Tag: Viewpoint

  • AI Can Help With Viewpoint Diversity Challenges (opinion)

    AI Can Help With Viewpoint Diversity Challenges (opinion)

    Viewpoint diversity and artificial intelligence are two of the most widely discussed challenges facing higher education today. What if we could address these two simultaneously, employing AI to create productive intellectual friction across different political and philosophical positions?

    Consider taking this approach: Whom do you ardently disagree with, philosophically or morally, but view as smart and rigorous in their analysis and arguments? I can think of one of my high school heroes, Ayn Rand, whose The Fountainhead I initially regarded as a powerful affirmation of creativity and innovation without knowing much about her deeper political ideology. This summer, I decided to read her collection of essays on capitalism, which I suspected I would disagree with at a fundamental level. Then I looked to AI. Could I engage Ayn Rand’s ideas through a large language model that would “disagree” with me, allowing me to experience intellectual friction with less at stake personally?

    I began my conversation with the chatbot Claude 3.5, asking it to play the role of Ayn Rand, by addressing her core argument: Capitalism is the only moral system because it honors the rights and liberty of every person to reap the benefits of their own creativity and effort without being coerced to give up some of what they have produced to “benefit” society. Here is how it went.

    Me: In your version of capitalism, how do humans/societies decide to produce something bigger than anyone could do alone? What if sending someone to the moon could never be coordinated through independent, voluntary contracts and instead requires some larger entity, like a government, to coordinate and incentivize? If democratic citizens vote to have the government organize a mission to the moon, why is that coercive?

    *Adjusting her glasses with a stern expression* (Stage cues provided by the bot)

    Rand bot: Your question reveals the very philosophical premises I reject. You speak of “democratic citizens” voting to achieve something “greater together”—but greater for whom? By what right do these citizens vote to expropriate the wealth of others for their collective fantasy?

    The fact that some men dream of reaching the moon does not give them the moral right to force others to fund their dream. If reaching the moon is truly valuable, let those who see that value risk their own capital, form their own companies and make voluntary contracts. Look at what private enterprises like SpaceX have achieved through voluntary cooperation and the profit motive!

    You present a false dichotomy between individual rights and large-scale achievement. The greatest achievements in human history—from the transcontinental railroad to the electric light—came from private individuals working through voluntary contracts, not government force. Even when multiple parties were involved, they chose to cooperate for mutual benefit.

    The moment you accept that it’s acceptable to violate individual rights for some “greater good,” you’ve accepted the premise of every dictator and looter in history. There is no such thing as a “right” to violate rights. A group’s desire, no matter how noble-sounding, does not trump an individual’s right to the product of their own effort.

    *Takes drag from cigarette* (more stage cues …)

    Would you care to explain why you believe some men have the right to enslave others for their collective goals?

    I was fully engaged at this point, and I wanted to expose her rigid thinking, so I raised the stakes.

    Me: Would you agree that public health might require a “collective response”? Let’s say that individuals acting independently have no incentive to invest in clean water, vaccines or databases that collect public health data. Is it better to allow millions of people to die from the spread of disease in the name of maximum individual freedom, or to have the government coordinate action to provide public health benefits to everyone?

    Rand bot: *Tapping cigarette ash with visible irritation*

    Your premise rests on the most dangerous of all moral fallacies— that the mere existence of a problem justifies the use of force to solve it. You speak of “public health” as if it were some mystical collective entity that supersedes individual rights. There is no such thing as “public health”—there are only individual human beings, each with the right to make their own decisions about their health and well-being.

    This back-and-forth went on for more than an hour, covering topics like innovation, market failures and unequal access to basic resources. I was worn out, so I closed the conversation.

    Me: I am arguing that humans can create mixed economic and political systems and that those systems can muddle along—imperfectly—and people may live with those compromises because they still have freedom while affording greater opportunity to their fellow citizens. You believe in an inevitable slide toward destruction and loss of freedom. I don’t see that slide happening in much of the democratic world. So compromise is possible. So I think we can work with this hybrid system—improve, find the right balance, and continue to advance a more perfect union.

