Public reason has plunged into a state of emergency. Dishonesty, non sequiturs, and distortions of fact (the president prefers the term “truthful hyperbole”) are the disorders of the day. As under the totalitarianisms of the 20th century, the key institutions of public enlightenment — higher education and journalism — are impugned as “elitist,” “enemies of the people” that transmit hoaxes and “fake news.” Truth is condemned at the wave of a tweet.
This virulent state of affairs calls for a revival of democratic life, but also a course correction on the part of higher education. The university cannot content itself with the sort of cultivation that takes place in walled gardens. It must also engage with the miserable state of public reason. When reason is itself so besieged, the university cannot be content to marinate in defensiveness and self-pity. It is in a fight for its life. It needs a forward strategy.
In 1963, Clark Kerr, president of the University of California, declared that the American university had outgrown its previous ideals. The first was that of Father John Henry Newman, who in 1852 called the university “the high protecting power of all knowledge and science, of fact and principle, of inquiry and discovery, of experiment and speculation.” Newman’s university was not only a place of teaching and learning but also a platform for public enlightenment:
“It is the place where the professor becomes eloquent, and is a missionary and a preacher, displaying his science in its most complete and most winning form, pouring it forth with the zeal of enthusiasm, and lighting up his own love of it in the breasts of his hearers. … It is a place which wins the admiration of the young by its celebrity, kindles the affections of the middle-aged by its beauty, and rivets the fidelity of the old by its associations. It is a seat of wisdom, a light of the world, a minister of the faith, an Alma Mater of the rising generation.”
Kerr caricatured Newman, who became a cardinal in 1879, as a purist fuddy-duddy. In fact, Newman had advocated “a cultivated intellect” not only as “a good in itself” but also because it “brings with it a power and a grace to every work and occupation which it undertakes, and enables us to be more useful, and to a greater number.”
But Kerr triumphally noted that, by the time Newman wrote, his ideal was rapidly supplanted by a different model, the German, in which the solution of practical problems reigned supreme. In his eagerness to show how the contemporary “multiversity” was superseding both models, Kerr did not bother to note that both Newman’s model and its practical German alternative were predicated upon the value of reason.
Political nihilism eclipses reason. Power disdains thoughtfulness. In this state of affairs, the university is in a fight for its life.
Today, political nihilism eclipses reason. Power disdains thoughtfulness. Donald Trump offers no serious explanations for his decrees. He does not believe he owes “a decent respect” to the opinions either of mankind as a whole or to the nation’s own citizens. The party in power does not attempt to persuade. It proclaims.
Democracy and reason have an intricate and checkered history. Socrates, or rather Plato, thought democracy tainted by its origins as a revolt against oligarchy, rule by the wealthy. Avarice and extravagance overpowered order and reason. What resulted, Plato thought, was government “in which the rich have power and the poor man is deprived of it.” A society so radically unbalanced could not survive, and so the poor rose up to conquer the oligarchs and usher in democracy, equality, and absolute license. Now the people abandoned all respect for knowledge in favor of the endless pursuit of pleasure. The love of reason and honor could not compete, whereupon democracy, in turn, would degenerate into tyranny.
In Plato’s telling, democracy came about because “the poor … conquered their opponents,” the oligarchs. He admitted that democracy was “charming … full of variety and disorder,” but that it squandered its force in an excess of liberty, in unruly desire and the demolition of reason.
Plato was the original elitist. Reason rightly achieved was the prerogative of very few. But since Plato was not without self-contradiction, he also displayed an unacknowledged democratic face, for in the Meno he demonstrated that an uneducated slave boy, ignorant of the laws of geometry, could be taught them. That was education: to educe, or draw, deep knowledge from the darkness.
Kerr’s land-grant University of California was, in principle, a temple of faith in behalf of that slave boy (and girl). It was founded on the belief that the elite — the best — could be recruited from all ranks of society so that society as a whole might benefit. No longer would higher learning be confined to gentlemen’s clubs and ministerial training. The new state colleges would “teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts … in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.” Kerr quoted the historian Allan Nevins’s approving words: “Widening the gates of opportunity,” the land-grant university “made democracy freer, more adaptable, and more kinetic.”
In other words, democracy would be freer and more adaptable when more people reasoned. Indeed, modern democracy is a wager that reason, however clumsily exercised by multitudes, will succeed both in equipping the republic to transcend petty interests and in eclipsing any unreasoning tyranny over the mind. Freedom of speech, press, and assembly were central to what would, by fits and starts, become a democratic process, precisely because they enabled reason. They were, as Aristotle saw, the foundation of humanity’s standing as political animals. They belonged to the deliberative faculty of the soul. That was the democratic faith.
More than 50 years ago, in his magisterial attempt to comprehend the roots of McCarthyism, Richard Hofstadter identified the political, religious, and business currents that fed Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. But no sooner had Hofstadter published his treatise than those traditional currents were joined by new ones that would undermine the university and leave it exposed.
