Limitless self-expression is not the essence of higher education
Miles Smith
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Events in the Middle East have fueled long-standing disputes about free speech on college campuses, with one side arguing that unfettered freedom of expression is essential to university education.
Even before the Israel-Hamas war, the libertarian Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression gave Hillsdale College, where I teach, a warning for not having what FIRE deems an appropriate commitment to free speech on campus. Hillsdale President Larry Arnn has since responded in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, emphasizing that education is not nor has it ever been predicated on FIRE’s ludicrous proposition that “unfettered freedom of expression is crucial to a university education.”
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No serious educational thinker has ever believed that limitless self-expression is the point of university education or even a useful exercise for the rightly ordered pursuit of the good, true, and beautiful. If free speech activists are going to weigh in on what makes a university, a quick look at how humans have pursued goodness, truth, and beauty for 2,300 years might be worth their time.
The ancients understood that education pursues the highest goods: leisure and friendship. These goods lead to the truest pursuit of knowledge and beauty. For that purpose, citizens need a specific type of education toward virtue. Aristotle wrote, “It is evident, then, that there is a sort of education in which parents should train their sons, not as being useful or necessary, but because it is liberal or noble.” Education rightly made students liberal and noble. It did not make them anything they wanted to be.
Since the 17th century, educational thinkers have likewise understood that education is fundamentally not about self-actualization but about acquiring the knowledge that makes humans more human.
John Locke, certainly a champion of tolerance in his era, nonetheless believed that men need education precisely because humans did not have a fully formed self-conception when they were born. He called this the tabula rasa, or blank slate. The point of education is not to find some undetermined potential self, according to Locke, but to become the virtuous humans we need to be. Students did not need a perpetually self-indulgent educational regimen but one that forced them to pursue virtue.
This was true of men as well as women. Mary Wollstonecraft championed women’s education at the end of the 18th century, not because she believed women needed to look inside themselves to learn something new, but because they deserved the opportunity to develop their minds as women. The women of the 18th century knew who they were and what they needed to become: the women who God and nature created them to be.
In America, Thomas Jefferson believed education was necessary for a free people to learn the practices of liberty and to pass those practices on to the next generation. Jefferson certainly believed in individual liberty, but this was not a kind of liberty that allowed “unfettered freedom of expression.” A young Virginian who wanted to self-express as a champion of George III would not have been welcome at Jefferson’s University of Virginia when it opened in 1819.
Jefferson hoped “that the instruction which may flow from [the University of Virginia], kindly cherished, by advancing the minds of our youth with the growing science of the times, and elevating the views of our citizens generally to the practice of the social duties and the functions of self-government,” would ultimately “ensure to our country the reputation, the safety and prosperity, and all the other blessings which experience proves to result from the cultivation and improvement of the general mind.” Education, for Jefferson, lay in making citizens who understood freedom. Liberal, yes. Self-expressive? Not at all.
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Nineteenth-century British theologian John Henry Newman, in his well-known treatise The Idea of A University, argued that education was less about making a man a philosopher and more about making him a gentleman. Newman believed there was an ideal type of citizen required to maintain ordered liberty and truth-seeking in broader society and that universities had as their mission to create that type of citizen. He wrote that if “a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society.”
In the latter part of the 20th century, the tyranny of the self made its way into universities and university curricula. Unfettered self-expression and the pursuit of limitless possible identities have become priorities for much of the American academy. This pursuit, however, is entirely inconsistent with the transcendent mission of the liberal arts and university education. A historical understanding of education, in fact, shows that limitless self-expression is, in many ways, one of the least important things a college might prioritize. While FIRE might have experience with unlimited self-expression, it doesn’t know much about liberal education.
Miles Smith IV is an assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College.