(a)dharmic academia
By Marcy Braverman Goldstein
Arjuna stood on the field of dharma (dharma-kṣetre) (1.1) between both armies (senayor ubhayor madhye) (1.21), gazing at people gathered together, desiring to fight. Faced with the responsibility to engage in war against relatives, he shivered, his skin burned, and his mind whirled. A panic attack overwhelmed him (1.29-31).
How did Arjuna arrive at this unthinkable moment? His predicament resulted from complex dynamics between rival cousins about who gets to live where. Attempting to resolve the conflict through peaceful negotiation, the Pāṇḍavas offered to take only five villages. But the uncompromising Duryodhana rejected their proposal. Arjuna’s side of the family then offered to take just a pinprick (sūcyagra) of land. But the nihilistic Duryodhana refused because he did not want the Pāṇḍavas to have any land, or to survive. This genocidal threat and the stress of imminent war consumed Arjuna who collapsed at the prospect of killing and/or being killed by his family.
The evil Duryodhana forced this war by withdrawing from dialogue and attempting to exile his extended family from their own historic homeland. While discussing this crisis with Kṛṣṇa on the battlefield, Arjuna felt his mouth go dry (mukhaṃ ca pariśuṣyati) (1.29), a symptom and symbol of his fear that Duryodhana might succeed in silencing his voice. Ultimately, Arjuna did not resign to moral disintegration and annihilation. He stood up and fought to maintain dharma.
The dynamic of this perennial dilemma is unfolding on 21st century university campuses. This current conflict is not primarily about literal land, but rather ideological space. While some viewpoints are fashionable, others are verboten. Constructive debate between opposing perspectives is rare or quashed, and sometimes people who present wrongthink, opinions that run contrary to the prevailing orthodoxy, are ostracized by purveyors of mainstream narratives. In an anonymous feedback survey, an assistant professor relayed a not uncommon realization: “I thought academia was about science, but I am realizing that it is actually about the scientific establishment.” Some students are mobilizing to create a more inclusive range of voices. For instance, Victoria Li organized a “Free Speech” petition due to “lack of dialogue.” She said, “It’s undeniable that we have a culture at Harvard that doesn’t encourage free exchange of ideas in classrooms.” Unfortunately, two generations after Pink Floyd’s iconic lyrics, people are still fighting against the educational establishment for their freedom: “We don’t need no thought control. . . . Teacher, leave them kids alone.”
The intolerant climate brings dire consequences. One is the desire to fire professors for wrongthink: “Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues.” Another is self-censorship: “Overall, 60% of college students expressed reluctance to discuss at least one controversial topic.” A third effect is disinviting guest speakers whose unfashionable views are deemed to be not only objectionable, but intolerable. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education has reported 532 campus disinvitations of journalists, a president of the United States, activists, and others. These issues beg the question: where should the line be drawn between inclusion and exclusion?
Across disciplines and nationwide, silencing, ostracization, forced resignations, and terminations are signs of academia’s fractured landscape. One example is Professor Luana Maroja, Chair of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Williams College, who was born under dictatorship in Brazil. She has taught the fundamental rules of biology that large gametes occur in females, and small gametes in males. In today’s classrooms, teaching that sex, not gender, is binary instead of on a continuum per “gender unicorn” explanations, is seen by some scientists as bigotry. This assessment of her expertise, Maroja argues, is stifling further research and weakening the scientific method of inquiry. She explained, “People are very afraid, professors in particular and many students. I have had secret meetings with groups of students that do not want to be identified. . . There’s definitely a fear of even questioning.” “The censorious, fearful climate is already affecting the content of what we teach.”
An incident of verbally violent silencing at Middlebury College became “the saddest day of my life,” as expressed by Professor Allison Stanger who had been scheduled to moderate a Q&A session with Charles Murray about his co-authored book, The Bell Curve. Students who think that Murray is racist shouted him down and yelled obscenities. Stanger does not agree with some of his stances but supported the liberal exchange of ideas and productive debate. She wrote, “What transpired instead felt like a scene from ‘Homeland’ rather than an evening at an institution of higher learning.”
