Zywicki on Academic Diversity

Alumni Trustee petition candidate Todd Zywicki ’88 has written a short article about the need for a diversity of opinions on college campuses.

Intellectual diversity, therefore, is crucial in that exposes students to a variety of ideas and perspectives, and through that developes critical thinking skills and an understanding of different ways of seeing the world which is necessary for living in a free and democratic society. I think the failure to have a serious representation of libertarian and conservative professors on campus, and the resultant tendency of the left to trivialize that world view (which is, after all, held by roughly 50% of students!), breeds a cynicism in students about the whole intellectual enterprise in which we are engaged. If the university itself doesn’t take ideas seriously and doesn’t care about free, open, and informed discussion of ideas, why would we possibly think that students would be any more interested in it? And if we aren’t going to teach them critical reasoning skills and to search for truth, they may as well major in Computer Science or Business Administration.

By way of example, he says that as a Dartmouth undergraduate he was assigned Marxist readings “in almost every class.” Not all that much has changed.