The Role of Higher Education in the Post-Truth Era

Abstract

The rise in populism and movements that threaten trust in science and expertise has been labeled a post-truth world. What challenges does this environment present for higher education, and how should it respond? This article examines the characteristics of a post-truth world and how that challenges the fundamental purposes of higher education. It then examines how higher education might respond, what risks come with that response, and how effectively it might resist attempts to attack and undermine its different purposes. These movements undermine possibilities for truth or objective knowledge, presenting a clear threat to higher education. Its response focuses around improving research and communication with the public, but the nature of cognitive processes in a polarized world leads people to discount information that does not fit with their existing worldviews and values. Simply providing better research will not solve the problem, and actively engaging with these movements can make higher education seem more partisan, further reducing trust. In the face of such intractable problems, it is important for higher education to also nurture communities with its students that foster trust and “critical loyalty” to knowledge and truth over falsehoods and conspiracy.

Keywords:

• post truth
• polarization
• trust
• epistemic communities
• curriculum
• students as partners

Introduction

Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine starkly emphasizes the threat to democracies from autocracies throughout the world. Populist movements also create internal threats, such as President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. One aspect of these threats to democracy has been called the “post-truth” era, in which modern technology, combined with the internet and social media, allow the easy creation and rapid spread of misinformation as well as deliberate falsehoods. These activities undermine confidence in all information, making people skeptical of any possibility of objective truth, and reduce trust between citizens and governments. The Russian government has played a leading role in such activities by creating and spreading falsehoods on an industrial scale, undermining confidence that any information can be trusted. Its interference in the U.S. election of 2016 and its attempt to control the narrative surrounding its invasions of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022 are prominent examples. These events highlight the more general dangers of a post-truth society and the need to protect democratic norms and institutions. Higher education plays a key role in that effort as leading knowledge producers as well as knowledge reproducers (Harrison and Luckett 2019) through the creation of new knowledge and understanding through research and discovery, training the next generation of researchers, and educating more than half the population of many countries. Yet, the current social and political climate of the post-truth world undermines both roles. This essay examines the concept of post-truth, why it has become such a threat, why it is difficult to counter, and how higher education should respond to it.

The post-truth era

Despite the rapid rise in demand for professional knowledge in the crises surrounding the global pandemic of COVID-19, the rise of populist sentiments and political movements threaten to undermine trust in science and expertise (Clarke and Newman 2017; Hochschild and Einstein 2015). The Brexit referendum process and the 2016 U.S. presidential elections presented key examples of post-truth politics through the levels of disinformation spread by external actors (Bennett and Livingston 2018). The Russian invasion of Ukraine similarly brought disinformation campaigns and attempts to counter them to new levels. Russian efforts appear the most prominent and well-covered (Thompson 2022), but other actors not directly involved, such as China, have also engaged in disinformation (Mozur, Lee Myers, and Liu 2022). This conflict demonstrates how regimes weaponize history to serve the purposes of the state (Rydel and Troebst 2022). Similar partisan revisions of history can be seen in false claims that Donald Trump won the 2020 election and in campaigns to ban educational lessons that cause offense, particularly around issues of race and identity, in the American states (Crenshaw 2023). Attempts to undermine the basis for authoritative knowledge fundamentally undermine core functions of higher education. Deciding how to respond requires careful identification of the problems of a post-truth world. This situation displays all the hallmarks of a wicked problem: there are many different causes, the issues are complex and difficult to understand, and there are no clear solutions.

