Morton Schapiro: campuses must address their own fundamentalism

It is now widely agreed that political polarisation poses major challenges for universities. “People grow up in silos and echo chambers,” explained Morton Schapiro, the president of Northwestern University. “This generation of students doesn’t know anything other than screaming at each other. Those of us on campuses have a tough job to get them to see beyond righteous indignation at ‘the enemy’.”

This is relatively familiar territory. What is striking about the book Professor Schapiro has written with Gary Saul Morson – Lawrence B. Dumas professor of the arts and humanities at Northwestern – is the extent to which they see universities also as sources of simplistically divisive thinking. Indeed, Minds Wide Shut: How the New Fundamentalisms Divide Us devotes far less attention to hellfire preachers and toxic tweeters than to what has happened in some academic disciplines.

When their book Cents and Sensibility: What Economics Can Learn from the Humanities was published in 2018, Professor Schapiro recalled, a prominent economist cited the fact that “people in the allied social sciences quote a lot of economists, but economists are much less likely to quote people in other fields” as “proof that the other fields don’t have much to say, not that we are insular”.

But while deploring the “market fundamentalism” of much economic thinking, Minds Wide Shut is equally unimpressed by its mirror image: the humanists who refuse to “understand the benefits of markets”, fall back on “all-purpose pejoratives” such as “capitalism” and “neoliberalism”, and are more interested in “moral crusades” than “well thought-out policies”, for example in relation to climate change. It describes a meeting Professor Morson once attended where a number of humanities department chairs who had “stressed the importance of improving the pay of non-tenure eligible faculty” were asked by the dean “how the money available for raises” should be divided between such people and those who were already tenured or on the tenure track. Uncomfortable about the obvious conflict this raised between their principles and their pocketbooks, one declared: “We reject the false choice based on the notion that resources are limited.”

In studying both religious and literary texts, the professors want to steer a middle path between uncritical reverence and judging them solely by the standards of the present. Although many academics were still teaching what he considered “real courses in literature”, rooted in the idea that we might have something important to learn from Shakespeare or Tolstoy, Professor Morson was dismayed by the scholars “who really believe that there’s no such thing as ‘great literature’ and that the purpose of the discipline is what I would call indoctrination. I know this from students who come to me and ask, ‘Can I find a class where I can actually read literature and not just be told what I already know politically?’”

Furthermore while supportive of opening literary canons, Minds Wide Shut administers a passing slap at “what is often done in the name of ‘post-colonialism’: assigning texts from other traditions showing the harm that Westerners do…There is something insufferably condescending in the implication that other cultures first had something important to say as a result of their encounter with our own.”

These were arguments, Professor Morson admitted, which he would not have dared publish if he were based in a department of English or comparative literature.

Although Professor Schapiro didn’t accept “the right’s critique of universities as [left-wing] ‘indoctrination mills’”, he acknowledged that the two of them had been approached by “ultra-conservative media” who saw the book as “trashing the humanities and academe, political correctness and cancel culture”. They turned down all such interview requests.

More generally, wasn’t Professor Schapiro worried about the dangers for a university president of speaking out in ways that could alienate faculty, funders and other supporters, or provide ammunition for those seeking to discredit universities?

“Those of us working on areas that could influence the public debate have a moral obligation to speak out,” he replied. Yet he could also appreciate why far fewer university presidents were now “well-known public voices”. Those running “flagship public-sector institutions reporting to regents often appointed by conservative governors or elected by the public” were understandably wary.

And although Northwestern was “not really reliant on state, local or federal government for direct funding, which can be taken away by alienating them with my next op-ed”, there was always a risk of “alienating trustees and board members and donors. I have written around 60 op-eds since I became president here, many in the Wall Street Journal or other prominent places, and every time one comes out I get emails saying, ‘I’m never going to give another dime to Northwestern as long as you are president.’”

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com