Truth-Seeking or Critical Thinking? Reconsidering the University's Mission

Khoa Sands ‘26

Attend a free speech-themed event at Princeton, or read any of our articles on the Princetonians for Free Speech website and you will encounter a familiar phrase, so ubiquitous it has almost become cliche: the “truth-seeking mission of the university.” Many defenders of academic freedom frame the debate in terms of a conflict over the fundamental telosof the academy (I myself have done this several times.) Is the mission of the university the pursuit of truth, or is it a socio-political goal? Whatever this socio-political goal, whether the radical social equality of Herbert Marcuse or the fascism of the Nazis, when the university dedicates itself towards political ends, truth suffers, freedom is extinguished and the academic vocation is compromised. Therefore, in order to protect free speech in the academy, we must reiterate and defend the mission of the university as the pursuit of truth. But what if we have it all wrong? 

On November 11, the James Madison Program hosted a conversation with Carleton College professors Amna Khalid and Jeff Snyder on “the state of campus free expression today.” Both Khalid and Snyder have toured the country to speak on free speech issues, worked for the University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, and are frequent contributors to the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Since last spring, the campus free speech debate has taken on a markedly different tone. Leftists rediscovered the virtues of free speech and institutional neutrality, while conservatives cried for common sense limitations. Central to the new conversation was the role of protest in the academy, and specially, encampments. Last April, Khalid and Snyder penned their own contributionin CHR, defending the importance of campus protest and activism. Protest, in their view, is an integral part of democratic citizenship, and universities have a duty to cultivate good citizens of our liberal society. But while many would accept that our universities have some duty to civic society, is protest necessarily the correct fulfillment of that obligation? Should a democratic society seek to cultivate activists or free thinkers? I would argue the latter – one cannot fulfill the right of free expression unless it is preceded by free thought and free thought can only be cultivated through liberal education. 

 However, this disagreement made me sympathetic to the crux of their critique of most free speech discourse: that the “truth-seeking mission of the university” may be unhelpful in the service of academic freedom, or just plain false. According to Khalid and Snyder, truth-seeking is an anachronistic view of academia, one that “neglects one hundred and fifty years of intellectual history in the academy” such as the secularization of higher education and the intellectual development of humanities disciplines towards more interpretive-based approaches. Certainly, some disciplines are obviously dedicated to the pursuit of truth, particularly the hard sciences, but a “truth-seeking mission” is less convincing when applied to, say, literary theory. Therefore, there exists a “sliding scale” of veracity from the hard sciences to the arts; on one end the mission is the pursuit of truth, on the other the discipline is interpretation, and the goal is critical thinking. In this view, critical thinking, that is open-mindedness and competent analytic skills, is the goal in itself, rather than the skills necessary to form a judgment of truth. In their telling, the constant reiteration of the truth-seeking mission of the university alienates potential allies in the humanities whose work is more interpretive. 

 Critical thinking is certainly a virtuous endeavor. In the tradition of Mill and Tocqueville, it is necessary that democratic citizens free their minds from the groupthink of mass culture in order to participate virtuously in a republic; free thought must precede free speech. But can critical thinking be an end in itself– an intrinsic good? We can accept that some academic disciplines are more directly concerned with truth and others with critical thinking, but what is one to do with the critical thinking acquired? Some scholars, like Allan Bloom and Eric Voegelin, have emphasized the intrinsic good of critical thinking and having an inquisitive, philosophical mind. And yet there is something deeply unsatisfying about existing in a state of perpetual criticism, and one that is inimical to the classical goal of liberal education: the good, the true, and the beautiful. Constant criticism is a recipe for nihilism. In his essay on the discipline of history, Nietzsche wrote that criticism “ is always a dangerous process...for since we are now the products of earlier generations, we are also the products of their aberrations, passions, mistakes, and even crimes. It is impossible to loose oneself from this chain entirely…too often what remains is a case of someone who understands the good without doing it.” Critical thinking is indeed indispensable for liberal education, but it cannot be an end in itself, but rather an instrumental good towards the pursuit of truth. To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, an open mind and an open mouth have the same goal: to shut it on something solid. 

 Khoa Sands ‘26, a PFS Writing Fellow, is the President of the Senate of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society and the Vice President of the Princeton Human Values Forum.