Tesich (1992) first used the term post-truth to refer to political scandals including Watergate, Iran Contra, and the First Gulf War. These events do not appear particularly unique, bearing in mind that dishonesty in public life is hardly new. More broadly, the “deliberate falsehood and the outright lie, used as legitimate means to achieve political ends have been with us since the beginning of recorded history” (Arendt 1971, p. 30). The new development of post-truth is not that there is lying, but that it is being systematically challenged and undermined as a tactic for gaining political power, while the internet provides a cheap and effective way of disseminating these lies in a way that undermines any confidence in facts or truth (McIntyre 2018). Deliberately lying to undermine any potential reliability in establishing facts has occurred in various events, from science denial around tobacco use and climate change (Oreskes and Conway 2011), to Donald Trump and Brexit, and now the invasion of Ukraine. It is the scale of intentional efforts to undermine or deny the very notion of objective truth as a political strategy and their weary acceptance by much of the public that makes it different.

The practice of openly lying or promoting falsehoods does seem particularly widespread in society and government (Hochschild and Einstein 2015). Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous quotation that “everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts” (Moynihan, 1983, p. A17) no longer seems to apply. When President Trump’s press secretary, Sean Spicer, lied about the size of Trump’s inauguration crowds in the face of clear photographic evidence, adviser Kellyanne Conway defended these lies as “alternative facts.” President Trump continued this style of communication, openly lying and misrepresenting facts in his public interactions on a daily basis (Kessler, Rizzo, and Kelly 2020). A similar pattern of open lying can also be seen in the Russian characterization of the war in Ukraine. While the Russian information war achieved some success after its 2014 invasion (Snyder 2022), similar efforts following the 2022 full-scale invasion have not proved as effective in the face of widespread condemnation and unity among European countries. Russia puts out consistent lines to control how the war is framed and perceived, blaming NATO for provoking Russia, blaming neo-Nazis for atrocities while claiming to be protecting the Ukrainian people, and claiming that evidence of atrocities is fake and staged with actors (Thompson 2022). Why has such open dishonesty become so expected and acceptable in public life?

Polarization and decline in trust

The problems of recognizing and valuing true information are multifaceted and complex, but it helps to separate out key factors and processes. First, there is a long-term decline in trust in political, social and cultural institutions in democracies across the world (Dalton 2005; Norris 2011; Smith and Son 2013). For politics, there is a widespread assumption that all politicians are corrupt and lie. At the same time, and not unrelated, political polarization has risen to extreme levels. In the United States, it has been driven by partisan realignment of the electorate, polarization of the mass media driven by the rise of the internet and social media as sources of news, and the influence of unregulated money (Mann and Ornstein 2016). Mass media have also become more partisan with the rise of cable television news and talk radio in the 1980s (Iyengar and Massey 2019). Internationally, conflicts between nations are routinely characterized by information wars as each side seeks to put its case most effectively. The perception of events and attributions of blame commonly follow along national interests. It is difficult to disentangle the extent to which European unity against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine follows public opposition and horror over the humanitarian costs versus governmental leadership in taking a clear stand against Russia. Neither were as present following the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea, where the risks of conflict seemed too high to both governments and the public to inspire more aggressive opposition and willingness to intervene.

Polarization can lead to fragmented depictions of news and fact in the media, though this does not always mean that public opinion will reflect those divisions. While the U.S. public remains clearly divided and fragmented over Donald Trump in the wake of his indictment, that has not been the case with the war in the Ukraine. Trump’s continuing popularity and hostility to Ukraine threatens this consensus, but most leaders and the public in the United States and Europe agree with government support for Ukraine, even given a prolonged conflict (Younis 2023). President Zelensky has engaged in an effective media campaign to portray Ukrainian resistance positively in the face of Russian aggression (Serafin 2022). A clear external threat provides an excellent way to unite divided loyalties, even in the face of misinformation and fake news. However, the profusion of misinformation and conspiracies about the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrate that clear external threats so not always persuade people to resist false information.

Polarization accentuates this problem through the psychology of how people process information. Individuals interpret information, weighing its accuracy and importance, through the lens of their existing values, beliefs, and partisan leanings. In an era in which everything becomes politicized, all disagreements quickly escalate into partisan warfare in which the opposition is demonized and portrayed as morally suspect (Abramowitz and McCoy 2019). Truth becomes an instrumental concept that is a means to an end rather than a value itself. Information and reason become weapons used to win arguments ,so people will often see the end justifying the means in their treatment of facts and truth so long as it is in support of their side (Haidt 2012).

