The Professoriate’s Politics Problem

Other claims I made have not aged so well, in particular regarding contemporary conservative movements. Mainstream American conservatism, I wrote then, “shares nothing meaningful with … protofascist figures. … Our conservatives accept the legitimacy of constitutional self-government, even when they hate the legislation and court decisions resulting from it; they play by the rules.” That was only 15 years ago. Today genuine conservatives who fit within the long tradition of thought that includes Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Michael Oakeshott are increasingly rare birds. Conservatism, in the old sense, has not changed. Rather, Republican politicians, many think tanks, and right-leaning young people who live online have abandoned the tradition and embraced instead Trumpian populism and far-right reactionary influencers who recycle many old fascist ideas.

These developments complicate even more the vexed problem of making conservatism part of the conversation in American universities. Steven Teles’s recent article in The Chronicle is the wisest and most thorough analysis I have yet read on the psychological and institutional factors that dissuade non-left students from speaking freely in class and pursuing graduate degrees. There are self-reinforcing processes at work that make it difficult to imagine things changing anytime soon. And they are reinforced even more by the recent radicalization of opinion on the American (and international) right. If asked to create a syllabus today on contemporary right-wing thought, I have trouble imagining who might stand in as a representative of the old conservative tradition I wrote about in 2009.

For most of my teaching career, I played the centrist liberal serving as a foil for my students, most of whom were on the left. Now the students who select my courses tend to be center-right on the spectrum, mainly because at Columbia, which has no prominent conservative professors, I am one of the few (they tell me) to make them feel respected and free to speak. And so now I find myself playing the liberal or progressive professor who questions their pieties, which are many and go unchallenged in the cloistered online political communities they belong to.

If I were called upon to make a case for greater intellectual diversity and the hiring of conservative faculty today, it would not be the same case I made in 2009. Instead I would argue that, just as ROTC programs help to moderate opinion in the military by giving future generals a liberal-arts education, so too a greater presence of serious conservatives and conservative ideas could help to moderate opinion on the right. Not to mention on the left.

Mark Lilla is a professor of humanities at Columbia University. His new book, Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), will be published in December.

These kinds of folks don’t just dominate the academy. They are the primary producers and consumers of most content produced in the “symbolic professions” (such as journalism and media, advertising and entertainment, design and the arts, science and technology, politics and activism, finance and philanthropy, consulting and administration, religion, law, and so on).

People who share this background tend to vary in dramatic and systematic ways from most other Americans. They perceive and think about the world differently. They have different emotional tendencies. They have highly idiosyncratic political preferences and modes of engagement. And they tend to be disdainful and intolerant toward those whose perspectives diverge from their own.

These differences, which are large under ordinary circumstances, grew much larger and more salient after 2011 — including, and especially, in higher ed — fueling mistrust and polarization around academic institutions, professors, and their teaching and research.

When people talk about these differences, they often focus narrowly on political affiliation or political ideologies: Professors are overwhelmingly Democrats and tend to identify with the “left.” However, in many respects, this misses the forest for the trees.

For instance, understanding these institutions as “left” can’t easily account for the militant response colleges mounted against students protesting the ongoing Israeli offensive in Gaza. Nor can it explain why higher-ed institutions are some of the most hierarchical and parochial institutions in America. Nor can it be easily reconciled with the central and growing role these institutions play in the production and legitimation of inequality. It’s more useful to understand colleges as oriented around the interests and worldviews of highly educated and relatively well-off urban and suburban whites —often at the expense of the marginalized and disadvantaged in society.

We can see this reality at work in how efforts to make it easier to purge or censor scholars for coloring outside the “correct” ideological lines tend to undermine not only conservatives but also racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, faculty from nontraditional backgrounds, contingent faculty, and faculty at land-grant public universities.

These trends are actually interrelated. Ethnic and religious minorities, immigrants, Americans from small towns and rural areas, etc., are significantly more likely to be socially conservative than urban and suburban whites from relatively well-off backgrounds. People from less affluent backgrounds and less prestigious schools are less likely to be “up” on contemporary moral and intellectual fads — they’re less likely to know what the “correct” thing to do and say is and, as a consequence, are more likely to run afoul of highly refined rules and norms.

