Can Progressive Academia Tolerate Enclaves of Dissent?

I nside Higher Ed has published what appears to be an attempted hit piece on the University of Florida’s Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, calling into question the center’s political impartiality and spotlighting bad-faith claims that the center is one of several “beachheads for the ideological right” that have been established at public universities over the past decade.

The innuendo-driven article attempts to stir up controversy about the Hamilton Center’s origins. It quotes disaffected liberal professors who make a variety of complaints about the center: that the university already has similar degree programs, that humanities students are less employable, that the professors being hired by the Hamilton Center are conservative, and that the center’s creation was a “railroad job” engineered by right-wing politicians in the state legislature. The piece claims that the Hamilton Center’s founding and recent expansion have been “political by definition” because the center exists “at the behest of the anti-‘woke’ DeSantis and Florida’s Legislature.”

“You look at who’s there, who they’re hiring and what’s the buzz around the center, what other people are saying around the center, including other people who were instrumental in setting up the center,” a critical University of Florida professor says. “Should I just completely dismiss all that?”

The problem is that the Inside Higher Ed article, like previous hit pieces on the Hamilton Center (and its peer institutions in states such as North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arizona), offers no evidence that the center is an ideological initiative to indoctrinate college students with “anti-woke” ideology or right-wing politics — unless, of course, you think that studying thinkers such as Aristotle and Alexis de Tocqueville is inherently right-wing (perhaps some in progressive academia do). All that the critics have are complaints about the personal ideological leanings of the center’s faculty hires along with misguided (and hypocritical) objections that the center is not helping the university transform itself into a career-training program of purely instrumental value for job-seeking students.

Many of the Hamilton Center’s faculty hires have expressed right-of-center beliefs, true. But others have not. And unlike many progressive-dominated universities — with their mandatory diversity statements, thought-policing DEI offices, and cultures of self-censorship and ideological conformism — there are no political litmus tests at the Hamilton Center. As William Inboden, the center’s director, noted, one of the its goals is to “depoliticize higher ed” and focus instead on “cultivating academic virtues” (such as active citizenship) that are “upstream” from political life. From the center’s course offerings to its faculty hires, all the evidence supports Inboden’s assessment — the personal convictions of faculty don’t change that.

So why does the criticism keep coming? The answer is simple: The progressive academic establishment is loath to allow dissenters to transgress the echo chambers that they have spent many decades cementing at nearly all of the country’s elite universities. They cannot tolerate ceding an inch to those who don’t affirm the dogmas and doctrines of their faith: faculty-job applicants who refuse to write diversity statements, professors interested in teaching traditional approaches to the humanities instead of revisionism and critical theory, and students who refuse to conform their views to dominant campus orthodoxies. For them, retaining their ideological monopoly is a zero-sum game.

Progressive academics are threatened not because conservative-leaning or otherwise “heterodox” faculty will, as many left-wing professors have long done, seek to indoctrinate students by setting boundaries of political acceptability, placing limits on free speech, and teaching students what to think instead of how to think. Indeed, at institutions sincerely devoted to a liberal education — like the Hamilton Center — political indoctrination and groupthink simply have no place. Instead, the steady stream of attacks on the Hamilton Center indicates that many members of the academic establishment feel threatened by the mere presence of ideas and perspectives that challenge their own. The criticism, it seems, is rooted in the profoundly arrogant notion that it’s unacceptable for dissent from progressive doctrines to be given serious platforms in higher education — that conservatives cannot be allowed to teach and study alongside progressive professors as if their ideas are equally legitimate or worthy of equal respect. It’s an intellectually poisonous worldview, and the fact that the Hamilton Center’s very existence disturbs it is something worth celebrating.

Instead of doubling down on their ideological echo chambers, academic progressives should view the establishment of institutions such as the Hamilton Center as a welcome opportunity: a chance to engage in rigorous scholarly debate and expose themselves to the best arguments of those with whom they disagree. After all, the intellectual laziness that results from the shielding of one’s views from criticism helps no one — not conservatives or progressives (who are thereby unable to test, refine, and strengthen their own views) and not the cultivation of a robust campus culture of truth-seeking and free inquiry.

The Hamilton Center and similar institutions around the country are here to stay. Rather than push back, will academia’s progressives take the opportunity and welcome enclaves of intellectual diversity and dissent on their campuses? It would be in everyone’s best interests that they do so.