The GOP Loves Western Civ

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In this episode

Over the past decade, centers and institutes devoted to the study of Western civilization and American civics have popped up on numerous public university campuses. Typically backed by conservative lawmakers, versions of this concept have taken root at universities in Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee. In Texas, an entirely new private university, the University of Austin, now offers students a curriculum steeped in the study of Western thought.

At a recent live taping at SXSW EDU, Jack Stripling, host of College Matters, talked with Jacob Howland, the University of Austin’s provost, and Pauline Strong, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, about what this growing trend says about the politics of higher education.

Related Reading:

• How a Center for Civic Education Became a Political Provocation (The Chronicle)
• We Can’t Wait for Universities to Fix Themselves. So We’re Starting a New One. (Free Press)
• Billionaires Back New ‘Anti-Woke’ University (The Wall Street Journal)
• A New Birth of Freedom in Higher Education: Civics Institutes at Public Universities (AEI)

Guest:

• Jacob Howland, provost and dean of intellectual foundations at the University of Austin
• Pauline Strong, director of the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies and a professor of anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. Strong is president of the American Association of University Professors’ chapter at UT Austin.

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from the Chronicle. Lately, conservative politicians have had a lot to say about what college students ought to be learning. Generally speaking, there’s a push from the right for more classics, more American civics — and a lot less critical race theory and gender studies. Nowhere is this trend more apparent than in the rise of academic centers devoted to the study of Western Civilization. Over the past eight years or so, centers of this ilk have popped up on numerous public university campuses across the country — often with the explicit support of Republican lawmakers. For supporters, these centers represent a rightful return to the great books — the sorts of things college was theoretically about, before liberals allegedly hijacked the curriculum. To detractors, these centers are little more than safe spaces for conservative scholars and students, indulging in a narrow scope of study that plays down the contributions of women and racial minorities.
To better understand this trend, I recently invited two professors to join me for a live taping of College Matters at SXSW EDU in Austin, Texas. The panel included Jacob Howland and Pauline Strong. Dr. Howland is provost and dean of intellectual foundations at the University of Austin, a recently created private university that was founded on the idea of providing students with a curriculum that is steeped in Western civilization. Dr. Strong is a professor of anthropology and director of the Program in Native American and Indigenous Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is also president of the American Association of University Professors’ chapter at UT Austin, a faculty group concerned with academic freedom and shared governance. Dr. Strong asked me to clarify that she is speaking for herself and not for the university. Today, we’re sharing with you the session we taped at SXSW EDU, which was titled, Why is the GOP Gaga for Higher Ed’s Western Civ Centers? The session took place on March 4, and the audio has been edited for clarity and brevity. I hope you enjoy it.

Jack Stripling: Dr. Howland, let’s start with you. So about three years ago, the University of Austin came on the scene with a big splash. There was an announcement that this new type of university was going to be created. And it was announced as an explicit sort of response to illiberalism in the academy. Why do we need a place like the University of Austin? What’s lacking in mainstream higher education that makes this necessary?

Jacob Howland Well, let me take the question first on the level of curriculum. I think that a problem that has been plaguing universities for decades, and I say this because I’m thinking of an essay by Wendell Berry written, I think, in 1974, pointed it out. There isn’t really a coherent and unified conception of the curriculum. I like the image of civilization in general and Western civilization in particular as like a great oak, a tree, because it’s organic and because what comes later, what comes higher up is built on what’s below. And if I were going to talk about Western civilization, I’d say that you’ve got these very fundamental roots. One we could call Athens, which is, you know, Greek poetry, Greek philosophy, Greek literature, Greek politics, and the other, Jerusalem, that is to say, revealed religion, the Bible. And then, at some point, you know, maybe it’s the lower part of the trunk, you’ve got Rome, which actually is influenced both by the Greeks, whom they worshiped, and, you know, they extended their Greek philosophy, and they had the slaves teach them Greek, and they, you know, copied Greek statues, and so forth, and also influenced, obviously, by the Hebrew scriptures because Rome became Christian. And Wendell Berry in his article said that the university has come to resemble, not a coherent tree. (Drops mic) You can’t take me out. I’m sorry.

Jack Stripling For those who are just listening, Dr. Howland just knocked his microphone over. The esteemed Jacob Howland.

