer policy recommendations for institutions coping with this mess (because I don’t have any), I want to speak in favor of intellectual diversity for individuals (because we all need to remember to keep an open mind). In my three decades in academia, I saw too many professors hang on too tightly to the conventional wisdom of their intellectual gang rather than entertain new ways of thinking.

My teaching career provides several examples of the dangers of dogma, on all sides.

For seven years, I was a Faculty Fellow in the Division of Diversity and Community Engagement, which was the DEI unit (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) of the University of Texas at Austin until a state law eliminated it in 2024. “Faculty Fellow” just meant that on top of my day job (teaching in the School of Journalism), I received a bit of funding for local projects, primarily to help launch a community center.

I enjoyed the community work but found that lots of people assumed, incorrectly, that they could predict my political positions from my association with the division. But I never fit comfortably on either side in the culture wars in higher education, a status not unique to me. I’m not suggesting I was a model professor but rather that reactions to my work show the dangers of dogma.

The politics of teaching

The first task is to clarify the relationship between intellectual work and political advocacy. Avoiding subjects with political implications is impossible in the social sciences and humanities. (Journalism departments are trade schools that include scholars drawing on both traditions; I taught about media law, ethics, and politics.) By political I don’t mean partisan battles but competing claims about human nature, a good society, and the distribution of wealth and power—questions that can’t be resolved by evidence and logic alone. Teaching is not merely politics, but there’s always an underlying politics to teaching about human affairs, whether acknowledged or not.

Second, while scholars in the natural sciences strive to identify laws of nature, there are no laws of human affairs. We search for patterns in a complex world, looking for clues about people and societies, but we shouldn’t pretend to be laying down the law of anything—people are more complex than particles. In........

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