This letter was written in response to the letter, "UNC administration excludes faculty and students to push conservative programming," published on Aug. 22, 2019.
To the Editor:
I have been involved, since the early spring, in a project tentatively called the Program in Civic Virtue and Civil Discourse. There have been, recently, a number of unfounded attacks on this project, often presenting misinformation, misrepresentations, and selective exclusions as truths.
The program is not seeking to hire based on political commitments, whether conservative or liberal; it is committed to the faculty’s power to make all decisions concerning hiring and curriculum. I certainly would not be involved if this were not the case.
Since I am involved, the implication is that I am either an unwitting dupe of a conservative conspiracy or a willing turncoat against the progressive values that I have championed my whole life, including my 45 years as an intellectual and scholar, and my role as co-founder of the Progressive Faculty Network.
The influential cultural theorist and critic Stuart Hall used to say that it is dangerous when politics “lets you off the hook” of doing the hard work. I have spent my career devoted to the idea that progressive politics requires intellectuals to tell the best (most “accurate,” complex, and empowering) stories that our research and theories allow.
The present attacks represent a dangerous tendency in which political certainty legitimates — even demands — that leftist academics abandon their commitment to the rigorous investigation of what’s going on. They deny that ideas are living things that get reshaped and rethought over time, through intelligent conversation and argument.
The current moment argues for a space to address the commonly noted problem of the erosion of public discourse, discussion, argument, and debate. That is the question that drives this new program: what can we do pedagogically to foster the capacities for real engagement? The faculty in this program will develop and teach the capacities to engage in serious argument, to embrace the full range of evidence and ways of thinking, and to question one’s own taken for granted assumptions and certainties.
The program will support classes and events embodying the civic virtues of agonostic conversations that: perform, simultaneously, the joy, seriousness and difficulty of real intellectual engagement across differences; that recognize that not all passionate disagreements can be reduced to the same simple war between two sides, driven only by the desire for victory. I have always thought that this was a good working definition of education and a crucial condition for the possibility of democratic politics.
