Editor’s note: The following statement by Heather Mac Donald appears in a RealClearEducation survey of experts on the campus speech climate.
The core mission of a university is to pass on our cultural inheritance from one generation to the next. There is a vast body of knowledge — of history, literature, art, the foundations of science, and the constitutional traditions that have lessened the threat of arbitrary, tyrannical power — that students lack and that universities should feel an urgent necessity to provide. Free speech and open inquiry can aid in that mission by allowing received errors about the past and present to be corrected. But to put free speech and open inquiry at the heart of a university's mission risks distracting attention away from the fact that students are graduating from college with their ignorance largely intact, and risks portraying the university as a debating society rather than the place where the past is curated and preserved.
This piece originally appeared at RealClearEducation
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Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor at City Journal, and the author of the bestselling War on Cops and The Diversity Delusion (available now). Follow her on Twitter here.
This piece originally appeared in RealClearEducation