Friends:
URGENT WARNING: Sen. Brandon Creighton's (R-Dist. 4) Senate Bill 37 demands immediate attention—not only because it poses a direct threat to the very foundation of higher education, but because it could set a dangerous precedent for other states.
This alarming piece of legislation is a full-scale attack on tenure and faculty governance, rooted in the misguided notion that educators are failing in their duty to prepare students for meaningful contributions to society. Even more disturbingly, as part of the "anti-woke" agenda, it perpetuates the false and inflammatory claim that universities are engaged in so-called "woke indoctrination" rather than genuine education. Hence, the focus of my testimony that addresses this assumption that lurks behind the bill. We only get 2 minutes to speak, so here is my testimony, short and sweet.
To learn about all that was said, you can hear for yourselves from yesterday's Senate Committee on Education deliberations (Parts I and II). If left unchecked, this bill could have devastating consequences for academic freedom nationwide.
Thanks to Dr. David Albert, here is the link to yesterday's Senate Ed hearing together with a breakdown of where exactly on the meter you can hear everybody's testimonies:
Public testimony begins at 2:33 minutes and goes on for about an hour and 35 minutes. I tried to get times for most of our people below.
2:33 - Leonard Bright, 2:35 Seth Chandler, 2:39 - Margaret Hale (they were asked some questions by the panel)
3:16 - Karma Chavez, 3:18 - Andrea Gore, 3:20 - Pauline Strong, 3:23 - Brian Evans,
3:25 - Caitlin Smith, 3:28 - Jake Leo, 3:30 - Angela Valenzuela,
3:42 - Amanda Garcia, 3:45 - Mathew LaDue, 3:48 - Andrew Henrich,
3:59 - David Albert, 4:01 - Maria Unda, 4:04 - Allen Liu
As you can hear from everybody's testimonies, our concerns are by no means exaggerated. SB 37 is truly appalling. Its very filing sends a chilling message and will undoubtedly already have devastating consequences just in terms of the message it's sending out to the world.
Frankly, this bill should have never been introduced in the first place.
-Angela Valenzuela
Testimony on Senate Bill 37
Countering the Allegation of Indoctrination in Higher Education: We are Epistemic Bubbles, Not Echo Chambers
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
March 20, 2025
I have thought long and hard about what education would look like if we were truly indoctrinating our students. I draw from the compelling work of game theorist and philosopher C. Thi Nguyen, who distinguishes “echo chambers” from “epistemic bubbles” or “knowledge bubbles.”
An echo chamber is a carefully rigged structure of language where a particular idea becomes a message that bounces off the walls from various sources. There is a distinctive sense of people who are insiders and outsiders to the echo chamber, with the outsiders being mistrusted and actively discredited. The “anti-woke” agenda itself is a good example of the echo chamber.
In contrast, an epistemic bubble emerges from an informational architecture that derives from our fields of study and the disciplines—that are themselves structured by specific methodologies, theoretical frameworks, operating assumptions, and so on.
While epistemic bubbles can also be impaired, they work differently from echo chambers. There is no “other side” that they are actively distrusting or discrediting. The issue is rather the never-ending quest of addressing our own blind spots, biases, and gaps in knowledge in our own research and teaching.
Whereas echo chambers can become quite durable—even to the point of rejecting disconfirming evidence—epistemic bubbles are more unstable and easily burst. And those bursts are the stuff of intellectual growth, epiphanies, and pathbreaking discoveries.
The irony is that SB 37 is justified as an attack on woke and ostensibly “woke professors” when what is actually sought is a backwards educational architecture that will cripple the scientific enterprise should this bill become law. Do we indoctrinate? No, we evolve and grow with our students by challenging them to think critically, question assumptions, and engage in the continuous pursuit of knowledge. Thank you very much.
Reference
Nguyen, C. T. (2018). Escape the echo chamber. Aeon Magazine,12. https://cs50.harvard.edu/x/2021/labs/10/chamber.pdf
No comments:
Post a Comment