Like many of you, I watched the events that unfolded in our nation’s capital on January 6th with sadness, concern, and unease. As disturbing as the initial reporting of the event was, further reporting only deepened my sadness and concern over where our Republic is headed.

CNN published a story on Saturday, January 9th, 2021 by Brian Stelter that spoke to the rioting.  In the article, Mr. Stelter wrote that "the images broadcast were largely not the most horrifying ones of the day." MSNBC’s Chris Hayes said Friday night that, "much of what we saw — silly costumes, people taking selfies, grabbing the speaker's lectern — looked like of kind a group that might even attend a Trump boat parade. But there was something way, way darker, more violent, more sinister, and more organized happening in that Capitol on Wednesday. And it's time we see it clearly."

As a young man, I joined the United States Marine Corps because I believed in an America that was an exemplar of representative government and a global advocate for freedom and democracy. I sincerely believed that America was, as President Ronald Reagan said in his Farwell Address to the Nation in 1989, “the shining city upon a hill.”

On January 6th, that shining city was tarnished. Why has this happened?

I grew up thinking that an education can broaden the mind, increase knowledge and perspective, and give mastery of a few specific skill sets, but the primary job of higher education is to teach students how to think critically. After the Marine Corps, I went into higher education certain that education was a leading driver in the promulgation of freedom and democracy in the US and elsewhere. However, as I reflect on the events of the last few weeks, I have come to wonder whether higher education bears some culpability for the divide in which we find ourselves today.

Traditional claims that college as an essential component of the American dream are being challenged as the value of a college degree is being questioned. A 2018 Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of Americans (61%) said that higher education is going in the wrong direction. According to the survey, Republicans and Republican leaners are significantly more likely to express this view than Democrats and Democratic leaners (73% vs. 52%). Roughly eight-in-ten Republicans (79%) say professors bringing their political and social views into the classroom is a major reason why the higher education system is headed in the wrong direction (only 17% of Democrats say the same). And three-quarters of Republicans (vs. 31% of Democrats) point to too much concern about protecting students from views they might find offensive as a major reason for their skepticism.

This leads me to believe that, perhaps, we are not doing all we can to counteract the pressure of social media and other outlets to push us into news and information silos. Critical thinking must be an interdisciplinary skill that is fostered across the College. We must teach students to search for evidence to support claims, to evaluate statistics and numbers, to learn fact-based history, and to express ideas in the open, without fear of ostracism. We must also teach them to defend those ideas with facts and logic, rather than emotions and opinion.

I believe that higher education matters and can be used to bridge the cultural and societal divide we find ourselves in today. It can be transformative and engender the capacity for a student to ponder the possibility that one’s fundamentally held beliefs might actually be mistaken.  It is time to discuss the need to educate our students and our citizenry to be prudent consumers of information.

College of the Redwoods believes that such an education plays a critical role for preparing students for citizenship, developing a sense of well-being, and fostering personal and social responsibility. We are committed to nurturing an institutional culture that values all perspectives and fights vigorously to make sure that all ideas, regardless of whether they fit into the prevailing narrative, are heard and discussed with respect. However, we also believe in facts and figures, in hard data, and provable results.

The gift in these tragic events is that educators have a unique opportunity to serve our communities by educating our students to think critically and talk about hard issues. I would like to see CR become an example of how to engage in these types of conversations.