    And then, “Ayn Rand” made her final summation:

    Rand bot: You want me to acknowledge that reality has not matched my darkest predictions. That humans have found ways to maintain significant freedom and progress despite what I see as moral compromise. And you argue that evidence matters—that decades of relative prosperity and innovation under mixed systems deserve consideration.

    I cannot and will not concede the fundamental moral principle: that force is force, whether applied by a dictator or a democratic majority. Your “muddling along” is built on a fundamental contradiction that I believe must eventually resolve itself—either toward freedom or toward force …

    I was impressed that the bot could articulate Rand’s core arguments, impersonate her direct writing and speaking style, question my own logic, provide specific examples, “reason” beyond the time and place of her original writing, and offer creative analogies (when pressed to explain the economic success of today’s welfare capitalism, she responded, “You are celebrating reaching the 2nd floor while I am pointing out that we could have built a skyscraper”). This was one of the most intellectually engaging 90 minutes I have spent in a long time.

    I wanted to check my reactions against the wisdom and judgment of one of our philosophy professors at Hamilton College, so I sent the entire exchange to him. He noted that the AI bot argued like a robot and relied too heavily on rhetoric rather than sound argumentation. Ultimately, the problem, as he sees it, is that “an AI Bot will never be able to genuinely distinguish between debating with the intent of ‘winning’ an argument and debating with the intent of arriving at a deeper understanding of the subject matter at hand.” It is also worth pointing out that debating across a screen, with AI or with friends and strangers, is partly why we are having so much trouble talking to each other in the first place.

    AI is not a substitute for what we learn in our philosophy classes. But there is something powerful about practicing our ideas with people across time and place—debating race with James Baldwin, asking Leonardo da Vinci to think about how we reconcile innovation with destruction.

    One of our faculty members worked with our technology team to create an AI agent based on thousands of documents and writings from our nation’s founders. At the end of this class on the founding of America, the students debated with “Alexander Hamilton” about the role of the central government, inherited wealth and his views on war. Perhaps the answers were a bit robotic, but they were based on Hamilton’s documented thoughts, and as our language models get better, the richness of the discussion and debate will grow exponentially.

    The best classes and teachers maximize learning by bringing opposing ideas into conversation. But we know that college students, faculty and many others in America find it very difficult to engage opposing views, especially those we find fundamentally objectionable. Ultimately, this must happen on a human-to-human level with skilled educators and facilitators. But can we also use AI to help us practice how we engage with difference, better formulate our arguments and ask deeper and more complex questions?

    AI can be part of the solution to our challenge of engaging with ideas we disagree with. If you disagree, try your argument with an AI bot first, and then let’s talk.

    Steven Tepper is president of Hamilton College.

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  • Okla. Instructor Put On Leave for “Viewpoint Discrimination”

    Okla. Instructor Put On Leave for “Viewpoint Discrimination”

    The University of Oklahoma put a lecturer on administrative leave last week for allegedly exercising “viewpoint discrimination” five days after a different instructor was placed on leave for alleged religious discrimination.

    Kelli Alvarez, an assistant teaching professor focused on race and ethnicity in literature and film, allegedly encouraged students to miss her English composition class to attend a protest in support of Mel Curth, a graduate teaching assistant in the psychology department who was removed from teaching after a student filed a religious discrimination complaint against her. Alvarez said she would excuse the absences of students who attended the protest. But according to university officials, she did not extend the same offer to students who intended to miss class that day to “express a counter-viewpoint.”

    “Immediately upon learning of the situation, the Director of First-Year Composition told students in class today and by email that the lecturer’s actions were inappropriate and wrong, and that the university classroom exists to teach students how to think, not what to think. The Director further stated that any student, regardless of viewpoint, would be excused if absent from class today to attend the protest without penalty, and that the lecturer had been replaced, effective immediately, for the remainder of the semester,” officials wrote in a statement Friday. “Classroom instructors have a special obligation to ensure that the classroom is never used to grant preferential treatment based on personal political beliefs, nor to pressure students to adopt particular political or ideological views.”

