The Role Of The Academy In A Polarized World

Oh yeah. Multnomah Talks back in business. Here we go. Campus of Multnomah University full of students, I might say.

Multima University Portland, Oregon we are here again with a new episode of MU Talks. This is Alim Bruncilla, your co host.

And we also have Rob Hildebrand, Canadian.

Robin, now you're introducing yourself as Canadian. You waited quite a few episodes to introduce yourself Canadian. Yeah, but Robert. Reverend Dr. Robert J. Hildebrand, one of our professors, distinguished professors here at Multivers.

I'll take it.

And of course he should take that. It's not often that I say that.

Right. But.

But it's distinguished professor University. Today we are going to talk about and we're going to have to wrestle with the role of the Academy in.

A politicized, polarized, polemicized, pandemicized world.

World.

World.

We have more p words but. But basically we're gonna land on polarized world. What is truly the role of the Academy in a polarized world? If you got a chance to scroll through your social media.

Yeah.

If you've had any conversation. Fascinating is I've been married for 10 most. The most time of, of having polarized conversations I've ever had with Diane on various topics.

Oh, you guys had some disputes, eh?

Well, actually discussions but they were like on various topics where I was like wow, I know, I didn't see it like that. Interesting. And it's back and forth. But as we may have 10 years, we've never had such a year with so many discussions on so many issues.

So much going on.

So we have a political environment that is absolutely, I'll just say I think it's absolutely crazy bonkers. I mean just craziness defined.

People have gone off the edge.

I mean straight up I, I think it's, it's pushing people on various extremes of both, both aisle. And, and so we have a political system that is like that. We have racial tensions, we have, we have a pandemic that is pushing us in so many issues. So we are in a time that is, that is interesting and I don't think, think that the polarization is very, very healthy. So let's talk a little bit about the role of Academy on, on this, the role of higher education in this. Have we, are we contributing? Are we failing? Are we doing anything? We are going to be as critical as other of other places. Then we're going to be of our own institution. You're thinking internally how are we contributing to this? So Rob, your thoughts?

Yeah, man, I agree. It's been crazy. And I think. I think probably most of us really don't like it. Maybe there's some folks that enjoy controversy. I think there are some folks that enjoy a good argument or a good fight. That's not me at all, my Mennonite upbringing. But this has been a deeply uncomfortable time. Like, I try to be real balanced on the social media and I try to listen to all voices, but this last while has been so crazy that I've just decided. The last month I started losing the battle. I'm like, I don't know if I can tune this out. And so I actually started snoozing for 30 days. Folks that anyone says that Trump is the devil or Biden is the devil, or if you start referencing Nazis, I'm just gonna snooze it. You know, I'm just gonna delete it for a bit. But the world's crazy. Now, I relate to your comment about the family. My son comes over and he's a smart guy, smart young guy. And I won't give out his positions or mine too readily since he's not here. But we've had some really interesting discussions about the protests and the Black Lives Matter and about certainly about politics and the re election. One of the interesting observations that was made that I asked him what he thought would happen if a certain person got elected and he wonders if there will be. He didn't say civil war. Maybe that's too strong, but significant riots. And you start to think about it and you're like, man, this is not where we want to go as a country. We do not want to have a civil war. We don't want to have riots. And as believers and certainly as the academy, as schools, we should be part of solving that rather than exacerbating it. And I think some people think the academy does exasperate it. Like I think they accuse us of that.

I think that, well, there's been a shift in our lifetime, I think so to see cancel culture penetrate higher education in a way where now different speakers are now welcomed on different campuses. I find that to be quite controversial. And it goes against the DNA of a university, which is unity and diversity. That diversity of thought.

Never thought of that.