The authority of reason, always precarious, was weakened by the usurpations and absurdities of the nuclear-armed state and then Vietnam. Moral objectors reasonably asked: If instrumental reason could go so badly wrong, what good was it anyway? Even as higher education spread, the counterculture demoted reason in favor of feeling. So, from a different direction, did the upsurge of evangelicalism on the right. The ecology movement unmasked the depredations to reason produced by the impulse to dominate nature. And postmodern suspicions evoked corrosive mistrust of “the Enlightenment project,” now viewed darkly as a rationale for elite privilege.
Many in the university, whatever their politics, turned inward. Much of the academic left seemed to think that by getting its postmodern act together, it could dismantle oppressive ideologies altogether. Campus conservatives stood up for the literary canon but gave little thought to what the university could do to further public enlightenment.
More influential than either the postmodernists or the conservatives was a surging culture war on intellectuals. George Wallace had denounced “a select elite cult” of “social engineers” comprising “some professors, some newspaper editors, some preachers, some judges, and some bureaucrats.” Now mainstream Republicanism married Wallace’s racism to populist suspicion. Here’s Senator Robert Dole, a witty and intelligent man, in 1995 railing against “intellectual elites":
What we see as opportunity they see as oppression. Where we see a proud past, they see a legacy of shame. What we hold as moral truth, they call intolerance. They have false theories, long dissertations, and endless studies to back them up. But they know so much they have somehow missed the fact that the United States of America is the greatest force for good the world has ever known.
Around this time, technological improvements were creating a media ecology amenable to celebratory bombast and incendiary falsehood. Fox News, founded in 1996, arose to consolidate a burgeoning market for the eclipse of reason and evidence. In the view from Rupert Murdoch’s spin zone, universities had devolved into nests for fifth columnists. (To William F. Buckley Jr., of course, the barbarians had already crashed the gates in 1951, with their “superstitions of ‘academic freedom.’”) Bill O’Reilly sneered at “liberal indoctrination” by “pinhead professors.” The ferocities of radio, cable television, and the internet would shape an alternate cognitive universe catering to resentment and revenge. A whole interwoven tissue of falsehoods and half-truths was packaged for a public predisposed to believe that the world was rigged against commoners by a diabolical alliance of overeducated coastal elites and dark-skinned parasites.
Honesty in politics has long been embattled, but all the more so as modern consumerism and spectacle multiplied the arts of deception. America’s ideals were enshrined in Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Atlantic City, virtual worlds where glitzed-up confidence men thrived on the cognitive dissonance of a half-gullible, half-cynical mass uninterested in how assertion differed from argument and argument from opinion. As Hannah Arendt observed, “the audience to which … lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive.” In an audience that hemorrhaged confidence in almost every institution but “reality TV,” propaganda provided soft landings in comfort zones.
When even simple facts are obscured in a fog of ideological distortion, why should universities dim their lights?
What flourished alongside lies and falsehoods was bullshit. For decades television has spiced up the deceits of advertising and public relations, from the straight-ahead “nine out of 10 doctors recommend” to the soft irony of Dos Equis’s “the most interesting man in the world,” which flatters viewers that they’re so hip as to see through hard-core hype even as it games them. As Donald Trump and his ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz, explained to readers of The Art of the Deal: “I play to people’s fantasies. … People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and it’s a very effective form of promotion.”
This was an age when a major political party played fast and loose with the truth — the Saddam-al-Qaeda alliance! death panels! Shariah law! — and so onward and downward to that extraordinary moment in 2015 when the chair of the Senate’s Environment & Public Works Committee, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, thought to refute “eggheads” at “science laboratories” with a pseudo-experiment of his own by toting a snowball onto the Senate floor to show that global warming is some kind of hoax. Inhofe is not the fringe; he is the Republican mainstream.
Meanwhile, journalism, democracy’s chief instrument of public knowledge, is in financial distress and cognitive crisis. It’s important to recognize that newspaper circulation was already in decline before the internet swallowed its business plan. Today there are about half as many full-time reporters at American newspapers as in 1990. For the most part, online enterprises comment and don’t report; they don’t take up the slack. Facebook and Twitter circulate falsehoods to the gullible. Outlets like Breitbart specialize in insults, hysteria, hoaxes, and white supremacy. A sea of disinformation rises. Bullshit gains ever-increasing proportions of the gross national product.
Standing for cosmopolitan values in a world besieged by exclusivist nationalism and private interests, the university is like a wildlife reserve surrounded by encroaching deserts of provincialism, ignorance, and venality. Intimidated by a corrupted political system, the university hunkers down. The temple of reason hopes to take shelter behind the battlements. Recent statements in support of foreign students and refugees, and moves to declare sanctuary campuses, however symbolic, are encouraging. For the most part, though, the university seals itself inside a protective dome, yielding to the temptation to act as a safe space for a gravely embattled Enlightenment dream. It does not see the implosion of public knowledge as any of its business. It lobbies behind closed doors for kinder treatment, but it does not understand that, to discharge its public purpose, it needs a forward strategy.
