Clearly the values, philosophy, and ideology of faculty play a major role in determining what happens in HUMEC. But all these values are essentially the same, leading to wholesale censorship by omission of other ideas. This is a situation which the administration does not want to change.
April 1993 The Cornell American, pp. 5 and 17.
By Professor Richard A. Baer, Jr.
Censorship is a dirty word, especially among academics. But it’s alive and well at Cornell, notably in the College of Human Ecology in the departments of Human Development and Family Studies (HDFS) and Human Service Studies (HSS).
This may strike some of you as an excessive claim. After all, Cornell is a world-class university, and its College of Human Ecology is nationally acclaimed.
Obviously, faculty in HUMEC would not be so unprofessional as to tell another faculty person that she could not make some particular claim or could not assign a particular book for a course (although pressure towards politically correct thinking comes very close to this). Censorship at HUMEC is of a different sort. It is what has been called censorship by omission. And all the evidence I have shows that it flourishes in HDFS and HSS.
In the last issue of The Cornell American a student and I in separate articles referred briefly to such censorship and also gave details of religious discrimination in HUMEC. Here I would like to expand my earlier comments, and reflect on the significance of what is happening.
First a bit of background. Discussions of censorship in the liberal media over the past couple of decades have become almost surrealistic. There is something near comic about the fawning manner in which the national media hang on every word of People for the American Way, The American Civil Liberties Union, and the American Library Association when they release their “horror stories” of attempts by disgruntled parents (almost invariably Protestant fundamentalists or conservative Catholics) to get a particular public school to remove offensive books from the curriculum or the library.
I find such tirades amusing, because what these parents are doing clearly is small potatoes compared with the massive systemic censorship that goes on in government public schools, colleges, and universities—censorship that has the tacit endorsement of these same groups. Their complaints about fundamentalist parents are little more than a diversionary tactic to keep people from thinking about where the real thought control in American education can be found, namely in government operated schools and colleges that have monopoly or near-monopoly access to public monies.
Several things should be made clear about HUMEC. First, even the administration admits (how could they really do otherwise!) that the curricula in HDFS and HSS are not value neutral. That is no big admission, for no school or curriculum is value neutral, and a curriculum would hardly qualify as educative if it were.
But the administration is far less willing to grant that individual faculty as well as the curricula in these departments seriously discriminate against conservative Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others (particulars of such discrimination were presented in our earlier articles). This is understandable, for such an admission would require remedial action.
To be sure, there is some (but not much) willingness on the part of the administration to agree that individual faculty have been less than fair-minded in discussing particular Christian beliefs and practices. And the college’s remedy to this is, in effect, to admonish such faculty to be nicer to religious students. But such a remedy is inadequate. For the truly significant discrimination in HDFS and HSS is in the almost total censorship of serious consideration of traditional Christian and Jewish views of the family, human sexuality, child nurture, homosexuality, marriage, divorce, and other such sensitive topics. Dean McClintock has said that he will not choose faculty on the basis of their religious beliefs.
Clearly when the college is interviewing someone to teach chemistry or mathematics it would be inappropriate to inquire about the Candidate’s religious beliefs. And although an atheist could in many respects do a competent job of teaching about religion, he can never “get inside” the religion in the same way that a believer can, just as males generally are not the best people to staff women’s studies programs or whites African studies. It is important to remember that the decision to study religion only from a descriptive perspective is itself an ideological commitment.
Clearly the values, philosophy, and ideology of faculty play a major role in determining what happens in HUMEC. Faculty may be doing outstanding research and teaching, but what is communicated to students is not just science and facts, as at least one HSS faculty member seems to believe. The school is highly ideological, as any reasonably fair minded observer quickly sees. Indeed, if one views the sacred as did French sociologist Emile Durkheim, it is fair to say that these departments are currently pervaded with religion.
In his book Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, James Davison Hunter writes (p. 131) that what is at stake “are deeply rooted and fundamentally different understandings of being and purpose.” He continues: To put this in terms proposed by the French sociologist Emile Durkheim, what is ultimately at issue are different conceptions of the sacred. For Durkheim, the sacred was not necessarily embodied in a divine or supernatural being, the sacred could be anything that was viewed as “set apart” and “exalted”; anything that provided the life-orienting principle of individuals and the larger community. To know the nature of the sacred in each moral community is to know the source of their passion, the wellspring of their fervor.
