‘The Barbarians Are at the Gates’

For decades now, the Brown University economist Glenn Loury has been one of the most influential conservative intellectuals, a reliably contrarian voice in left-leaning academe. And since 2020, he has been a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, the conservative think tank that, especially through the activist journalism of Christopher Rufo, has been a major player in the Republican legislative interventions in higher education. Under the institute’s auspices, Loury has for years hosted The Glenn Show, an ideas-and-politics podcast featuring guests from across the political and ideological spectrum.

That is, until recently. Loury no longer works for the Manhattan Institute, which declined to renew his contract after Loury became highly critical of Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. For his part, Loury is magnanimous about the severed tie. “I want to say that I’m not mad at anybody at the Manhattan Institute about what has happened,” he told The Chronicle, “and I’m in debt to them for the support that my podcast and my other work has gotten over the years.” (The podcast will continue without the institute’s help.)

Over 30 years ago, Loury wrote an influential paper on self-censorship. It’s perhaps fitting that he’s returned to the subject in a new book, Self-Censorship, coming out this summer. We recently sat down with Loury over Zoom to talk about Trump’s attacks on the university, what Rufo should be doing now, and whether conservative support for free speech is a hypocritical ruse. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Evan Goldstein: When we last spoke, you were eyeing retirement after five decades in the classroom. I think you’re now officially retired from Brown University.

Glenn Loury: Effective June 30, I will be emeritus professor and no longer on the payroll.

Goldstein: I was going to ask if the transition has been easier or harder than you expected, but that question might be premature.

Loury: It’s a terrifying life transition. But I’m in my 70s. I don’t want to be the guy drooling in front of his students, barely pulling himself into the classroom. Let me leave while I’m still on my own two feet, with my head high, and while I’m not going to say I’m at the top of my game, still going strong.

Goldstein: With everything going on with Trump and higher ed, including at Brown, which had $510 million in federal funding frozen, do you feel like you’re getting out just in time?

Loury: This is a crisis moment for higher ed and for the country, but I’m not sure it’s curtains for those who are left behind. I view the heavy-handed, extortionist posture that the government has taken with alarm. A kind of politicization is afoot. The government demands to have a say over who gets appointed to a faculty. They don’t like certain aspects of the curriculum, and they want to use their funding leverage or tax authority to coerce these institutions into a set of intellectual judgments about what gets taught and what gets written. I don’t like what I see. Who’s going to decide whether or not Edward Said is worth reading, Christopher Rufo?

Len Gutkin: Speaking of Rufo, you were until recently — and we’ll get to this in a bit — a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where Rufo is on staff. What has Rufo got right, and what has he got — or is getting — wrong?

Loury: Christopher Rufo has had a spectacularly successful run. He basically deposed the president of Harvard University with a tweet. Not literally, but he exposed her alleged plagiarism and helped to create a cumulative effect that ended up deposing the president of Harvard. He’s got the governor of Florida, Ron DeSantis, bringing him under his wing to help guide the transformation of New College in a direction that is much more in keeping with the conservative ethos that DeSantis embraces and that Rufo exemplifies. And he ain’t done yet.

Gutkin: As a conservative who until recently was at the same think tank with Rufo and who has shared many of his concerns about the sector, what do you make of his more recent posture? When you introduced Rufo by saying, who’s supposed to decide whether Edward Said is worth reading, Christopher Rufo?, the implicit answer was certainly not.

Loury: Look, maybe there should be more conservative professors. If I were running the world, I would have a different faculty in the anthropology department at Harvard or Columbia. The Middle East studies department is characterized by a certain ideological coloration. A person could object to that. But these universities, and Harvard is at the pinnacle of an exquisite system of intellectual production, are places of real mastery. That’s true in the sciences, the social sciences, and in the humanities. The people who get tenure at these institutions are custodians of the legacy of intellectual reflection and the production of ideas that goes back centuries. They are responsible for curating, transmitting, and augmenting our understanding of the problems of existence. They deal with questions of the origins of the universe, the origins of the species, with what is beautiful, and what is true. So with great respect, somebody sitting at a think tank who’s on a crusade of political criticism can’t be allowed to substitute for the collective judgment of these communities of reflection and refinement.

