The Truth is Out There
I recently visited the Greenwich Observatory. At the gate
there is a clock showing the official Greenwich Meridian Time along with a set
of markers indicating the standards for the lengths of a yard, two feet, one
foot, six inches, and one inch. It is a monument to facts for which we no
longer accept alternates.
One of the great promises of the rise of modern higher
education and then the digital age was the democratization of knowledge, but failing
information literacy is quickly becoming a threat to our understanding of truth
and our trust in what we know.
For centuries, information was held tightly by those in
power, including those in the academy. Colleges and universities had the books,
data collections, and scientific instruments, and they housed and trained those
who knew how to interpret and use them. Preserving our hold on information and
enhancing these holdings made us relevant to those whose power and wealth made
our work possible. This principle is at the heart a quote from John Adams to
which I regularly return:
The poor people, it is true, have been
much less successful than the great. They have seldom found either leisure or
opportunity to form a union and exert their strength; ignorant as they were of
arts and letters, they have seldom been able to frame and support a regular
opposition. This, however, has been known by the great to be the temper of
mankind; and they have accordingly labored, in all ages, to wrest from the
populace, as they are contemptuously called, the knowledge of their rights and
wrongs, and the power to assert the former or redress the latter. I say RIGHTS,
for such they have, undoubtedly, antecedent to all earthly government, —
Rights, that cannot be repealed or restrained by human laws -- Rights, derived
from the great Legislator of the universe.[1]
Higher education in the United States has increased those
who have access to knowledge, all too slowly, but the tent has expanded over
time. Oberlin College opened in 1833 and accepted African-American students
from its founding; Mary Lyons founded Mount Holyoke College in 1837, providing
baccalaureate education for women; and Oberlin became co-educational in 1838. The
Morrill Land-Grant Act provided resources for the creation of public flagship
universities across the quickly expanding nation. The GI Bill flooded our
campuses following WWII and launched a rapid growth in higher education. The
Higher-Education Act of 1965 finally created the support necessary to make a
college education possible for the nation’s citizenry.
By 1952, there were 1 million students enrolled in private
higher-education institutions in the U.S. and an equal number in publics. By
the beginning of this century, that number had grown to 3 million students in
private colleges and universities and 13 million in publics.
There has been no greater impact on our growth as a democratic
society than this diversification and expansion of a learnéd populace. The
digital age had such promise to extend and, one day, complete that trajectory.
The freeing of information from temples of learning and the creation of new
pathways of instruction and research have all been boons, but we have reached a
dangerous crossroads.
Two of the treasured principles of the academy have been the
reproducibility of experiments and peer review of research. These have provided
critically important safeguards against quackery and chicanery. The best
principles of the media have been modelled upon these traditions: the
dependence upon multiple sources and the vetting of those sources and the
information they have provided.
The danger of the Information Age is the difficulty in
discerning the sources and veracity of information that are all too perilously
accessible. This is why we teach information literacy.
I used to tell my students that when I was in their place, I
was lucky to find 4 or 5 sources to support my research, and it took weeks or
more. They have nearly instantaneous access to hundreds of thousands of
potential sources, but it is likely that there will still be only 4 or 5
legitimate needles in their data haystack. One of the most important skills we
strive to develop within our students is the ability to identify and
corroborate those needles of truth.
We have recently seen other world powers directing media
campaigns to shape public opinion in the United States. There are innumerable
internal threats eroding our confidence in the information we encounter, which
has led some in power to gain plausibility among their audiences to dismiss
accurate reports as part of the unreliable chaff of the Information Age.
Truth remains inviolate: one foot is one foot. For this
fact, we have a fixed source, but we must be vigilant for increasingly adept
imposters in our consumption of more complex information from divergent sources.
The same skills we instill on our campuses related to research need to be
applied to all of our interactions with digital media.
We have the tools to truly democratize knowledge in the
coming generation, but only if we prepare ourselves to be effective navigators
in a sea of information that grows more treacherous by the second with rising
tides of unfiltered content and proliferating flotsam intentionally placed
along our route.
The truth is out there, and we have never needed higher
education more to prepare us to recognize it.
