Universities are broken, say a group of academics, philanthropists, journalists and artists.
The fearless pursuit of truth, which we associate with universities, is at risk and so they have founded a new university in Texas and Philosophy Professor Peter Boghossian is among the founding faculty.
He has left his position at the University in Oregon to help start the new university of Austin and Texas.
It became impossible to teach philosophy, Boghossian told Jesse Mulligan.
Professor Peter Boghossian Photo: supplied
“This is about the university and students within a university being able to ask questions and inquire freely, and the faculty members not looking at the university as an ideology mill, but a place where they can come together to facilitate constructive dialogue about contentious topics,” he says.
This culture of open rigour is too often lacking now, Boghossian believes.
“We have people who are absolutely hell-bent on teaching people, they walk into classes knowing, or at least believing, that they know, that they have the right answers to moral questions.
“And then they test students on that to make sure that students have replicated or given back to them their own ideology. You do this enough and what you have is a faculty who call out people who don't agree with them.”
This is a slippery slope, he says.
“First, they came for the conservatives, and then they came from the classical liberals and then they came for me.”
He believes that there has been a shift towards teaching students that they shouldn’t hear another point of view.
“Because there's something fundamentally wrong with those arguments, in engaging with it the word they use is platforming, that you're giving those arguments a platform."
The intellectual technique of arguing against your own position is being lost, he says.
“That is a method that we have used since Socrates, the dialectic - counter examples.”
Absolutism has no need for dialectics, he says.
“When you think that you have the truth, you no longer rely on those methods. And you also no longer look to the scientific method of defined truths about the world. Why would you if you have your own ideology?”
Going back to Socrates, he says, the discussion about what knowledge is was characterised by a person not knowing something and therefore the person's belief is wrong.
“But now, if people have a difference of opinion, particularly a moral opinion, it's not that they don't know something, it's that they believe it because they're bad people.
“So, the whole way that we think about these problems has shifted … it's that people have these beliefs, not because they're ignorant but because they're just bad people. And once you start crafting that narrative, then you've really cemented your own doom.”
He hopes the new university will be somewhere free discussion can flourish.
“The hope is that is that we can make something new, that we can build something extraordinary. And I think we're doing that, we're building a university based upon freedom of thought, freedom of expression and classical texts.
“So, you don't read about what somebody else said about somebody else …you actually read, those translated classical texts.”
It will be an environment where student’s beliefs are challenged, and pushed back on, he says.
“Aristotle talks about types of friendships and he says one of the highest forms of friendship is people who like good conversation - the highest form of friendship.
“The highest conversation is between two virtuous people. And so, if somebody loves the truth, and someone wants to figure out the truth, and they value changing their own mind, they value discourse - that's the kind of institution we want to create. We want to create a shining city on a hill.”