Professor Bret Weinstein’s experience is a glaring example of exclusion. Every spring quarter since the 1970s at Evergreen State College’s Day of Absence, minority students and faculty had avoided campus to highlight their contributions to the college. However, during the Day of Absence in 2017, white people were asked to stay away from campus. Weinstein, who is politically on the left, chose not to absent himself and explained the dangerous precedent set by this proposal: “There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles. . . and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.” The irony: excluded people are excluding people.
Weinstein held his biology class. Students protested, and a riot broke out, captured on video. He was warned by the chief of the college police department, who had been told to stand down by the college president, that his safety could not be guaranteed. In “The Campus Mob Came for Me – and You, Professor, Could Be Next,” Weinstein wrote about “coercive segregation by race” and “anarchic protests.” His wife, Heather Heying, also a biology professor, clarified what is at stake: “If you do not come together in real life with people with whom you disagree, you guarantee finding yourself in a silo, out of which you can not see. . . . Let us be willing to disagree with respect.”
At Michigan State University, physicist Stephen Hsu, Vice President of Research and Innovation, was forced out of his administrative position after sharing a study that found no widespread racial bias in police shootings. While investigating deadly force and how to improve policing, he had interviewed MSU Psychology Professor Joe Cesario whose research revealed that “contrary to activist claims and media reports, there is no widespread racial bias in police shootings.” The data showed different conclusions than what is commonly reported and accepted as truth. Soon a letter to the university titled “Fire Stephen Hsu” gathered hundreds of signatures. He defended himself, writing in his blog that it “started as a twitter mob attack, with very serious claims: that I am a Racist, Sexist, Eugenicist.” Perhaps this President of Research and Innovation is a racist, sexist, eugenicist. Certainly “scientific racism has no place in an equitable and just institution.” But how many of the letter’s signatories read Hsu’s and Cesario’s research, and engaged them in dialogue to learn and wrestle with the information before working to exile Hsu from campus?
Had Hsu’s detractors read similar, surprising, controversial research findings previously published by Roland Fryer, Professor of Economics at Harvard University? In 2016 Fryer reported that Black and Hispanic Americans were not more likely than White Americans to be shot by police. The youngest African-American to be awarded tenure at Harvard, and a recipient of the prestigious MacArthur “Genius Grant,” Fryer spoke with Ian Rowe and Nique Fajors on their Invisible Men Podcast about disrupting the false narrative around policing. Perhaps his analysis is highly flawed, as reported by Justin Feldman, a visiting scientist at Harvard’s FXB Center for Health and Human Rights, who explains that there is in fact racial bias in shootings by police. Will truth emerge from this contested ideological space?
A few years after Fryer reported his findings, he was removed from campus. A review found that he had engaged in unwelcome sexual conduct with at least five women. Harvard suspended him without pay for two years, closed his Education Innovation Laboratory (EdLabs), and barred him from teaching and supervising students. After apologizing for “insensitive and inappropriate comments,” Fryer was permitted to teach and conduct research again. If silences could talk, what truths would emerge about the ascent, exile, and return of this African-American academic?
Illiberalism is antithetical to universities (from Latin universitas ‘the whole’) that should hold a universe of ideas. The Report of the Committee on Freedom of Expression at Yale in 1974 mentions the “right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.” Not presenting students with all the viewpoints is a betrayal by the system that is supposed to guarantee unrestrained quest for knowledge. “The students are ultimately the real losers as a result of the lectures they don’t hear, the paintings they don’t see, and the classroom discussions that never take place.” Their ability to seek and discern truths is compromised. If academia “prioritize[s] emotional comfort over the often-uncomfortable pursuit of truth, who will be left to model the discourse necessary to sustain liberty in a self-governing society?” Has “academia killed its own muse?”
The Bhagavadgītā’s timeless relevance addresses this dilemma. The first word is dharma (verbal root /dhṛ, to preserve, survive, nurture, and sustain), a declaration of the cosmic law that holds everything together. On the field of dharma (dharma-kṣetre) (1.1), Arjuna and Kṛṣṇa speak between both armies (senayor ubhayor madhye) (1.21) of cousins. There is no absolute binary opposition because these two parts of the extended family are ultimately a reciprocally sustaining singular whole, a collective that preserves and therefore survives each other.
