McMahon’s Trick Questions (opinion)

Responses to last week’s letter from Secretary of Education Linda McMahon calling on university presidents and governing boards to “seize this occasion to drive essential reforms” so as to restore public trust in higher education have so far been fairly muted. Although the American Association of University Professors issued a rebuttal, some university presidents have signaled a willingness to comply, and few if any have rejected the demand for “reform.” That worries me.

Among the reforms requested in the letter are public pledges to fair admissions, open inquiry and truth-seeking. Few would quarrel with these goals, at least when stated abstractly. But by characterizing these as “reforms,” the letter rehearses a well-worn slander: Universities are “woke” echo chambers, characterized by a leftist monoculture that subordinates truth to politics. Whether any of this is true is not open to discussion. The question for universities is simply, Will you publicly pledge to do better?

Philosophers call this a complex question—a logical fallacy identified by Aristotle in his On Sophistical Refutations. A question is complex when it conceals a question-begging assumption—a claim the person being asked the question might wish to reject, were it to be made explicit. Consider the following example, borrowed from Stan Baronett’s Logic, a textbook used in many undergraduate philosophy courses: Do you still cheat on your taxes?

The question seems to require a yes or no answer, but either response involves an acknowledgment—explicit in the case of a yes and implicit in the case of a no—that you have cheated on your taxes. Concealed within the question is a controversial premise that a flat-footed response cannot help granting.

Complex questions are gotcha questions, the stuff of cross-examinations, congressional hearings and elementary school playgrounds. Logicians consider them informal fallacies, a deceptive strategy for scoring unearned rhetorical points.

McMahon’s letter includes a series of what are effectively, if not always grammatically, complex questions:

Packaged within each is an invitation to concede a background of malfeasance—to grant the insinuation that universities have discriminated against white students, are sites of violent unrest or have replaced truth-seeking with political advocacy. Universities are asked not whether these allegations are true, but rather: Have you stopped?

A number of colleagues and administrators with whom I spoke seemed relieved that the news was not worse—that, unlike last year’s proposed “compact,” the letter did not explicitly condition federal funding on compliance (although some fear that is its subtext). Other commentators have suggested that the questions are innocuous. “For institutions who want to fill out the questionnaire, they’re gonna be able to do so rather easily because these are kind of gimme questions,” Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education, told Inside Higher Ed.

Some of the questions—e.g., about containing costs and prioritizing rigor in an age of AI—are perfectly legitimate, if not unfamiliar to universities. Higher ed is indeed in crisis and there are, needless to say, many ways universities might improve. But what is insidious about the letter is that it smuggles in a series of ideological talking points that universities dispute.

Or rather, universities ought to dispute them. It was therefore disheartening to learn that the letter enjoys the support of the prestigious Association of American Universities. Early reports that several college presidents helped draft the letter have since been downplayed, but other presidents have already begun signaling willingness to get on board.

The letter’s academic backers may feel, as the AAU’s president Barbara R. Snyder is quoted as saying, that it is “critical to have a really good working partnership with the federal government.” They may believe they are helping to avert something worse. But in signing on to the slander the letter implies, they risk giving credence to higher education’s enemies in the Trump administration.

A complex question, as any logic textbook will explain, is a trap. The trap is easy to fall into because, in every conversation, the “presuppositions that are required by what is said straightway come into existence, provided that nobody objects”—a phenomenon the philosopher David Lewis called “accommodation.” Accommodation involves creating a shared understanding of the world by not contesting the presuppositions an interlocutor brings to a conversation. Psychologically and socially, accommodating tends to be easier than objecting, especially when power is distributed asymmetrically—and therein lies a risk. When presented as the taken-for-granted background for conversation, otherwise tendentious claims may simply be swallowed down, wrongly acquiesced to so as not to bring conversation to a grinding halt.