Right. So the university concept came out of church, out of the England part, like long time ago and came like initially universities came out of an actually church and where this was modeled quite well. I think the ability to have to be in the same place with people that have that diverse thoughts on all spectrum. I mean, you know, I was Talking recently with our theology professor here at Mult University, and I thought he said something really profound. He said being having a church online is detrimental. Now for the fact that, yeah, I'm not going to the altar right now and right next to me is somebody that wears a Biden T shirt and somebody that wears a make comedic or Greater Again hat and T shirt at the altar. And I am there with them in the same space, embracing and living together in what it's called the joint of the unity of the spirit. So you can be in the same body by having diverse thoughts. And I think, for me, I think it's a detriment to the concept that we can come together in the academy and wrestle with difficult thoughts, with very difficult thoughts and push back on things that have been predetermined by the previous generation and say, no, let's reconsider that. But this is an environment to do so. If we don't have that freedom, that commitment to do it in a university setting, where is that happening? Because now it's happening on social media. I have some problems with that. It's happening in the households and at the kitchen tables without any skills or any framework or any tools to do it. So in a constructive way.

Yeah. Boy. So much to say. You're so right about. When you know somebody, when you care about them, when you build a relationship, you're much more willing to learn and to listen instead of just automatically shutting them down. Like I was on. Okay, so I was on an Oregon Ducks football post the other day and somebody made a comment about one of the quarterbacks and then everybody started fighting and everybody's arguing and I'm like, oh, here we go again. And the truth is, I don't know any of these guys. And so I don't, you know, I don't really have anything invested in the relationship. So it's easy for me if, if I'm kind of a hot headed person to throw in my. Throw in my comment and be nasty. But when you know somebody, when you take the time to get to know them and you appreciate them and love them and then they say something that's maybe a little different than you're thinking, you want to take the time to be careful and understand where they're coming from. A great example is when we were talking about socialism a while back, coming from very different countries, Romania and Canada. And so sometimes coming from Canada, which is not really very socialist. I don't even think we're using the same word, really.

No, no, we're not.

Yeah. Sometimes I'm kind of like, oh, you know, it's not the end of the world. But then you're like, well, here's some things I've seen. And I'm like, okay, I got to think about that. You know, I gotta. I gotta. I gotta. I gotta accommodate my schema to better understand the world. And I'm willing to do that because we have a relationship. And so instead of just dismissing something right away, you think and you listen.

Polarized world. I. I was reminded recently of a few words. I want to read this to you because I think one of the best examples that I. I want to go to is Apostle Paul. I know, I'm going. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna do it. I'm about to preach. But he says, 2 Timothy, chapter 2 says, avoid worthless, foolish talk that only leads to more godless behavior. This kind of talk spreads like cancer, as in the case of these two guys. They have left the path of truth, claiming that the resurrection is. But God's truth stands firm like a foundation stone. But this is the guy. So he's saying, avoid worthless talk that only leads to just worse things. But he's the guy that we find him debating out there with the Greeks and with all this about, like, this and this and this and theology. So. So finding what is what is worthless. Because you think, well, it's worthless to talk to them. That's not what he's talking about. There are things that I think are worthless.

Yeah.

In the way we approach him, that acid arguments of the why just going. Burning through everything, but with no end in mind. There's no ends to this mean means no ends whatsoever. You're not becoming more informed. You're becoming more, you know, passionate about something. This is where I think academy. The academy and. And higher education has a significant role in how this works. So I'll give you an example what I'm thinking, and we're thinking out loud here. If you're. If you're listening to our podcast. We're just wrestling with this man. I don't. I don't have significant answers for this, but we're reflecting and thinking about the role that Academy should have and how it has an increasingly active role in the polarization instead of really bringing some tools to deal with this.

Right.

Theory. Evolution. Evolution. Yes. I said it right. This comes as a. This comes as an academic research paper. It was an academic research paper that. That had some fascinating thoughts in it. Some fascinating concepts. Right. Of. Of how this works with some research, some academic research in it, that, that really needed some pushback and some thinking and some, some evolving of that.

Right.