Jacob Howland Yes. Thank you. So where was I?

Jack Stripling: There was something about a tree.

Jacob Howland: The tree. So Wendell Berry says it’s like the branches have been lopped off, and they’re just sort of waving around in the air. Now why is this important? I think that one of the primary purposes of education is to address a question that I regard as fundamental to human existence. And one reason I regard it as fundamental to human existence is it shows up both in Plato and in the Bible. And the question is, where have you been and where are you going? And I believe that a coherent curriculum should provide students with an answer to that question. Or, and I mean, obviously, first you have to pose the question and you have to help students understand why it’s important. We live in a troubled age, an age of increasing complexity and difficulty. It’s important for us to know where we are. And then to answer the question where we’re going, it’s very important for us to know where we’ve been, because we have been shaped by this tradition. And now I’m speaking about the Western tradition. And so maybe I’ll stop there, just to reiterate. I think that universities could do a better job of trying to understand and trying to provide for their students a kind of coherent education that allows them to locate themselves in relation to the past and the present, and therefore to be able better to find their way into the trackless future.

Jack Stripling I am curious though, Dr. Strong, I think that this whole idea of creating centers devoted to this study is predicated on the notion that it’s not happening in quote unquote mainstream higher education. And you’ve been a professor at the University of Texas at Austin for a good long while, and I’m curious what you make of that. Do you think that students at UT Austin, a major public research university – do they have enough Descartes in their diet? Do you, are you satisfied with the level of classics that they’re exposed to?

Pauline Strong Well, I mean, I guess the question is, are they, do they get an education that has a center, right? That answers large questions about human existence? And to that, I would say yes. At a large public university like the University of Texas, students have very, very, different educational experiences, depending on what they major in. But they do all take a course, a signature course, that’s designed to introduce them to college in their first year, to introduce them to critical thinking. They all take six flags that introduce them to various kinds of skills. And two of those are cultural diversity and global cultures flags because we really believe that students in this day and age should be well-versed in both their own culture and cultures outside of theirs. So I do think that we educate students in a way that leads them to flourish, that leads them to contribute to society, but it doesn’t have the... the kind of homogeneity that was described for the Western civilization-centered education. And I absolutely think there’s a place for that. At the University of Texas, we have the Thomas Jefferson Center for Core Texts and Ideas. So students who want that kind of education can absolutely get it. But students who want to understand the Americas over thousands and thousands of years, who want to understand Mayan civilization and Aztec civilization and the civilizations of indigenous people in North America, how those were influenced over 500 years of European settlement, they can also get that education as well. There’s a lot of choice for students, but a common belief that education is a central part of a satisfying human life.

Jack Stripling I think, I mean, Dr. Howland, I see you nodding over there. But, at the same time, I feel like, and correct me if I’m wrong, that folks like yourself are saying, “No, this actually isn’t happening on major college campuses across the country. This type of education is wanting, and we have to fill this void with centers and institutes and even a new university.” I mean, which is it?

Jacob Howland Well, look, I mean, I’m not going to… I’m not at the University of Texas. I know that it is a major institution. I know that it is filled with highly accomplished scholars, with very promising students. I have no question that a student going to the University of Texas can get an excellent education. So I’m not going to spend my time criticizing your institution, Pauline, or any other institution. Let me shift a little bit over though, okay, because the real genesis of the University of Austin was the thought that education has, that the college experience has changed since, for example, I was in college. When I was in college, I mean, looking back, first of all, I went to college at 16, so I was already immature. Eighteen-year-olds are also immature. I made a lot, you know, I’m sure I said a lot of stupid things in class. And that was good because I had a lot of very intelligent peers and excellent professors and I was corrected. What I do not remember is ever thinking of something that I wanted to say and biting my tongue. And the data shows that the majority of students and in many surveys the majority professors have felt that they cannot honestly express in a public or semi-public setting like a class their own opinions over the last X number of years. And I think it’s probably hard to argue that there hasn’t been a politicization of the American university. Now, why is this important? The analogy I use is — well, before I tell you the analogy, it seems to me that you’ve got to make mistakes in order to learn. You have to say stupid things and write stupid things and then be corrected and that’s what’s called learning. So my analogy is if I told you that you had to learn to ride a bike but you can’t fall off, that would be very difficult for you to do. So we wanted to get politics out of the classroom – and let me be clear about what I’m saying – to transcend politics, that is to say to make sure that students were being presented with alternative perspectives, being able to engage in arguments. So if you’re studying economics, maybe you study Hayek and you study Marx, let’s say. So you set up debates. Students need an environment in which they could feel confident that they could speak freely. So for example, in our classes, with the exception of STEM classes where you might need to use your computer, no electronics. It’s not possible to record another student in a class or to record a professor or to post what they said. And in fact, if anybody were to do that, there would be penalties for them. So open discourse, intellectual pluralism, civil discourse, we felt that those things were the heart and soul of the great American academic tradition and we wanted to reintroduce them. So that’s really the sort of central conception. So I’m not gonna You know,

