Do You Teach Critical Race Theory at Hildegard College?

Nov 10

“Do you teach CRT?” This is one of the questions we’re asked the most by interested students and parents.

I answer, “No, but not for the reasons you might think.”

When people imagine a professor teaching students Critical Race Theory, they often think of faculty indoctrinating young people. The professor uses their authority as expert and gatekeeper to tell students what they ought to believe. The world isn’t as it seems, they might say. The ideals you value — justice, goodness, freedom, love — are tools that oppressive systems use to obscure what is really going on. And eighteen-year-olds tend to receive this news as a revelation.

This is a bad way to teach because it discourages the kind of free inquiry that cultivates self-governance.

But the main reason we don’t teach CRT at Hildegard is that we don’t teach anything this way. The Hildegard classroom is centered on authentic conversation and does not allow any expert to intimidate or confuse our Fellows with quick jargon. We don’t indoctrinate, plain and simple.

But I would pose a second, more important question: Is Critical Theory commensurate with liberal education? Can it be taught conversationally? That is ask, is CRT intrinsically hospitable or opposed to the Socratic style of learning? To answer this, we need to understand what Critical Race Theory is, or at least, we need to understand what kind of knowledge it offers.

What is Critical (Race) Theory?

Critical Race Theory is an application of Critical Theory to matters of race. And Critical Theory is a method for explaining cultural phenomena based on a materialist interpretation of history. Karl Marx famously described all of world history as the history of class conflict. After the first World War, a group of European political, economic, and philosophical thinkers established what became known as the Frankfurt School. The founders of the Frankfurt School saw that Marx’s socio-economic ideas were being championed by several disconnected groups around Europe, each failing, they believed, because they lacked a comprehensive understanding of Marxist principles that can be applied in different contexts.

Hence the “theory” of Critical Theory. Mark Horkheimer, Georg Lukács, Theodore Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and other significant figures in the movement insisted on distinguishing theory from praxis. Theoretical Marxist thought purposely viewed society from a distance and so ought to view class conflict in its immediate settings as well as in its less immediate effects.

The power of capitalism, they said, was not only perceivable in social stratification but also in our very ideas. The writings of Adorno, Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin pay just as much attention to music, literature, and mythology as they do to economics and history. In time, modern forms of Critical Theory in Cultural Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Feminist Studies came to extend a theory of causation based in Marxist thought to all cultural artifacts, including ideas.

Are ideas merely the tools of oppression?

There is obviously much more to the story of how Marxist thought became the predominant approach to the liberal arts in the academy today. But, I want to make one additional observation, and that is to distinguish between two basic propositions of Critical Theory. Here they are:

PROPOSITION 1 — that our values and ideas are caused by historical circumstances.

PROPOSITION 2 — that all of world history is the history of class conflict.

The first proposition is subject to philosophical scrutiny. The second is not.

Those who have read the dialogues of Plato might recognize the first proposition. I think most reasonable people will agree that our ideas can serve multiple ends, like ulterior motives. To go a step further, we can also imagine how some of these purposes of our ideas might be influenced by the historical circumstances through which we came to hold them.

Consider Plato’s dialogue, the Meno. Socrates asks his conversation partner, Meno, what virtue is. Meno doesn’t skip a beat in giving an answer:

Let us take first the virtue of a man — he should know how to administer the state, and in the administration of it to benefit his friends and harm his enemies; and he must also be careful not to suffer harm himself. A woman's virtue, if you wish to know about that, may also be easily described: her duty is to order her house, and keep what is indoors, and obey her husband. Every age, every condition of life, young or old, male or female, bond or free, has a different virtue: there are virtues numberless, and no lack of definitions of them; for virtue is relative to the actions and ages of each of us in all that we do.

Meno has one foot in the door of the Frankfurt School. He answers that virtue varies depending on the kind of person somebody is. As a father, teacher, and husband, there are particular actions that are virtuous for me and others that are not.

Socrates’s problem with this definition is that it describes virtues (plural) rather than defining virtue (singular). Notice that my virtuous action as a statesman, insofar as I “administer the state,” not only applies to me simply as a rational being but also applies to my role as a member of the state. And as we know from the Republic, the justice of the state is partly measured by how well it creates the conditions necessary for individual citizens within that state to be virtuous. Statesmanship is an art in and of itself, and it comes as no surprise that Meno views virtue as relative to individual arts. Socrates knows that the most accessible ideas and values that we have also serve to uphold a certain state of affairs — regardless of the truth or falsehood of those ideas and values.

What Socrates is getting at in his conversation with Meno is that Meno’s idea of virtue is conditioned by life and history. Obviously Socrates doesn’t believe that Meno’s definition is the idea of virtue by which Meno ought to test whether an action is virtuous, but he nevertheless recognizes that circumstances lend themselves to and ultimately inform the ideas we have. And as is clear in so many of Plato’s dialogues, the ideas that we have tend to reinforce the cultural and social states of affairs through which we arrived at these ideas. This often makes the truth hard to see.

That is precisely the methodological argument of Critical Race Theory — that our ideas about what is just and equal and good perpetuate themselves in society. What should cause us to pause, however, is the assumption that this sort of reflection cannot lead us to the truth.

Indoctrination runs deeper than you might think

It is actually the second proposition of the original Critical Theorists that makes the first one dogmatic.

For argument’s sake, let’s grant that the ideas we have about justice, goodness, love, and so on might be shaped by the society in which we learned about them. Even for Socrates, there’s no problem with beginning with an idea of a thing as drawn from various relative scenarios (a man, a woman, young or old, bond or free), but by reflection we eliminate the relative factors until eventually we arrive at the notion that virtue must be something singular. We conclude that for a thing to be a thing it must be one thing.