    Spokespeople for the University of Oklahoma did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment. An X post by the University of Oklahoma chapter of Turning Point USA, a conservative student group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, said that the chapter president, a student in Alvarez’s class, had asked to miss class in order to counterprotest.

    “Kalib Magana, student in professor Alavarez’s [sic] class and TPUSA OU president, asking to counter-protest was denied the same option unless a large, documented group could be organized,” the chapter wrote. “Kalib filed a report with The University of Oklahoma’s Equity Office for ‘discrimination of a viewpoint’ and freedom of speech violations Friday morning.”

    Hundreds of students, faculty, staff and community members rallied Friday in support of Curth, who is on leave after giving a junior psychology student, Samantha Fulnecky, a zero on a reaction essay assignment. In her explanation about the grade, Curth said that Fulnecky did not answer the assignment’s questions, that her essay contradicted itself and that it “heavily uses personal ideology over empirical evidence in a scientific class, and is at times offensive.” A second teaching assistant for the course concurred with Curth’s grade.

    Fulnecky fought back, appealing to the president of the university and the governor of Oklahoma, arguing that she was unfairly given a failing grade because her essay cited the Bible and discussed her religious beliefs. Though university officials said the grading dispute was settled last week, Curth was put on leave pending investigation after Fulnecky filed a formal religious discrimination complaint.

    The university’s TPUSA chapter helped whip the story into a social media storm. The news caught fire, offering something for everyone to comment on. Supplied with the full essay, assignment instructions and rubric, academics online debated how they would have scored Fulnecky’s essay. Others blasted her writing skills. Conservatives, including Fulnecky’s mother, used the story to fuel a narrative of persecution against Christian students by “woke” academics. “Individuals who identify as trans should be automatically disqualified from holding any position as teacher or professor,” one X user commented, which Samantha Fulnecky’s mother, lawyer and conservative radio commentator Kristi Fulnecky, reposted.

    Liberal commenters pointed to the incident as another example of genderqueer faculty being unfairly maligned and doxed. “Mel Curth should be reinstated,” a user wrote on Bluesky. “I’m sorry, but religious freedom does not mean you as a student get to write out a genocidal screed wishing for your teachers death & eternal torture.”

    During a meeting Thursday, the University of Oklahoma Graduate Student Senate passed a resolution calling for greater transparency and protection for graduate teaching assistants on leave and under investigation. The resolution also said that Curth was justified in giving Fulnecky a zero on the assignment and called on the university to publicly apologize to the professor for failing to protect her from the bullying and harassment the case has incited.

    The Oklahoma University chapter of the American Association of University Professors made a similar call to administrators, KOKH reported. “Disturbingly, OU has not made a public statement stating that it vigorously defends instructors, including transgender instructors, from harassment, discrimination, and even reported death threats,” the chapter told KOKH in a statement.

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  • The Push for Viewpoint Diversity Misses the Point (opinion)

    The Push for Viewpoint Diversity Misses the Point (opinion)

    Much of the controversy around the Trump administration’s “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education” has focused on its push for viewpoint diversity and the claim that open inquiry does not exist in our classrooms. That push builds on a long-standing conservative critique that today makes hay out of the fact that the vast majority of faculty in U.S. colleges and universities lean left.

    Recent data supports that claim. In elite institutions, like Duke and Harvard Universities, surveys suggest the number of faculty identifying as liberal exceeds 60 percent. The percentages differ not only by type of institution but by discipline, with the humanities and social sciences leaning more liberal than STEM. Some even claim that political bias corrupts academic disciplines.

    Liberal faculty and commentators on higher education sometimes take the bait and respond defensively to what often is a politically motivated attack. In an op-ed in The Guardian, Lauren Lassabe Shepherd argued that the purpose of the conservative critique has been “to delegitimize the academy … [and] return colleges to a carefully constructed environment not to educate all, but to reproduce hierarchy.”

    Whether or not she is right, you don’t have to look hard to see that institutions of higher education are feeling growing pressure to right their ships—to create campuses and classrooms where open inquiry flourishes, where students feel free to say what they think and to challenge ideas they disagree with. Colleges have responded by scrambling to incorporate more ideological diversity into their course offerings, to implement new programming and to recruit guest speakers who challenge progressive thinking.

