Washington Post Op-Ed: To Save Themselves, Universities Must Cultivate Civic Friendship, by Robert P. George (Princeton) & Cornel West (Union Theological Seminary):
The war between Washington and our nation’s elite universities continues to heat up. From stripping federal funding from Harvard to targeting the accreditation status of Columbia, the Trump administration is delivering on the campaign it promised to carry out against universities that refuse to meet its demands.
As professors who have taught at institutions including Harvard and Princeton for many years, we have consistently encouraged universities to reject any demands or conditions that would compromise basic principles of academic freedom and freedom of thought, inquiry and speech. Nevertheless, as we have previously argued, elite universities themselves bear much of the responsibility for their current predicament. From fostering (or willfully looking past) campus intellectual climates poisoned by conformism, ideological homogeneity and groupthink to failing to take adequate action against harassment and other activities that undermine their core truth-seeking mission, universities have made themselves legitimate objects of scrutiny — and low-hanging fruit for an administration that is metaphorically out for blood.
We believe a fundamental reason for the decline of the pursuit of truth on campuses is the collapse in acknowledging the importance of civic friendship — which, following Aristotle, we understand to be the bond of mutual respect and willingness to cooperate for the sake of the common good, even across significant disagreements or divisions.
The cultivation and recovery of civic friendship must necessarily undergird any successful effort by universities to regain public legitimacy and the moral high ground. Here, we hope to provide some guidance for restoring campus cultures where faculty and students feel free to speak their minds and explore ideas, no matter how unpopular or controversial on or off campus they happen to be. …
[B]y taking steps to promote the authentic practice and cultivation of civic friendship, our universities can demonstrate that they are working to address legitimate criticisms — and that they take seriously their role to form citizens who understand that, if we are to maintain our pluralistic republic, we need to be able to talk to one another and disagree in a spirit of civility. Through such efforts, universities can strive to be nonideological incubators of our republic’s next generation of thinkers and leaders: people of courage, conviction and charity who recognize that a collapse of civic friendship will mean the eventual collapse of our shared civic order.
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