Information processing: Echo chambers and filter bubbles

In addition to political polarization, from the 1990s the internet became a growing source of news and information, further undermining traditional news providers and creating a fragmented system with no central gatekeepers (Iyengar and Massey 2019). This online environment distributes much of the news through social media sites. These sites use algorithms to select which news items to show an individual, emphasizing previous viewing or purchase habits of the audience, which tends to reinforce existing views and values. This trend, referred to as “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles,” suggests that people ignore other opinions that conflict with their own and increasingly narrow their exposure to focus on views that agree with their own (Lewandowsky, Ecker, and Cook 2017). Drivers of false beliefs from this process include source cues, emotional appeals, and worldview influences. Source cues include information from trusted elites and in-group members, emotional messages attract attention and are more persuasive, and, as previously stated, viewpoints that fit with personal views or partisanship are accepted more readily (Ecker et al. 2022). In a polarized world, people accept information that fits their existing views or are from trusted elites while discounting the rest.

While polarization has prompted people to increasingly sort themselves into communities of like-minded folk, whether through their physical locations, group interactions, or political beliefs, this effect does not necessarily apply in the same way to media consumption. Worries about echo chambers may be misplaced. Most people see a diverse range of viewpoints in their news consumption (Flaxman, Goel, and Rao 2016; Iyengar and Massey 2019). Lack of diversity in the content that people view is not the main problem. The main issue is that this information is filtered through peoples’ existing worldviews. It is the biases in how people process information, as well as the overall quality of that information, that is the larger problem. It is not so much being ill-informed as a willful ignorance or refusal to allow rational discourse or evidence to challenge existing ideological beliefs, which leaves people vulnerable to misinformation and fake news (McIntyre 2018).

The internet provides an easy means of creating and spreading disinformation. The cost of spreading intentional lies and exaggerations is so low that it has become a ubiquitous aspect of the internet (Hochschild and Einstein 2015; Jamieson 2015). The ease with which people with extreme or fantastical views find like-minded supporters and receive validation for their opinions is a crucial factor. Connections with like-minded supporters mean that people with extreme views feel more justified in their beliefs and become even more resistant to traditional means of logical argumentation, refutation, or correction of errors (Ecker et al. 2022). Finding support for extreme views means they can perpetuate when, in previous times, they might have remained isolated or shunned, leading to their decline from lack of validation and support (Berinsky 2023). This effect enhances the potential impact of false and outlandish conspiracies on the internet, whether about pedophile rings in pizza parlors or Ukrainian shelling of their own nuclear plant or hospitals. Once we believe something is true, it becomes very difficult to shift that belief, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. Even worse, attempts to correct misinformation may backfire because repeating the false claim, say that vaccines cause autism, while refuting it with further factual evidence simply reinforces the original false belief through repetition rather than undermining it through rational argument (Schwarz, Newman, and Leach 2016). Though there is mixed evidence at best for this “backlash” effect (Swire et al. 2017), the reluctance of people to embrace evidence that contradicts their existing beliefs is well established.

The post-truth world is one in which emotion or personal belief can be more important than reasoning or other rational thought in shaping public opinion. Polarization and increased partisanship lead people to interpret events in ways consistent with their interests and values, though some argue that this filtering process has always been the case (Haidt 2012). What is the role of higher education in such challenging times, when the value of knowledge has never been higher, but it can now be undermined and devalued more quickly and easily? Universities and their staff support the status of expertise in society and protect the value of knowledge, reasoning, and truth, but how should they act when truth conflicts with national values and powerful interests or, for example, in the case of the Russian invasion of Ukraine or free speech issues on campus? Calling out misinformation or conspiracy theories from political opponents is always easy, but most people appear reluctant to act similarly when the source is a cause they support. Truth is often the first casualty of war, but, due to their role in society, universities and their staff are morally obliged to oppose the war on truth no matter who the source (D’Acona 2017).

