Beware of Bad Ideas

IN THE LONG HISTORICAL RIVALRY between town and gown, the Trump administration’s Executive Order 13950 of 22 September 2020 was something of a watershed. The order on “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping” was an unusually specific and high-level example of democratic society exercising what I will call a “reverse gatekeeping” function against what are seen as bad ideas borne inside the academy. The executive order noted that the core assumptions of identity essentialism, the division of citizens into oppressor and oppressed, and the assumptions of guilt and virtue based on group characteristics “may be fashionable in the academy, but they have no place in programs and activities supported by Federal taxpayer dollars”.

These ideas, it warned, were “migrating from the fringes of American society and threaten […] to infect core institutions of our country”. The day after the order, Russ Vought, director of the office of management and budget, said in an interview that the stereotyping “emanates from left-wing universities across the country that suggests that our institutions are fundamentally racist and need to be brought down”.

While the order sparked healthy debate on so-called “diversity” training, the more interesting aspect was this stark example of an inversion of the usual hierarchy of judgment. It is normally academics, sitting in their ivory towers, who keep out ideas and evidence from campus that they find to be defective. Here, we had a reversal of polarity: an elected government rejecting an