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GRANT H. CORNWELL AND EVE WALSH STODDARD Freedom, Diversity, C A LIBERALEDUCATIONdepends upon—presup- I poses—unfettered thought, inquiry, and ex- P pression.1This is necessary not only for the O T production of knowledge but also for the preparation of citizens in a diverse democracy. D E A vital campus is one where ideas meet, mix, R conflict, engage, and emerge changed by the U interaction. But genuine dialogue is a difficult, T A even fragile, human endeavor. It entails both E speaking and listening, articulating one’s F views and earnestly considering those of others. Campus communities need both to protect the rights of all members to think and If you know that speak freely and to foster the conditions that make dialogue possible. speaking out On campuses, as in society, open debate is according to your silenced as rhetoric hardens into fixed politi- conscience or cal positions, drawing impassable lines in the your analysis of a sand between groups. The multiple pressures on freedom of expression include the dis- situation means course of patriotism created after 9/11 to legit- you will be shunned imate the war on terrorism, the backlash for doing so, are against multiculturalism and affirmative action, you free or not? the increased diversity of U.S. campuses, and the increasingly corporate management and service orientation of universities. While these social changes suppress free expression, popular media discourses model either radical ideological indoctrination as practiced by Rush Limbaugh and all his imitators on both sides of the political spectrum or forms of op- positional discourse that are either outlandish and irresponsible, as in The Jerry Springer Show, or merely reinforce the viewers’ biases, as in Crossfireand its imitators. Within this GRANT H. CORNWELL is vice president of the university, dean of academic affairs, and professor of philosophy, and EVE WALSH STODDARD is professor of English and chair of the global studies St. Lawrence University department, both at St. Lawrence University. 26 LIBERAL EDUCATION SPRING 2006 and Global Citizenship C I P O T D E R U T A E F University of North Dakota context, campuses need to support and teach of the social structures of slavery and serfdom. practices of critique and contestation as cen- In The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Dubois tral to civic engagement, butthese practices of observes that freedom need to respect the dignity and value few men ever worshipped Freedom with half of all members of society. such unquestioning faith as did the Ameri- can Negro for two centuries. To him, so far Diversity as he thought and dreamed, slavery was in- The word “liberal” in “liberal education” orig- deed the sum of all villainies, the cause of all inally meant education for free men, an edu- sorrow, the root of all prejudice; Emancipa- cation to prepare men for the exercise of tion was the key to a promised land of freedom within their polity. For this reason sweeter beauty than ever stretched before the practice of freedom on campus is deeply the eyes of wearied Israelites. (1969, 47) tied to the practice of freedom in the larger But achieving freedom in the sense of citizen- society and internationally, as well as individ- ship and enfranchisement turned out to be a ually and interpersonally. Yet in every society lengthy struggle for African Americans, one that called itself a republic or a democracy in still mired in the obstacles posed by voting the past, free persons or citizens were a privi- machines, faulty registrations, and felony leged minority. This includes the republic of laws. The civil rights achievements of the the United States, which did not have univer- 1960s have also shown that there is more to sal suffrage until 1920. At the founding of freedom and citizenship than formal equality America’s oldest colleges, the civic dimension under the law. of the mission of higher education, though On U.S. college campuses, the inclusion of framed in a discourse of democracy, was elitist women and persons of color as full members and exclusive. Those who were imagined to of the community of learners has complicated require the knowledge and skills necessary to the pedagogical project of liberal education, participate in democratic deliberation, those including especially those dimensions related who had access to this form of education, to civic participation and responsibility. where white men. These new members of the academy, first as As Orlando Patterson (1991) has argued, students and then as professors, brought with the Western belief in freedom as a revered and them, in their bodies and in their minds, very almost uncontested value arose dialectically out basic challenges to the tradition. As Renato 28 LIBERAL EDUCATION SPRING 2006 It is now believed that the most privileged white students are deprived if they receive an Rosaldo puts it, “initial unequal population is all-white education C efforts concentrated on straining a system de- I P getting people