Abadoning Logic for One-Liners

As I sat down in the lounge to watch the presidential debates, I was hoping to hear interesting comments from my dorm mates and fellow students, who are diverse in background and academic interests. Instead, I was shocked to hear a series of unintelligent and uninformed comments at each turn. In a series of debates critical to the future of our nation, it was appalling to hear such a juvenile response from my peers.

Students snickered at John Kerry’s misnomer about “funding proliferation” and the president’s infamous mispronunciation of “nuclear.” Sure, malapropisms are funny. They become less funny when we are at war.

When one student asked a pointed question of health care policy, I began to explain in a wholly nonpartisan way what the arguments were for both sides. She simply walked away, saying it was “shameful” that there was another view. It was as though she was afraid to hear about competing arguments, and afraid to intellectually assess the situation.

Having spent my undergraduate years at Stanford and now starting my graduate studies at Harvard, I have arguably been exposed to some of the brightest minds of my generation. Since freshman year, I have been continually disappointed at a profound lack of intellectualism in most students. The game of “who can name the most philosophers in two minutes” does not count as intellectualism. The disturbing behavior I have observed is the unwillingness of students to form coherent and logical arguments.

There are numerous causes for the decline of intellectualism, but they can be boiled down to three major factors:

A push in higher education towards specialization and marketability of skills.

After perhaps one year of general education at most schools, students are pushed into a concentration and then a specialization. They are encouraged to “find their passion” and eschew other subjects. Even worse, concentrations often have a very small set of core classes, and students can choose at random to fulfill their requirements. A history concentrator can graduate with only knowledge of women’s resistance movements; an English concentrator can get away with knowing a lot about Melville and not much else. As a result, students are reluctant to engage on a wide array of topics.

A complete failure to give students the appropriate background and appreciation of their intellectual heritage (as well as a failure on the part of the students to seek it).

Partially as a result of the first factor, and partially as a consequence of the rise of constructivist thought in pedagogy, the educational system fails to teach students about the march of human knowledge. Students are not given adequate background in basic logic and classical thought, and are thus not able to assess modern-day issues in their appropriate context. Their lack of training in logic leads to obvious complications. This also creates the problem that students are unable to engage when they are taken away from familiar ground.

A cultural shift that places more value on cute, unqualified statements than well-formulated arguments.

Perhaps most telling, my dorm mates preferred to watch The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’s commentary on the presidential debates above any news sources. Of course, in a culture that prioritizes snippy phrases over cogent logic, the ultimate broadcaster is Jon Stewart. I completely agree that when Stewart takes news clips and unmercifully ridicules important public figures, it’s very funny. But that’s all that it is, and I’m not sure that my fellow students always realize it. In fact, Jon Stewart was recently on CNN’s Crossfire complaining that the news media had sunk to his level of analysis. Somehow, cynicism and kitsch have become much more palatable than logic. In that cultural background, it should be no surprise that students prize a one-line zinger above reason.

When a student makes a statement such as “I don’t understand how anyone can vote for that idiot,” I challenge them to offer a clear argument, and they often seem bewildered that someone would even ask. When I press, the student loosely strings together a series of standardized talking points. A form of blind liberalism has taken over our campuses, and it is massacring any form of intellectual diversity. Rather than assume their place in the (perhaps mythical) intellectual elite, students prefer to stick to pithy turns of phrase without substance or reason.

Students and administrations are often too quick to stifle ideas with which they disagree rather than having a meaningful dialogue. One would only have to look as far as UC Berkeley’s Horowitz debacle or Cal Poly’s censure of Steve Hinkle to realize that. It is troubling that the culture of academic life has eschewed the notion of vibrant discussion. Instead, we stifle what we do not want to hear, and we fail to engage on topics for which we have not studied. If we walk away from our debates, we will never be able to progress, and the culture and cause of intellectualism will be beyond repair.

Nathalie de Leon is a first-year graduate student pursuing a PhD in chemical physics.