Jack Stripling I’m not asking you to pile on other universities. But I think that these institutes and centers have defined themselves in some ways against traditional higher education, or at least higher education as it exists today. I think that the need for it as espoused is that because the traditional academy is too liberal — and you’ve just raised this — perhaps hostile to conservative views. You know, I think the politics of this, there’s an expression in my business, follow the money. And I think that one of the questions that people have about centers and institutes devoted to Western civilization is, is who’s supporting them? There are occasions where there’s been bipartisan support of establishing these in some states. I can think of at least one. But by and large, this is a conservative movement. This is something that conservative lawmakers are pushing, that they wanna have adopted on college campuses across the country. We’ve done our own reporting on the Hamilton Center at the University of Florida. It was Gov. Ron DeSantis’ former chief of staff was somebody who played a huge role in pushing that early on. There’s been reporting in The Wall Street Journal about the funding for the University of Austin. Harlan Crow, who’s a major Republican donor and is probably known to this audience as somebody who’s given some gifts to Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court Justice; Bill Ackman, who’s a hedge fund manager who’s been really involved in the anti-DEI movement. These are funders at the University of Texas. Excuse me, University of Austin. There’s a little confusion there, University of Austin. So I am curious. You want to get politics out of the classroom, but it’s hard to separate the politics from this conversation. Why are conservatives so enchanted with this type of education?

Jacob Howland Well, you know, you’ll forgive me for sort of resisting your question, because for me it’s really about education. This is called SXSW EDU — not SXSW POL. What I want to say about these centers is, first of all, what you’ve said is on one level undeniable, right? They tend to be being plopped into state universities, yes. They tend to be supported by conservative politicians, yes. And frankly, you should probably be talking, you should address that question to somebody who’s actually been involved in founding one of those centers and maybe in the state legislature where this is happening.

Jack Stripling I think there’s a curriculum component to this that’s also political, though. That the reason that the curriculum needs reform, the theory goes, is that it’s been hijacked by the left. So I don’t see how we can not put the POL in the EDU.

Jacob Howland Well, look, okay, so let’s talk about politics with regard to the question of education. Now, surveys show that the American Academy in general is overwhelmingly left. That is to say, in the hard sciences, it’s something like three to one. I’m just talking about political affiliation, okay? And then when you go all the way down to various other sorts of disciplines, it can be 100 to 1, in some cases, 70 to 1. There was a big survey of liberal arts colleges and they found, I don’t know how many they took, but sort of top liberal arts colleges and they found in some cases there were literally no Republicans in anthropology or sociology. Now look, why do I think that matters? I think it matters for only this reason: Political affiliation is undeniably, to some extent, an index of intellectual diversity, okay? I can tell you that when I was at the University of Tulsa, people who didn’t have liberal left-wing views were simply not going to talk about certain subjects in the presence of their colleagues — like it just wasn’t going to happen. And what that means is that there is a kind of self-censorship. And so frankly, if we look at the institutional elements of advancing in academia, first you’ve got to get hired. And I can tell you that I’ve seen this, there are these kinds of political filters by some departments for who’s going to be allowed in. Then you’ve got to get tenure. And basically that means that you start thinking about your self-interest and perhaps adjusting your search or at least adjusting the positions that you take. And what that means is that the frame in which ideas, different sorts of ideas can be discussed and debated shrinks. And that’s not good for teaching and learning.