Higher education’s role in a post-truth world

Higher education’s two key roles as knowledge producers and disseminators (Harrison and Luckett 2019) each face different challenges in the post-truth world. As knowledge producers and researchers, higher education faces great difficulties in effectively providing expertise and knowledge that underpins decision making in society. The rise of an interconnected, globalized world makes the role of expertise even more important and powerful, but that also makes it a more valuable asset for partisan gain. Scientific advisors have become a de facto fifth branch of government, and the value differences that drive partisan conflict threaten to reduce the marshaling and evaluation of facts into a simple power struggle of my science versus your science (Jasanoff and Simmet 2017).

Higher education responses to the pressures of the post-truth world tend to fall into four categories: knowing how to know, fallible ways of knowing, disagreeing on how to know, and not caring enough about truth (Barzilai and Chinn 2020). The first three feature most prominently because they are about core research functions of higher education. Researchers naturally respond to criticism with logic and reasoning to communicate their findings more clearly. The effort to do better science and create more confidence and consensus around knowledge is a natural part of the scientific process. Scientists and teachers work harder to effectively communicate knowledge and developments in science to convince an increasingly polarized and partisan audience (Oreskes 2010). This response demands better analytical and communication skills, but it also requires clarifying epistemic knowledge, how we know what we know, to better evaluate disagreements and coordinate multiple approaches to understanding. These strategies emphasize the core activities of higher education, but they are also a more comfortable response that will not solve the root problem. The complicated aspects of the post-truth world demand efforts using multiple approaches because none by itself is likely to succeed. The rise of public misinformation and disinformation is not caused by a failure to communicate or fundamental disagreements among scientists about the state of knowledge. More consensus and better communication will not solve the problems created by weaponizing knowledge and portraying it as simply a partisan pursuit meant to achieve political goals rather than a neutral search for truth. Knowledge that clashes with existing beliefs will be met with skepticism or outright rejection, particularly when there are other sources of information refuting those claims, even if those sources are not credible. The ease of communication today makes dissemination of all information easier and much harder to exert any gatekeeping function or quality control.

Rising distrust is also a consequence of the widespread dissemination of misleading, biased, and false information. The circulation of fake news on the internet using organized trolls, bots, and respondent-driven algorithms demonstrates the limitations of science against the imperatives of power and the influence of deliberate propaganda and falsehoods. The lessons of the smoking, climate change, and vaccine debates provide ample evidence that concerted campaigns against science can be very effective at undermining public knowledge and understanding, even when scientists largely agree and present a largely united message and even when the results have direct implications for people’s own interests (Hochschild and Einstein 2015; Oreskes and Conway 2011). Yet, the lessons from the war in Ukraine have also shown that these efforts do not always succeed. Despite sustained Russian efforts that succeeded in 2014, concerted efforts to identify and resist misinformation and conspiracies have blunted the impact of the information wars in 2022 in this particular case, yet disinformation appears to spread widely in other areas, such as the conspiracy that the 2020 American presidential election was stolen. The willingness to believe patent falsehoods and fantasies while rejecting information developed through reason and evidence lies in the processes underlying the widespread acceptance of untruths, which are explained by psychological and cognitive sources of belief (McDermott 2019).

The construction of belief and our mental conceptions of the world and how it works is a social process: it depends on how we interact with and trust the views of other people. We have always used methods beyond the acquisition of fact and rational calculation in building our knowledge. This applies to scientific advancement as much as it does public opinion (Kuhn 2012). What is fact and knowledge in a scientific discipline, say astrophysics, is not just about the rational discernment of reality using empirical evidence. It is also a social process. There is too much information in the world to take it in and process it all as individuals. Therefore, we adopt processes as default strategies to provide intuitive shortcuts (Kahneman and Tversky 1979) that are necessary but leave us vulnerable to systematic error or manipulation by others.