in the door. pendent on having in- O Institutions of higher learning appeared to tell siders and outsiders, speaking subjects and T those previously excluded, ‘Come in, sit down, alien others. The insiders’ club had rules of D shut up. You’re welcome here as long as you engagement that did not need to be spoken, E conform to our norms.’” He goes on to make and the outsiders had their own systems of R U the point that resistance and survival. Rosaldo characterizes T in order to democratize higher education, well the kind of reaction that occurs when A people need to work together to change the new kinds of people are included in a previ- E F present situation where the higher the per- ously homogeneous group: ceived social status of the room the less di- One reaction is predictable. People who verse its membership. When people leave a once had a monopoly on privilege and au- decision-making room and one hears that a thority will suddenly experience relative consensus was reached, remember to ask: deprivation . . . they will feel diminished “Who was in the room when the decision was and may in certain cases find themselves made?” Introducing diversity in such rooms drawn to nativistic movements, perhaps to will slow down the process. (1993, xi-xii) the National Association of Scholars or Implicitly, Rosaldo raises here the question of other groups bent on practicing curricular civic discourse, of verbal and social processes apartheid. When people become accus- of deliberation and communication. tomed to privilege, it appears to be a vested In the fifty years since Brown v. Board of Ed- right, a status that is natural and well de- ucation, this nation has experimented with served, a part of the order of things. In the various models of integration and exclusivity. short run, the transition to diversity can be Brown v. Boardwas decided on the grounds traumatic; in the long run, it promises a that “separate but equal” has no place in great deal. (1993, xii) public education and that students of color in Whereas the federal government in the 1960s segregated schools, even those with equiva- intervened to integrate the University of Mis- lent facilities and resources, are deprived of sissippi, there have been subsequent periods equal educational opportunities. Turning to of backlash, including the culture wars of the higher education today, we find an ironic 1980s as well as the current curtailment of reversal in the terms of the Brown v. Board civil liberties and charges that academia is a reasoning. It is now believed that the most haven for leftist faculty members who seek to privileged white students attending selective indoctrinate students. private colleges and universities are deprived Thus, while the battle for integration has if they receive an all-white education (see been more or less won, despite rearguard ac- Bowen and Bok 1998). The belief fifty years tions against affirmative action, the contest ago was that there was something called edu- has shifted to the nature of the curriculum cation, the transmission of knowledge and and pedagogy, and implicitly, the ultimate skills, that was race-neutral and apolitical, goals of liberal education. Moreover, the very and that could be made equally available to ability to discuss and debate differences of all Americans. As a result of integration, viewpoint in an open environment has seri- especially at the college level, there has been ously diminished as the larger social climate of an explosion of new knowledge and pedago- neoconservatism has come head to head with gies created by the inclusion of women and increased multiculturalism in the curriculum, people of different classes, races, and cultural pedagogy, and demographics of the campus. backgrounds in the academy. These changes One of the watchwords of groups like Stu- have been hard-won, as the metaphor of the dents for Academic Freedom is “intellectual “culture wars” suggests. diversity.” This is held up as the true diversity Given that democracies and republics have that colleges should seek out. While most ed- always had their suppressed others, whether ucators would rally around this concept, since internally or in colonies abroad, we wonder it appears to transform the traditional value of whether the attempt to enfranchise, meta- multiple ways of knowing into a contemporary phorically speaking, a diverse and historically appreciation of cultural diversity, in fact it is SPRING 2006 LIBERAL EDUCATION 29 C Rice result from exposure to many different per- I University spectives and ways of knowing. In her book P Whose Science? Whose Knowledge?, the femi- O T nist philosopher of science Sandra Harding (1991) argues that adding the perspectives of D E underrepresented or unrepresented groups to R scientific inquiry plays a huge role in knowl- U edge production by adding new vectors of T A critique. The first things to be revealed are E the most basic, and therefore most hidden, F assumptions and presuppositions of inquiry. Thus, even in the realm of science, thought by many people to be abstracted