Opinion | America’s strength is learning through history — not rewriting it

This legislation is one of many recent attacks on the very American values that its proponents purport to defend — and one among dozens of similar measures gaining ground in legislatures across the United States.

Government should not prescribe or proscribe the free expression and exchange of ideas within our institutions of higher education, or anywhere else. As Thomas Jefferson wrote of the university that he founded (and of self-government as a whole), “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.”

As two business leaders, we are speaking out and calling on others to do the same.

For one thing, these statutes and proposals — among other attacks on diversity and equity — will render our economy, businesses and workforces weaker and less competitive.

We know that diversity initiatives help organizations build and benefit from teams with wider ranges of experience and perspective, increasing creativity, productivity and profitability. Future business leaders must become more proficient, not less, at fostering community and belonging within their organizations, exactly the opposite of what this legislation promotes.

More fundamentally, any attempts to limit our freedoms to think and speak our minds contradict the values that bind us together.

As Americans, we should vigorously disagree and debate all manner of public policies. We, by definition, contain multitudes, with differing perspectives and divergent opinions. This is healthy for our democracy.

But prohibiting certain ideas — whitewashing curriculums, banning books — is just a new expression of the old extremism that we ought to be studying and then repudiating, not denying and then reinforcing. The textbooks of our youth presented vastly incomplete, even misleading, portrayals of U.S. history and our forebears’ roles in it. They rarely explored the contributions of Black people or countless other communities that have shaped our shared history.

During recent decades, scholars and teachers have worked to correct these omissions — to recover and relay a fuller, fairer, more representative story of our past. Much of this work, the more inclusive light in which we see our struggles and our progress, is now imperiled.

Today, expressions of intolerance and bigotry that once were relegated to the fringes are migrating to the center, at the cost of common ground and the common good.

While this trend is insidious, it need not be inevitable.

The vast majority of us still believe that we all are created equal. We all are endowed with inalienable rights. And among these are the freedoms that allow faculty and students, and everyone else, to engage with our past and future without fear of state-sanctioned censorship or retaliation.

When our laws suppress free speech or erase uncomfortable parts of our history, they are testing our core principles. They are also denying our young people crucial training in critical thinking — in learning how to think, not what to think; how to follow the data to the truth, however inconvenient.

These principles and skills are essential to our democratic capitalism — the greatest market system in the world — in which our tradition of free inquiry fuels innovation and commerce. They also are essential to democratic citizenship and pluralism, which depend on our collective abilities to understand the complexity of the human experience and the myriad ways that the past is present in our lives, laws, organizations and institutions.

When we reckon with our past, we see what can happen if we allow the merchants of resentment and grievance to pit us against one another. We see the danger of neglecting that most American value of all, “E pluribus unum”: from many we are one.

But we also see the inverse: the promise fulfilled when we extend and expand the circle of opportunity, generation by generation, ensuring that uniquely American journeys like ours remain possible.

From this history, we draw hope — hope that we will overcome this moment of turbulence, as Americans have during periods of challenge before; hope that we will rediscover the fundamental values that belong to all of us, as our common birthright.

The ultimate measure of American strength is our proven ability to become more perfect through our history, not the misguided power to rewrite it.