Rigorous.

Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818

Professor Stanley Fish on intellectual diversity ...

Isn't it the case that, at least in the humanities and social sciences, the materials to be studied are fraught with political and ideological implications? How could those implications be ignored or removed without producing a classroom experience that would be arid and just plain dull? Easy. What you do is regard the political and ideological implications of your materials as something to be studied and not as something you and your students vote on. The master rule was given long ago by Max Weber when he insisted that while canvassing for votes and trying to persuade others to your partisan views is perfectly appropriate in the political arena, it is perfectly inappropriate in the classroom. "It is one thing," says Weber, "to determine...the internal structure of cultural values, while it is another thing to answer questions of the value of culture." I have coined an ugly word which, I think, captures Weber's understanding of what should and should not go on in higher education. The word is "academicize," and it is easily turned into a slogan on the model of Duke Professor Fredrick Jameson's famous advice to cultural critics--always historicize. My advice is always academicize, by which I mean always remove the materials you bring to the classroom from the context of their real-world urgency--where you ask and answer questions like what should we do now and which of the alternative courses of action is just and moral--and insert them into the context of academic urgencies--where you ask and answer questions like what is the structure of the arguments on either side of this issue or what are the historical antecedents of the present controversy or what is the relationship between this controversy and others now playing out in neighboring areas of inquiry? The more you ask this second kind of question, the less you and your students will ask, or even be interested in, the first kind. Academicizing a subject means draining it of the energies that animate partisan proponents of one position or another, and infusing it with the energies that come along with rigorous intellectual interrogation. And you can do this without losing the political significance of the subject; it's just that that significance becomes part of what is being studied rather an occasion for real-life decision making.

Martin Hackworth on the orthodoxy of the elites ...

The triumph of group-think over intellectual diversity has occurred to our considerable detriment. Our government is vastly incompetent and the progenitor of bad outcomes because political parties and the federal bureaucracy each rely on only their own corrals of acceptable thought. You may be incompetent (see Pete Buttigieg), you may be of any race, creed, or sexual orientation, you may even identify as a puppy and still get a seat at the table with the big kids, as long as you don’t object to the orthodoxy du jour. Do that, and you are out.