To put it another way, inculcating an environment that is hostile to conventional norms and more “traditional” values and worldviews, although typically carried out in the name of diversity and inclusion, will often have the perverse effect of excluding and alienating those who are already underrepresented and marginalized in elite spaces.

When we try to understand why it is that so many people of color, or people from low-income, immigrant backgrounds or otherwise nontraditional backgrounds feel as though they don’t belong in symbolic economy spaces — whether we’re talking about elite K-12 schools, colleges and universities, or professional settings — this is an underexplored part of the story. Rather than being insufficiently progressive, these institutions are too homogenous and extreme in their ideological bearings. They are too fiercely oriented around the idiosyncratic (ostensibly emancipatory) belief systems of white elites, and too oriented around serving their agendas. Welcoming a broader range of ideas into the academy — to include conservative and religious perspectives — would be one of the most genuinely egalitarian moves liberals could make.

Musa al-Gharbi is an assistant professor of communication and journalism at Stony Brook University and the author of We Have Never Been Woke (Princeton).

Hostility to religion is the most virulent form of prejudice against conservatives on campus. But conservatives are not its sole victims. Many newcomers from underrepresented social or economic backgrounds find that the first requirement for upward mobility is the abandonment of open faith. Religion is permitted only if expressed in terms of progressive politics. Most religious teaching and practice falls outside of that limitation, untouchable in conversation.

Open hostility to religion also obscures whole lines of inquiry. My home field of philosophy has long contorted its canon to avoid Jewish or Christian texts, leaving a thousand-year gap between the pagan Greeks and the Enlightenment. Recent scholarship has begun to fill in the gaps, but in strictly historical terms, without the enlivening effect of first-order inquiry.

A broad diet of questions is wholesome for all kinds of reasons. Newton, Kepler, and Leibniz were each obsessed with God. Should we imagine their religious inquiries played no role in their insights into the laws of nature? Can science flourish today without free and open foundational inquiry? I am no scientist myself, but the idea beggars belief.

The greatest problem in universities is not the exclusion of marginal viewpoints, but a limited approach to fundamental questions. Vast worlds of possible understanding are shut out, along with the authors and cultures that ask them. Yet if universities are not held together by the honest inquiry into fundamental questions and the free play of the imagination, what on earth are we doing?

When we look to our common perplexities, we open the door to many voices. Fundamental questions attract beginners and outsiders. Likewise, they draw specialists out of their subcultures and into conversation. A university rooted in fundamental questions pollinates far past campus boundaries and blossoms without regard to discipline.

A diverse community is a sign we have gotten something right, a side effect of a focused zeal for learning. Where is our zeal focused? Every teacher and scholar, every department chair and dean must undertake a course of introspection, personal and communal. What is the point of our intellectual endeavors? We’ll know we’ve hit the mark when the room comes alive with the desire to understand.

How to begin? Restore core curricula, in which every student reads and every faculty member teaches. Great books are the best territory I know for open-ended inquiry into serious questions. For a university that looks and thinks like humanity, nothing beats a foundation in the human questions and humane conversation.

Zena Hitz is a tutor at St. John’s College, where she teaches across the liberal arts. Her most recent book is A Philosopher Looks at the Religious Life (Cambridge).

The Humboldtian ideal of the university, to which we in the U.S. are self-consciously heirs, is one in which the only subjects taught are those that are “scientific” (wissenschaftlich), in the German sense of that term. Scientific fields involve rigorous and teachable methods for investigating and acquiring knowledge about their subject matters. In the Humboldtian university of the 19th century — when Germany was the world leader in almost every academic discipline — Wissenschaft included not only the natural sciences, but history, classics, and many other “human” (or social) sciences. Max Weber’s plea for “value neutrality” in the human sciences was made against this background: A scientific method, Weber argued, is not a politically partisan method.

These days there is a tendency, especially in the feebler parts of the academy, to scoff at the Weber/Humboldt ideal, which draws a bright line between science and politics. This is a mistake, even if the relationship between partisan political values and Wissenschaft is more complex than Weber allowed. Political and moral values, for example, can influence the choice of what to study with scientific methods: Should a scholar investigate the role of the capitalist class in Hitler’s seizure of power, or the relationship between race and intelligence? Political and moral values may also affect tolerance for the weakness of supposedly scientific methods (think of the methodological intransigence of neoclassical macroeconomics despite decades of predictive failures).