    All this misses the point and distracts us from the work that needs to be done to further improve the quality of the education students receive in American colleges and universities. Put simply, instead of fixating on who is in the classroom and whether they are liberal or conservative, we should be focused on how we are in the room.

    Higher education’s greatest challenge to achieving open inquiry is not one of ideology or viewpoint diversity, but of disposition. Harvard University’s 2024 report from a working group on open inquiry gestured in this direction but did not flesh it out.

    If we are to truly commit to open inquiry, we need to step back, pause and reflect not just on what we think, but on how we acquire knowledge, how we think, whether we are interested in learning more or if we are content with what we already know.

    You can decorate campuses with all the colors of the political rainbow but not make them better places to learn.

    The issue is how we show up with others. Data suggests that students in our classrooms don’t feel comfortable pushing back on each other or on their professors when they disagree. They engage in what psychologists Forest Romm and Kevin Waldman call “performative virtue-signaling.”

    In conversations with students at Amherst College, we have heard that they are not just constraining their expression in academic settings but in social settings, too. It seems we are afraid of each other.

    It is no wonder. The academic and public squares have not proven themselves to be especially kind or generous as of late. We need look no further than the vitriolic reactions to Charlie Kirk’s murder, and the as-vitriolic reactions to the reactions to his murder. When we do, we can see that the rush to righteousness operates across the ideological spectrum.

    The work of college education is to dislodge the instinct to judge and replace it with a commitment to rigorous listening. The work of college teachers is to model an approach to the world that puts empathy before criticism.

    What if instead of just talking about the right to speech, we emphasized the right to listen? But we don’t just mean any kind of listening; we mean listening in a certain way. Deep listening. The kind of listening that takes in ideas in slow, big gulps and lets them settle deeply, and sometimes uncomfortably.

    It is listening that seeks to catch ideas in flight and carry them further. This is a disciplined kind of listening that resists defensiveness and instead burrows into curiosity.

    To foster it, we have to cultivate in ourselves and in our students a disposition to wonder. Why does someone think that way? What experiences, places, relationships, institutions and social forces have shaped their thinking? How did they get to that argument? How did they get to that feeling? How is it that they could arrive at a different perspective than I did?

    This is the heart of open inquiry, and it is much harder to achieve than it is to bring more conservatives to campus. Without the disposition to wonder, doing so will produce enclaves, not engagement, on even the most ideologically diverse campus.

    This kind of open inquiry would demand that we remove the stance of moral certainty and righteousness from our ways and practices of thinking. That is the real work that needs to animate our colleges and universities.

    It is hard, slow work. There is no magic bullet. Teachers and their students, liberals and conservatives, have to commit to it.

    While open inquiry is a social disposition, it is also about how we orient our thinking when we are alone. We need to challenge our students to wonder not just about others but about themselves.

    What would happen if we all got into the habit of asking ourselves: When was the last time we changed our mind about something? When was the last time we left a conversation or finished a text and actually grappled with our orientation to a subject?

    We yearn for our students to practice open inquiry not just when they are in our classrooms, but when they are in the library or in their dorm room with a book to read, an equation to solve, a painting to finish.

    The promise of this type of inquiry is exhilarating, freeing. And it opens up great possibilities of seeing the world differently or in more complicated ways.

    At the end of the day, the literary scholar Peter Brooks gets it right when he says, “To honor, even only nominally, the call for ‘viewpoint diversity’ is to succumb to a logic that is at its heart hostile to the academic enterprise.” At the heart of that enterprise is a belief that viewpoint diversity is not the same thing as open inquiry. That belief requires changing the culture of learning on our campuses.

    Maybe the shift does not seem responsive to the political clamor of the moment. Maybe it sounds like it demands too much and will be hard to assess.

    But whatever the case, it feels revolutionary to us.

    Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

    Leah Schmalzbauer is the Clarence Francis 1910 Professor in the Social Sciences and associate provost and associate dean of the faculty at Amherst College.

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