Marketplace of Ideas and the Student’s Role

In 1967, the Supreme Court in Keyishian v. Board of Regents summarized in its decision, “The classroom is peculiarly the marketplace of ideas.”

This construct often enough is attributed to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. His 1919 dissenting opinion in Abrams v. United States carries as far the implicit, without the explicit: “[W]hen men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas…”

Holmes continued, “The best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which [any of man’s] wishes safely can be carried out.”

As in the market for any other commodity, competition delivers the consumer with a better product at a better price.

When ideas are exchanged in this marketplace time is given to the argument, the act of criticisms and rebuttals. Whereby, the idea that remains stands less porous and more strengthened—that is, better intellectually, as a whole or more often amended to the new information gathered in the argument experience.

The other ideas linger on with pockets of individuals still speaking the gospel of his or her determined convictions. For no idea dies, no matter how poor, how corrupt, how wrong it may be. Once an idea is brought into the world, it exists with no regard to mortality.

Likewise, ideas carry no burdensome message of value, such as good or bad, moral or immoral, righteous or evil. Ideas just are, as an apple just is an apple.

Thomas Jefferson in a letter to William Roscoe in 1820 wrote, “This institution [University of Virginia] will be based upon the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Jefferson spoke poetically, yet in this he struck upon the utmost ideal of an academic institution.

In the present day, however, the competition in the marketplace for ideas wanes.

Economist Thomas Sowell wrote recently, “Elementary as it may seem that we should hear both sides of an issue before making up our minds, that is seldom what happens on politically correct issues today in our schools and colleges. The biggest argument of the left is that there is no argument--whether the issue is global warming, “open space” laws or whatever.”

Granted that many a time more than only two sides of an issue exist, Sowell succinctly notes “the biggest argument” is to argue that “there is no argument.”

As consumers of education in the marketplace of ideas, we, as students, are told that no competition--no ideas, no debate, no thinking--is needed to uphold the high quality of our education. And we are foolish enough to believe this economic fallacy and to gaily digest the asininity.

Many causes have led to this effect: bad institutional incentives, academic politicization, societal complacency, etc. Maybe, however, the biggest is the student body itself.

The individual students remain not as victims, but as co-conspirators.

We aid and abet the crimes perpetuated against us. We seek not to push ourselves, personally or jointly; more so we accept naively, for to accept and not to question is the path easiest to stumble on Friday and Saturday nights.

Mark Twain may well have been correct, “I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.”


This week's column came into form after reading a campus editorial and listening to an interview from the Hoover Institution with Justice Antonin Scalia, as well as with further reading of Thomas Sowell, John Dewey, and Oscar Wilde recently.