Gutkin: What would you tell Rufo if he called you up and said, Glenn, what do I do now? What’s my next move?

Loury: I would say, Chill out, back off, and find something else to do. He would probably say, in response, that he’s striking while the iron is hot. This is the moment in which we actually win. We have power. He would say that I’m equivocating when I should be standing fast. You don’t make an omelet without breaking eggs! You don’t have a revolution without some heads rolling from the guillotine!

Goldstein: My impression during the election was that you were not a Trump supporter, exactly, but were Trump curious.

Loury: I was not a Trump supporter. I didn’t vote for Trump. But I was one of the guys who would say, Look, the phenomenon of Trump is important in American politics, and to dismiss Trump as an ignoramus or a 38-times convicted felon and not take on board the fact that his ascendancy has massive popular support is to miss that the tectonic plates are shifting, and there’s a reason they’re shifting. It’s not enough to simply make a characterological argument: Trump, bad. Trump, bad. I was not content to simply say Trump is bad. I was moved by the fact that Trump is succeeding and that’s exposing fault lines that demand our attention.

Goldstein: What would be the right way for college leaders to think through those fault lines, and how they should respond to them?

Loury: It comes down to what’s in the curriculum and who’s on the faculty. I would encourage them to be open to a range of ideas and commitments that are broader than the near unanimity of left-of-center sensibility and anti-populist orientation that is characteristic of these institutions.

Gutkin: Do you think that would mitigate some of the distrust of elites, to the extent that elite universities are included among the elites who are distrusted now?

Loury: Let me be concrete. You had George Floyd get killed in 2020, and it was an election year, and there were civil disturbances, and there was a kind of reaction in many universities. Mine was one of them. My president, Christina Paxson, wrote a letter in which she expressed the university’s standing in solidarity with the antiracist movement, exemplified by Black Lives Matter. I don’t think she made explicit reference to them, but she did invoke the specter of structural racism and all of that. Now there are riots in the streets, and there are reactions to those riots in the streets, and this is a very divisive political issue. Some universities, like the University of Chicago, have taken the position that a university shouldn’t be in the business of putting its imprimatur behind one side or the other of contested political issues. You could take the position that the university is where all sides of the contested questions raised by those events get aired and debated. It should be possible to have a conservative reaction to those events and have that taken seriously, without condemnation or sanction. I don’t mean formal sanction. I mean informal social sanction.

Gutkin: I remember reading your piece about Paxson, and it’s clear that you bristle at the imposition of an orthodox position from any institution you’re associated with. So let’s talk about the Manhattan Institute. What caused your falling out?

Loury: No one told me, don’t say this or that. It was much more subtle. I had Omer Bartov, the Israeli historian of the Holocaust who’s very critical of the occupation post-1967 and of the prosecution of the war post October 7, 2023, on my podcast. Omer is appreciative of the concerns raised by international human rights and legal organizations about the possibility that the Israeli campaign in Gaza is bordering on or crossing the line to being an instance of genocide. He takes that seriously. We put up the podcast, which is published independently but which was supported by the Manhattan Institute. Staff there communicated that they’d like that particular episode not to be presented with the imprimatur of the Manhattan Institute. I could have taken that as a warning. I could have backed off. But I didn’t.

Some time later, Ta-Nehisi Coates comes out with his book The Message, and one chapter recounts his experience visiting the West Bank. What he saw there had all the features of apartheid, and he expressed it. And I’m talking about the book on my podcast, and I say that there’s much to admire in it. We were in negotiations with the Manhattan Institute about renewing the contractual relationship that governed their support for the podcast, and one of the administrators made clear they were no longer interested in supporting the podcast. I carried on, however, as a senior fellow.