For a significant number of HDFS and HSS faculty, the sacred appears to be what might be described as a liberal-progressive view of society, one deeply influenced by Enlightenment thinking. It is a view that tends to be antithetical to tradition, especially to traditional Christianity. It sees tolerance as one of life’s greatest goods (except when what is to be tolerated is a genuine competitor, in which case a certain intolerance apparently is appropriate). In viewing religion as an essentially private matter, it in effect marginalizes and disenfranchises Christians, Jews, and others who dare to believe that their views are relevant to the social and political life of the nation.
Durkheim helps us understand why faculty and administrators in HUMEC have so strongly opposed the idea of broadening the marketplace of ideas. Summarizing Durkheim, Hunter writes: “The reality … is that communities cannot and will not tolerate the desecration of the sacred.” Dean McClintock may not be opposed in principle to broadening the marketplace. But he and his colleagues do not want HUMEC to entertain a different concept of the sacred than what is now dominant. Science is not the determining factor. Ideology is.
How else can we explain the censorship by omission that are hallmarks of HDFS and HSS? Clearly, it has nothing to do with scholarship as such. Conservative Christian and Jewish scholars have produced books and journal pieces every bit as sophisticated as what is routinely written or assigned by HUMEC faculty. There is no lack of such material available.
The response I have heard is that HDFS and HSS basically are doing social science, and that material on the family, human sexuality, and so forth written from a Christian perspective is not appropriate for classroom use. This response also falls short—for two reasons.
First, if the goal of the school is “the improvement of family wellbeing and human welfare through education” (1969; a more recent publication refers to “everything that defines the quality of life”!), then why restrict course content to the social sciences? At the very least, students ought to be exposed to moral and philosophical discussion that would help them become more sophisticated about the nature of the social sciences and about how values and ideology affect what is researched and talked about in HUMEC, and also how it is talked about.
Second, this one sided preference for “science” is in this case itself an ideological commitment. Students taking my course “Religion, Ethics, and the Environment” (including HUMEC students) routinely find insights from the Bible, Augustine, Reinhold Niebuhr, C.S. Lewis, Stanley Hauerwas, and Thomas Merton at least as illuminating, interesting, and relevant for understanding the family and human interactions as they do much of what they encounter in HUMEC courses.
I find it more than a little depressing that most graduating seniors I meet from HUMEC strike me as singularly narrow in their interests and education. They sound more like the future bureaucrats and technicians many of them will become rather than what one would expect from graduates of an Ivy League university. There is a dreary, depressing, and almost totally predictable sameness about what these students say and think.
Let me comment specifically on just one of many items that might be mentioned.
(1) Most HDFS and HSS students I meet are thorough-going ethical relativists—at least in terms of what they say they believe. But they hold their ethical and metaethical beliefs in a naive manner, with almost no awareness of why such beliefs have been rejected by most professional philosophers and theologians.
(2) Many HDFS and HSS students (and even a fair number of faculty) are largely ignorant of the main ideas, beliefs, and values that have informed Western culture, particularly those shaped by Judaism and Christianity. They pride themselves on being open-minded, but generally do not know enough about Western religion to warrant their speaking at all on the place of religion in culture. Such ignorance is remarkable when found in students in a world-class university, and the prejudice it engenders will hardly equip them to take jobs in various social services, for religion remains important in the lives of a very large number of Americans.
(3) Conversations with HDFS and HSS students tell me that they have for the most part been exposed to only one side of many highly controversial issues, and often are given information in their classes that is distorted or outdated. For instance, for faculty to have claimed that 10% (or more) of American males are homosexuals has been irresponsible not just since the April 1993 release of the Alan Guttmacher study on this issue, which claims that only 2% have engaged in homosexual sex, and only 1% consider themselves exclusively homosexual. It has been irresponsible for years—not only because of the existence of various competent studies in the U.S. and in Europe that had previously confirmed a much lower figure, but also because it is common knowledge that the Kinsey studies which produced the 10% figure were methodologically indefensible and have been shown to be largely unreliable. That the 10% figure continued to be used so long had more to do with ideology than science.
(4) With respect to many controversial social issues, my experience with HDFS and HSS students is that either they have not been exposed to some of the best research that is available or they have not listened very well. Most still seem to think that it is largely irrelevant to the health and happiness of children whether they are brought up by one or two parents. Few seem to know of the solid. research that points to the advantages for children of maternal (or perhaps paternal) care over surrogate care. Hardly any seem to be familiar with the data that indicate that only sex education curricula that stress abstinence seem to be effective in reducing sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy.
