Last week, Minouche Shafik, the president and ostensibly the leader of Columbia University but of late not famous for showing actual leadership, wrote an op-ed entitled “Universities must engage in serious soul searching on protests.”
As if to remind us just how out of touch she is, the piece was published in the Financial Times — a great newspaper (it better be since they want $900 a year to subscribe) but not an American one and not one with wide readership in the only nation that matters in this conversation. But then, I’m sure Minouche views herself as “a citizen of the world.”
Relying on a “common good” standard … is a cheap way of sounding as if you stand for all that’s good and true.
She touches on all the platitudes of the day: “free speech,” “activism,” “dialogue,” “enabling conversations,” “bring(ing) a multitude of perspectives together,” “rebuild(ing) the bonds within ourselves,” “shared values,” etc. I mean, if you had a bingo game of the mind-numbing word salad of academy-speak, everybody would have won. (READ MORE from Ross Kaminsky: Dumping the Term ‘Bidenomics’ Isn’t Enough for Joe)
One other topic that Ms. Shafik must find of paramount importance (because it emerges in her first sentence) deserves a deep dive. I quote that sentence in full: “When I was inaugurated as Columbia’s 20th president on October 4, 2023, I called for strengthening the bond between universities and society through a recommitment to academia’s contribution to the common good.”
Paraphrasing the wisdom of Inigo Montoya, I do not think that phrase (“the common good”) means what she thinks it means.
The fatal conceit of believing that one knows what the “common good” comprises (much less, as Hayek explained, that one can “shape the world around him according to his wishes”) is far more prevalent on the left; conservatives are not immune to it but the intellectual narcissism involved in such pronouncements is typically found in the Democratic caucuses in Congress, among leaders of major left-leaning foundations and think-tanks, on the editorial pages of most big-city newspapers and, of course, in the offices of college and university administrators.
But beyond clean air and water, avoiding nuclear war, and rooting against the Oakland Las Vegas Raiders, there cannot be such a thing as a common good because there is not, and will not be, near-universal agreement as to what is good. Indeed, if there is anything that recent protests should demonstrate to someone whose life has been as impacted by them as Ms. Shafik’s has, it’s that there is no such “common good” agreement on almost any major subject of the day.
I’ll run a few issues by you. Ask yourself, “Do I think I know what’s truly ‘good’ here?” and “Am I confident that almost everybody else agrees with me?” Honest people will find many confident “yes” answers to the first and a dominance of “no”s to the second.
- Abortion
- Aiding Ukraine
- Raising (or lowering) income taxes
- “Canceling” student debt
- Who should win the next presidential election
- Expanding Medicare
- Increasing education about African-Americans in K-12 education if it means less teaching about others whose achievements may have been more important
Each of these questions — and endless more you might think of — goes beyond just politics or policy. For most people these questions have significant moral content or implications for fundamental principles and worldviews.
So what is to be claimed about the “common good” on such issues … on almost all issues? The only honest answer is “there isn’t one.”
And since there isn’t one, what does it mean that the president of one of the world’s most elite educational establishments believes there is, and further that it is her job to promote it?
I very much doubt that Ms. Shafik’s conception of “the common good” is limited to clean air and avoiding a nuclear winter. Perhaps she believes more gauzy ideas like “talking instead of fighting to work out problems” fall into the “common good” category. But even if true that seems an exceedingly narrow mission for the highest of higher education.
Still, I doubt that’s what she means.
She means what too many professors and most 20-year-old students with Guiness-World-Record levels of strong-opinions-not-justified-by-knowledge-or-experience mean: What I think is good IS good, it is our role to make you agree, and (intellectual) beatings will continue until morale improves.
I understand that university students, especially at the “best” schools, have always suffered this conceit. It’s as common a part of growing up as getting acne. And while administrators and deans want to support, even encourage, certain levels of societal awareness and activism among students, in the past there has typically been a bit of adult supervision on campus. But not lately.
Just as too many parents have wanted to be their kids’ friends rather than boundary-makers and worthy role models, even though kids desperately need both of those things, Minouche and other (mostly female) university presidents seem afraid of their charges, looking to nonsensical appeals to the “common good” to assuage the madding crowd of petulant teens and 20-somethings.
What kind of university creates a creature that spends a couple hundred thousand bucks to study “theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens in order to update and propose an alternative to historicist ideological critiques of the Romantic imagination” and then demands that the university let GrubHub cater her takeover of a university building lest the poor darlings inside (who could just walk out) starve to death? (READ MORE: Voters Care About Threats to Democracy … But Not Today)
What kind of university president is afraid of that creature? Not only does Ms. King-Slutzky (her real name) not know what a “common good” is; she manifestly does not care. So even by Minouche’s own stated goal, Columbia has failed. That’s partly because Columbia has always promoted students like our little Marxist snowflake but also because Columbia, like most other of the “best” schools, has for decades had the wrong goal.
It’s important to distinguish the “common good” from the institution’s values. For example, just because some subset of Americans might not value (and some might not even benefit from) deep study of the “great books” of human history (a key part of Columbia’s “core curriculum”) — and therefore it’s not properly considered a common good — a university can and should say “this is a fundamental principle of this institution and you will abide by it or leave.” It need not be a global common good; it just needs to be important to that institution and understood by all who might attend, donate to, or work for such a place.
Relying on a “common good” standard which eliminates almost everything when choosing what your organization stands for is a cheap way of sounding as if you stand for all that’s good and true in the world when actually you stand for nothing.
President Shafik and others in similar positions must refocus. Turn away from ethereal nonsense fueled by egotism and virtue signaling, away from the non-existent “common good” as they conceive it, and toward their own clearly stated values and the sole true “common good” at an institution of higher education: for the teachers to teach, and the students to learn.