To the Editor:
Pluralism, understood as the proactive and productive engagement of diversity, is essential to the vitality of diverse institutions and societies. In “Pluralism U” (Oct. 10, 2024), my friend and former colleague Eboo Patel writes that pluralism thus understood advances civic goods like reducing prejudice and strengthening overall social cohesion. Colleges and universities bring together diverse groups of people around a common mission of the advancement of knowledge through teaching and learning. To do that well, they must also pursue pluralism.
However, It is one thing to pursue pluralism and quite another to make it the ultimate mission and purpose of a university. Patel’s proposal fails to recognize this difference. Out of that misunderstanding he falsely pits “free speech university” and “pluralism university” as mutually exclusive alternatives, arguing for the superiority of one over the other. What he misses is that both free speech and pluralism are important principles within a university. In fact, a proper understanding of their place within the life of a university shows how they actually complement one another while operating in distinct spheres—free speech primarily deals with regulations, while pluralism emphasizes culture. While a good university needs both, neither free speech nor pluralism should be the mission.
Patel seems to falsely believe that the University of Chicago has made free speech its telos. In referencing Jonathan Haidt’s casting of alternative university teloses, Patel fails to recognize that the contrast is between social justice and truth, not social justice and free speech, writing that “Chicago has become the free speech university, offering a clear alternative to what Jonathan Haidt called the emergence of the ‘social justice university’ over the last decade.” That misunderstanding then creates a fictitious foil of UChicago, against which Patel offers the glimmering alternative of Pluralism U.
The reality is not very complicated. Truth, the knowledge-seeking end of the university, has always been the telos captured in UChicago’s motto. With Tom Ginsburg, I edited a book on the University of Chicago tradition that makes all of this abundantly clear. While interesting reading, you neither need to affirm Jamesian pluralism against Hegelian monism, nor furnish a taxonomy of pluralism to see this. Nor should UChicago in its official capacity take Patel’s advice to “follow in the footsteps of one of its earliest luminaries [John Dewey] and declare itself the pluralism university,” any more than it should follow in the footsteps of neoliberal economics or neoconservative politics.
The whole point of a university committed to seeking knowledge is to set the ideal conditions for a community of scholars that argues over the merits of a diversity of schools of thought, distinctive theories and methodologies. To do that well is to do pluralism. But to take any school of thought whatsoever and officialize it as the mission and purpose of the university is to create an orthodoxy that actually suppresses the free exchange of ideas. Planting a flag for Pluralism U would, ironically, corrode the spirit of pluralism and harm the proper knowledge-seeking mission of the university. I imagine John Dewey would be none too pleased.
Universities, like any institution, have competing values. Yet there should be one ultimate telos. Aristotle defined such a final telos as that which is pursued always for its own sake and never for the sake of something else. However a university chooses to phrase it, that ultimate end should always be knowledge and truth. Free expression is UChicago’s first practical principle, necessary for the attainment of that mission. It just so happens that this entails the proactive, productive engagement of diversity that is pluralism. Where’s the conflict in that?