It gets taken from the academic world and being pushed through, monetizing and through some interest and becomes an agenda and a political agenda and it gets exploded out of that. My understanding, from what I've read is Darwin itself never wanted this to come out of that academic world. He did it as a research. He didn't do it as an agenda to actually go in. He did it. What I liked about that is that there are some clear rules of engagement in the academia on how do you approach any given topic. You, you wrestle with it, but there's some rules of engagement. You put together a thesis, right, that an argument, a research argument that has a thesis, an antithesis and a synthesis in it. Right? And then your synthesis. Now I'm not going to just go and say, well, you're not right. You need to come up with some counter arguments that are built with those rules of engagement in that world. Now people from the theological field, people from the, from the biology field, from people can do it in their own fields of expertise. What happens when you remove the rules of engagement? Free for all? And now let's talk with uninformed decisions. And here I am talking even specifically about the evangelical community that is very rapidly addressing every point that moves around us. Very reactionary, but without really giving it the time to get informed on how this works.

Yeah, the time to listen.

Just adding worthless, just gas on this fire. And a significant concern that I have is that there are more and more people feeling lost. Lost. So academia now becomes a hot bed of, of, of disagreement instead of the place where you can disagree constructively.

One of the things, yeah. One of the things I love about teaching at a school like our school, Multnomah University, is I, I love being on faculty with some smart folks and some of them disagree with me. In fact, probably all of us disagree on, on other things. And one of the first lessons you learn when you go to do a doctorate is that you start reading books on a, whatever your topic of study is. People disagree. You know, it's always funny to me when people quote science as if science was a monolith. There's lots of opinions, there's lots of beliefs, there's papers disagreeing with anything of the interpretation of a passage. And the truth is, as human beings, our minds, sometimes we're a little lazy. And we think we understand the world and we want to, we're comfortable with our understanding, but a lot of times we're not, you know, we don't understand everything. And so we're presented with something that we don't, we haven't considered yet. And the lazy default is to just assume that those people are all idiots. And I think that when people on the left or the right, any of us, when we start to believe that all the people that disagree with us are idiots, we're never going to come to the truth and we're never going to progress. We're just going to get farther and farther apart. So I think part of the role of the academy should be to foster discussion, to create students that are willing to listen and to hear multiple perspectives and then try their best to grasp truth. You know, again, this is no, no slight on the idea of truth. I'm firm believer in it. But, but to find that sometimes you have to listen a little bit.

I, I actually agree with you. Another thing that I think has penetrated a little bit in the academic world that, that I, I, I hold higher expectations for is the, the inability to, to distinguish between the person talking and the argument that we're talking about.

Yeah. The ad hominem.

Yes. I mean, you're just. Everything becomes personal. The person that says it. We demonize the demonization and demonization and demonization of the person. Yeah. I find that to be an intellectual and a problem of the soul, not just an intellectual matter here. Right. A tainting and a poisoning of the soul. But we should be able. You know, I grew up in a culture where I didn't have this framework to this day. So for people that don't know, I'm actually from Romania. I'm Romanian originally. And what that means is I come from Eastern Europe. Growing up my entire life. You have friendships. If you've helped me, Rob, let's say you're my friend. Right? We grew up being friends.

Hypothetical.

Hypothetical. We grew up being friends. And you've helped me many times. And I asked you to help me one more time, and you just cannot at that time. You just can't help me. That's it. Our relationship is done.

Yeah.

Like, how can you. What, what do you mean? You say no. What do you like, you can't. You cannot refuse me. Our relationship needs to end or we have a significant argument that relationship is done.

Yeah.

And it might be years until we reconcile. We reconcile. Look back. Well, I can't believe it. It was not until I had a friend in my life. He was a missionary from the Netherlands. He was in Romania. And we, we had a disagreement. We had an argument. And I was like, well, that's it done, right?

Yeah.

And he said, well, our relationship doesn't have to be affected by this. This is just an argument. And it was for the first time in my entire life that I was like, yeah, that makes sense. Wow, that was easy. These things are separate.

It can be done and we continue.

