The university should, if it is to fulfil its duties of educating students and engaging in research, be a place where all ideas can be expressed and debated, It should be a place where both the students and the academic staff are intellectually challenged and also an environment which doesn’t just impart practical knowledge, but also encourages the life of the mind for its own sake.
But to even begin to approach this idea of what the academy should be, there is one thing that ought to be in place and that is for both students and academics to be exposed to political, cultural and artistic views that they may be either unfamiliar with or which they may find challenging. There should be no place for groupthink in academia.
Unfortunately, groupthink is what many on the Left seem to want these days. Gone are the days it seems when being confronted with alternate views was a normal part of the higher education system, now, in the West at least, we have ended up with universities that are characterised by being a monothought clique.
A good example of this monothought clique in action and the smears and other questionable tactics that the Left use to keep control of the political narrative comes via the US publication The College Fix and concerns Rutgers University in New Jersey. According to the College Fix, the university authorities caved in to demands from students to rescind an invitation to Lisa Daftari an Iranian born journalist who has been a critic of Islam.
The campaign against her by the Left used smear tactics to paint Ms Daftari as a hateful individual and an ‘Islamophobe’. The College Fix report said that Leftist students took comments from Ms Daftari out of context and used them to smear her reputation and thereby get her banned by university authorities from speaking at the university. Apparently the university gave no reason for the banning but later climbed down over the banning issue due to massive public and media pressure being put on them. The university seems to have realised what a PR disaster this silencing of an alternative voice has caused and has backtracked and offered Ms Daftari speaking engagements at a later date.
However. Ms Daftari is not happy with the response from the university and she believes that the university has not done enough to investigate fake or misleading or out of context quotes that student Leftists used to paint her as ‘an Islamophobe’ and as hateful. She believes that this damages her reputation and that the university did not look into whether the accusations were real or fake which they really should have done.
If the university authorities did indeed ban Ms Daftari without checking whether what she was being accused of could be verified then they look like cowards in the face of aggressive left wing students and that is not a good look for any institution of learning. If what Ms Daftari is claiming is correct, then this university, by silencing a voice that a portion of the students find challenging, has abandoned the idea that all voices should be heard in the academy. This sort of censorship, forced on the university by leftists who have no moral qualms about smearing opponents and short changes the whole university community, students and academics to only have viewpoint on display.
I want institutes of higher education to contain a diversity of ideas even though some of those ideas may be bloody awful because it is only by creating an environment where ideas can be debated and concepts challenged that good ideas can drive out the bad. The sort of academic environment which the Left are creating is one in which it is all too easy for bad ideas to flourish and they will flourish because they will not be challenged. It is incidents like this which have caused some commentators to refer to American universities as the ‘least diverse place in America’ and everyone should be alarmed at what is happening to learning environments which should be more intellectually and politically diverse than they currently are.
