Dear Editor,

At the September meeting of the University Senate, Chancellor Kent Syverud suggested in a somewhat vague but nonetheless rhetorically pointed speech that the university’s faculty — and/or perhaps the faculty of certain departments, he did not say which — were too “ideologically uniform.” Citing polarization around the upcoming election and the university’s need to hire “hundreds of new faculty,” he said he wanted to “get something done on this now, this semester.”  He said he had members of the board who support him.

Chancellor Syverud, given the current political climate and the ongoing assaults on science, rational thought, academic freedom and higher education in general from the Trump administration, how are we to interpret your comments? What specific positions or viewpoints do you feel are missing at SU, and in what departments? Do you wish, as many on the right would, to hire climate deniers, apologists for white supremacy and advocates for American and Judeo-Christian exceptionalism, all in the name of “exposing students to a true range of views?” I very much hope not, and yet that is how many will interpret what you have said.

It is true that there can be, in certain circles on the left a pressure toward a kind of conformity, particularly in an age when one’s stances are often publicly available on social media. There can be this conformity on the right, though I presume your complaint is with the left and that you are not in fact taking issue with, say, a possible scarcity of socialists in the Whitman School. But I suspect you underestimate the diversity of opinions that exist within the existing faculty, not all of which falls neatly along the left-right axis as currently defined.

In any case, the way forward should not be to hire faculty based on their political affiliations in an attempt to achieve some sort of imagined balance, or out of some ill-advised both-sides-ism, which would only serve to diminish the university’s intellectual and academic integrity. Rather, we need to do that which you called for in the main part of your address: to stand firmly for the freedom of speech on campus and for the rights of all those with well-considered, genuinely held views to express them. I am not talking about intentionally provocative or threatening hate speech. As for prospective faculty, let them be measured by their teaching ability and academic/intellectual rigor, not their politics.

Sincerely,

Stephen Paisley

Master of Fine Arts Graduate Student

Syracuse University

Published on September 23, 2019 at 7:41 pm