What the University Should Be
(Obviously this isn’t a fully-fledged speech — I wrote one, but John Tomasi’s comments convinced me that it could use some work and I don’t think one needs to read the entire thing. I also realized there was pretty much no way I’d be selected as student speaker and ultimately didn’t even try.
My main point lies here, however, and this part, I hope, works well enough to communicate an idea or two).
In his inaugural piece for the Heterodox Academy in his capacity as President, “Curiosity U.,” John Tomasi suggests that we need to straddle the line between the “overwarm[th]” of “social justice” and the “icy companions” of truth. The university should embrace viewpoint diversity and encourage its students and researchers to say and publish what they wish without fear of institutional reprisal or mass-character assassination from their fellow students (our faculty) that disallows a civil conversation or the opportunity for realizing the error of one’s ways and earning redemption. More importantly, the university should nurture students’ curiosity, encourage our sympathy towards, or care for, our fellow human beings, and train us to think critically.
We are young. We are seniors, and trust me, that's hard for me to believe. It seems like just yesterday I was sitting in Mary-Louise Gill's Ancient Philosophy class and feeling the wonderment and aporia – the state of realizing you don't know something and being, well, stumped – that Plato's Apology taught me. That's the wonder of the university – we come into an oasis, with knowledge abounding, but with a more important purpose as well. The faculty, imperfect purveyors of knowledge, are here to induce that aporia, smile indulgently at our confusion, and help us take the next step. Once we realize that we don't know, we are ready to begin learning, and assembling knowledge that may be of use to us in leading our lives with dignity, and to others in trying to bring about a more just society. We have taken steps, but we are not done. We may never be, but that doesn't mean we can't try to take action, so long as we recognize that we shouldn't take any ideas for granted, and that we should always be curious, and care about what happens to our fellow human beings. We can do that, as products of a university that has as its telos not truth, or social justice, but what I will call knowledge-based social justice : a telos that encourages conscientious consideration of all possibilities, from all perspectives, of alleviating injustice. It's just doing what we can to bring about social justice, and doing so in a spirit of camaraderie, that recognizes, per Haidt's psychological analysis, that we all have different personalities and observations to bring to the table, and thus, together, we'll understand more and be able to bring about social justice more effectively. When I suggested this conception of social justice to Jeremy Waldron, he agreed, and called it a scorecard. We just need to do what we can to rack up points in progress towards making our society a better place for its citizens, and we can learn this ethic – pursuing knowledge and wisdom in a spirit of intellectual humility and sympathetic curiosity – at a university dedicated to fostering in its citizens a knowledge-based social justice that prioritizes the search for knowledge and ability to think critically but ultimately works towards making the world a better place. It may sound naive, and God knows I used to scoff at it, but Brown has changed me. If it's naive to hope that we can change the world for the better, naive to think that we should come to the university and be gently reminded to be curious and to care as well as to hone our ability to think and argue, naive to think that we have a purpose in what we learn at university beyond doing our jobs and leading our lives for only ourselves, a purpose that turns us towards others and leading a life of meaning, then let me – let all of us – remain naive for the rest of our days.