Jack Stripling So we hear a lot about the self-censorship of the conservative faculty member, and that’s part of the conversation we’re having here. I do want to ask Dr. Strong, though, some of this has happened in your own backyard. The Texas legislature has appropriated, I think, $6 million to establish the Civitas Institute at UT Austin. Why do you think that conservatives are so interested in this particular type of curriculum?

Pauline Strong Well, I can’t really speak to why conservatives are interested, but I can speak to the way mainstream education has been misconstrued. So I hold many of the same values and pedagogical principles as have motivated the University of Austin, as do many of my colleagues. So, we do believe in intellectual diversity. And since I entered the academy as an assistant professor in 1993, we have found ways to broaden the voices that we are listening to, the voices that are included in our curriculum. And students appreciate that. Students from all over Texas who come to the university, they are extraordinarily curious. They want to learn about the experience of their fellow students. They want to learn about the experiences of people around the world. And I think they benefit from having faculty members with a whole variety of backgrounds, a whole variety of intellectual specializations. I think that opens up the mind. It opens up discourse. And of course, to do that successfully, to look at points of view that are very different, whether it’s politically, or economically, or philosophically, a faculty member has to be really skilled. And I was part of a group of faculty members who got a grant from the Ford Foundation in the early 2000s to start a program called Difficult Dialogues. And we were one of 40 universities across the country that set up Difficult Dialogues programs. And what we did was train faculty and graduate students in how to lead a dialogue among students with very different views on very controversial issues in a civil and respectful way. And those courses continue to be taught, they’re part of the first year signature course curriculum. I teach a course called Cultural Identities and Differences, where I ask the students to read books that are really controversial, the book Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. The book Evicted about homelessness in the U.S. A book about migrant farm workers in Texas and California. And my students do have very different points of view about these issues, but they engage with each other with open minds and with open hearts. And I think that is a form of education that is really worthy of our democracy, of our multicultural democracy.

Jack Stripling I think that it’s interesting to hear two things being said here that in some ways sound like they’re harmonious, right? I mean, on one hand, we’re talking, you’re both talking about talking across difference. You’re talking about trying to get above politics. You’re talking about the great works. But then I’m picking up on little things from you, Dr. Strong, that I’m thinking a certain side of the political aisle would pounce. You’re talking about a curriculum that’s based in identity. You’re talking about a curriculum that might be described as smacking of identity politics. In my home state of Florida, there’s a piece of legislation that’s become law where they’re trying to do away with anything in the general education curriculum that includes identity politics. So do you feel like some of the things that you’ve taught and have been a big part of your curriculum over the last several decades or are now under scrutiny or even under attack?

Pauline Strong No, I’m not talking about a curriculum based on identity. I’m talking about a curriculum that takes identity into account.

Jack Stripling Help me understand the distinction.

Pauline Strong So we all have multiple identities, right? We all identify ourselves in terms of one or more nations, of one or more ethnicities, of one or more genders, in terms of sexuality, in terms of ability or disability, in terms of our relationships to family members. This is all part of the complex process of identity formation. And I do think those are important features of human existence. I think they’re very important to understand. But it doesn’t mean we can’t talk across those identities. And in fact, people don’t have identical identities because of this complex intersection of different ways of identifying with other people. So I think that it’s a field that needs to be understood, that influences education, that since the ‘60s we’ve been able to really expand in terms of what we take into account. So rather than being based in identity, I really would say we take identities into account. We also help students form their own identities. Students don’t come to college with a stable identity. They are looking to find out who they are, who they want to be, what path they want to take, who their people are. And I think we can help them do that by providing them a whole variety of ways of thinking about human existence, human values, human futures.

Jack Stripling I’m curious what you think about that. You know, I think one of the questions that was in my mind as we sort of put this session together was thinking about, okay, creating a curriculum is always an act of deciding what’s in and what’s out. I mean, you are making judgments all the time about what’s important to students. I think for a curriculum based on Western civilization or American civics, the question becomes, what are we not doing? What are your thoughts on that?

