Yes, we do, certainly. I think there's nothing wrong with having a lot of different ideas. I think it's important that we are open to all sorts of different ideas. There are a couple of problems, however. There are essentially two different world views at play in the university now. I think what we have to recognize is that many of these ideas, as in some of the examples I've shown, are part of a strain of thought called “critical social justice”. I think they're not playing by the liberal science rules we're accustomed to.
In our liberal society, we tend to have a liberal economic system, with a right of free markets, and a democratic system. The writer Jonathan Rauch coined the term “liberal science”. Liberal science is any knowledge production system, via a scientist or a journalist, to generate robust knowledge. There are really only two rules. The first rule is that knowledge is provisional. No one has the final say. Anything could be questioned. If you look at, for example, the history of estimates on the size of the universe, it changes constantly. That's because no one said, “We're done. It's over.” What you notice now is that it's becoming more fashionable in the academy to say, “This is beyond debate. The science is settled.” It's becoming fashionable to actually break Rauch's first rule.
The second rule is that no one has personal authority. No individual or group gets to decide, “I know the truth. It's just me.” You need to have it open to anyone. I tell my students, for example, that if they do an experiment well and describe it properly, it should be replicable by someone on another continent in another culture centuries into the future. It's universal. That rule is being broken through assertions of a certain ethnic knowledge or ways of knowing or lived experience.
I think these are problems that are ascendant in the academy. They have to be recognized, and I believe they have to be confronted head-on.