Campus Shenanigans

So some students at Reed College have made a list of demands to change the curriculum of a couple of basic-level courses most students take. They want the courses to study more writers and people of color and other marginalized groups -- in fact, that's all they want the courses to cover, zeroing out white and European writers entirely.

I thought one facet of the modern wired-up generation was their innate connection to irony and ability to sniff it out in situations that unhip old people would take seriously. But now I'm not so sure. Because I may have this wrong, but aren't these students demanding to pay to be taught only what they want to be taught?

Sure, most of the time people only want to hear what they already want to hear or believe to be true. It's called confirmation bias, and it explains 90% of the audiences of people like Sean Hannity or Lawrence O'Donnell.

Almost everybody can or has been guilty of proclaiming that this or that news organization or person offers the unbiased truth, which just so happens to coincide with their own worldview. A liberal person suggests that someone who wants to find out what's really going on in the world should listen to or read mainstream news outlet coverage like one of the old Big Three networks or well-established papers such as the New York Times or Washington Post. Those are trusted names without a real heavy ideological lean.

But just 7 percent of journalists called themselves Republicans, while 28 percent called themselves Democrats according to this Washington Times story from 2015. But you can't take that story seriously, because the Washington Times is an identifiably conservative-leaning news outlet and they skew the facts. And so on.

Most of the time, though, a responsible person tries to combat their own confirmation bias by taking in information from other sources -- responsible ones, of course, but sources that he or she knows come at things from a different ideological point of view. The Reed students, on the other hand, want to double down on their own confirmation bias. Part of their goal makes sense -- we learn more about humanity the more human perspectives we consider. But they want to replace what they see as silencing of marginalized perspectives with the silencing of what I suppose they would call privileged perspectives. What if the perspectives were the same? What if it turns out that some long-dead Greek philosopher is actually an ally of the oppressed when we learn what he had to say about them in his own time? Might a long history of the same idea and the same critique of power strengthen its case?

Well, because Reed students can't be bothered to learn ideas they don't want to know, they won't know. And they'll have spent close to $2,300 per credit hour to do that. Reed's website says it has a program in economics, but it doesn't seem like the student group making these demands has sampled any of those courses.