Community, identity, and the value of truth

Academic disciplines create epistemic communities to sift and review information for one another. That applies to all fields, from astrophysics to political science. People rely on the judgements and opinions of trusted members of the epistemic community. Who is trusted in this community depends on its social norms, which are not entirely objective. In each discipline, there will be a hierarchy of universities and professorial positions. Professional publications determine the state of the field through the process of peer review. There will also be a circuit of professional conferences where papers are delivered, different ideas presented, and their implications argued over. While this process puts a premium on rational argument, it is still a social process subject to human biases and pressures. Who decides what areas warrant more study? Who decides how much money is allocated to research and who allocates that money? Which universities fund research departments in astrophysics? Who decides which scientists are hired into those posts? The process of how scientific and other academic disciplines function has been well documented (Kuhn 2012). Epistemic communities all function in ways that are vulnerable to human weaknesses and biases as they form their own tribes and territories with rules and hierarchies (Trowler, Saunders, and Bamber 2012).

Similarly, each individual creates their own epistemic communities to filter out reliable information from the rest in constructing their knowledge of the world. We choose which newspapers or media outlets we prefer. We may trust family, friends, or other community institutions, such as churches or political leaders, to guide our system of beliefs about what is real in the world and what it means. In this web of social networks, people tend to default into believing what other say, particularly if they are from trusted parts of a personal network (McDermott 2019). The importance of social networks as epistemic communities for how people form their opinions and knowledge highlights the important roles of higher education as both knowledge creators and institutions of education. These institutions not only produce the scientists and knowledge producers of the future, but they also educate over half the population of many societies. Educational experiences can strongly affect how people deal with knowledge and facts in the post-truth world.

How should political science education respond?

The challenges facing political scientists are exacerbated by the subject matter of the discipline, where almost everything we teach overlaps with ideology and partisanship. There are differing views on partisan neutrality in the classroom. While complete objectivity is impossible to achieve, some argue it is a value to strive toward. Marks (2008) argues instructors can avoid engaging partisan filters by teaching through hypotheticals, simulations, and historical cases in order to teach critical analysis, while Hess (2009) argues that teaching students to argue about political issues and how to disagree with one another respectfully is a key skill that we should actively encourage and develop. While there is no systematic evidence of partisan bias in the higher education classroom and no evidence that students change their political views as a result of their classroom experiences (Burmila 2021), political science is inherently controversial because of its subject matter, and students can become very resentful if they perceive instructors are pushing a particular position or let competing views be aired (Hess 2009). Learning to voice one’s opinion in a political science classroom is a key part of students’ education (Rom and Mitchell 2021). Regardless of whether an instructor keeps their partisan political views hidden or not, an atmosphere of trust and tolerance of other students is a key component for effective teaching and learning.

The one goal of higher education that a large majority of academics agree upon is the importance of critical thinking (Association of American Colleges and Universities 2011). Many commentators and researchers on higher education emphasize the importance of teaching information or media literacy to undergraduates to develop their critical thinking. These key skills in sifting and evaluating information now also provide a potential means of resisting fake news, disinformation, and misinformation. The modern world provides a deluge of information to the public. As previously noted, traditional outlets for news have now been supplanted by a more diverse range of professional and amateur sources that largely avoid the traditional gatekeepers of the traditional media that upheld some common norms and standards of journalism in terms of sources, bias, and accuracy. In the absence of any such gatekeepers or norms, many argue that there is a great need for the skills to deal with this information (Harrison and Luckett 2019; Hauke 2019; Farrow and Moe 2019; Lewandowsky, Ecker, and Cook 2017).