Andrei Moldovan has distinguished the fallacy of the complex question (FCQ) from a related fallacy he terms the “fallacious nondialectical use of presuppositions” (FNP). Unlike FCQ, the latter need not take the form of a question, and listeners are not invited to say anything. Rather, the listener is encouraged to make inferences on the basis of controversial presuppositions concealed within a claim. Moldovan offers the following example, which is modeled on a quote from former U.S. Senator James Inhofe:

Expressed declaratively, rather than as a question, such a claim aims not at verbal assent, but to persuade an audience that climate science is bogus. Moldovan writes, “By presupposing the proposition, a speaker invites the audience to conclude that the proposition is uncontroversial, a candidate for accommodation.” (Inhofe’s dismissal of climate science helped to sink the 2003 Climate Stewardship Act.)

It is not difficult to see how one type of fallacy might prepare the ground for another. The complex questions McMahon asks of universities are designed to elicit written—and, more importantly, public—accommodation of tendentious claims about American higher education. “These statements of principle should be posted prominently on institutional websites,” the letter announces in bold. But if universities publicly accommodate what these questions invite them to presuppose, they run the risk of perpetuating fallacious reasoning, reproducing and proliferating problematic presuppositions that ought to be contested.

The public nature of the demanded accommodation to FCQ renders the general public a target for illicit persuasion through FNP. They are invited to make inferences—for instance, about the value of a college degree—on the basis of the implied smears against universities, which now enjoy the endorsement not simply of universities’ critics but of the universities themselves.

Some logicians distinguish “direct” answers to complex questions, which fall into the trap, from “corrective” answers, which reject it. A cautious, circumspect way of responding to a complex question is to break it down into parts, so as to isolate the indigestible bits.

But the context in which arguments are made matters, too, and the culture wars over higher education are arguably more akin to a rough-and-tumble grade school playground than a logic classroom. A complex question, even if not accommodated, can leave its target sputtering, back on their heels, and that is nearly as bad a look as pusillanimous self-criticism. The Trump administration is not wrong that public trust in higher education has eroded, even if this is partly a result of careful political engineering. To build trust with the public, universities would be wise not only to refrain from colluding in their own defaming, but to be proactive in setting the terms for future debate. What might an articulate, truthful and rhetorically savvy rejoinder look like, if a flat-footed response is ruled out?

First, universities must avoid the trap: Whatever they do, university leaders should not accommodate what they think is untrue. Universities should not apologize for sins they haven’t committed. Doing so in an effort to appear conciliatory will only weaken our credibility.

But avoiding the trap is only the first step. The larger challenge is to turn the trap into an opportunity to build trust, not with those acting in bad faith (attempting this is a fool’s errand) but with the general public. A lot of public outrage about universities involves regularly rehearsed anecdotes (the one about the Halloween costumes, the one about the antisemitism hearing, etc.), from which sweeping, ungenerous conclusions are extrapolated. There is an enormous demand for stories that make our current lurch into authoritarianism seem like an overdue course correction. What joins these highly curated but disparate snapshots together is a narrative, the broad outlines of which are elaborated in JD Vance’s aptly titled 2021 speech to the National Conservatism Conference: “The Universities Are the Enemy.” Higher ed needs a narrative of its own.

Among its data points could be the following: Fewer than 1 percent of U.S. college students attend the private Ivy League universities that are the object of disproportionate political attention; 70 percent of U.S. college students attend public institutions; since 2019–20, the average net price of going to college has gone down, not up; international students contribute culturally and economically to the U.S. and help to keep tuition lower for domestic students; universities accelerate scientific discovery and technological innovation; they produce graduates for the workforce; a university degree continues to offer strong return on investment; universities help to sustain the communities of which they are a part.

Additionally: Universities provide space for dialogue, friendship, civic engagement and intellectual growth; a university education correlates with better health, career fit and life satisfaction; and the overwhelming majority of college graduates say their college experience was worth it and important to their success.

While different institutions will have different stories to tell about their achievements, they would do well to work together, in a spirit of shared governance, to reframe the conversation around the value of American universities. An unapologetic charter for higher education would indeed be worth posting prominently on institutional websites.