The role of partisan values in the choice of scholarly questions looms larger in the human than in the natural sciences, and even in the former its influence is felt disproportionately in certain humanistic fields where political partisanship often rules the roost (e.g., literary studies, communications). Even human sciences with apparently robust formal methods — think, again, of economics — still fall prey to the sotto voce influence of partisan values. (Consider the extraordinary fact that MIT’s Daron Acemoglu and colleagues had to point out to other neoclassical economists that technological progress does not necessarily benefit everyone in society!) To the extent there is no scientific method at work in an academic field (or to the extent it is a weak method that persists), then it would hardly be surprising that partisan politics comes to the fore. That is not an objection to the Weber/Humboldt conception, just a confession that contemporary universities have “departments” that are not fully scientific and that ought to be either abolished or reformed.

How would reforming disciplines compromised by political partisanship work? Departments have, after all, academic freedom to appoint faculty they deem qualified. The political labels, moreover, are largely irrelevant to the problem at issue: “Conservative” or “left” are indexical terms whose meaning is hugely context-sensitive. A conservative in Canada would be considered a moderate Democrat in America. Someone on the left in America would be a moderate social democrat in most of Europe. It is hard to see why these provincial categories should affect hiring in disciplines that are international in scope. Universities should demand scholarly vibrancy, not political bean-counting — at least if improving Wissenschaft is the goal.

Brian Leiter is a professor of jurisprudence and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago.

Had I not already left my liberal moorings, I would have veered conservative after coming to teach at Harvard in 1993. Though traditional academic values like scholarship, objectivity in the search for truth, and overall responsibility for conserving the Republic still prevailed, they were in the process of being surrendered in the humanities and social sciences without acknowledgment or apparent awareness.

The banning of ROTC programs, already in place at Harvard when I arrived, would be enforced with increasing animus for 40 years — ten undergraduate rotations. Faculty kept shifting its rationale for this policy, which students understood to mean that they were too good to defend an imperfect America that was, anyway, not worth defending. It takes no PhD to realize that the age of soldiering overlaps with that of college, and that no democracy can endure unless its finest youth assumes responsibility for its defense. The trickle of students who defied the ban were sent to MIT for training. Faculty’s contempt for the military morphed into campus contempt for the country.

As for the policy euphemistically known as “affirmative action,” it was being implemented by colleges and universities without acknowledgment that it violated the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and without any attempt to monitor its accumulating negative effects. I argued at the time that the introduction of group preferences would necessarily foster identity politics. The university’s enforcement of a contentious policy would prevent intellectual diversity, since those appointed through gender and racial categories would never appoint anyone in turn who opposed them, even as social engineering precluded opposition to its claim of progress. That I was dismissed (“No-one listens to Professor Wisse,” the Crimson quoted a colleague as saying) didn’t bother this tenured dissenter, but the institutional failure of self-scrutiny troubled me greatly. Our government uses checks and balances to prevent the Gehenna of good intentions gone awry, and science monitors its experiments for verifiability. The university did neither when it introduced anti-intellectual criteria into the academic process.

Without tracing all the administrative, faculty, and student measures that have progressively shut down intellectual diversity, we can be certain that wherever coalitions claiming progress staked their claim, they will hold on to power as tenaciously as Ayatollahs. Graduate students, our professors in training, are now represented by the United Auto Workers. Whatever hope remains must now lie with independent think-tanks, schools, and programs still free of indoctrination where the foundations of our civilization are being taught—as, unapologetically, our Judeo-Christian, American civilization, the one that believes in coexistence and free speech.

I deeply appreciate the small hardy groups at Harvard and elsewhere that are trying to reestablish academic values. Their focus, like that of this symposium, is on restoring the free exchange of ideas in a democratic context. But the prescription of heterodoxy won’t cure terminal stage hegemony. Before they can thrive again, universities would first have to excise what ruined them.

Ruth R. Wisse is professor emerita of Yiddish literature and comparative literature at Harvard University.

The university is becoming more sectarian and intolerant. Given the activist mind-set of many graduate students and junior professors, this problem won’t correct itself. The university’s growing illiberalism seems “baked in,” as Teles puts it.