(5) How many HUMEC students could tell you that as many as 75% of women with small children may be working outside of the home not because they want to but because of economic pressure? How many know much about the negative effects of high taxes on family life or have ever been told that if the 1948 personal exemption of $600 had kept up with inflation it would be worth over $6,000 today—an amount that would make it possible for families with, say, two parents, three children, and average home mortgage, charitable, and medical deductions to escape paying a penny of state or federal income taxes till they were earning over $40-45,000 a year?
Students in HDFS and HSS are being exposed to a highly ideological view of family life and human sexuality—liberal, pro-feminist, pro-gay rights, opposed to women as mothers and homemakers, negative towards pre-marital chastity, and so forth. It all sounds much more like indoctrination than education, at least to this observer.
The point at issue is not whether I or other conservative Christians or Jews agree or disagree with what HDFS and HSS are teaching. Even if I agreed with the great bulk of what is being taught, I would still object, for the curricula of these departments—particularly as taught by the present mix of faculty—are one-sided. They indoctrinate rather than educate. If nothing else, too many courses are boring to the inquiring and open-minded student.
The situation in HDFS and HSS is problematic from an educational standpoint. From a political standpoint, it is a disgrace. Let me elaborate.
It is a disgrace because HUMEC is a public, tax-supported institution that is being used by a small elite to foster its particular views of life and its social and political agenda, all the while suppressing competing points of view. The curriculum is so science oriented that the casual observer may altogether miss the underlying ideological agenda that is being pushed by a significant number of faculty. Insofar as the college offers no genuine opportunities for students to hear competing and countervailing ideas, the institution as a whole becomes a vehicle of social and political indoctrination.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that “to compel a man to furnish contributions of money for the propagation of opinions which he disbelieves and abhors, is sinful and tyrannical” (Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, 16 January 1786). That sentence alone should cause us to question the wisdom of a free society forcing citizens to pay taxes to support institutions such as the College of Human Ecology—at least as it now operates.
John Stuart Mill, perhaps the single most important liberal theorist on freedom, wrote in On Liberty: “That the whole or any large part of the education of the people should be in State hands, I go so far as anyone in deprecating…. A general state education is a mere contrivance for molding people to be exactly like one another; and as the mold in which it casts them is that which pleases the predominant power in the government, whether this be a monarch, a priesthood, an aristocracy, or the majority of the existing generation, in proportion as it is efficient and successful, it establishes a despotism over the mind, leading by natural tendency to one over the body.”
Should we worry about those fundamentalist parents who give grief to the People for the American Way when they protest the use of certain textbooks in public schools? Well now. If Mill is correct, we should rather focus our censorship concerns precisely on institutions like Cornell’s College of Human Ecology. That’s the kind of institution you need to dominate if you are serious about gaining cultural control in a pluralistic society.
My hope is that faculty and administrators in HUMEC will yet respond to such arguments as various students and I have made over the past few months in The Cornell American. It’s possible that HUMEC faculty will come to agree that fairness in a democratic society demands a greater diversity of ideas, and that it is imperative that the college hire a number of faculty who would be able competently to represent conservative Christian views in HDFS and HSS.
What can be done if faculty and administrators dig in their heels and refuse to meet these demands for educational and political justice? That’s not clear. Options probably include further writing on the subject, public protests of some sort, appeals to faculty and administrators from the larger university community, and appeals to university trustees.
At the very least, we will continue to try to open up dialogue with faculty and administrators in HUMEC. To date these efforts have proven fruitless, mainly because the administration in HUMEC has insisted that it will maintain full control over the time, manner, and place of any formal discussion.
If HUMEC’s administration had treated blacks, gays, or women in the way they have treated conservative Christians over the past two months, Cornell would have a major scandal on its hands.
But it still is not too late for constructive dialogue. Students are not asking for favors from HUMEC but are seeking a redress of debilitating discrimination and educational injustice. Thus it is inappropriate that the administration of the college seek to control such dialogue. It has not taken that approach with other minority groups, and it is not appropriate in this present case.
Opening up HDFS and HSS to a broader spectrum of serious scholarship on the family and human relationships will immeasurably strengthen the school academically. It will stimulate the intellectual life of faculty and students. It will better prepare students for careers in social service. It will be altogether more consonant with the American political compact.
But above all, it will be more just. And thus it should be done simply because it is the right thing to do, whatever the utilitarian benefits.
Professor Richard A. Baer, Jr., is a professor of environmental ethics and policy in the Department of Natural
Resources in the College of Agriculture and life Sciences.