But what gets in the way of reflection, of the pursuit of wisdom, is Critical Theory’s second proposition — the closing off of all other causes besides those that constitute the history of class conflict.

It is this aspect of Critical Theory — and by extension, Critical Race Theory — that we do not teach at Hildegard College because Marxist thought precludes the possibility of arriving, through reflection, at an idea of a thing in itself. We certainly read about and discuss matters of race, gender, and the behavioral habits examined in the field of economics, but we must approach them in authentic conversation through which, with Socrates, we seek to grasp the thing itself.

It was when I was a PhD student in Literature that I first learned that my philosophy of education was not permitted within the paradigm of Critical Theory. 90% of what it meant to study literature in graduate school was the practice of applying these two propositions to literary texts: the historical production of ideas and the reduction of history to social conflict.

I would occasionally ask something like, “Yes, that author deploys the idea of justice in ways that are racist [or sexist, or prejudiced], but what then is justice itself?” “How do we know that this act isn’t justice if we don’t know what justice is?”

“Well,” was the response, “that’s not our intellectual project.”

Or, since we were spending so much time applying Marx’s ideas, I would suggest that we look directly at Marx’s writings — or Hegel’s or Hobbes’s or those any other materialist philosopher — to discuss the ideas themselves.

* crickets *

The point is that all classrooms are governed by a philosophy of education. Discussing race in the classroom does not mean that the underlying philosophy of learning is inherently critical, that is, disoriented from the pursuit of what is good and true. It isn’t the topic of study that establishes the end of learning, it’s the way that we study it.

Yet many of the most celebrated approaches to teaching in universities today assume that what we study and how we study it are utterly inextricable from one another. For example, the professor of Black Feminism, Patricia Hill Collins, whose ideas were constantly repeated by my fellow graduate students, observes that scholars and students from minority groups might be at a disadvantage in the classroom because the rules of discourse are set by the majority group. She writes:

Black women scholars may know that something is true but be unwilling or unable to legitimate our claims . . .

Were we to stop reading there, we could examine the argument philosophically. To what extent are rhetoric, logic, and the art of listening well susceptible to power dynamics? Probably, to some extent, they are. But complete the sentence, and the Socratic practice is paralyzed:

Black women scholars may know that something is true but be unwilling or unable to legitimate our claims using Eurocentric, masculinist criteria for consistency with substantial knowledge and criteria for methodological adequacy. (from Toward an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology)

Collins says that our epistemology — how we know things — is so determined by social and cultural circumstances such as race and gender that in order to have an inclusive dialogue we need to admit of alternative ways of using logic and recognizing what is true.

Now imagine this sort of argument being presented to a group of 18-20 years-olds, and even further, to 18-20 year-olds who have never before thought deeply about the nature of knowing. It’s completely paralyzing to first-order questions like, “What is knowledge? What is understanding? What is the nature of learning itself?” How does a confused student challenge this sort of argument, if they happen to disagree, without being viewed as oppressive?

That is the deeper indoctrinating tendency Critical Theory.

How to differentiate the careful study of race from the theory that currently holds a monopoly on it

One takeaway from these reflections is that “indoctrination” doesn’t amount merely to being lectured at or being told what to believe. Indoctrination is happening whenever the classroom is inhospitable to an honest question, whenever a student assumes that their confusion or doubt must be due to their own deficiency as a thinker or to their own racial or sexual makeup. And in this way, indoctrination can just as easily take hold of discussions of theology, classical philosophy, and the natural sciences as of race.

I offer three safeguards against indoctrination.

Reading Original Sources. There are many reasons we read original sources in a Great Texts curriculum — building a history of ideas, experiencing the undistilled beauty of a great book, understanding ideas in historical context, and gaining confidence interacting with intimidating problems and texts. But one additional reason is that it guards against any individual (professor or student) claiming authority simply because of who they are. The author is our teacher. We each have equal access to the text in front of us.
Studying Across Fields of Knowledge. I don’t like the term “interdisciplinary” because areas of knowledge are not merely disciplines of practice. Still, one characteristic of dogmatic academic programs is the dominance of one methodology of knowing over others. A feminist or Marxist theorist might object that this is exactly their own point: to open learning up to a plurality of scientific methodologies. But beneath this dogmatic pluralism is an unsound philosophy of what it means to come to know something. Great books like Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Poetics, Augustine’s Confessions, and Dante’s Divine Comedy are not disciplinary. They aren’t testable according to a single method of interpretation. They blend rhetoric, politics, poetry, theology, philosophy, and arithmetic into a single work that requires readers to be humble, sharp, and honest at once.
A Learning Environment That Knows What It Is. There is nothing “uni” about most uni-versities today. Five freshman can enroll at the same university and four years later graduate with no ideas, questions, or virtues in common. The reasons why universities have become multi-versities are older than any of the people leading these universities today. And so the business of most universities is no longer education. You don’t go to a certain university to learn something or to become a certain kind of person. The size and professionalization of most universities make ideas like that absurd. Individual programs and even individual faculty teach what they want to and how they want to. So, you’re taking a gamble no matter what big university you attend. But the last twenty years has seen the founding of new colleges that believe in the power of a common education. These are schools that know who they are and who are able to answer questions like What will I learn at your school? without confidence and conviction.

A final word of advice. We should practice what we preach. The acronym “CRT” is uttered in town halls, school meetings, churches, blogs, and social media platforms every day. Don’t take anyone else’s word for it. Read the writings of its proponents for yourself. Practice self-governance, and judge for yourself.