Kṛṣṇa exhorts Arjuna to become established in yoga (yogastha) (2.48). He should stand up and skillfully engage in this battle to express his own duty (svadharma) as a warrior. Despite initial confusion, Arjuna eventually steps into his prescribed social responsibility and acts (karma-yoga) without clinging to any possible results (karma-phala), which maintains dharma. Had the uncompromising Duryodhana also engaged, instead of attempting to drive his cousins out of their own homeland, he would not have caused certain downward spiral into war.
Kṛṣṇa and Arjuna’s face-to-face dialogue is a model for people who should connect with each other in this way. As Professor Brené Brown advises, “People are hard to hate close up. Move in.” Her guidance about courage and leadership reflects the Bhagavadgītā’s message. Arjuna was confused, frustrated, and on the brink of resignation, but he courageously (from Latin cor “heart”) continued to show up for his wise, patient charioteer advisor who affirms his freedom: “Do as you so choose” (18.63). This prolonged, intimate conversation in the midst of chaos, during which Arjuna eventually sees clearly through his divine eyes (11.8), exemplifies a practice that is a necessary condition to maintain dharma. Had the nihilistic Duryodhana chosen to connect with individual people instead of rejecting the Pāṇḍavas as a group, had he decided to “move in” instead of digging into hatred of the “other” who is not ultimately “other,” he would not have generated a sequence of events that triggers complete breakdown.
For an academic landscape to be dharmic, it must be inclusive. As the catchy tagline of Heterodox Academy states, “Great minds don’t always think alike.” Banishing people whose views are inconvenient is not social justice. A Stanford University member explained, “if we can’t speak with others about certain things, we can never learn how to think about them properly. . . . Many people don’t seem to realize that inviting limits to freedom of expression is inviting dystopia.” This warning echoes a statement from the University of Chicago: “[T]he ‘cure’ for ideas we oppose ‘lies through open discussion rather than through inhibition.’ . . . [F]ree inquiry is indispensable to the good life, that universities exist for the sake of such inquiry, [and] that without it they cease to be universities.” In response to this high-stakes issue, Alumni Free Speech Alliance groups “pressing free-speech issues are popping up at colleges in many states, as debates over academic freedom, ‘cancel culture’ and changes on campus intensify.”
Some people courageously stand up (yogastha), knowing that the “consequences of a generation unable or disinclined to engage with ideas that make them uncomfortable are dire for society, and open the door – accessible from both the left and the right – to various forms of authoritarianism.” They reach out and cast the net wide, instill the value of engaging in constructive disagreements, and practice it. And they place necessary boundaries. Short of welcoming genocidal maniacs, despite inevitably uncomfortable moments, and for the sake of discovering truth(s), they commit to inclusion.
A group of academics who recognize the brokenness of the system is designing a new venture: “What unites us is a common dismay at the state of modern academia and a recognition that we can no longer wait for the cavalry. And so we must be the cavalry.” Pano Kanelos, the Founding President of UATX explains, “We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.” The principles state: “For universities to serve their purpose, they must be fully committed to freedom of inquiry, freedom of conscience, and civil discourse.” UATX introduced Forbidden Courses with this exemplary goal: “The end is not to prove that we are right, but rather that we can work together.”
How we frame binary opposition matters. The most consequential conflict is not primarily among rivals whose viewpoints and conclusions do not align, but rather between 1) people who push others onto a pinprick of land or entirely out of their own homeland and 2) people who stand skillfully (yogastha) and encourage excluders to become includers. People should bravely get up and connect with others despite real and sometimes irreconcilable differences. This way of living is worth fighting for.
On the field of dharma (dharma-kṣetre) Kṛṣṇa tells Arjuna that people follow the standard of the greatest ones (3.21). This tendency explains why what happens in academia does not stay in academia. People admire illustrious professors whose knowledge and values are inspiring. Many academics and prominent intellectuals have noticed some negative influence trickling out of universities. In 2020 Gloria Steinem, Cornel West, Steven Pinker, Salman Rushdie and others signed “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” that warns about a “new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” There is some consensus that the fracturing began in academia. The book review, “Why is America Fractured? Blame College, A New Book Argues,” explains that “colleges have been as much the venue for political division as they have been its root cause.”