Jacob Howland Well, let me just say, I think that Pauline is pointing to a very important part of education. While you were speaking, and I don’t know if you know this, but Pauline is a cultural anthropologist. So again, not only were we talking about the Bacchae, but I was telling her in my limited experience in cultural anthropology, I’m interested in the sort of French structuralists who have written a lot, by the way, about Greek drama. And, as you were talking, I was thinking that, you know, if we look at the Greek experience, you’ve actually got something really complicated going on. First of all, the Greeks, and this is sort of Jean-Pierre Bernard and Claude Lévi-Strauss, divide up the world into these identity markers, okay? So, Greek-barbarian, male-female, adult-child, citizen-stranger, etc. Then you got this thing called Greek tragedy, when – comedy does this, too – which basically, as far as I can tell, and it certainly is illustrated in the Bacchae, which is a great play. Those distinctions begin to erode. They fall apart, right? Aeschylus has this wonderful play where these fifty women come, they’re being chased by these Egyptians, and they’ve been grown up in Egypt for a long time, and they come and they seek refuge. I think it’s in Argos. They claim to be Greek, right? And then the question is like, are they Greek or are they Egyptian? And, you know, so it’s all the mixing up. But then you’ve got somebody like Socrates that comes along. And Socrates is saying, well, yeah, but there’s another category here, which is I’m an individual. And I’m free. And I have the capacity to think about my own perspectives. Socrates is famously said to be in, but not of Athens, right? And so now, now we have, if we put that together, we’ve got a really interesting situation, which is the human situation. I mean, there’s no question that, you know, speaking personally of my identity: I’m a male and not a female, you know, I’m Jewish and not Christian, whatever. I can go through these things. My family came from this place and not that place, et cetera. But also I am an individual who has perhaps some claim on a kind of inner infinity, I mean, the religious way to put this is we’re made in the image of God. I have autonomy. I can make up my own mind. So there’s also the Socratic dimension. And I think a really robust education is one that would combine the kinds of things that Pauline is talking about — I’d love to sit in on the class — and, you know, this other dimension where we can sort of look at another way of thinking about this and bring in this question of, you know, individual liberty and things like this.

Jack Stripling So were the Greeks, practitioners of identity politics? This is news to me.

Jacob Howland Yeah, I mean, in some basic way, they were. I mean, look...

Jack Stirplin: We’re canceling the Greeks, everyone. It’s over.

Jacob Howland: There you go. No, I mean... I’m being a little humorous when I say that they were practitioners of identity politics, but your identity really meant something, right? I mean, you know, uh, you’re a Spartan and I’m an Athenian. I can’t move to Sparta like, hi, I’d like to live in Sparta. Get out.

Jack Stripling But this is interesting, because you’re suggesting that a tale as old as time is looking at people through lenses of identity and experience, and that seems to be the very thing that folks who are rallying around these centers are rejecting. What’s the disconnect there?

Jacob Howland Well, look, I mean, first of all, I would need to know a lot more to have any opinion on your claim that people who are rallying around these centers are rejecting that. It’s very possible that you’ve got people in these centers who are saying, we’re studying American life. What is an America? I mean, what is America? It is a melting pot. It is a country that’s full of immigrants. It is a country that has Native Americans in it. It is a country in which Native Americans, by the way, pride themselves — at least in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where you can go to the museum of the Cherokee people — on their military service and on their patriotism to this country. It’s a great example. We have a structure, a vision of what it is to be an American, of American politics and so forth that allows for this coming together. I’m hesitant immediately to accede to your claim that people who are starting centers of American studies are necessarily objecting to, I don’t know, the other or something like this or thinking in a particular way.

Jack Stripling Fair enough. I see some crossover between supporters of these movements and folks who are concerned about quote-unquote identity politics. And I’m probably making a generalization there. I understand that. You know, Dr. Strong, I’m curious, I think another piece of this is the notion that exposure to Western civilization is valuable because Western civilization contains some or most of the best ideas, and I wonder what you think about that.