Unless, of course, the university’s liberal institutionalists decide to behave more responsibly than the GOP’s. If they do so, they must not neglect their most formidable power: gatekeeping. Professors must do a better job of vetting applicants to their graduate programs and professorships, ensuring they are committed to free inquiry and intellectual pluralism. More than anything else, these choices will determine the future of the university.

University leaders, as Teles rightly recommends, should also “send visible, credible signals that they are not discriminating against conservatives.” So should professors. One way they can do so is by developing undergraduate courses on what is best in the conservative intellectual tradition. With rare exceptions — such as courses at Emory and Cornell — these classes aren’t offered, and those who teach them are generally older scholars nearing retirement.

Liberal institutionalists should ensure that every major university offers a course on the conservative intellectual tradition. While this change by itself won’t save universities, it is nonetheless indispensable to the revival of liberal education. Teaching such courses would send signals to young conservatives that the university is not as closed to them as Ben Shapiro says it is. As research suggests, too many conservative undergraduates avoid majors and courses in the humanities and social sciences because they see them as offering little more than leftist pieties.

Courses on conservatism would send a similar signal to the public at large, especially Republicans. If universities in red states want to undermine the perception that they are simply progressive seminaries, they shouldn’t just deny the charge — they should offer the public some evidence that these accusations are false. Tour guides, college presidents, and admissions officers could point to these courses as proof that their institutions take conservative ideas seriously.

What’s more, the development of these courses would also provide an opportunity for professors to undermine the populist right by tutoring the next generation of conservatives. If professors don’t teach the young what it means to think and act like a conservative, Turning Point USA will.

For curious liberal institutionalists who know little about the conservative intellectual tradition, I recommend reading Jerry Muller’s introductory chapter in Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought From David Hume to the Present. The experience can be electric. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who identifies as a liberal, confessed that his encounter with Muller’s book “floored” him. To make such encounters routine we need to develop new courses and programs on a scale that will shape the next generation of elites; and that, as Teles rightly concludes, will require organization. If instead we just sit on our hands, we won’t be remembered as the university’s noble relics. We’ll go down as its passive undertakers.

Jon A. Shields is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College.

Students at highly selective colleges like the one where I teach embody a strange oxymoron: They are professional students. Their discipline, stamina, and singularity of focus is quite unlike what I and most of my peers exhibited as undergraduates. But there is an even more salient difference: Today’s students are more reluctant — a lot more reluctant — to disagree with one another. There is a recognized orthodoxy, highly attuned to the linguistic codes of the day, that students seem terrified of breaking, like the Latinx student leader who confided to me in a whisper, as if the walls could hear, that she was “a little bit capitalist.”

I see this phenomenon most clearly in students, but it’s there among the faculty as well. Conservative voices stand out like reeds in a prairie, flayed every which way by the prevailing winds. Perhaps because of their isolation, and because only people of a certain temperament are willing to stand up against a broad consensus, these conservative voices are often strident and proudly unregenerate. Strikingly, many of the “conservatives” on the faculty are conservatives only in the context of an academic community. Out in the world, they are traditional liberals who vote for progressive policies and candidates. Thirty or 40 years ago, they would have represented the academic mainstream, but the center has shifted to their left.

The experimental yet communal character of academic life makes campus culture prone to ideological extremes. Our current malady is an ingrown liberalism that has become self-negating. Critical alertness to racism, misogyny, and bigotry often morphs into a reflexive posture of purity, self-righteousness, and intolerance of opposing views. But even as I recognize that this is a problem, I am concerned that calls for “viewpoint diversity” aim not at openness and dialogue, but at establishing a more evenly divided partisanship on campus.

Academics should challenge ideological orthodoxies of every kind. The same commitments that inform our valuation of diversity in race, religion, and gender, should make us value ideological diversity. Hard questions will still arise: Should ideological diversity extend to tolerating the spread of white supremacy, religious bigotry, or disinformation? To what extent, if at all, should we censor or prohibit speech that some members of our community find offensive or threatening?

However we approach these complex questions, we must never restrict abhorrent views casually or reflexively. We must contend with them and do our very best to create a climate where they can be voiced and reckoned with. Only when objectionable views are clearly articulated can they be adequately rebutted.

Roosevelt Montás is a senior lecturer in Columbia University’s Center for American Studies and director of its Freedom and Citizenship Program. He is the author of Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation (Princeton).

