Cognitive development is a natural process continuing throughout the life cycle, not just in childhood and adolescence. Just like children and adolescents, adults need environmental stimuli conducive to development for that process to continue. There are highly developed adults who get that way without benefit of higher education. All kinds of factors—life processes—can stimulate adult cognitive development; on the other hand, it is far from assured. Societies and cultures are full of factors and functions that would suppress adult cognitive development.

It is in the home, school and local community that youth may develop cross-categorical cognition necessary to predict sequences of events resulting from a given choice or action. This kind of thinking allows people to be responsible adults in context of their local communities, and faithful to the ideologies of nation-state. Some adults develop further; many do not.

While cross-categorical cognition may have been adequate in the past when our communities were largely insular and homogenous, and dominant ideologies more locally shared, it necessary but far from sufficient for the scope of social structures, cultural contexts and material resources now activated by the smallest local choice or action—to say nothing of governments and the powerful. Everything we do from our relatively wealthy, industrialized position in the world resonates multi-nationally, multi-culturally and macro-ecologically. People need to develop systemic cognition to live effectively and cross-systemic cognition to lead effectively.

Higher education represents a systematic approach to adult cognitive development. As a college professor I consider myself in the adult cognitive development business. I believe our education system needs to be restructured so far more high school students are prepared to continue, with higher education made much more broadly available. In the meantime, existing institutions of higher education need to provide more broadly for their local communities as they are. For now, I work with the traditional body of students with which I am provided, and sometimes volunteer to teach free evening sections provided to the local community at the college where I work.

If higher education is about cognitive development, then the content of study matters less. The processes of gaining comprehensive grasp of a given discipline, of viewing reality from diverse historical, social, cultural, linguistic and subject positions—struggling with difference, and of reconciling seemingly contradictory facts into larger systems integrating them, are all conducive to developing modes of thinking necessary to live humanely and sustainably in such a diverse but interconnected world. That is why I value and participate in a liberal studies approach to higher education. I believe providing as many different avenues as possible for cognitive development is the best way to encourage it. Again, higher education is by no means the only stimulus for adult cognitive development, nor is it unfailingly effective.

Collective entities and their participants threatened either by the directions of overall human development, by the subjects or modes of thinking conducive to continued cognitive development, or by any call to transcend comfortable modes of thought, tend to resist a liberal model of education. In the U.S. there is a popular myth of higher education promoted by fundamentalist religious and reactionary political groups. It is based on notions of higher education as merely filling minds with information, rather than teaching people to think more effectively, and as reflecting the wisdom of society rather than challenging it.

It takes note of statistically observable political orientations and ideas about religious faith among college professors. It relies on the misperceptions of students and professionals in higher education who struggle to develop beyond cross-categorical modes of cognition and transcend comfortable ideas to integrate more systemic modes of thinking. It highlights cultural hot-button or easily misrepresented subject matter in higher education. And it draws a caricature of academics as inhabiting a well-funded and privileged but largely theoretical or hypothetical world disconnected from day-to-day reality.

These features are woven into a mythic portrayal of higher education as a place where radical academics bent on influencing a new generation of impressionable minds fill them with unreliable or untested concepts in a vicarious attempt to remake the world according to their own self-aggrandizing but impractical schemes. It is a disturbing scenario, and also wildly inaccurate. The problem is, it also describes a popular myth shared by millions.

This portrayal functions several ways: It is comforting to outsiders who have class or cultural issues with higher education. For those who benefit from entrenched or underdeveloped thinking, it discredits a social agency that challenges entrenched thinking and encourages human development. And it discredits the expertise of those who, on the basis of specialized knowledge, would question inaccurate or misleading speech and ill-advised action by the powerful. It is a useful tool both culturally and politically.

If, as the myth goes, colleges and universities indoctrinate students, then professors' statistically observable political orientations might be a problem, but this view of higher education as merely filling minds with information is simplistic and inaccurate. Professors teach people to think, and in order to do that, students must wrestle with ideas that are challenging.

Other important purposes of the academy include creating new knowledge and challenging socially or culturally entrenched thinking, all in the interest of functional human and ecological development. Entrenched thinking can take the form of Liberalism just as well as Conservatism; but either way, the more truly educated people are, the less loyal they tend to be to social structures and cultural values they perceive as native.

This is necessary to accomplish the creative and challenging purposes of the academic system. What we end up with are people able to do their jobs precisely because they can resist thinking what they are told to think and consider reality more independently. Politically speaking, they often identify what they are told to think with ideas understood as conservative. For them, independence suggests considering ideas and approaches seen as non-conservative. But there are also a few in the academic world who identify what they are told to think as liberal, representing the academy itself, and a type of social mainstream in it own right. For this minority, independence suggests swimming against the tide of their immediate context and espousing ideas broadly identified as conservative. Either way, people tend to become "liberal" relative to their perceived contexts in the process of developing critical skills. That is why it is no secret and should be no surprise that most professors are politically liberal and a few have been politically radical. But "left-wing takeover," "aggressive radicalism" and "lack of political diversity" on campuses are myths based on misperception.

The personal politics of professors and the content of classroom discourse are two different things. Professors do bring social, cultural, material, and personal aspects of reality into discussion in ways that seem unrelated in the minds of students, but the purpose is to tie specific topics to broader reality in as many ways as possible. Socially or culturally specific content does sometimes seem one-sided to students who are in the process of developing more complex modes of cognition, and students sometimes assume professors are trying to influence them toward professors' own opinions. This is practically unavoidable.

Colleges and universities do not exist to represent the thinking of their cultures and societies, but to challenge it. If the thinking of instructors and the content of lessons only reflected institutions' larger communities, they would be functioning as continuing secondary schools, not institutions of higher learning.

Conservatism is concerned with maintaining status quo, not dissenting to it. Dissent by espousal of conservative alternatives is not truly dissent in the broader sense, but only locally toward what is immediately opposed. While setting forth conservative ideas might constitute dissent in such a local context (and provide just as well for the development of critical thinking), it is not dissent in the broader sense; thus, the notion that progressive thinking on the part of a majority of professors stifles dissent in the broader sense is preposterous. Thoughtfully questioning broadly entrenched thinking--and sometimes dissenting to it--is part of what the academy is for, not defending it for the comfort of the general populace.

Knee-jerk reactions based on misperception fuel concerns about political diversity on campus and about the political orientations of college professors. There are three presuppositions underlying these concerns. The first is that professors, by nature of their statistically observable political orientations and students' common perceptions of them, necessarily indoctrinate students with professors' own political opinions. The second is that conservative opposition constitutes dissent in the broader sense. The third is that what professors believe, teach or exemplify must be representative of the societies and cultures in which their institutions operate. None of these presuppositions are supportable, given the true nature and function of higher education.

The basic function of higher education--that of adult human development--must be better understood within our culture so fear and misperception cannot be manipulated as political and cultural tools to the detriment of higher education itself. More than ever, the shape of our collective destiny depends in part on the systematic approach to individual adult development that higher education has to offer.