And it was such a for. I know this sounds really weird for people that are in this way, but you, you grew up with that framework to realize, like, well, I can't, like that's it, everybody around you does it. And to realize that the argument is very different if you don't cherish that relationship, that person, to realize that the argument is way less important than the person and that the formation of the person. And that's what one of the things that I love about Multnomah University is I. We have diverse thoughts on this campus. We have people with various philosophies and various thoughts. We have 31 programs here, from biology to theology to everything. Right. But what's very difficult, Somebody actually said that it's very difficult for them to hear us. Let us know if this is a little better.

Yeah.

But what's fascinating is that I can look at that person and say, wow, those are some really weird things that they're thinking right now, but they have value. They're a very intrinsic worth, beautiful person created by God, but they are, they're figuring some things out. I can, I can distinguish the fact of saying, wow, their thoughts are not so clear or wow, it's interesting that they think like that, but that doesn't mean they themselves are ready to be thrown in the recycle bin.

Right?

So because that's what we do in, in the social media, right? We just. That's it. This person is done. This person. Oh, you are this, you are this. Because you hold these political views, you hold these philosophies in your life. This is who you are. I find that to be quite problematic. And this is maybe another area where higher education and the academy, the academy should help, should contribute to that, to say, your arguments, your development, your thought process is different than who you are today and what values you have outside of this argument.

And hopefully higher. Hopefully schools also, you know, teach humility to their students and to their faculty members. Because the truth is, I don't know everything. I'm not God. You know, I believe in God and I believe in the Bible and I try to understand that the best as I can. But there are folks that have studied other things than I have and there are folks that have had other experiences that I have. And only when we start to, you know, consult all of these, I don't know all of these truths can you really get a good handle on truth. And if I just walk into everything thinking I know everything and everybody else is an idiot. No, not going to happen. We're just going to have more fights and we're not going to come to truth nearly as well.

Yeah, we, we're having some people mentioned that the, the sound signal is really low.

That's unfortunate.

Yes. One thing you could do is make sure that you actually listen to our actual podcast episodes. Facebook Live is just a preview of what we, what we do here. So listen to our actual podcast episode coming out soon. Do you think, Rob, I'm going to pick up your brain a little bit. Do you think higher education should actually take a moment more active role of getting involved in what's happening in our society now? Should we, should we publish more? Should we have more speaking engagement? Should we have a more active role in our society than. Than this? Just the intrinsic values that we bring to the market and that's it?

Sure. No, I, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, and I think schools generally do pretty well at this. Like, I know a lot of, a lot of schools are very good about allowing the professors to get out and speak different places and, and I think even in, if I remember correctly, my job descriptions, it's included. Like I believe it's a quarter of my job is to community involvement and getting involved. I think one of the things the schools need to watch out for. You've heard of the idea of a school of thought and that is true that schools tend to lean in directions. Clearly we're a Christian university, so we have lots of leanings. I think there's a lot of folks on the right that sometimes suspect the academy of being kind of a left leaning, you know, something about the idea of higher education wants to lean left. A lot of schools, not maybe ours so much, but. And so I think it's important for schools to continue to bring in people from diverse perspectives like, and not just the left, also the right. And to have, you know, those types of, I don't know, real world experience kind of considered not, not just academic or book learning, quote unquote. So I think that's one thing we can do to help. But yeah, absolutely, we should get out there and, and be ready to listen and ready to talk.

What else would be the role of higher education in this polarized world? What are you thinking?

Yeah, Man, I just, I mean I just the balance, like it's, I, it's always hard because you don't want truth sensors. Like, you know, whenever Twitter or one of the social medias decides that they're going to start becoming the arbiter of truth, I get a little nervous and I get that they're trying to cut out the fake news and we live in, in a world where fake news is, it seems to have proliferated. But, but on the other hand, if an I, truth should be able to stand under scrutiny. And so if, if someone's sharing dumb ideas, people should eventually be able to figure that out. I would think so. I, I actually tend to push back against the censoring a little bit. If somebody has an idea that's a bad idea, show them why it's a bad idea. Don't just cut it, cut it out. At least that's my take. It's a hard call though. I get that.