For many progressives, universities are essentially goal-oriented institutions that exist for extrinsic purposes. Just as construction companies build houses and hospitals improve health, universities should produce social and political activists. There is a version of this understanding on the political right, too: Universities generate successful, high-earning workers. In both versions, unformed young people are filtered through the university and emerge as satisfactory social or economic products.

There is another way of thinking about university education that is not so teleological. It is also not quite as natural, because we tend to think about most activities in terms of future outcomes. Exercise is for health or beauty; work for money; money for future happiness and security. But certain activities are intrinsic goods, not for anything else.

The old-fashioned idea of liberal education is one such activity. Here we put practical concerns on hold, focusing not on power, money, or honor, but on texts, pictures, and musical compositions, and on the insights and conversation they generate. The aim is not criticism but understanding and, often, appreciation, awe, and wonder. Liberal education does not exhaust what goes on at a university — indeed, it now constitutes a minority pursuit — but it requires a significant measure of conservatism. Teaching great works from the past is, after all, a kind of conservation.

I teach at Baylor University as part of an Honors College that prioritizes such learning, in courses that unabashedly fly under the banner of the “Great Texts.” I am not alienated from my colleagues or from the university. I teach what I find beautiful and valuable, even though it is not au courant, socially relevant, or progressive. My students are hungry for what one conservative thinker has called “the permanent things.”

But my experience is not typical. Friends across the country report that their colleges are overtly hostile to any hint of conservatism. Several have retired early out of frustration or despair. A friend at a University of California campus reports that her colleagues “actively discriminate against conservatives in hiring and graduate admissions.” Working at an activist college “is frustrating, alienating, inhibiting, and very, very dull.” She doesn’t begrudge her colleagues their views; but she wishes they would “acknowledge that teaching and learning are one thing, political activism another.”

This is the heart of the conflict: The career-oriented or activist institution is the antithesis of one where liberal education can flourish. Activism and career preparation focus on social criticism, praxis, and future outcomes; liberal education focuses on understanding for its own sake. I know well that the distinction is not as stark as this polarity implies, for surely there are many politically progressive professors who are engaged in liberal education. But it is an essential distinction nonetheless, and it explains why so few conservatives feel welcome in the contemporary university.

Elizabeth Corey is an associate professor of political science in the honors program at Baylor University.

I won’t waste your time trying to prove that the professoriate is a hotbed of liberalism where conservatives are largely absent. Others have done a better job demonstrating this point than I could, and more importantly, anyone who would try to convince you that higher education has any substantive ideological diversity is either blind or a liar, and in either case they are not worth taking seriously. The more interesting question is how to reconcile the reality that a deeply liberal professoriate exists within a deeply conservative institutional framework, and how to understand this dynamic against the backdrop of the claim — a favorite right-wing talking point for going on a century — that the ivory tower and its professors “indoctrinate” students into fringe left-wing views.

The solution to this apparent riddle — why is the professoriate so liberal when the academy is so conservative? — is that the actual function of elite universities is not, pace academe’s reactionary critics, to injection-mold students into radicals. It is, rather, to make students comfortable with cognitive dissonance: to help them cultivate a kind of studied blindness to the way that their purported liberal beliefs are actually in direct conflict with the values and standard operating procedures of the kind of prestigious and well-paying institutions they will spend their lives moving through or aspiring to move through. What students learn at these kinds of schools is to uncritically believe in the fantasy that a university where students pay in tuition more than their precariously employed instructors make in a year — while senior administrators and sports coaches rake in high six-figure salaries — is a Good Place and that everyone involved in this song and dance is a Good Person, which is to say, a Good Liberal.

In other words, what elite universities actually prepare students to do out in the “real world” is to compartmentalize. They teach them to make peace with — and ideally, stop noticing — the ways their big-hearted personal convictions are at direct odds with their sources of employment. And it is liberal professors who model this cognitive dissonance for students: If spouting left-wing talking points while being cheerfully blind to ubiquitous exploitation were a sport, tenured faculty would be Olympic athletes.

The ultimate consequence of the absence of conservatives in higher education is not that the views of half of the American public are unrepresented, or that conservative students are acculturated to hide their beliefs, or that they are left unexposed to the best versions of conservative arguments and instead turn to YouTube and other digital sewers to encounter conservative thought, though all of this happens to be true. The ultimate consequence is that the absence of conservatives in higher education prevents us from seeing that higher education is structurally conservative, that the “radicalism” of the ivory tower is corporate radicalism, that the universities that sit near the top of the U.S. News & World Report rankings mountain are a ceaseless motor for elite reproduction and the staffing of big-tech and finance capital.