There is less consensus over exactly which skills to develop or how to embed them in the curriculum. Despite the many exemplars of such classes, it is unclear how to deploy them most effectively. Stand-alone or bolt-on classes that are simply added to any existing curriculum are much easier to design and teach, but the pedagogical literature contains many warnings about the danger of such an approach (Dennis, Bailey, and Abbott 2018; Harris 2016; Wingate 2006). It can be seen as remedial and put off students if they perceive it as irrelevant to their discipline or major. Single modules do not sufficiently prepare students to practice complex key skills that require much practice to develop. Such skills need to be embedded throughout the curriculum and practiced multiple times, just as one would expect for essay writing in the social sciences or lab reports in the natural sciences, which also makes them seem more relevant (Fullard 2017). Another way to develop information literacy and critical thinking in students is to have them carry out research. Criticality can be achieved by activities such as questioning data sources, recognizing bias, and making judgements about knowledge claims (Hughes 2019), all features of the research process.

The final-year project is seen as a key element or capstone in the degree experience in many political science degrees, and the complex set of skills required are similar to those advocated as a bulwark against fake news, misinformation, or other elements of a post-truth world. Forty percent of U.S. political science degrees require a research project, and over three-quarters (76%) of UK politics degrees require one (Parker 2020). In the UK, the current QAA subject benchmarks for politics and international relations strongly emphasize the need for all students to develop the skills needed to carry out research as well as critically select and analyze information (QAA 2023). As with other skills, research requires much development and practice and cannot simply be added onto the final year without preparation. Such deliberate sequencing and skills development is characteristic of stem subjects but less common in the humanities and social sciences. It is also important that students participate as active coproducers of knowledge rather than passive receivers, meaning they must practice doing research rather than just learning to consume it (Clark and Hordosy 2019; Hughes 2019; Meyer and Land 2005).

However, while a critical approach to information literacy is beneficial, it still operates under the same psychological constraints that feed belief in misinformation. Even students who learn critical thinking do not necessarily apply it in practice. People confronted with factual content that directly contradicts their existing beliefs or interests often discount or reject that information. It is challenging to persuade people to evaluate evidence from a neutral, critical perspective when polarization creates incentives to treat information as just another political weapon. However, there is some evidence that training in media or information literacy makes people more critical about the information they receive and believe, independent of whether it is consistent with those beliefs (Kahne and Bowyer 2017). Such results hold out the hope that training in critical thinking may create a level of “critical loyalty” (Lavine, Johnson, and Steenbergen 2012) in which arguments are evaluated with a questioning analytical lens, regardless of partisan conformity of its message or source.

Students also need to be included as partners or cocreators to make them feel a part of the disciplinary epistemic community to create countervailing memberships and loyalties that value rational thought and argument and to draw them into a more critically loyal outlook. Students cognitively interpret the world by constructing their own meanings filtered through their experiences and values. Practicing how to think in terms of disciplinary norms is an important developmental moment for students that needs to be supported through in-course and program sequencing of activities and research practice. Helping students connect disciplinary literature and norms of evidence and analysis with their own personal experience is one of the few effective ways to challenge existing belief systems and inculcate the value of knowledge independent of belief (Bowell 2018; Hochschild and Einstein 2015). There is great irony in using the emotional ties of community to persuade students of the value of rationality and truth, but that is an inevitable consequence of the social construction of knowledge.

Conclusion

Undergraduate research and critical-thinking skills are important and would help to increase a more skeptical approach to using information. However, they do not provide a solution to the problems of a post-truth world. No one solution completely addresses the issues of misinformation and intentional lying, and a concerted response requires using many different approaches to the problems. A more social approach to these issues addresses not just what we teach, but how we conduct our classrooms. Faculty must decide how to respond to events that undermine the goals of higher education every day. Do you openly challenge political actions in the wider world that appear immoral or unethical? For example, should you critique Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine as an act of aggression to annex a sovereign country, even if there are clear disagreements over that conclusion among the public and your students and it risks appearing overtly partisan in your teaching? Similarly, should you criticize actions that restrict free speech or how historical events are taught, even if clearly linked to a major political party with which many of your students identify? Should staff actively call out what they see as injustice in their role as a teacher, or does that approach cast higher education as a partisan political tool, as many of its opponents now charge? How do you treat wider political events in your classroom teaching? As has been noted, people discount information based on their prior beliefs. Contradicting people’s existing beliefs, even when accompanied by clear or even overwhelming evidence, often proves unpersuasive. There is ample evidence from the climate change and vaccination debates that scientific consensus and evidence does not persuade people who disagree on these issues. It takes persistent evidence that is presented repeatedly over time, addresses particular areas of concern to the people involved, and is accepted by peers in these issue groups in order to have any sort of widespread impact (Hochschild and Einstein 2015).