You know, fascinating. They mentioned the, the, the truth filtering. I, so I'm on most major social media platforms. I have not been filtered yet because I don't use it for controversy. But I've seen multiple ones being, being filtered. Multiple friends that were around us that made comments that I actually didn't think.

They were that crazy.

They were, they were filtered and you know, identified as spam. And then what happened, which was fascinating is that one of the social media platforms forms put forth their own article on something and I thought it was quite disingenuous and it was not actually really very truthful. But nobody, you know, they, they're not, they're not, you know, fact checking themselves, which I thought that to be a little bit, you're putting yourself above. I'm deciding what people can talk. And here I am having an agenda and pushing something which I think is highly problematic now because that means that truth is going to be, you know, promoted more than what I have to say. When did my voice become more irrelevant than somebody else that actually owns that platform?

Yeah, I have, I have zero confidence in, in the social media executives to be our arbiters of truth. And, and no, no hate to them. I just, the world is too complicated and, and, and I just don't think they're up for that. So I, I, I don't know. I guess I say let the voices go and, and then if people make bad arguments, come back and engage them on it. But not in a, a nasty way. You know, I don't know.

Well, this is definitely not an easy, not an easy topic. These are very, very difficult times. But I think if we're to draw some conclusions to this, we see it with our institution. So I think the number one responsibility we carry in this polarized world is to actually equip our own students to be change agents, to, to be the ones that they're in their home, they're in their peer groups, they're everywhere they go and to have something to say to contribute to this discussion in a healthy way. I think that's our number one responsibility. I also think we have a responsibility to publish and to be quite active in that field. And I have a feeling that people. One of the images that I always have clear in my mind, Rob, is John the Baptist. He is. It says, go in the wilderness and preach. That doesn't make any sense. You're in the ministry practitioner, practical ministry, practical theology. Who in their right mind is going to go out there in the wilderness and preach like that? That doesn't make any sense. Can you imagine if we sent our students to be like, listen, your assignment today is to go like east Oregon and just straight up preach there. Right.

National Forest.

But, but what was actually interesting is that there's one aspect there where people were coming out from the city, but it was even more than that. People were coming out from the temple. The Sadakis, the Pharisees, they're all coming out to the wilderness. Because I believe the truth preached in the wilderness is stronger and louder than sometimes the, the fake or the, the non truth spoken from the, the largest pulpit.

Sure.

So I think our responsibility to speak truth would love. But to speak truth. Anything to add to that before we wrap up this really interesting conversation?

Yeah. My shout out is, you know, this is going to be a difficult next few weeks, but we can get through it. I would say love your neighbor. The big idea of the New Testament, you know, do unto others as you would have done unto yourself as you're. Whatever happens in this election, let's keep cheering for the country, let's keep doing good. Let's love people we disagree with and let's try to keep humble and, and keep our ears open and to try to better understand the world and understand why maybe our quote unquote opponents feel differently than we do. I, I really think this is a solvable problem. We just got to decide to do it, you know.

Oh, wow. I really loved your thought to come and approach this so we can listen more than we can. We can speak. If we would be really consumed more we're understanding than to actually sharing our opinion and Right. And putting it out there for everybody to hear without actually thinking about it.

Yeah.

Great thought. Well, Here we go. Mr. Robert J. Hildebrand, thanks for listening to us. Thank you for listening to us. Going through all kinds of things and all kinds of thoughts. And please don't forget to come to our next episode. Coming up, we wrestle as a university with all kinds of things. And Rob, do you think the views and opinions expressed especially to especially on this episode.

Yeah.

Represent the university?

No, they're just our own views. The views represent. I never get this right by the way. This is the ongoing joke.

I love it.

The, the views expressed on MU talks in no way legally represent Multnomah University or its official affiliates.

Yeah.

It's just two guys talking and we're glad you joined us and hopefully you had some thoughts, too.

Thank you, everybody.

Stay safe.

See you in our next episode.

Cheers.