If the question is whether or not institutions of higher education can be considered liberal, despite the near total absence of conservatives, the answer is no. But the fantasy that universities are liberal depends on precisely this absence.

Tyler Austin Harper is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College.

But this is a minor quibble. I agree with almost everything else that Teles has to say in his excellent article. The reasons for conservatives’ absence from academe are undoubtedly complex. I have experienced the perception of discrimination firsthand. When I was speaking at Wheaton College in Illinois many years ago, students considering applying to Ph.D. programs at Harvard asked me if they would be discriminated against as conservative Christians. Almost certainly, actual discrimination also plays a role. Some scholars, such as the philosopher Michael Cholbi, have even offered a serious scholarly defense of it. He claims that documented personality differences between conservatives and liberals produce significant differences in their orientations to learning. This argument posits that conservatives prefer structure over ambiguity, order over creativity — and that these preferences are not suited to the epistemic demands of faculty life. But we do not want an environment in higher education hostile to half the population.

I agree with many of Teles’s proposed solutions, particularly that departments create faculty lines in fields in which conservative scholars are more likely to be engaged. This should be part of a broader evaluation of the questions that disciplines should address and teach. I also think liberal scholars need to take conservative critics seriously, even if this only means testing theories against imagined interlocutors. We need to expend as much effort doubting our conclusions as we do persuading others to accept them. More conservatives may join the debates if they believe that their concerns will be taken seriously.

Teles’s invocation of “neutrality” as a solution, however, is a mistake. Neutrality is an appealing but impossible myth. Instead, we need a robust discussion about the values of the university and professional responsibilities of faculty members. As we affirm our core values, we constantly need to revisit how those values should guide policies in higher education, recognizing that ideals must be reconciled with practical considerations such as the need for funding and public support. We need to discuss and commit to ethical norms in scholarship and teaching. We need to articulate the value of higher education beyond job preparation. All of this requires that we reinvigorate the notion of the academy as a community of people with a shared commitment to its welfare.

The lack of conservative faculty is a serious problem, but it is one issue in a broader ethical crisis of higher education. Let’s not address it in a vacuum. It’s time for serious soul searching and change across the sector.

Julie A. Reuben is a professor of history in the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

This diagnosis suggests a few lessons. First, that there is only so much that concerned faculty can do to address the issue of conservative marginalization. Insofar as the pipeline problem is driven (I suspect) more by the para-academic sectors of the university than the strictly academic, professors signaling ideological fair-mindedness won’t move the needle all that much. Recall the gauntlet the aspiring academic has to run: four years of college, six to eight years of grad school, another couple years of postdoc, and more than a half-decade as junior faculty. It seems rather optimistic to imagine that the prospect that your possible future senior colleagues almost two decades from now might be less likely to ding you for voting Republican when you go up for tenure than they would have been at the height of the Awokening will outweigh in the mind of today’s undergraduate the pervasive impression, conveyed in myriad ways with which faculty have little involvement, that conservatives are unwelcome.

Second, it suggests that if they are serious about fixing the ideological skew over the long term, there are steps that university leaders can take now that might bear fruit in years to come that do not require restricting academic freedom or undermining tenure.

It is not a law of nature, for instance, that student-life programming must be overwhelmingly left-leaning in orientation, nor that such an extensive university bureaucracy exist to begin with. It is within the discretion of the university executive, for instance, to compel the now numerous “centers for civic engagement” and the like to emphasize other causes alongside the ubiquitous “social justice”; to seek out conservatives for positions in the administrative hierarchy; to invite conservative figures for honorary degrees and commencement addresses; and to address the many quotidian displays of bias and ideological aggression (such as students contacting the future employers or places of internship of their peers to report the latter for their objectionable views in hopes of having them dismissed) that, over the past few years, have undoubtedly led many bright students who might otherwise have been curious about an academic future to eschew it for a more congenial environment. Determined presidents and deans could do all this and more without imperiling any values that are crucial to the university’s academic mission.

Gregory Conti is an associate professor of politics at Princeton University.