Researchers conclude US university classrooms 'closed' to intellectual disagreement

Key topics:College syllabi often omit key critics, limiting exposure to debates.Case studies show strong bias in teaching race and Middle East issues.Philosophy courses on abortion show rare but notable intellectual balance..Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..BizNews Reporter .A working paper by scholars Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik argues that American college classrooms are failing in a central mission: forming citizens by exposing them to the great moral and political controversies of our time. In "Closed Classrooms? An Analysis of College Syllabi on Contentious Issues," the authors investigate whether students are being exposed to a broad range of intellectual perspectives or, instead, being insulated from viewpoints that challenge a dominant academic narrative.Their methodology is unique. Using the extensive "Open Syllabus Project" (OSP) database, which has collected millions of syllabi, the researchers analyzed how three contentious issues are taught. They identified "canonical texts" that have fundamentally shaped the debate on each issue and then checked how frequently these texts are assigned alongside their most prominent and reputable intellectual critics.The authors' central finding is one of "strong asymmetry". While influential, often critical, texts are "routinely taught," their most significant critics are not. Conversely, in the "comparatively rare" instances when these critical texts are assigned, they are typically paired with the canonical works they critique. .Read more:. The Oxford curriculum that all other universities need: Allison Schrager.This suggests that while a minority of professors do teach the full controversy, the "academic norm" is to shield students from "wider intellectual disagreement".The report details findings across three case studies: 1. Racism and the American Criminal Justice SystemThe study first examines Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, a foundational text in the modern debate on mass incarceration. The OSP database shows it has been assigned over 5,300 times, making it more popular on syllabi than Hamlet or The Federalist Papers.Despite its massive influence, its key scholarly critics are almost entirely absent. For example, James Forman Jr.'s award-winning critique, which challenges Alexander's core thesis, is assigned with The New Jim Crow in only 3.46% of courses. Other major critics like John Pfaff and Michael Fortner fare even worse, appearing less than 2% of the time.Instead of being paired with its critics, Alexander's book is most frequently taught alongside texts that reinforce its perspective, such as Angela Davis's Are Prisons Obsolete? and Ta-Nehisi Coates's Between the World and Me. The authors find a similar pattern with Coates's memoir, noting that in the top 100 most co-assigned books, there is not a "single reading" that fundamentally challenges his pessimistic account of racial inequality in America. 2. The Israeli-Palestinian ConflictHere, the authors identify Edward Said's Orientalism as the canonical text. A "godfather" of postcolonial studies, Said's work casts the West as an oppressor and has had a "singular influence" on how the conflict is understood in academia. It appears in nearly 16,000 courses.Yet, its most significant critics are virtually invisible. Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilisations (strongly recommended by BizNews columnist and long-time Oxford prof RW Johnson) is paired with it less than 5% of the time. Bernard Lewis, Said's most prominent intellectual foe, is assigned with Orientalism in only 1.12% of courses.The report finds that Orientalism is overwhelmingly taught alongside other works of critical theory by authors such as Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, creating an "interlocking and comprehensive attack on Western intellectual and political traditions". This one-sidedness extends to specific histories of the conflict, where texts by authors critical of Israel (such as Rashid Khalidi and Avi Shlaim) dominate, while balanced or pro-Israel scholars (such as Daniel Gordis or Efraim Karsh) are rarely assigned. 3. The Ethics of AbortionThis case study provides a notable contrast. The canonical text, Judith Jarvis Thomson's 1971 essay "A Defence of Abortion," is assigned over 2,500 times. However, the most common text assigned alongside it is Don Marquis's "Why Abortion Is Immoral," a prominent pro-life argument, which appears in 35.5% of the same syllabi.Furthermore, when Marquis's pro-life essay is taught, it is paired with Thomson's pro-choice essay nearly 75% of the time. The authors credit this greater intellectual diversity to the pedagogical norms of philosophy departments, which explicitly aim to teach competing arguments. Even so, the report notes that this balance is limited; more sophisticated, book-length pro-life arguments are almost never assigned. Conclusion: A Failure to 'Teach Our Disagreements'The authors conclude that these "closed classrooms" are a "problem we must collectively remedy". By shielding students from profound intellectual disagreement, universities fail to cultivate essential civic virtues like critical thinking and intellectual humility. This, they argue, ultimately undermines the pursuit of truth and erodes public trust in higher education..Read more:.How decades of fraud and corruption plague the University of Fort Hare.The report is not a call to include "disreputable demagogues" but to expose students to the full spectrum of "reputable and informed thinkers" who shape our most important public debates. The authors' final irony is that by evading political contention in the curriculum, universities have only intensified the "political war over higher education." The only way to restore public confidence, they conclude, is to "recommit themselves to teaching our disagreements".

Researchers conclude US university classrooms 'closed' to intellectual disagreement

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