On May 23rd Pepperdine’s School of Public Policy held the Free Speech 2022 Conference: Challenges and Opportunities Through Institutions, the event was part of a series of talks held during the school’s 25th anniversary celebration.
“We are focusing our events on the anniversary theme derived from Pepperdine University’s Affirmation Statement: ‘that freedom, whether spiritual, intellectual, or economic, is indivisible,’” noted Pete Peterson, dean of SPP. “Our Free Speech 2022 Conference was a wonderful opportunity to welcome some of America’s top scholars and activists to Malibu to discuss the importance of free expression in academia and the journalistic media,” he added.
The event featured a variety of speakers, including Bion Bartning, founder of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, an organization the Beacon interviewed last fall, as well as a variety of panelists in higher education, media, and politics. The topics the panelists discussed centered on “Media: Problems from the Inside and Out, Internet: Challenge or Opportunity, and Academia: The Root of Our Problems?”
Keynote speaker Dr. Robert P. George opened the conference and spoke for the first time in his new role as the Nootbaar Honorary Distinguished Professor of Law at the Caruso School of Law, and as the Ronald Reagan Honorary Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the School of Public Policy. Dr. George also serves on this paper’s advisory board.
Dr. George’s lecture centered on “self mastery, academic freedom, and the liberal arts,” which contrasts two ideas of the purpose of liberal arts education today. One is a revisionist idea of liberal arts education and the other is the classical notion of liberal arts education.
According to Dr. George, the difference is in what the students are supposed to become liberated from. The revisionist liberal arts ideal seeks liberation from anything that would inhibit the individual from pursuing his or her desires. Conversely, the classical notion of liberal arts education seeks self-mastery over the passions; it is liberation, as he said, “from slavery to self.”
First, the revisionist perspective. Dr. George says that the revisionists seek “liberation from traditional social constraints and norms of morality–the beliefs, principles, and structures by which earlier generations of Americans had been taught to govern their conduct for the sake of the common good and personal virtue.”
He demonstrates that revisionist universities and academics espouse that the ultimate good is having the individual “be true to oneself” regardless of prevailing moral traditions–these traditions now being regarded by many as oppressive. According to Dr. George, “hang-ups” arise when personal desires are inconsistent with traditional ideas of virtue, whether they be religious or secular, with the revisionist liberal arts education seeking to “transcend such hang-ups.” They believe that traditional morality is oppressive because it creates such hang-ups, and thus should be overthrown by the revisionist liberal arts education.
George gives the example of freshman orientation at many universities, saying they act as a mode to undermine the “lingering allegiance to traditional norms of morality or decency that the new students may happen to bring along from their benighted homes,” and that these freshman orientations are “largely exercises in liberationist propaganda.”
According to George, the revisionist liberal arts ideology believes that reason is the slave of the passions and its sole function is to help the individual achieve what he wants. So, the ultimate human good then is not found in self mastery over passion but in “freeing ourselves from the allegedly irrational inhibitions–those hang-ups that impede us from doing what we want.” Man would be a mere animal that uses an animalistic instinct to pursue his desires.
So, if humans do have irrational souls they could never achieve self mastery over their passions, and humanity would be no different from the rest of the animal kingdom. But, Dr. George argues, we do see humans achieve self mastery when considering the morality of an action in contrast to desire. So, the revisionist liberal arts philosophy must be incorrect according to Dr. George.
While Dr. George argues against the notion of irrational souls and therefore revisionist liberal arts, he doesn’t necessarily address the validity of revisionist values themselves. The revisionists themselves would likely say that their philosophy is in fact a moral one–with the classical tradition being the immoral one. So, it would be interesting to hear Dr. George mount an argument against the revisionists’ truth claim of their values being the correct ones.
After having argued against the revisionist philosophy, Dr. George presents the classical understanding of liberal arts in which, “The goal of liberal arts learning is not to liberate us to act on our desires whatever they may be, but rather and precisely to liberate us from slavery to them. Personal authenticity under the traditional account consists in self-mastery, in placing reason in control of desire.”
The classical liberal arts education is rooted in a dialogue with the great ideas of the past and in fostering students who learn how to be independent thinkers and who “appropriate” the classical rational virtues which enable self mastery, self fulfillment, and in people who benefit the broader social order.
Dr. George said that the students’ engagement with this dialogue opens them up to great truths and perennial questions on what it means to be human–and in what ways humanity can aspire to the best possible goods. It is this liberal arts education and engagement with history, philosophy, and the sciences that can “direct our desires and our wills to what is truly good, truly beautiful, truly worthy of human beings.”
He said academic freedom is crucial to this process. And this freedom and the interrogatory attitude can be smothered in a multitude of ways:
“The interrogatory attitude can be smothered by speech codes but it can be suffocated in less obvious ways as well. It can be smothered when well-qualified scholars, teachers, and academic administrators are denied or removed from positions and institutions that claim to be non-partisan and non-sectarian or when they are denied tenure or promotion or subjected to discriminatory treatment. It can be smothered also by an atmosphere of dogma, political correctness, wokeness, what have you, and whether it’s of the right or the left or something else.”
According to Dr. George, academic freedom should be fought for, not because freedom is a good in and of itself, but because it is the precondition for “the intellectual excellence that makes self mastery possible–that makes good people and good citizens possible.” In essence, academic freedom is at the core of a liberal arts education.
Even though there may be an argument to prevent objectively false viewpoints or information from being allowed in academia, this must be avoided because it will therefore prevent people from discovering which of their current beliefs is false. This also means, according to Dr. George, that students should be reading and engaging with the best thinkers on both sides of important questions, including things like religion and faith.
So, freedom is a precondition for the “personal appropriation” of knowledge and truth by the students in a liberal arts education. This appropriation of knowledge is important because it is:
“An aspect of the integral well-being and fulfillment of human beings, rational creatures, rational animals, whose flourishing consists in part in intellectual inquiry, understanding, and judgment and in the practice of the virtues which make possible excellence in intellectual questioning,” said Dr. George.
He concludes his lecture with, “The freedom we must defend then is freedom for the practice of these intellectual and moral virtues. It is freedom for excellence. The freedom that enables us to master ourselves, to understand and live by the truth, whether we happen to like the truth as it is or not. It’s a freedom that far from being negated by rigorous standards of scholarship demands them. It’s not the freedom of ‘if it feels good do it’ it’s rather the freedom of self-transcendence, the freedom from slavery to self.”
Additional details, including links to both Dr. George’s and the panelist discussions can be found at the School of Public Policy’s website.
