A university should be one of the few places in society where no idea is beyond examination.
Not because every idea is equally credible.
Not because facts are merely opinions.
And not because expertise does not matter.
But because the entire purpose of higher education is supposed to be the disciplined pursuit of knowledge through evidence, argument, criticism and the willingness to be proved wrong.
That distinction is becoming increasingly important.
In The Madness of Crowds and The War on the West, Douglas Murray identifies a number of cases in which contentious ideas surrounding race, identity, sex, gender and social justice appear to have moved beyond being theories that can be examined and challenged and instead become propositions that students are expected to accept as established moral truths.
Whether Murray is correct in every example is itself open to debate.
Indeed, that is rather the point.
His arguments should be examined in exactly the same way as the arguments he criticises.
But the broader question he raises is difficult to dismiss:
What happens when a university stops teaching students how to distinguish between an argument and a dogma?
Theory Is Not the Same as Fact
Universities routinely teach theories.
They should.
A theory can be enormously powerful. It can explain patterns, generate hypotheses and provide a framework for understanding complicated phenomena.
But theories remain open to testing, criticism and modification.
Critical race theory, Marxism, feminism, post-colonial theory, evolutionary psychology, behavioural economics and countless other intellectual traditions should therefore be available for serious academic study.
The problem begins when the educational language subtly changes.
There is an enormous difference between saying:
“Here is a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon. Here is the evidence supporting it. Here are its limitations and competing explanations.”
and saying:
“This is how the world is, and disagreement demonstrates that you have failed to understand it.”
The first teaches scholarship.
The second teaches doctrine.
A university should be teaching students to ask:
What exactly is being claimed?
What evidence supports it?
What evidence contradicts it?
Is the claim falsifiable?
Are there alternative explanations?
Does correlation demonstrate causation?
Is this an empirical claim, a philosophical claim or a moral judgement?
And perhaps most importantly:
What evidence would persuade me that I am wrong?
If the answer is “nothing”, we may no longer be dealing with intellectual inquiry.
We may be dealing with dogma.
Disagreement Is Not Violence
One of the more troubling developments Murray explores is the transformation of intellectual disagreement into a question of personal harm.
A student hears an argument they consider offensive.
That in itself is not unusual.
Universities should contain offensive ideas.
Not gratuitous harassment, threats or discrimination.
But ideas capable of offending people certainly.
Otherwise universities could never seriously discuss religion, imperialism, abortion, capitalism, communism, race, sexuality, gender, war, crime or virtually any other important subject.
The appropriate academic response to an objectionable argument is remarkably simple:
Challenge it.
If the professor is wrong, demonstrate where.
Challenge the evidence.
Challenge the methodology.
Expose the logical error.
Produce contradictory data.
Write the rebuttal.
Debate them.
That is what universities are for.
Yet some controversies described by Murray appear to have followed a very different pattern.
Rather than attempting to defeat an academic’s argument, campaigns have sometimes sought to defeat the academic.
Speakers are disinvited.
Academics face disciplinary complaints.
Petitions demand dismissal.
Professional reputations become targets.
Universities find themselves responding administratively to what began as an intellectual disagreement.
That creates a dangerous educational lesson.
Students may learn that if they cannot successfully defeat an argument, sufficient institutional pressure can sometimes remove the person making it.
That is not critical thinking.
It is the substitution of power for reasoning.
The Most Serious Failure May Not Be the Loss of the Academic
When an academic is hounded from a position because of lawful but unpopular arguments, attention naturally focuses on the academic.
Was their freedom of speech protected?
Was academic freedom respected?
Was the university’s disciplinary process fair?
These are important questions.
But there may be an even larger educational failure.
What did the university teach the students involved?
If students object to an academic argument and the institution’s response is to encourage debate, evidence and counterargument, the university is doing its job.
If the institution instead responds primarily by investigating the academic because students object strongly enough, it risks teaching something very different.
It teaches that moral certainty can substitute for intellectual scrutiny.
It teaches that offence can substitute for refutation.
And it teaches that institutional pressure can sometimes accomplish what argument cannot.
Universities should be producing graduates capable of confronting ideas they hate without needing those ideas to disappear.
That is intellectual resilience.
The Jason Arday Controversy
The recent controversy surrounding Professor Jason Arday provides a very different but equally important example of why academic scrutiny must operate in every direction.
Arday became Professor of Sociology of Education at Cambridge and was widely celebrated following his appointment.
Later, serious allegations emerged concerning substantial textual overlap between his doctoral thesis and earlier academic work.
Independent academics reviewing the material publicly questioned both the extent of the overlap and aspects of the quality of the work itself.
Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded the PhD, had previously investigated allegations and did not uphold academic misconduct, while later scrutiny led to renewed institutional examination and intense public controversy.
The important point is not to turn the case into a referendum on Arday personally, nor to use it as an argument against research concerning race or inequality.
That would itself be intellectually lazy.
The important question is institutional.
Were the same standards of critical scrutiny universities claim to teach their students consistently applied to the academics they employed and promoted?
That principle has to operate symmetrically.
An academic working in fashionable or morally important areas of research should not receive reduced scrutiny because challenging them may be uncomfortable.
Equally, an academic challenging fashionable theories should not receive increased scrutiny simply because their conclusions are unpopular.
The standard must remain the same:
Show the evidence.
Racism, Accusations and Evidence
The Arday controversy also illustrates another important principle.
An academic can experience racist abuse while simultaneously facing legitimate questions about their scholarship.
Those propositions are not mutually exclusive.
Evidence of plagiarism is not disproved by demonstrating that some critics hold racist views.
Equally, evidence of plagiarism does not demonstrate that racism played no role in other treatment directed towards the individual.
These are separate questions requiring separate evidence.
Universities should be exceptionally good at recognising this distinction.
Instead, contemporary discourse sometimes collapses complicated disputes into moral binaries.
Either someone is a victim or they are a wrongdoer.
Either criticism is legitimate or discriminatory.
Either an academic is entirely credible or completely discredited.
Reality is rarely that tidy.
Critical thinking requires the ability to hold multiple propositions simultaneously and examine each on its own evidence.
A University Is More Than a Degree Factory
Universities perform many functions.
They conduct scientific research.
They educate doctors, engineers, lawyers and teachers.
They provide laboratories, libraries and research infrastructure.
They contribute enormously to culture, medicine, technology and economic development.
But their distinctive intellectual function is something deeper.
A university should teach students how knowledge is constructed.
That means teaching them how to distinguish:
fact from interpretation,
correlation from causation,
hypothesis from conclusion,
evidence from assertion,
and moral conviction from empirical proof.
Most importantly, universities should teach students that even deeply held beliefs remain open to examination.
That principle must apply equally to ideas associated with the political left and political right.
A conservative proposition does not become true because progressives dislike it.
A progressive proposition does not become true because conservatives dislike it.
Truth is not decided by political ownership.
Nor is truth determined by who shouts loudest.
The Right to Be Wrong
Universities must also protect something increasingly uncomfortable:
the right to be wrong.
Intellectual development requires mistakes.
A student may make a poorly reasoned argument.
A professor may propose a hypothesis that eventually collapses.
A researcher may publish a conclusion that later evidence disproves.
This is not necessarily academic failure.
It is often how knowledge progresses.
What matters is whether the system allows those mistakes to be discovered and corrected.
A university that punishes incorrect but honestly expressed ideas creates incentives for intellectual conformity.
If speaking controversially carries professional risk while remaining silent carries none, rational academics may simply avoid controversial subjects.
That produces an invisible form of censorship.
Nobody needs to ban the argument.
People simply stop making it.
What Should Universities Teach?
Perhaps the simplest response to a student saying:
“That professor is wrong.”
should be:
“Excellent. Prove it.”
Bring the evidence.
Identify the flawed premise.
Challenge the methodology.
Find better data.
Construct the counterargument.
Publish it.
Debate it.
That is education.
Similarly, if a student says:
“This theory explains society.”
the university should respond:
“What evidence supports it, and what evidence would make you abandon it?”
That single question may be one of the most important things higher education can teach.
Because the purpose of university education should not be to produce people who know what they are supposed to believe.
It should produce people capable of explaining why they believe something.
And capable of changing their mind when the evidence demands it.
So What Good Is a University That Cannot Do This?
If a university becomes unwilling to expose fashionable theories to criticism, unwilling to protect academics expressing lawful dissent, or unwilling to teach students the difference between evidence and dogma, then something fundamental has gone wrong.
It may still issue certificates.
It may still generate research income.
It may still appear high in international rankings.
But its educational purpose has been diminished.
A university’s strength should not be measured by how successfully it creates intellectual agreement.
It should be measured by whether its graduates can disagree intelligently.
Because the greatest achievement of education is not certainty.
It is the ability to recognise uncertainty.
To examine evidence.
To challenge authority.
To challenge ourselves.
And occasionally to say the three words that dogma can never tolerate:
“I was wrong.”
A university that teaches students how to do that is performing one of society’s most valuable functions.
A university that teaches them merely what they are expected to think has forgotten what a university is for.