A forward strategy — I use the word advisedly. Paradoxically, in this unfavorable climate, the university ought to enlarge its ambitions. In an anti-intellectual age, the university is needed for public education and needs to get good at it. It needs to go beyond MOOCs and occasional public forums; it needs to experiment with different ways and means. If the Morrill Act of 1862, which created land-grant colleges, recognized higher education’s responsibility for agricultural and industrial improvement, today we need a commitment to the improvement of the public’s intellectual life. I offer here only some modest suggestions.
Sponsor ambitious journalism. National Public Radio and Public Radio International are lifelines for intelligent commentary, and their jeopardy will only increase in the years ahead. Fortunately, many universities already help operate public television and radio stations. These will become only more necessary as the Trump administration moves to privatize the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
But more, why shouldn’t universities incubate nonprofit journalistic endeavors through partnerships with newspapers, providing journalistic muscle in the manner of ProPublica, whose staff of 50 working journalists pursues on-the-ground stories with (in its words) “moral force”? ProPublica prides itself on persistence — taking the necessary risk of drilling “dry holes” as the price for unearthing big stories. If state universities operate agricultural research stations to help farmers make improvements, why not journalistic research stations?
One encouraging local prototype is the nonprofit, nonpartisan, professionally staffed Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism, founded in 2009, housed at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and dedicated (in its own words) to increasing
the quality and quantity of investigative reporting in Wisconsin, while training current and future generations of investigative journalists. Its work fosters an informed citizenry and strengthens democracy. … The Center’s guiding principles: Protect the vulnerable. Expose wrongdoing. Seek solutions to problems.
Along similar lines is the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism, at the University of Iowa. With so many crucial decisions being made at local and state levels — consider, if nothing else, redistricting and voting restrictions — taking up some of the slack in local reporting is a matter of civic duty.
Wisconsin and Iowa are nominally public universities, though the taxpayer subsidy of state universities sometimes runs down into single-digit percentages. But why shouldn’t private universities recognize their responsibilities as well?
Stand up for science. There are many ways to put intelligence and political muscle together to defend embattled knowledge. One set of projects has been proposed by the 314action.org network (delightfully named for the first three digits of π). They are, in their own words, “members of the STEM Community, grassroots supporters and political activists committed to bring innovation to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education, aggressively advocate for real solutions to Climate Change, and elect more STEM trained candidates to public office.” They have announced an April 22 (Earth Day) rally in Washington.
Such a mobilization, to my knowledge, will be unprecedented. Even in the late 1950s and 1960s, when many scientists protested against nuclear weapons, the Vietnam War, and antiballistic missile defense; even in the 1980s, when Physicians for Social Responsibility mobilized in favor of a nuclear freeze — even then, there was no single collective action by scientists.
Put up billboards. When truth is at a premium, when even simple facts are obscured in a fog of ideological distortion and culture war, why should universities dim their lights? Whether it’s a question of crime rates; of autism and vaccines; of the actual incidence of voter fraud as opposed to Trump’s outlandish claims that millions of illicit votes kept him from a popular-vote victory; of the percentage of scientists who believe that extreme climate change is a human-caused menace; or of projected sea-level rises — universities should be in the business of promoting knowledge.
Public-interest advertising has proved its use in public-health campaigns. Why not also visible, day-in-day-out public education toward social and political health overall? Why not straightforward statements about baseline truths so often traduced? It will be charged, of course, that taking the side of demonstrable truth is partisan and unfair, that some truths are controversial. Indeed they are: That is why the clamor of ignorant veto groups must be resisted. Are our universities too cowardly to stick up for knowledge?
Universities subsidize research. Professors and students conduct it, debate it, revise it. They unearth and aggregate data. Why should they hide their lights beneath bushels? When fraudulent claims run rife, why not go public — very public — with truths? Despite what generations of postmodernists suspect, there’s nothing partisan about facts. (As the saying goes, you’re entitled to your own opinion, not your own facts.)
In the age of instantaneous electronics, the humble billboard may seem retro. Think again. Billboards stay put for a while. They can be organized in time sequences — Billboard A for one week, Billboard B for the next. A billboard campaign would make news. Let us see whether it really has been superseded as a medium of communications — or simply neglected because ad agencies can make vastly more money on TV and social media.
It goes without saying that these are only preliminary notions. If universities are as essential, as fertile, as entrepreneurial, as brimming with intelligence, as eager to think outside the box, inside the box, or plain without the box, as we claim to be when we are shaking the cup for donors, we need to exercise our imaginations to step up in what is not only an emergency for the republic but also an emergency for the future of public reason itself.
Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology and chair of the Ph.D. program in communications at Columbia University. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as a lecture at the University of California at Davis.
