Dear Provost Susan Jeffords,
I’m writing to you today to resign as assistant professor of philosophy at Portland State University.
Over the last decade, it has been my privilege to teach at the university. My specialties are critical thinking, ethics and the Socratic method, and I teach classes like Science and Pseudoscience and The Philosophy of Education. But in addition to exploring classic philosophers and traditional texts, I’ve invited a wide range of guest lecturers to address my classes, from Flat-Earthers to Christian apologists to global climate skeptics to Occupy Wall Street advocates. I’m proud of my work.
I invited those speakers not because I agreed with their worldviews, but primarily because I didn’t. From those messy and difficult conversations, I’ve seen the best of what our students can achieve: questioning beliefs while respecting believers; staying even-tempered in challenging circumstances; and even changing their minds.
I never once believed — nor do I now — that the purpose of instruction was to lead my students to a particular conclusion. Rather, I sought to create the conditions for rigorous thought; to help them gain the tools to hunt and furrow for their own conclusions. This is why I became a teacher and why I love teaching.
But brick by brick, the university has made this kind of intellectual exploration impossible. It has transformed a bastion of free inquiry into a Social Justice factory whose only inputs were race, gender, and victimhood and whose only outputs were grievance and division.
read more:
https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/my-university-sacrificed-ideas-for
Replies
I completely understand what the professor is talking about here: I have been in the school system for the last 7 years. I also agree that there are times that we need to regress in order to determine a new approach by which we impact the younger generations. However, with all that being said, I need to ask this question, "if all of us who don't agree with this type of indoctrination and lies leave the public square--like the schools, etc.--who is left to facilitate real change? I am not disagreeing with the decision of this professor at all. I am merely pointing out, like the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWII (to name a few) was the fight of our forefathers, liberalism, communism, critical race theory, and so on is our fight: the fight of the modern patriot. How do we fight it so as to impact the hearts and the minds?