from socio- cultural influences,new insights are fostered by making scientific inquiry more inclusive. Nonetheless, the assumption tends to be made, perhaps too easily, that different skin colors bring this diversity with them. “Posi- tionality” is about more than skin color. It de- scribes a specific set of coordinates produced by geography and power, by social class, and by a number of kinds of identity. Most impor- tantly, diversity only adds to a collaborative deployed as a weapon against diversity under- project of knowledge production if the partic- stood as the inclusion of underrepresented ipants retain a principled openness, a commit- groups in the campus and the curriculum. Its ment to listening for and across differences. main referent is a narrowly construed ideologi- This openness, in turn, presupposes an ethic cal diversity—Republican vs. Democrat, of respect. conservative vs. liberal—and it assumes that liberals are the majority on college campuses; Triangulating differences hence, conservatives need “affirmative action” Citizens of today’s world need to recognize to ensure they are represented. This notion of that people situated in different spatial, cul- intellectual diversity also implies that the cur- tural, economic, and political locations will riculum needs defending against the allegedly inevitably perceive events and relationships hegemonic forces of political correctness. differently from each other.2We need to teach It is the case that the portmanteau word “di- students to seek out understandings from versity” tends to conflate bodies with perspec- these multiple perspectives and not to rest tives, and this is an issue that needs constant content with the self-serving views presented critique. The conflation exists because there in the mainstream culture. Power and inter- are, in fact, at least two very different justifica- ests intervene in the act of seeing, such that tions for diversifying campuses. One is a social differently situated observers actually see justice or restitution motive that applies most different realities. clearly to African Americans and Native We are not arguing for a relativist position. Americans (though arguably to many others as Rather, we are proposing a process for creating well), two groups that have been systematically a complex and multiple “truth” or “reality” excluded from advancement in U.S. society that requires understanding and negotiation. since the nation’s inception. This is the motive Within such a collaborative epistemological behind affirmative action as it applies to women process, multiplicity would not be replaced by and these historically excluded groups. unity; different viewpoints would be placed in The other motive has two subcategories. rhizomatic conversation with each other. Using One concerns demographics and the inter- the metaphor of a GPS (Global Positioning cultural skills required by an increasingly hetero- System), we argue that the epistemology re- geneous society. The other is the liberal arts quired of today’s global citizens demands tri- notion that good knowledge and thinking angulation; it demands readings taken from as 30 LIBERAL EDUCATION SPRING 2006 The portmanteau word many locations as possible, “diversity” tends to the academy is the degree to C especially readings that re- conflate bodies with which difference is not ab- I P flect the knower as viewed stracted from the individual perspectives O from outside. This is why but carried in his or her body, T study abroad and second lan- often a marker for a powerful D guage learning are so valuable. Both forms of sense of identity. This has posed a fundamental E knowledge and experience reflect back to the challenge to the ideal of disinterested debate. R U student how the country and its citizens look Where is the line between an abstract debate T to those outside the U.S. This can be both over the merits of affirmative action and the A very disturbing and very liberating for Ameri- implication that a particular group of people, E F can students. possibly including the professor, should not be On our campus, we teach a seminar for stu- in the classroom having the debate? Free discus- dents who have been abroad that attempts to sion has probably never been easy, but it has be- model the epistemology represented by a come very difficult today, closed sometimes by GPS. It is an inquiry into the ethics of global outside political forces, by both racism and so- citizenship, focusing on debates over whether called political correctness, and by disrespect. “human rights” are a product of Western cul- While freedom is absolutely essential to higher ture or have universal validity. The students education and to the exercise of vigilance re- research the politics and discourse of human quired by democracy, freedom must be exercised rights in the nation where they studied, and with respect toward all members of society. we read in common a multiplicity of perspec- The political philosophy associated with tives on human rights. What we find is that, the republican