Although one often hears that faculty “impart knowledge” to students, the reality is that in a good liberal education, substantial time is devoted to teaching students how to acquire new knowledge for themselves and how to evaluate evidence within different areas of knowledge. To do this well, professors in the classroom also need academic freedom to explore their subject—including contested questions and real-world implications—with their students.
To help students think critically about a subject or problem, faculty members need to take seriously what students already know or believe about that topic and engage that prior understanding so new learning modifies the old—complicating, correcting, and expanding it. This process of cultivating a liberal education is a journey that transforms the minds and hearts, and frequently the starting assumptions, of those involved—both teachers and students. Because knowledge is always expanding, the eventual destination is uncertain.
To develop their own critical judgment, students also need the freedom to express their ideas publicly as well as repeated opportunities to explore a wide range of insights and perspectives. The diversity of the educational community is an important resource to this process; research shows that students are more likely to develop cognitive complexity when they frequently interact with people, views, and experiences that are different from their own.
Expressing one’s ideas and entertaining divergent perspectives—about race, gender, religion, or cultural values, for example—can be frightening for students. They require a safe environment in order to feel free to express their own views. They need confidence that they will not be subjected to ridicule by either students or professors. They have a right to be graded on the intellectual merit of their arguments, uninfluenced by the personal views of professors. And, of course, they have a right to appeal if they are not able to reach a satisfactory resolution of differences with a professor.
Learning to form independent judgments further requires that students demonstrate openness to the challenges their ideas may elicit and the willingness to alter their original views in light of new knowledge, evidence, and perspectives. Just as a crustacean breaks its confining shell in order to grow, so students may have to jettison narrow concepts as they expand their knowledge and develop more advanced analytical capacities. As they acquire the capacities to encounter, grasp, and evaluate diverse points of view, they also gain more nuanced, sophisticated, and mature understandings of the world. Every college student deserves to experience the intellectual excitement that comes from the capacity to extend the known to the unknown and to discern previously unsuspected relationships.
Students may, in the end, reaffirm the worldviews and commitments that they brought with them to college. But they should do so far more aware of the complexity of the issues at stake and far better able to ground their commitments in analysis, evidence, and careful consideration of alternatives.
(Association of American Colleges and Universities, "Academic Freedom & Educational Responsibility," Liberal Education 92 [spring 2006]: 6-13, at 11)
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 