Discourse, Not Indoctrination

Fortunately, it’s rare to find a politician willing to discourage American students from pursuing higher education.  Yet, in this Republican primary season, we’ve found one such candidate in former Senator Rick Santorum.  Last week he speculated that Obama only wants more students to attend college because the universities’ “indoctrination…is one of the keys to the left holding and maintaining power in America.” Santorum’s accusation betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the American university.  Campus discourse is about a free exchange of ideas, not indoctrination.  Despite what Santorum may believe, colleges like Harvard are home to an impossibly broad array of political and cultural affiliations, which mix, mingle, and collide to give the campus its vibrancy.

There has never before been a time when so many different perspectives, identities, and political leanings have been present on the Harvard campus. We are home to Bible studies, queer organizations, religious associations, and labor-rights groups.  Even the faculty is more intellectually diverse than every. Our largest course, Ec 10, is headed by arguably the nation’s most prominent right-wing economist, Gregory Mankiw. The University is also home to left-wing luminaries like Roberto Unger. Perhaps the real issue at hand is that Santorum seems to consider the free flow of ideas to be malignant to society.  A university that fit his bill would likely be more prone to indoctrination than any current American university.  Harvard maintains a high standard of freedom, allowing a veritable intellectual Noah’s Ark to flourish on campus.

The fact of the matter is that things Santorum considers to be the trappings of leftism, like available birth control and respect for queer individuals, are in fact just the basic requirements of a decent, modern community.  Today, a majority of Americans support gay marriage, and unrestricted access to contraception has been the law of the land since, well, 1965. It is Santorum’s views that live on the fringe of the American ideological landscape. Our universities, while perhaps a couple notches to the left of the general population, are its intellectual bazaar. They are a cross section of our national community and are vital to our culture.

Yet, there is another troubling implication of Santorum’s statement. Considering that blue-collar jobs are disappearing from America’s shores, we must come to terms with the economic imperative of a highly educated workforce. Santorum, in discouraging students from pursuing higher education, has shown his willingness to sacrifice our economic welfare at the altar of right-wing extremism. President Obama is right: We need more, not fewer, students in higher education.

As evidence for his statement, Santorum mentioned a vague statistic that “62 percent of children who enter college with a faith conviction leave without it." Even if we are to take Santorum’s statistic at face value, it is hardly instructive. Correlation is most certainly not causation, and to presume that universities are faith-killers ignores the high possibility that other factors motivate the change. Perhaps the students who choose to leave home for college are generally less deeply religious than their peers. Or maybe 18-23 year-olds, regardless of higher education, become less religious than those below them in age.

Colleges aren’t places of “liberal indoctrination”, they are a great resource of intellectual freedom that play a key role in keeping the United States economically viable. In the future, hopefully Santorum will consider these sorts of things more heavily before making policy prescriptions.