Since October 7, 2023, pro-Palestine protestors have disrupted and occupied American college and university campuses. But these are only the latest instances of an increasingly violent ideology that has been infiltrating American higher education for decades. In his forum lead, Paul O. Carrese rightly argues that ideological orthodoxy that promotes activism over liberal education has produced the recent unrest. According to Morgan Marietta, this ideological orthodoxy is really “identity authoritarianism”: the idea that identity determines everything significant about a human being and belonging to an oppressed or oppressor group defines that identity. This ideology asserts that oppressors use free speech, liberal democracy, and American constitutionalism to maintain power. The distinction between persuasion and compulsion collapses when words are considered violence and reason a tool of oppression, meaning fighting perceived “authoritarianism” requires authoritarianism.

We can find identity authoritarianism embedded in most American higher education academic departments and administrative offices. Students learn this ideology in their university courses and on campus more broadly. Many of America’s youth now view illiberal activism as simply what justice demands. Not every student today has become an ideologue, but what John Locke called “the law of opinion or reputation” often dictates the behavior of even those who have not acquired these views. Some brave students reach escape velocity from these forces, but they are still endeavoring to learn in a hostile environment. The illiberal education that has spawned this disruption and violence is incompatible with the material and social conditions needed for the pursuit of knowledge.

This illiberal education is also incompatible with our liberal democracy.

If we do not counter illiberal education, then students’ belief that identity defines human beings will ossify. They will accept that power defines every human action and violence is that by which one acquires and maintains all power. This orthodoxy will replace the liberal understanding that human beings are rational creatures capable of reasoning together about shared goals and consenting to abide by agreements about those goals. Students will not know that consent is legitimacy’s hallmark and raw compulsion tyranny’s. Students raised in the schoolhouse of illiberality will be incapable of maintaining our liberal order.

Still, all is not lost. Carrese notes a “silver lining”: the protests show that students “are hungry for a larger moral purpose and civic engagement.” Yet one must add that these students misunderstand or see only in part their longed-for justice and community bonds. Identity authoritarianism and its attendant illiberal education are not just because, if justice is a zero-sum game, then it obliterates the possibility of a pluralistic community in which one person’s flourishing does not come at the expense of another’s.

We cannot afford to maintain the notion that liberal education is not for “the common man.” Students need liberal education rooted in a community dedicated to open inquiry, intellectual pluralism, civil discourse, and the supposition that we can and should seek truth. We must offer students a core liberal arts curriculum that confronts them with fundamental questions of human existence. And in our liberal democracy, this core must have a civic component. Maintaining our liberal democracy and ability to pursue happiness peacefully and freely calls for helping students understand the virtues befitting free human beings.

To begin, we must be clear: liberal education is choice-worthy. It liberates students from ignorance and unreflective opinions by teaching them to think. In a liberal democracy, liberal education’s goal is to form free human beings who are good citizens capable of flourishing in their public and private lives. Students learn to read old and not-so-old books carefully and with an open mind, because such books teach them how to think, speak, and write about the most serious things. Mark Blitz argues liberal education is truly choice-worthy because it alone engages in “most completely examining and exercising what is distinctive to human beings. … To put this in the most accurate traditional sense: liberal education forms man’s distinctive liberality or openness; it expands and shapes the soul. To continue to educate oneself liberally is the central goal of a lifetime.”

In a liberal democracy, civic education is a salutary part of liberal education. It is a part, and not the whole, because living well is not exhausted by civic life. All the same, civic education helps secure the conditions for liberal education and helps students become responsible citizens. American civic education is broader than simply learning our political institutions’ workings; it asks students to examine our political principles and compare them with those of other political orders before determining whether they are choice-worthy or need reform. This examination is also a self-examination: in studying these principles and institutions, students also study themselves as human beings who possess a nature and whom, as citizens, these principles and political institutions shape. Only then can students thoughtfully assess whether the principle “liberty to all” is entwined about their heart and whether the authors of the Declaration of Independence “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society.” This is Carrese’s “reflective patriotism” or “considered patriotism.” Yes, our students should study the Declaration of Independence, The Federalist, and The Anti-Federalists, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, and Montesquieu and Tocqueville, to name only a few, but adjusting course content does not address the entirety of the problem of illiberal activism. State legislatures may mandate that every student read some number of documents from the American founding and the African-American freedom struggle, but if read on a campus teeming with administrators and faculty who are not dedicated to open inquiry, intellectual pluralism, civil discourse, and the pursuit of truth, it will not matter.

Illiberal education in American colleges and universities is also due to a personnel problem. There are professors, as well as administrators (staff members who punish and reward student behavior), openly promoting illiberal activism. It is the responsibility of those charged with hiring faculty and staff to consider the mission fit of potential employees. The university’s mission and work are “the discovery, improvement, and dissemination of knowledge”; anyone who dogmatically denies knowledge’s very possibility, or anyone who, for whatever reason, disavows or subverts civil discourse and intellectual pluralism, undermines the university’s mission.

The Kalven Committee Report declares “a university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, politics, practices, and institutions.” Challenges can serve the open inquiry and intellectual pluralism that are the means for discovering, improving, and disseminating knowledge. Challenges, however, are not demands. Academic freedom is not a suicide pact. Teachers and administrators properly understood are those who understand and model the behavior required for the university and its students to flourish. State legislatures, private donors, boards, presidents, and those responsible for hiring faculty and staff must understand the virtues liberal and civic education need. I would like to offer a preliminary sketch of these virtues.