form of government in Western although the specific discourse of human societies has always emphasized the need to rights is rooted in Western liberal metaphysics remain vigilant against the power of the state. of the person, the politics of signing on to a One of its chief spokespersons today, Philip human rights agreement are rich, complex, Pettit, redefines freedom as non-domination and offer hope for ways to negotiate across to connect the personal, the interpersonal, deep metaphysical and epistemological and the political. Contestation, understood differences. as a relational participation in a collective group process, is essential. “Freedom as non- Freedom as non-domination domination,” Petit writes, Even as we struggle to shift pedagogy and cur- supports a conception of democracy under ricula toward issues of civic engagement, the which contestability takes the place usually politics of positionality constrain and vex dis- given to consent; what is of primary impor- course on college campuses—not uninfluenced tance is not that government does what the by the dynamics of national politics. The edu- people tells it but, on pain of arbitrariness, cational value of what is called “diversity” to- that people can always contest whatever it day is an extension of a core value of liberal is that government does. (1997, ix) education: the emphasis on multiple ways of Implicit in this is the fact that citizens must knowing, on different methods of intellectual know what a government is doing in order to inquiry and analysis. The measure of vitality be able to contest it or to protect themselves in any intellectual community is the scope against abuses of power. and variety of perspectives it can sustain in A college is like a small republic, a space dynamic engagement. It is the changing nature where we should be able to practice the kinds of knowledge that makes universities dynamic, of contestation and vigilance that maintain and change comes about primarily through the and support freedom as non-domination, that productive encounter, the challenge, of differ- model this kind of vigilance for our students, ences. Any stance that forecloses the free dis- and that strengthen our ability to participate cussion of differences also forecloses the quest critically in the politics of the state. for learning and knowledge creation sufficient On the other hand, speaking out in opposi- to the complexities, both national and global, tion to the state’s policies or to the established of the twenty-first century. position in one’s field or to any kind of power One of the major changes brought about by structure is not necessarily pleasant. It may the inclusion of women and people of color in entail being responded to with dismissal or SPRING 2006 LIBERAL EDUCATION 31 C Rice I University P O T D E R U T A E F hostility. However, this is what Pettit is get- identification with the common good, with the ting at in defining freedom as non-domination. need to promote liberty for all. Pettit argues, in If you know that speaking out according to relation to the concerns of marginalized your conscience or your analysis of a situation groups, that when freedom is defined as non- means you will be shunned for doing so, are domination, the common good has to mean you free or not? There is evidence on cam- that no member of society “can achieve it fully puses across the country that some faculty and for themselves without its being achieved for all students feel that they cannot express their members: no member can hope to achieve it views because they are too solidly opposed by fully for themselves except so far as member- the majority view. ship of the group ceases to be a badge of vulner- There is also evidence that sometimes when ability” (1997, 259). He is not promoting a people do speak out they feel crushed by the liberal notion of color-blindness or a giving up response. And often that response is not a of particular identities. Instead, he is arguing direct engagement with the point but a com- that people have shifting and partial identifi- munal sense of outrage that the speaker has cations and that they need the capacity to violated some unspoken code of politeness or identify in partwith the common good of the niceness. Shunning and dismissal are extremely whole society—though not to relinquish their damaging non-responses. They effectively re- own racial or gendered or regional identities. move the person they are aimed at fromthe So civility does not mean being nice and polite; community, hence taking away freedom under- it means participating in and valuing the stood as civitasor participation in the discourse collective group, the common good; most im- and action of theres publica. Although often portantly, it means believing that everyone’s done in the name of politeness, that kindof full and equal freedom to participate must be dismissal or negation of a person’s actuality, actively supported and protected. his or her belonging, is politely vicious. It is This may seem like a realistic goal, but it is often done to people who don’t fit in because nonetheless a challenging one. It is easy to they are different in some way, whether in their practice freedom as non-interference. You sense of manners or their cultural background don’t have to listen; you don’t have to do any- or their politics. thing. Practicing freedom as non-domination While vigilance and contestation are essen- asks more of us, but it also promises a higher tial to freedom in Pettit’s view, so is some level of well-being for the collective group. 