Then I invited a young scholar, Matthew Cockerill, who is a history doctoral student at the London School of Economics and is acquainted with an initiative called Air Wars, which chronicles civilian casualties and aerial bombardments, including in the campaign in Gaza. Air Wars put out a report that concluded, contrary to some opinion, that the character of civilian casualties in Gaza suggested a kind of campaign of collective punishment. I moderated a debate between Cockerill and Eli Lake, a well-known and experienced journalist who’s reporting for The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s operation. I moderated the debate. I listened, and I did a post-mortem directly to the camera and said, in effect, I didn’t find Lake’s arguments very convincing. And I allowed that I thought we probably were witnessing, if not something that you would call genocide, certainly something that you would call collective punishment. The next day, I got a letter from the president of the Manhattan Institute informing me that they were going to discontinue their relationship with me altogether.

Goldstein: Do you see Manhattan Institute’s treatment of you as an example of cancel culture on the right?

Loury: They’re under no obligation to do business with me. They are running a shop. They get to decide who is a part of their shop and who’s not. I see it as an indication of the realities of political life. If you have a view about a controversial matter, and you express that view publicly, people who hear you are going to make judgments about whether or not they like what you say and whether or not they like you in virtue of you having said it. Everybody knows that this is the case in life. None of us says everything that comes to mind; we edit and censor ourselves out of a deference to and respect for the sensibilities of those who are going to hear us when we speak.

Talking about Gaza is not my wheelhouse, you know? I could have just stayed out of it. I didn’t. I’m not calling it cancellation. I spoke my piece, and I paid the price of having done so. I wouldn’t have wanted to live with myself if I hadn’t been willing to pay that price.

Gutkin: No speech is free in the sense that there are always potential costs to controversial speech. But one of the things about the university is that it should at least strive to produce an environment in which serious speech is as free as it can be. Something that you have been paying attention to since at least your 1994 paper on self-censorship and public discourse, which has been resurrected in the new book, is the problem that universities have not honored that commitment very well. They became bastions of censorship, usually coming from the left. At least, it seemed to many people, including yourself, that the censorship was primarily coming from the left. Now that the right has all three branches of government, now that think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, where conservative intellectuals like you might have found a home, seem to have bright lines that you can’t cross on certain topics, where do you look for a genuinely principled openness?

Loury: It’s important to distinguish between a think tank and a university on exactly the grounds that you’ve identified. A think tank is not necessarily an environment in which a commitment to freedom of inquiry is to be expected. That’s not what think tanks are. That is what universities are, and it’s what they should continue to be. It’s why I say that the barbarians are at the gates and the crown jewels of our civilization are at risk, because the effort on the right to dictate what happens in the university smacks of a kind of McCarthyism. It takes us back to the censorious climate that I was objecting to in my critical reaction to groupthink and political correctness that came from the left in the ’80s and ’90s.

Goldstein: You have this memorable phrase in the new book, Self-Censorship: the “lure of quiet conformity.” Are there structural reasons why that lure is especially strong in the academy?

Loury: Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, a German political scientist from a half century ago, has a book called The Spiral of Silence. Her argument is that people don’t know what other people think about controversial issues unless they tell you what they think. No one wants to step out on a limb and be alone in taking a view contrary to some consensus sentiment. A lot of people actually might hold a view contrary to the consensus. For example, a lot of people might think it’s ridiculous that you can’t say that biology determines the difference between a man and a woman. But if we are in a circumstance in which the consensus view is that that’s an anti-trans, bigoted posture, and no one wants to be thought of as a bigot, they don’t say so. Similarly, a lot of people might think the Israeli campaign in Gaza is excessive. They might think that it casts aspersions on the entire project of Zionism. But if only radical anti-Zionists and antisemites are prepared to say so publicly, someone who is not an antisemite or rabid anti-Zionist but who holds that view, probably won’t say so. The spiral of silence creates an environment in which, in a self-confirming way, the only people who are prepared to speak out are the radicals.