Pauline Strong I think Western civilization is really, really broad, right? And I think it has some really, really great, inspiring ideas. And I think it has some really horrendous ideas. And I think other civilizations similarly are broad and have the good and the bad. I wouldn’t want to privilege Western civilization. It happens to be the civilization that the dominant culture in the United States has inherited, but we can interpret that inheritance in a whole variety of ways. And in order to interpret it and build on the best of it, we have to know it. So, this is one reason to understand history in its full complexity. The good and the bad and the ugly and the parts of it that make us very uncomfortable, the parts that may be considered to be divisive because we may have different relationships to that history. So, that is how I answer some of the attacks on the teaching of our racial history, for instance, of our history of colonization, et cetera. I really think it’s absolutely essential that we look at that history with clear eyes and understand how it’s gotten us to where we are just as much as the ideals of Western civilization have gotten us. And at the same time, I think it’s important to think about other ideals. So Western civilization is very much based on individual liberty and it’s something that we in the United States really prize. That is not a universal value across human history and it’s not a universal value in the world today. And I think we often have a very hard time understanding people who have more collectivist kind of values, who believe that human beings become their fullest when they are part of a group and are thinking about their relationship to the group. So I think it’s really important to understand Western civilization, to develop a critical as well as an appreciative perspective on it, but also to understand alternatives. And I truly believe the way forward needs to draw from all the alternatives that we have. I think we’re all agreed that we’re at a critical moment in human history. And I think we need all of the resources we can possibly muster to meet this moment.

Jack Stripling You know, higher education throughout its history has been known for different types of institutions that do different things. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. We’ve got great books colleges in America. We’ve got the University of Austin now. Are there things when you sat down among the founders of the University of Austin, you said, this is what we are and this is what we’re not? Because I still don’t feel like I’ve got a great answer of what’s not in the tree, sorry.

Jacob Howland Yeah, I mean, look, let me first of all begin by seconding Pauline’s major point here, which is, or major points, we are at a moment of crisis. More knowledge is better than less knowledge. We absolutely need to understand non-Western traditions as well. And let me also agree with her when she said that, like any tradition, there are good things and bad things. Look, we live in a world that is kind of, first of all, hyper-technical and technological. And we all know that AI is coming down the pike and we have no idea exactly what it’s gonna do to us. We know that we have, in the last 20 years, embraced certain technologies that have deleterious and detrimental effects on psychological health, particularly of young women, but also men. We know that that has had all kinds of consequences in terms of reading and so forth. We know that it has amplified the capacity for surveillance and censorship and things of this nature. You know, these are all growths. These are all outcomes of the Western tradition. And we don’t need to look far to see, to see why we would really want to understand our tradition in terms of bad things that have happened. Because somehow, somehow, and this is a major question, the liberalism and humanism of the 19th century gave birth to communism and fascism, which killed lots and lots of people and destroyed many, many lives. How did that happen? So let’s try to understand that. Now, to understand that, you gotta go further back and you gotta go and figure out, well, what about modernity? Because modernity was a conscious rejection of the pre-modern and an embrace of technology and an embrace of certain kinds of politics.

So I think we have to begin with sort of where we are in understanding ourselves. I, sort of the whole question — we could have a discussion that wouldn’t be particularly fruitful, comparing civilizations, saying, is this good? How much good is there? And how much is better than this, right? My claim is just, again, we have to understand where we are and where we’re going and where we came from. And so, that’s why we wanna begin with the West. Our hope is that our, and incidentally, I mean, I designed the Intellectual Foundations curriculum and we have some non-Western things there. I mean, one of my favorite parts about a course that’s going to be taught next term, we’re going to read Marco Polo, which I love. I don’t know how many of you read Marco Polo, but what’s really cool...

Jack Stripling I know the game in the pool.

Jacob Howland Sixty seconds on Marco Polo. His father and his uncle traveled all the way across Asia to meet Kublai Khan. Talk to Kublai Khan. Kublai Khan turns out to be a brilliant guy who is super interested in the world. And he says, okay, so this is your religion, huh? Go back to Italy, talk to the pope, talk to the bishops, have them come out and talk to me. And if we like it, we’ll all convert and we’ll be Catholics. Well, they went back but they never made it back. So then Marco Polo, here he is. He’s like. I’m going to make this trip. And it’s incredibly dangerous and incredibly crazy. So what you have is the Westerner Marco Polo, who is traveling, going out, and he goes and meets Kublai Khan. And Kublai Khan, he’s not going anywhere, but he wants to know everything. So he says, okay, Marco, I want you to travel around the world and bring me back reports, right? So it’s a really cool thing. But I had a big component of Chinese philosophy and Chinese thought, and I was convinced by a Chinese scholar that we shouldn’t implement that until we have the personnel who really know what the heck they’re talking about. I mean…

Jack Stripling But if somebody wants to study Eastern religions at Austin, they can?