32 LIBERAL EDUCATION SPRING 2006 Our highest professional duty, the ethical judge. And this need for multiple perspectives C commitment most essential to our mission as as the grounds of a global epistemology is also I P educators, is to create and maintain a climate the most basic argument for diversity in lib- O on campus that goes beyond a silent and si- eral education. The curriculum can represent T lencing, begrudging tolerance of a diversity of diverse points of view, but that is not enough. D views and is instead a climate of respectful en- Precisely because the world looks different E gagement. If we do not—if we cannot— from different vantage points, the students R U model the method we endorse, we can hardly and faculty who comprise a campus need to T lament its absence in society at large. have different life experiences and different A Because ideas are passions for teachers and social locations that they can bring to the E F scholars, differences are often engaged pas- table in a collaborative or dialogic process of sionately in the academy. But one person’s knowledge creation. They also need to get “passion” may be another person’s idea of ag- outside the campus, to gather perspectives gression. One person’s enjoyment of vigorous from the local communities, the nation, and argument or debate may be experienced as in- from other parts of the world, and then to sub- timidation by other people. The sine qua non ject those triangulations to interpretation and of deliberative dialogue is to create a climate evaluation. This method of inquiry will be of engagement where passion and respect are both the basis of and the actual process of an mutually reinforcing. Certainly there is a ethics of global citizenship. ■■ place in serious, respectful dialogue for passion, for ardent expression, for pointed criti- To respond to this article, e-mail [email protected], cism, sometimes even for anger. Colleges and with the authors’ names on the subject line. universities should be communities that are able to model modes of dialogue and deliberation, modes of respectful conflict resolution, NOTES modes of public debate that productively draw 1This paper is a revised version of a lecture presented upon diversity to achieve more complex un- at Roanoke College in October 2004 and subse- quently published in the Roanoke College Journal. derstanding. These are communities situated 2 The ideas in this section are developed more fully in within the context of a larger society sorely in our article“Peripheral Visions: Towards a Geo- need of positive models, and we could do no ethics of Citizenship.” better than to graduate students who have developed their capacities for respectful dialogue on critical issues, especially with others who REFERENCES think differently. Bowen, W. G., and D. Bok. 1998.The shape of the river: Long-term consequences of considering race in college and university admissions.Princeton: Princeton Conclusion University Press. We expect members of our community to be Cornwell, G. H., and E. W. Stoddard. 2005. Contes- passionate about ideas; in fact, we would be tation and respect: Intercultural inquiry and global troubled if they were not. But passion and citizenship. Roanoke College Journal1:15–32. commitment serve our purpose only to the ex- Dubois, W. E. B. 1969. The souls of black folk. New York: Signet. tent that they promote lively engagement, not Harding, S. 1991.Whose science? Whose knowledge?: shut it down, and to the extent that they foster Thinking from women’s lives.Ithaca, NY: Cornell compelling expression, not impede the capacity University Press. to listen. To this end, we must continue both Patterson, O. 1991. Freedom: Freedom in the making of to defend the campus as a place of free inquiry Western culture. New York: Basic Books. Pettit, P. 1997. Republicanism: A theory of freedom and and exchange and to encourage modes of dis- government. New York: Oxford University Press. course that respect the basic human dignity of Rosaldo, R. 1993. Culture and truth: The remaking of all engaged in its mission. social analysis. Boston: Beacon Press. If education for citizenship is indeed a goal Stoddard, E. W., and G. H. Cornwell. 2003. of American higher education, students have Peripheral Visions: Towards a Geo-ethics of Citizen- ship. Liberal Education(89) 3: 44–51. to learn both how to locate themselves, to think critically about their own positionalities, and how to engage various other perspectives on the issues they seek to understand and to SPRING 2006 LIBERAL EDUCATION 33