First is intellectual humility. Recognizing one’s own ignorance and acknowledging that someone else might understand a matter more fully requires humility. It makes space for accepting oneself and other human beings as fallible, as not always speaking and acting according to knowledge and virtue. The American liberal order incorporates this virtue into our constitutional structure; our indirect democracy depends upon the notion that representatives might have a better sense of the whole than individual citizens do and that one will not and should not always get one’s way. 

Next is intellectual courage, which allows one to overcome the fear of being wrong or the fear of the embarrassment that one does not know something, e.g., why what one holds to be unjust is unjust. When fear overcomes those who lack this courage, they may shout down or shut down open inquiry and the free exchange of ideas. Intellectual courage allows one to choose openness, wonder, and inquiry over unreflective opinion, and it allows one to preserve what reason uncovers. Intellectual courage’s civic counterpart is the courage to defend one’s opinion or interest, as well as one’s freedom and country. Cultivating courage and humility are prerequisites if one is to be free from ignorance and pursue truth, since courage untempered by humility produces self-righteousness. 

Civil discourse and reasoned debate support these virtues and are essential to education. Universities and colleges must make the distinction between free speech and free expression clear. “When we equate free speech with free expression,“ Wilfred M. McClay has argued, “we deny or diminish the unique property of speech: as the medium of deliberation, as that middle ground between thought and action, and as the instrument that enables us, together, to seek and test and validate the truth.” Learning with and from others—civil discourse—is essential to education because through the productive clash of opinions one may better pursue the truth. A free, self-governing people actively engaging in civil discourse can find common ground, agreement, and even unanimity where there otherwise would be disagreement or even faction. Unanimity in a liberal order, even in its instantiation in a simple majority, substitutes for the impossible and illiberal rule of the “wise” or of violence. 

Next is justice, which is at least what is fitting, due, proper, and deserved. Liberal education is an education in self-government befitting a free individual. We hold as self-evident that all human beings are equal in their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Justice is also at least equal things to equals, and we are all equal in these rights. Freedom is a component or condition of pursuing happiness, which, again, is a right possessed by every human being. Pursing happiness, then, is a fundamental freedom, a right. One may choose to pursue happiness by enrolling in a higher education community, which exists for acquiring knowledge. Obstructing another’s right to pursue happiness, which here is the pursuit of truth, is then violation of that person’s rights. It denies justice as equal things to equals and is unjust in its insistence of unequal things to equals. At its height, if pursuit of truth is what is fitting and proper for human beings as rational creatures who possess an openness to the nature of things, then those who pursue truth do so in accordance with justice. Ideological orthodoxy, identity authoritarianism, and illiberal activism are, by this understanding, unjust. 

This leads to responsibility. Responsibility at least means care or stewardship informed by an understanding of what is good, both for oneself and others. In the higher education context, responsibility calls for securing and improving the conditions higher education requires, which Mark Blitz has argued leads to a fundamental moderation. An intellectual’s “occasional radical action” might issue from this responsibility, but because responsibility is bound to liberal education in this context, there can also be the “salutary moderation of dogmatic political and moral opinions,” as well the moderation of one’s “expectations concerning political and moral perfection.” Responsibility should lead professors and administrators to model the virtues and habits befitting the free pursuit of knowledge. Responsibility should even lead to a consideration of the tension between the publication demands of the research university and the teaching and mentoring demands of a liberal and civic education. 

Finally is what Carrese describes as the “political-intellectual virtue of moderation—of avoiding extremes and single-mindedness in philosophy as well as in action.” Moderation is antithetical to identity authoritarianism and ideological orthodoxy. It is needed for the health of our liberal democracy and the health of our souls. Hence, Carrese’s School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership (SCETL) aims to graduate students who possess the virtues of “civil disagreement; civic friendship across philosophical and partisan difference; and a reflective patriotism.” As SCETL’s founding director and as a professor, he understands that this is his responsibility. This is the ennobling responsibility of all who are involved in American higher education. 

I would like to conclude with an account from Harry Stein’s article, “How My Friends and I Wrecked Pomona College.” Stein’s account reflects on a professor who modeled these virtues and habits. I would be remiss not to mention this remarkable professor, for I knew him personally. In 1969, amidst anti-war occupations of campus buildings and Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia, the Claremont Consortium’s faculty voted to close the campuses. Yet: 

There was a young philosophy professor at Scripps—he later moved to Claremont Graduate School—named Harry Neumann, who I heard was still holding class that day. He was jeopardizing his whole career doing this, taking the risk of being denied tenure, so a couple of us headed over there. It was a seminar on Nietzsche, and in addition to its nine or ten students, there were 40 or 50 others hanging around the walls of this little room. What he was discussing was indecipherable to me, but finally he looked up, acknowledging that all these other people were around. And he said: “At the faculty meeting yesterday, somebody asked me when, if ever, I would close the university. And I told him: When all the answers to all the important questions have been found, then it would be appropriate to close the university. And for all the people who have all the answers to all the important questions, the university is already closed.”

A growing contingent of state legislators, donors, faculty members, parents, alumni, and most importantly, students want to return to what Harry Neumann understood. There is more than a silver lining here: there is hope. Students may find respite in Oases of Excellence from New York to California; along with SCETL, eight states are opening new schools and centers of civics. And in an attempt to offer not merely respite but a comprehensive solution to the higher education crisis, concerned citizens who understand what is at stake founded a wholly new institution—the University of Austin.

All the answers to all the important questions have not been found. We have work to do.