Forget “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” In higher education, what happens at Yale, stays at Yale.
This spring, the Ivy League school made waves by issuing a report on “trust in higher education.” The faculty-led review was unsparing, finding that Yale had acceded to “pressures toward conformity, intimidation, and social shaming.” The report urged every department to confront its “intellectual and methodological commitments,” the “range of scholarly approaches represented on its faculty,” and “the diversity of perspectives in its curriculum.” The authors also urged Yale to gauge whether the school is willing to hire and admit people with “dissenting or underrepresented traditions.”
For academics, this language is a searing indictment — one that applies to virtually every college in America. Such refreshing honesty gave outside observers hope that higher education is on the verge of rediscovering ideological diversity and vigorous debate, foundational elements to a college education.
But a May 5 faculty meeting at Bucknell University, a well-regarded school in central Pennsylvania that’s emblematic of the broader collegiate landscape, poured cold water on that dream. The meeting was attended by about 200 professors, including Fr. Paul Siewers, an associate professor of English literary studies and my co-teacher in a course on the history of conservative thought. Prior to the meeting, Fr. Siewers had submitted a motion for consideration by the faculty — a proposal that ought to be utterly unobjectionable.
Fr. Siewers requested that the faculty establish a committee to study “trust in liberal arts education,” playing off the title of Yale’s report. As an Orthodox priest, he comes from what the Yale faculty described as “dissenting or underrepresented tradition,” and he and I have both witnessed the “range of scholarly perspectives” narrow at Bucknell over the past two decades. Fr. Siewers hoped to convince our colleagues to acknowledge that Bucknell has a problem. More accurately, he wanted them to acknowledge that it’s worth asking whether Bucknell has a problem. If Yale could do it, couldn’t we?
And so, mid-meeting, Fr. Siewers stood up and formally made his motion. He asked that the committee be established and filled with “senior tenured faculty who are not administrators.” And he requested that such a committee be as “inclusive as possible of diverse philosophical and cultural views.”
What ensued was scandalous silence.
Not a single faculty member seconded the motion, ensuring Fr. Siewers’ motion wasn’t even discussed. They simply sat there, apparently unwilling to countenance the idea of a campus-wide self-examination. I missed the meeting because of a fundraising trip to New York, but had I been present, I would have raised my hand to advance the motion to a debate and then a vote. Even so, based on the silence that met Fr. Siewers, it seems all but guaranteed that the motion would have been overwhelmingly voted down.
This is not the first time Fr. Siewers has had such an experience. In 2022, after the University of Chicago enacted its vaunted free-speech principles, he made a motion at a Bucknell faculty meeting to adopt them. Once again, his motion wasn’t even discussed. It was indefinitely tabled and has never been revived.
FACULTY POLITICAL BIAS IS EVEN MORE WIDESPREAD THAN WE THOUGHT
What’s happening at Bucknell — or, rather, what isn’t happening — doesn’t matter only to a small university in rural America. The deafening silence from the faculty suggests that despite the newfound honesty at institutions such as Yale, the typical campus has little desire to admit the error of its ways, much less choose a different path. The academy is comfortable in its ideological conformity. Why rock the boat?
But the ship of higher education is already sinking. It has lost the trust of Americans, nearly two-thirds of whom now say a college degree isn’t worth the trouble. It is also losing colleges themselves, with many shutting down in recent years and 400-plus expected to follow in the next decade. If higher education is going to right itself, it must recommit to its purpose of forming minds to think independently and lead courageously, not follow the ideological herd.
Charles Mitchell is an adjunct instructor at Bucknell University and co-founder and CEO of the Open Discourse Coalition.