Strong partisans are unlikely to be persuaded, but many people are not fully convinced by rumor and conspiracy. The best way to persuade such people is to include them and show respect for their beliefs. Gathering people of different backgrounds and beliefs in order to create meaningful interactions and engagement in which everyone feels included as part of a group, class, cohort, discipline, or university is a core aspect of higher education. The need for this effort is echoed in current concerns in higher education over creating a sense of community among our students. Creating an atmosphere in which people’s beliefs are respected while still encouraging a healthy, critical skepticism is a difficult task to manage, as the current controversies over free speech on campuses clearly indicate. Yet, this challenge speaks directly to a core goal of political science and should be pursued purposefully and energetically in our teaching (Hess 2009; Rom and Mitchell 2021).

In a polarized world, how can higher education effectively promote the value of expertise, evidence, and truth when to do so is seen as a partisan position? Can you openly criticize the actions of Putin in Ukraine or DeSantis in Florida without jeopardizing the standing of higher education? Does avoiding that argument simply ignore hard moral choices and risk a similar loss of standing from a failure to act? There are no easy answers to this question, and faculty clearly divide over how to effectively respond. Perhaps we should consider the way we respond more carefully than exactly what we say, as there is an opportunity presented by educating such a large group of students. Partisan interests are not the only actors in the cross-cutting influence of social groups, and we need to make students feel included and respected in the higher education community to make it part of their identity and foster loyalty to it. The “tribes and territories” of the disciplines are epistemic communities, but they are also social groups with norms and values of their own (Trowler, Saunders, and Bamber 2012). The movement to see students as coproducers or creators of knowledge is predicated on the notion of everyone joining a community as equal partners. That ambition needs to be further energized and nurtured in higher education alongside more traditional efforts to improve the quality of academic research and its communication to the public as a way of combatting misinformation.

We must actively and inclusively engage diverse groups of people in substantive encounters that discuss and debate the importance of facts and values that make up their respective realities. This process helps students critically link personal experience with professional knowledge and norms of evidence and debate to engage the same potential of emotion and facts of lived experiences as a route to reason (Bowell 2018). We need to create “critical loyalty” among our students, which means that they still hold strong partisan views and beliefs but also value truth and logic. We need to create critical thinkers who value evidence and truth independently of their political stances. In a highly polarized world in which partisanship seems to overwhelm other values and allegiances, it can seem naïve to call for developing stronger communities of practice with our students, but that is the core of what we do and aspire to in higher education teaching. It is both practical and closely aligned with our expertise and what we do in our classrooms. Our responsibility in this post-truth challenge to the fundamental purposes of higher education is local and should focus on nurturing a sense of community with shared goals of pursuing truth and creating a community of students as fellow producers of knowledge. It is not a simple nor clear solution, but it is clearly linked to the purposes of higher education and what we already seek to do through our teaching. In an imperfect world that appears increasingly hostile to the core purposes of higher education we must, as Voltaire concludes in Candide, cultivate our garden.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Parker

Jonathan Parker is a senior lecturer in politics at Keele University and a National Teaching Fellow. He researches higher education policy and pedagogy. His monograph, Challenging the Liberal Arts: Undergraduate Education in the United States and United Kingdom, is to be published by SUNY Press.