The intolerance of differences that is pervasive in academia shaped Florida’s “Stop W.O.K.E.” Act. With the intention to prevent viewpoint conformity, this law prohibits endorsement on campuses of what is commonly known as Critical Race Theory (CRT), an ideology that divides people based on their race into oppressor and oppressed groups. As part of his response to a lawsuit about this issue, the judge warned of looming dystopia due to a cycle of (un)indoctrinations: “It is not lost on this Court that Mr. Orwell, in the original preface to his iconic satire of the rise of Joseph Stalin, Animal Farm, was responding to the liberal elites of his time. According to Mr. Orwell, the censoring of Animal Farm was merely a symptom of the fashionable orthodoxy of that era – namely, an ‘uncritical admiration of Soviet Russia.’ So, too, here, the State has responded to fears of ‘woke indoctrination’ in university classrooms. But rather than combat ‘woke’ ideas with countervailing views in the ‘marketplace of ideas,’ the State has chosen to eliminate one side of the debate. This only highlights the problem with viewpoint discrimination – in the name of combatting ‘indoctrination’ of one perceived orthodoxy, the State allows for ‘indoctrination’ in its preferred orthodoxy.”
The silencing and ostracization happening in ivory towers similarly occurs in corporate America. For instance, Levi’s brand president, Jennifer Sey, as a private citizen with young children during the COVID pandemic, questioned whether schools should shut down because closures seemed to be harming people, especially disadvantaged students in public schools. In the fall of 2021 the CEO told her that she was on track to become the next CEO, but that “all [she] had to do was stop talking about the school thing.” Sey did not cave to his pressure and instead “turned down $1 million severance in exchange for my voice,” as she explained in the article, “Yesterday I was Levi’s Brand President. I Quit So I Could Be Free.”
Pushing people out of ideological space also occurs on social media, which purposefully and insidiously isolates users in silos of viewpoint conformity thereby preventing them from encountering disconfirming information that might diminish allegiance to the media’s chosen narrative. When censorious Big Tech meets silencing unpopular, expert voices in the medical world, where people should theoretically be able to seek multiple opinions for healthcare, a potentially life-threatening concoction is foisted on the public. Add academia to the mix, and illiberalism becomes even more potent.
For instance, Jay Bhattacharya, M.D., Ph.D., Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, was secretly blacklisted on Twitter in August, 2021 after sharing views about COVID that did not conform to the dominant narrative. Anti-Bhattacharya sentiment is rampant among his colleagues and others, many of whom are not as qualified to assess the validity of the Great Barrington Declaration that he co-authored and signed on October 4, 2020 to propose focused protection instead of the reigning COVID-19 policies. In late 2022 at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, he was honored with the 16th Doshi Bridgebuilder Award by Navin Doshi who “offered insights for bridgebuilding, encouraging the audience to adopt principles of co-existence and to avoid the trap of polarization. ‘Nature’s nature is to create pairs of opposites within and without. . . . The path for transcendence is to bring balance, harmony, and complementarity between the opposites.’” Christopher Chapple, Doshi Professor of Indic and Comparative Theology and founding director of the Master of Arts in Yoga Studies, stated, “I am grateful to Dr. Bhattacharya for his bravery in expressing initial concerns about pandemic policies and for continuing to shine a spotlight on the impacts of these policy choices so that we can be better prepared in the future.” That Bhattacharya was invited to present his research and accepted this award at a university reveals the great possibility for more inclusion.
Another example of exclusion in Big Tech happened at Google News when Tanuja Gupta invited Thenmozhi Soundararajan, Executive Editor of Equality Labs and author of The Trauma of Caste, to speak about caste discrimination. Some Hindu employees at the company said that this topic was offensive and made them feel unsafe. So Soundararajan’s talk was canceled. Gupta was investigated, and then she resigned after having worked at the company for more than ten years. These women stood for inclusion, yet were pushed out by the exclusive establishment.
