Isn't a university a place to learn how to defend your ideas?

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The University of Minnesota is most certainly failing its students in the social sciences and the humanities.

Four and a half years ago over lunch with a friend, I shared my intent to take a class at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus starting in the fall of 2019 under the Senior Citizen Education Program (SCEP). The SCEP offers courses at reduced cost for Minnesotan citizens aged 62 and older at all of Minnesota's state-supported institutions of higher education.

For that first semester I searched for a class and professor to challenge my own beliefs and biases. I repeated this for the most part each semester. Although twice I found the course description to be so interesting, I enrolled in those classes for that reason alone.

Before I knew it, one semester became two, then one year became four. Now I have taken seven classes over the course of those four years, and I am enrolled for another class this fall. Although the experience has been great, each subsequent class added to a suspicion that began in my first class, that there was something fundamental missing in the classroom. I eventually concluded that it would have a lifelong drag on students' intellectual development and that the state would not receive the full benefit of its investments at the university.

The classes I took — sociology, political science, planning, critical theory and contemporary art — were mediocre to exemplary. Most of the professors were very knowledgeable, the lectures were often thought-provoking and usually solicited a significant number of comments and questions from students.

Thus, the important learning curve of rhetoric — critical thinking, argument formation and articulated speech — was not encouraged. Students' skills in this area therefore did not advance because they were not exposed to the challenging and, most important, incredibly daunting experience of having to defend one's beliefs to a professor in front of one's peers.

This absence left the classroom environment less interesting, less challenging and bereft of the camaraderie needed to facilitate advanced learning.

Paradoxically, a few classes' writing requirements came with instructions to vigorously defend one's position.

The liberal political biases of most of the professors were plain to see but that is only problematic in isolation. Students need to be exposed to the opinions that their professors have developed over a lifetime of learning; however, without the concurrent classroom atmosphere of challenging each other, the professors' biases act like a wet blanket on students' intellectual development. The additional negative effect is that the beliefs of liberal students are calcified and conservative students feel silenced.

Minnesota taxpayers expect a return on their significant investments in higher education at the University of Minnesota. The students in these classes are admitted to the U because they have demonstrated, through their first 12 years of education, that they have a high probability of developing into very productive individuals whose professional accomplishments will benefit all of us.