Inviting Discord to Campus

Civil Discord is our effort to intervene constructively in the campus speech wars and help burnish the liberal arts brand

Only in our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides. Living in a real world and speaking with one another about it are basically one and the same. —Hannah Arendt

In about a month, we will be hosting a new kind of conference for us, and it's one that brings with it a certain amount of anxiety. The conference, Civil Discord, is our effort to intervene constructively in the campus speech wars that have already resulted in the dethroning of a number of high-profile college presidents (with more to come, one has to imagine) along with a great deal of dissension and confusion on campuses around the country. Inviting some version of this energy to our campus feels both important and also a bit dangerous.

Civil Discord's format is very simple. Each of the five sessions will be a moderated argument between two scholars or writers who disagree profoundly on an issue of major public significance. Young Black conservative

Coleman Hughes

, for instance, will argue with Black Power historian and UT Austin professor Peniel Joseph about whether "colorblindness" should be the ideal toward which America’s racial politics should aspire. Our dean, economist Ann Huff Stevens, will face off against University of Austin president Pano Kanelos on the question of whether higher education is broken beyond repair. New York Times columnists

Michelle Goldberg

and

Ross Douthat

will argue with each other about whether or not liberalism is doomed. Etc.

We will be providing our moderators with some loose guidelines, but the hope is that the two panelists will engage with each other as directly as possible, and that they'll do so with both passion and the presumption of good faith on the part of their opposite. The goal is to model for our community, and particularly for our students, the kind of intellectual engagement that we believe is at the core of the scholarly endeavor. We hope to demonstrate that our campus is and should be a place where people can hash out with both vigor and civility the most difficult issues that shape our collective future.

Our partners in this endeavor are the Civitas Institute at UT Austin and the University of Austin. They are both, it's worth noting, very new institutions that have been created in whole or in part out of a critique precisely of colleges of liberal arts like ours. That we’re partnering with them is not an accident. It’s a very deliberate choice to engage with these critiques because engaging in good faith with critics is both a gesture of strength and a means of growing stronger. That's the promise of this conference, for us and them and our panelists and the audience, that by trusting each other to think and fight together, in the spirit of a shared commitment to truth and democracy, we all benefit.

I should confess to one more, slightly less pure motive for the conference. As I wrote in my last post for this newsletter, part of my job as head of communications for the College of Liberal Arts is to think strategically about how to contribute to the broader effort to stem or even reverse the ongoing cultural decline in the status of the liberal arts. To put it more crassly, the liberal arts have a brand problem, and I’d like to help burnish the brand. This conference is very much a strategic effort in that direction.

We need to be out there, as colleges of liberal arts, making both defensive and affirmative cases for our virtues. The defensive case that we’re making with this event is that contrary to how we are often characterized by our critics, we are open to the vigorous exchange of ideas from across the political spectrum. The affirmative case is that we’re the best place to have these kinds of arguments. We’re precisely where the action should be happening.

This becomes obvious when you ask a simple question: Where else? On the UT Austin campus, there are a few other good answers to that question. The LBJ School of Public Affairs, certainly. The Law School. The nascent School of Civic Leadership. But that’s about it. We have a host of other excellent colleges and schools focused on essential areas of research, practice and teaching — medicine, the natural sciences, engineering, architecture, nursing, pharmacy, business, fine arts, etc.—but we don’t look to them to serve as fora for arguments about the big questions about who we are, how we should live together, what form our institutions should take, and what narratives have and should define our collective life. We look above all to the liberal arts, where we study philosophy, economics, sociology, literature, politics, anthropology, history, psychology, the list goes on…

In my last post, I wrote that the ideal campaign to sell the liberal arts would look a bit like a luxury clothing brand campaign:

I’d want to craft a campaign that positioned a liberal arts education as an experience that can satiate three particular desires: our desire for status, our desire for distinctiveness, and our desire for meaning. You want a liberal arts education, it would convey, because you are elite, you are unique, and you have purpose. And you are these things, in particular, relative to the other kinds of degrees you can earn at a place like UT, the “practical” ones (with “practical” said with some condescension) which are all well and good for people who are interested only in following the herd, getting an office job, grinding it out, checking the boxes. For those people, it makes sense to get a job in the technical or money-making fields. For you, though, remarkable and purpose-driven creature that you are, the only possible degree is one that challenges you to delve into the mysteries of the world, understand yourself and society better, and cultivate the virtues that distinguish the best among us now as they did in ancient times. For a rare and precious gem like you, the only possible degree is a liberal arts degree.

This was perhaps a bit (though not mostly) tongue in cheek. What I’d add, here, is that another way to go would be to go more aggressive (in a market-y way) on that framing, crank up the volume a bit. Instead of “rare and precious,” something more like “rough and ready.” We’re the place where you go because you’re a forceful and adventurous person who looks toward a future in which you’re exerting power (for good, of course) over the people and the world around you. In this hypothetical campaign, the college is a training ground for young gladiators of the soul and intellect. The colors are bolder, and the casting call for models emphasizes sharper edges and more muscularity. The tag line is more in your face. The graphic design might, for instance, emulate a boxing fight card.

I think either of these strategies could work, over the long term, but only if they’re rooted in something real. The academic communities that they’re advertising would have to actually be places where this kind of exploration, disputation, and soul cultivation aren’t merely tolerated but are embraced and encouraged. Civil Discord, from this perspective, serves as both marketing and enactment. It is the thing itself, and the advertisement for it. Or at least I hope it will be.

For those of you who can make it to Austin on March 21-22, please join us. The entire event is free and open to the public. We aren't planning to live stream it, but we will likely disseminate the conversations after the fact on Substack and elsewhere. If you're interested in chatting with me about the event, reach out. 

-Daniel Oppenheimer