Citizenship Education and Speech in the College Classroom: What's the Real Problem?

• Author: Brighouse, Harry

Visit the website of any major selective American university or college and you'll see promises not just to make students more economically productive, but also to make them into better citizens. Harvard College aims "to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society. We do this through our commitment to the transformative power of a liberal arts and sciences education" (Harvard 2021). Princeton's motto is "In the Nation's Service and the Service of Humanity" (Trustees of Princeton University 2021). My own institution, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, calls itself "a public university guided by public service." The civic mission of higher education traces back at least to the 1862 Morrill Act, which established the land-grant universities, but is periodically reinforced, at least rhetorically, by politicians and college leaders.

Some might think that higher education shouldn't have a civic mission: pre-K through 12 education, which after all is free and universal, should have taken care of ensuring that young people are good citizens (Martin 2021). If all democracy required was citizens who vote their interests then, conceivably, high schools could take care of that. But for democratic institutions to survive and thrive requires a critical mass of citizens who can, and are inclined to, engage thoughtfully and respectfully with one another across sometimes quite wide differences of opinion and belief; who are disposed to be magnanimous when they prevail in elections and to be gracious in defeat (Levitsky and Ziblatt 2018). The pertinent skills and dispositions don't develop organically and can easily atrophy. They need to be fostered well into adulthood.

The task would be daunting in the best of circumstances. And we are not in the best of circumstances. U.S. politics are highly polarized, and the U.S. population is politically fragmented into echo chambers and epistemic valleys. The politically active (including elected politicians themselves) are increasingly disengaged from those with whom they disagree, and opposing sides increasingly see themselves as battling against, rather than thinking with, one another. Although in the country as a whole the national vote is fairly evenly split, with Democrats normally getting just small majorities in aggregated national vote counts, counties are increasingly solidly Republican or solidly Democratic; when people move, they tend to move to places where their political affiliations are widely shared. Alarmingly, whereas racial, religious, and cultural tolerance have all increased markedly over the past fifty years, tolerance of supporters of the opposing party has declined dramatically. A poll asking adults whether they would be "disturbed" if their child married a member of the opposing political party in 1960 found that fewer than 5 percent of supporters of either party would be; in a similar poll in 2010 33 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered yes to the question (Pew Research Center 2014).

These outcomes, though in a sense shocking, should not be too surprising. The deliberative infrastructure, as we currently experience it, is not optimally structured. Social media seem to facilitate, and possibly encourage, false belief (about relevant empirical facts) while simultaneously discouraging calm, engaged, reasonable discourse. The incentives built into the political process, especially (but not exclusively) in a voting system designed to ensure that only two parties can realistically compete, are to emphasize rallying the base over winning hearts and minds. The design of state legislatures combined with the low quality of the politicians they currently (and, for all I know, always did) attract does little to facilitate responsible public deliberation. An anecdote might illustrate: a friend who spent exactly ten years in a state legislature told me that, during that decade, deliberation--that is, a debate in which any legislators entered the room either open-minded or open to having their mind changed--occurred exactly once in the chamber. The issue debated on that occasion was one about which members of neither party had a fixed view and about which the unreflective prejudices of many legislators failed to give a determinate answer. (1)

In the face of such a background, we shouldn't think of education as the solution: the multiple structural and cultural causes of polarization and fragmentation are beyond the control of schools, colleges, and universities. But optimists think that colleges and universities can do something, thanks to various distinctive characteristics. When students attend a selective college, they usually enter a more socioeconomically, racially, religiously, and even politically diverse environment than they experienced in high school or at home. Whereas in most countries college involves studying just one academic discipline (or, sometimes, two closely related disciplines), in the United States students take numerous breadth requirements, ensuring that they have classroom contact with students whose interests diverge considerably from...