The open secret about academia’s deleterious effects on society are widely known, even more so since celebrity psychologist Dr. Phil was interviewed on The Joe Rogan Experience, the highest followed podcast globally. They lamented the strange moment in which we find ourselves. Dr. Phil said, “We’ve had more professors disciplined, suspended, or dismissed in the last 10 or 15 years than we’ve had since McCarthyism. When I was in college, campuses were where you went to hear the other side. That’s how you rounded things out. If there was a speaker coming that was totally on the other side, you went to listen to him. You thought, ‘I’m going to learn how to shoot this full of holes.’ Now anywhere from 15-30 percent of students think it’s ok to shout down somebody you disagree with. To protest and run them off campus. You don’t listen to them. You get rid of them. They protest and yell. What’s that about?”
The ramifications in society are dreadful as coddled students leave school and enter the workforce with little or no exposure to forbidden viewpoints, and minimal experience sorting through competing agendas. Currently American students do not rank high in reading, math, and science in comparison with other countries worldwide. Many experts anticipate that our ranking will drop further if our educational system continues in its dysfunctional way. And these people are our next generation of citizens. But they are not being trained to think critically, and therefore will not know how to assess perspectives or discern information from disinformation in the public square. The judge in the “Stop W.O.K.E.” case wrote about the destructive implications for democracy that result from lack of freedom of speech. “One thing is crystal clear – both robust intellectual inquiry and democracy require light to thrive. Our professors are critical to a healthy democracy, and the State of Florida’s decision to choose which viewpoints are worthy of illumination and which must remain in the shadows has implications for us all. If our ‘priests of democracy’ are not allowed to shed light on challenging ideas, then democracy will die in darkness.”
What to do?
One accessible course of action is to put Brené Brown’s theory into practice. As previously noted, she says,“it’s hard to hate people close up. Move in.” Let’s do it! One-on-one facetime, i.e. time spent face-to-face speaking with people in real life rather than from behind a screen on FaceTime, is a grassroots way to make a good difference.
Another approach is for two people to look at each other and not speak. The profound effect of this type of connection was revealed as the artist, Marina Abramović, sat with another person, each gazing at the other, during the performance The Artist Is Present in 2010 at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). “Seated silently at a wooden table across from an empty chair, she waited as people took turns sitting in the chair and locking eyes with her. Over the course of nearly three months, for eight hours a day, she met the gaze of 1,000 strangers, many of whom were moved to tears. ‘Nobody could imagine…that anybody would take time to sit and just engage in mutual gaze with me,’ Abramović explained. In fact, the chair was always occupied, and there were continuous lines of people waiting to sit in it. ‘It was [a] complete surprise…this enormous need of humans to actually have contact.’” The pure connection is a transformative, new way of seeing, such as when Arjuna grasped majestic reality with his acquired divine vision (11.8).
Dr. Phil led students in a similar silent face-to-face exercise during a focus group: “‘Pair up. No small talk. I want you to make eye contact. Just look this person in the eye. Cause we don’t do that much anymore. What are their challenges? What are they proud of?’ I left them looking for way past comfortable. They said, ‘I’m really shocked. I had never thought about this person as a human being before. I have a completely different attitude.’ When they had to make eye contact at a human level, every one of them said, ‘it really changed my attitude.’ Take a few minutes to make eye contact.”
The title “(a)dharmic academia” captures the perennial dilemma unfolding at 21st century universities. To what extent are these ideological spaces systemically just (dharmic) or unjust (adharmic)? How often is constructive debate welcomed? How often are “wrongthinkers” pushed onto a pinprick, shunned on campus, and exiled from their own historic academic land? How often do people self-censor? And who is willing to question, research, and publish answers?
I am. The overwhelming enormity of what is unfolding on the academic field has long been an “Arjuna crisis” for me, sometimes causing body shivers, burning skin, mind whirling, and a dry mouth. But Kṛṣṇa advises that we should not be attached to inaction (2.47). And many yoga philosophies guide us to re-cognize that there is no absolute binary opposition between parts of a pluralistic family that are ultimately an interdependent, singular whole. So let’s get up and engage one another (yogastha).
Professors especially should model spiritual citizenship by skillfully acting to hold the world together (loka-saṃgraha) (3.20). We should loosen our grip on ideological blinders, speak with people who hold different views and welcome more speech from them, mindfully affirm or change viewpoints, and encourage excluders to become includers. Others might then choose to align with blossoming new standards in the shifting campus culture. Our landscape can then become an increasingly fertile field for social justice (dharma-kṣetra).
