My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey and her co-author Jeffrey Polet have written an essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education called “Indoctrination Sessions Have No Place in the Academy.” The heart of the essay is, I think, these paragraphs: 

True, many people also understand the university as a place where social justice should be learned and practiced, assuming that we agree on what social justice is and what it requires. But a simple thought experiment highlights the problem with this view. Can we imagine other institutions whose intrinsic purposes are to promote social justice? Of course we can. Hundreds or even thousands of such institutions exist: think tanks, businesses, social clubs, Facebook groups, and nonprofits of all sorts.

Can we imagine, by contrast, other institutions where the free exchange of ideas is valued and promoted as an end in itself? Certainly many other institutions — journals, publishing houses, public-interest groups, advocacy groups, and foundations — engage in the “ideas business.” But these operate on the basis of largely predetermined agendas and shared values. They do not tend to be interested in freewheeling conversation or debate about first principles. A foundation that exists to promote religious liberty, for example, will likely not be enthusiastic about questioning the legitimacy or importance of religious liberty itself.

Only a university invites the contestation of ideas in a ceaseless effort to get at the truth. Free inquiry is, therefore, intrinsic to universities — extrinsic to other organizations. Social-justice efforts can and do take place at universities, of course, but universities could exist without them and still retain their fundamental character. Without the free contestation of ideas, universities would lose their central animating purpose, their raison d’être. 

I think this point — a very MacIntyrean point about the goods intrinsic to a given practice — is correct. “Trainings” or “training modules” that remove disagreement and even mere inquiry from the environment are intrinsically anti-intellectual and anti-academic. The pervasiveness of such “trainings” — I can’t use that silly word without scare-quotes — raises many potential questions, but the one I want to ask today is simply: Why do universities do this kind of thing? 

Here are my answers: 

First, academia is a world that is not just strongly left-leaning but also profoundly sensitive to media attention, and the media have agreed that One Must Do Something about social justice (vaguely but recognizably defined) — so a university can create these online click-through slide-shows and say See? That’s Something. 

But why that particular Something? In the American university, the predecessor to these Diversity/Equity/Inclusion/Justice endeavors was the need to educate faculty and staff in the legal implications of Title IX. That was especially important at institutions (e.g. the one I work for) with ugly histories in these matters. So online click-through slide shows were made to train us — the word is quite appropriate in this context — in the nuances of Title IX law. And then when the next big problem rolled up … well, why not do the same kind of thing? 

And here comes what I believe to be a vital but neglected point: Universities don’t usually create their own training modules — they buy products from companies that specialize in that kind of thing. And those companies want to save money by reusing their old code. So they extract the content of their Title IX courses and simply stuff new content into the existing frameworks. Easy-peasy. And the upper-level administrators of the university, who don’t want to spend any more money on such projects than they have to, accept the Frankenstein’s jury-rigged monster they’ve been handed. 

But that creates a big problem: the kind of structure needed to communicate to people the contours of a law and the expectations generated by that law is not the kind of structure needed to explore the moral development of a community. It’s just not; it can’t be. As Corey and Polet write, “When the training involves ‘tests,’ the tests usually have only one right answer. The ‘correct’ button must be clicked before one can ‘successfully complete’ the training.” Inquiry and reflection are prohibited by the code. 

All of which leads me to one final point. The re-use of code designed to elucidate law in the very different context of communal values introduces ambiguities — ambiguities that actually might be useful to administrators of a certain cast of mind. 

Imagine that you’re working through a module on Title IX. You’re presented with a scenario in which you’re asked to choose among several possible actions. You click on one option and are told that that option could in fact land you (and by extension your university) in very hot water. You are told to go back and pick another one. The inflexibility of the code exhibits what we literary scholars like to call “imitative form”: it imitates the non-negotiability of the law. 

Now imagine that you’re working through a social-justice module. You’re presented with a scenario in which you are asked to respond to someone’s complaint they they are the victim of an injustice. You click on one option and are told that it’s wrong. But wait a minute, you say to yourself, I don’t think it’s wrong — I think the one you tell me is correct would not in fact contribute to a more just community. But there’s no way for you to say that. There’s nothing to do but choose the answer you’re told is correct. 

This is an experience that might lead you to certain questions about your responsibilities as an employee of your university. Do you have to do what the module tells you is correct? Would you be punished if you failed to — maybe even fired? What are the consequences of dissent? What might be the consequences even of asking questions? Nothing in the module itself, or in the university’s presentation of it, addresses these matters. You’re just told: Do as we say. 

But you keep thinking about it. One possibility is that the administration is just hoping that everyone will comply with the demand, because then they can say to the world, See? We’re doing Something. It might be that disciplining recalcitrant employees is more than they want to deal with, since any employee so disciplined could take legal action the outcome of which would be uncertain. But they don’t want to say that. They don’t want to admit that there will be no consequences for the disobedient, because that would reduce compliance. But, heck, maybe they don’t even care about compliance, they just want to be able to point to the creation and distribution of the “training” as evidence that they’re supportive of the current imperatives. 

Maybe. But, you reflect, the ambiguity is susceptible to a less consoling interpretation. It’s possible that the administration wants you to get this message: Nice tenured position you got there. Shame if something happened to it.