Gutkin: Can I push back on this? When it comes to Israel’s conduct of this war many people, including Joe Biden when he was president, said something like, Netanyahu is going too far. That was quite early. At The Chronicle, we published a sympathetic profile of Omer Bartov some months after the attacks of October 7. Thomas Friedman and Nicholas Kristof have both been scathing about Israel’s conduct in The New York Times; Bartov published an opinion piece there. In other words, the position that Israel’s conduct of this war has been extreme is a mainstream position. It’s prohibited not in the mainstream, but on the right — in places like the Manhattan Institute. So while I take your point that a think tank has different commitments than the academy, I want to suggest that a puritanical echo chamber seems to have emerged on the right. Is there a politics of taboo around certain subjects?

Loury: I’m going to answer plainly and directly, yes.

Gutkin: The Manhattan Institute is not required to act like a university, but because the intellectual right has declared itself a standard-bearer for free speech, in large part because the left has seemed to many to have abandoned it, is it painful to see them, in this case, abdicate that commitment? Has this commitment turned out to be more hypocritical or more tenuous than you had hoped?

Loury: I wouldn’t put it that way. I would say that the temptation to censorship is universal, and I’m not surprised to see it manifest itself on the right. The high-minded ideal that we should be open to all arguments and that we should be patient with people who are heterodox and whatnot, people fall short of measuring up to it. People on the right are no more immune to those temptations than anybody else.

Goldstein: Coming out of the closet, so to speak, with your true view of the Gaza war risked certain people labeling you an antisemite. Does that shape at all how you think about the broader debate regarding antisemitism on campuses? As you know, much of what the Trump administration is doing is being carried out in the name of combating antisemitism.

Loury: As far as I know, no one at the Manhattan Institute has accused me of being an antisemite. The main thing, however, is that there’s a glaring, ironic contradiction in the anti-DEI sentiment of the new right’s assault on universities and the anti-antisemitism campaign, which is that our Jewish students shouldn’t have to cower out of fear that the mob is going to condemn them for being pro-Israel. Anti-antisemitism is, in my mind, clearly an identitarian stand. I think the university should be a safe space for our Jewish students. But I do think the campaign to stamp out antisemitism when it’s defined as the International Holocaust Remembrance Association would define it, in such a strict way that it in effect prevents the articulation of criticisms of Zionism — that is in itself a kind of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative for Jews, and that strikes me as worth observing.

Goldstein: The topic of self-censorship has preoccupied you for a long time. But your interest in the topic was rekindled by a recent experience giving a talk at a synagogue in Florida. Why is that experience an enduring source of shame for you?

Loury: I was invited by some admirers to come and talk about Black-Jewish relations. The invitation was issued in early 2023, before the October 7 terrorist attack, but the event was in January of 2024, after the attack and after the earliest phases of the Israeli campaign to counter Hamas in Gaza. What would I say? I had a pat set of things to mention about affirmative action and Louis Farrakhan, and all of that my audience would have warmed to. I had a text that I could read and satisfy my obligation to give the lecture, but events were unfolding even as I was speaking, and I was deeply disturbed by those events. But I knew that if I expressed that disturbance, I would probably engender the ire of many in that audience. And I wondered whether I had a responsibility to do so. In the end, I decided to play it safe and not talk at all about Gaza, even though it would have perhaps engendered a productive, if acrimonious, exchange from which I might have learned something, into which I might have been able to contribute something. I choked. I don’t say that with pride, but I say it with candor.

Goldstein: You’re invited to a synagogue. I presume they’re paying you. Under what conditions is biting your tongue admirable rather than shameful? When is self-censoring the right thing to do?

Loury: You might want to be polite. You might not want to give offense. You might want to be strategic. You might want to keep your powder dry. Don’t gratuitously invite the contempt of your audience. Don’t tip your hand. Or you might want to be a passionate advocate of the truth, and the truth is its own reward, regardless of the consequences of expressing it. War is a time for truth. This Black American could have stood for truth on that occasion, and I elected not to. I’m not proud of that.