Jacob Howland I hope that we will have the resources soon for them to be able to do that. I will tell you that we do have a club and we have a director of our program in Persian studies; Iranian studies. And she is teaching both ancient Persian to students and, now you may say Persian is Western, I don’t know how to even categorize that exactly, I mean maybe it is, but, and she’s also teaching Sufi mysticism. So there’s a lot of interest in this and I know there’s interest in Buddhism, and we have been interviewing people who can teach in that tradition as well. But we’re just getting started. We’ve got 92 students, you know, we have 18 faculty. We want to expand and we want to grow and, you know, with any luck someday we’ll — we’re never going to be the University of Texas, probably. I mean, maybe we will, but, you know, you guys have been around a long time and you have a huge, you know, you’ve got top scholars and everything. So, so, you know, but we want to move in that direction.

Jack Stripling Pauline, when we spoke before on the phone, we were talking about whether there’s a pocket of dissension within the country that is just concerned about certain approaches to studying the world, whether it’s post-colonial or postmodern or Foucault. How much do you think that figures into the broader discussion we’re having right now about where curriculum ought to head in higher education?

Pauline Strong Well, I think there are approaches in the academy that make people uncomfortable. So I’m a feminist anthropologist. And I study power relations between men and women and people of other gender categories throughout the world. And I study resistance to those power relations. And I think this is a very, very important part of anthropology. I think it’s a very important part of human life for people to understand the variety of ways that gender relations have been shaped. That is threatening to some people, because it does question…it questions male dominance. It questions, in some cases, taken-for-granted assumptions about the relationship between sex and gender and particular kinds of dispositions. So I do think that that kind of discomfort can lead to certain kinds of pushback or backlash. I think there’s been a similar backlash to teaching about colonial history, the colonial history of the West in relationship to other peoples, the peoples the West colonized, to the resistance of people to those processes of colonization. So there’s been resistance to decolonial theory and to whether students should learn that. And then there’s resistance to certain kinds of theories that go under the banner of postmodernism that question the notion of a singular truth or an empirical truth. That’s very unsettling to think in that kind of way. But it’s an important part of Western philosophy actually and it dovetails with some movements in Eastern religions as well. I do think we’re at a time where people… some people are seeking more certainty, they’re seeking more authority than what has been offered in some of our educational institutions. But I frankly think people should be exposed to as many possible ideas and make up their minds for themselves rather than offering students a set of privileged positions.

Jack Stripling Dr. Howland, to kind of build on that a little bit, you seem interested in everything from Marco Polo to identity to what have you. But I am curious about some of the things that Dr. Strong just ticked off, the study of gender, postmodernism, et cetera. You had mentioned before that some conservative faculty feel that they have to toe the line within the academy, take certain positions that are thought to be in keeping with liberal orthodoxy. Do you think those fields of study, those disciplines that Dr. Strong has talked about, contribute in any way to that self-censorship environment that you’re describing?

Jacob Howland Well, if they do, it would be because they would be at the expense of sort of other areas of study. I mean, they’re, you know, and again, I’m not an expert on all universities by any means, I was a long time ago when I was in college but... some fields and some departments in universities sort of have become dominated by those kinds of studies, perhaps to the exclusion of others. But let me say this though, I want this to be clear, if a student is going to study in our arts and literature center, they have to study postmodernism, postcolonial studies. Foucault, I read Discipline and Punish in college, I thought it was a great book, I learned a lot from it. I think that these are really, you know, again, This is part of the discourse today and we have to understand it. I think that a large part of our discussion is obviously sort of focusing on what should be studied, what needs to be studied. Remember, when I’m talking about the Western tradition at the University of Austin, we’ve been trying to make decisions about what every student needs to encounter and then they can go on and kind of explore these other things. So if you were to ask me, well, wait, hold on a second. Do you, in your intellectual foundations program where every student is studying, do you have postcolonialism? Do you have postmodernism? The answer is no. Do I think these things should be studied? Yes. I have even studied them, not by any means to the extent that Pauline has, but I’m not unfamiliar with these ideas. So I don’t know, let me stop there.

Jack Stripling Yeah, no, it’s fair enough. I think that, you know, part of what I hear a lot, not only about faculty self-censorship, is the perception that among conservative students, the feeling that the academy is somehow hostile to their views. And I’ve viewed places like Austin or some of these centers as places that are in some ways billing themselves as safe havens for people who have conservative viewpoints. And I wonder whether you think that a young Trump voter who goes to Austin or one of these centers and goes to a class that is steeped in discussions about the meaning of the Constitution, for example, is that student going to feel more welcome than they might at another type of university?

Jacob Howland Well, they might feel more welcome, but let me flip it around. Will students who aren’t Trump voters feel welcome in our classes? And the answer is yes, we have students on the left. We have faculty on the left. There’s a young woman who is explicitly on the left. She writes for our student newspaper. We have a substack. She wrote a beautiful article. But I should also say, by the way, just to give you a flavor of our students before they even started their freshman year that is over the summer in July and August they put together a plan and launched a sub stack and the first issue was on the question: what is the university? And she wrote an article and it said look you know if you’re on the left don’t be afraid of the university of austin you know you should come here you should study here and we need students on the left because we want to hold the University of Austin to its promise that they are transcending politics. that you will be comfortable here if you’re on the left. And she’s been quite outspoken, in fact, and she’s certainly not the only one, by the way. And again, she’s not the only faculty member. I very much welcome this. I think that it’s extremely important for students from any background — and we have kids with blue hair and stuff — I mean, it’s not, this is, you know, this is not, like I know there can be a perception of like, well, only conservatives are gonna go there and that’s not the case and it’s not what we want. It’s not what we want.

Jack Stripling You know, one of the things I’m curious about is the sort of future that we might see if this idea catches on in more places. And I’ve mentioned this to both of you. I guess I’m low-key concerned, as somebody who cares about higher education, about a system in which we have a sort of ideologically segregated higher education system — that we might move toward a place where conservatives go to one school and liberals go to another. And I know that’s not what either of you want, but could that be the byproduct of this movement? Why don’t you start, Dr. Strong.

Pauline Strong Well, the American public university has been a kind of leveling agent for decades. If we go back to John Dewey’s notions of democracy and education, that education is essential, civic education is essential for citizens to function in a democracy. And a university like the University of Texas is intended at scale to provide an education for the citizens of Texas. And of course the whole, you know, UT system, the A&M system, we have a lot of institutions that do this. I think critical to that enterprise is that students across the political spectrum are in classes together. I don’t think a segregated form of education is good for the republic. I don’t think it’s good for students.

Jack Stripling You mentioned we’re in kind of a polarized time or a fractured time at one point. What’s the role of higher education at that moment?

Jacob Howland Well, look, I mean, I have to agree with everything Pauline just said, a healthy institution. Well, let me back up. I don’t know how many colleges and universities we have in the country. I think it’s around 4,000, okay? And if somebody wants to have a university: this is the Islamic University of California, great. God bless you. This is a Christian university, great. This is a university, the University of Marxism or something. That’s fine. Let a thousand flowers bloom, you know. But then there are all these schools…

Jack Stripling I thought we already had The University of Marxism. Isn’t that what this was all about?

Jacob Howland I don’t know, you tell me, Jack. You’re the moderator, But then there are all these universities that don’t stake out like that identity, right? We’re not a Christian school or we’re not, you know, we’re nonsectarian or whatever. And in those schools, I think it is extremely important to have intellectual diversity and therefore also, I think, political diversity. I mean, just like diversity, diversity of perspectives. We individuals, you know, reality is this enormous thing and the smartest of us have, are like the blind men with the elephant, you know, we have a little view. And so how do you learn? You gather together lots of people who are dedicated to getting at the truth and bringing their perspectives. You teach them how to have a civil conversation, not to shut each other down, and to argue for their views and to entertain counterarguments. And that’s what you do, and that’s how you learn. And that’s what we want at the University of Austin.

Jack Stripling A great note to end on. Thank you both for having a civil conversation with us across difference. I really appreciate it. Maybe not that much difference as it turns out. But thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you both.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our Chronicle producer is Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez. Our podcast artwork is by Kattrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.