The University Has Always Been ‘Liberal.’ That’s a Good Thing.

When faculty members attempt to raise their students’ political awareness or mobilize them to political action, are they living up to their highest calling or betraying it? When university presidents take official stands on issues like the Black Lives Matter protests or Israel’s actions in Gaza, are they displaying civic responsibility or undermining their institutions’ intellectual mission? Underlying these topical concerns is the vexed and longstanding question about the proper relationship between academe and politics.

The positions people take on this question range between two poles. At one end are those who regard academic work, especially in the humanities and social sciences, as political activism by other means. Richard Rorty speaks for this group when he writes that “we cannot take the idea of unpoliticized humanities any more seriously than our opposite numbers in the clergy can take seriously the idea of a depoliticized church.” For Rorty, there is no return to the humanist myths of universal values, disinterested criticism, or objective knowledge. Teaching and scholarship are inescapably political because knowledge, culture, and subjectivity are inescapably political. Classrooms are political spaces, whether we like it or not. The honest thing is to admit it.

At the other end of the spectrum are those who hold that academe and politics are distinct realms which should be kept as far apart as possible. Stanley Fish, the most-trenchant proponent of this view since Max Weber, insists that academics are neither trained nor qualified — let alone paid — to act as moral guides or political seers. We have no business shaping the political consciences of the students who wander into our classes. Our job is to train them in the forms of knowledge and methodology appropriate to our disciplines. When we go further by trying to recruit students to our pet political causes, we overstep the bounds of our professional remit.

I think it’s fair to say that, after a decade of activist ascendency, Fish’s view is about to have its moment in the sun. Deplatforming controversies, scholar sanctions, imposed speech codes, and other forms of DEI overreach have soured many academics on the activist self-image. Now, the pendulum appears to be swinging in the opposite direction. Mandatory diversity statements are on their way out; the DEI industry is coming under increased scrutiny by insiders who support its aims but question its methods and outcomes; and top colleges, chastened by recent public embarrassments, are embracing a stance of institutional neutrality on social and political issues. Winter is coming for activist academe.

To put my cards on the table: I believe this course correction is, on the whole, a good thing. The aggressive framing of academic scholarship, pedagogy, and administration in overtly progressive terms has yielded few demonstrable gains for progressive politics, while causing real harm to individual careers, institutional reputations, and academic culture at large. A reaction was bound to happen.

Still, reactions have a tendency to go too far. In this case, the retreat from the belief that our academic work can or should advance some clear and immediate political goal — the belief that Michael W. Clune aptly describes as “the professoriate’s reigning delusion over the past decade” — might encourage the equally untenable notion that academic work lacks any social significance beyond the narrowly professional. To avoid both bad ideas, we need an account that reconciles Fish’s sensible insistence that we should keep to the orbit of our expertise with Rorty’s historically grounded view of colleges as engines of social progress.

We should first clarify what we mean by “politics.” In the common meaning of the term, we engage in politics whenever we debate about which course of action our community, party, or government should take. Politics (so construed) is driven by the question: What is to be done? And this kind of question, as Fish argues, has no place in the classroom. The goal of an academic discussion is to describe, analyze, historicize, offer counterfactuals, or otherwise comprehend the matter at hand — not to arrive at a policy decision.

Even less should the classroom be used to proselytize students. It goes without saying that if you open a session on modernist European poetry with a broadside against new state regulations on reproductive rights, you are acting as an activist, as the latter issue has nothing to do with the announced topic of the course. However, a class dedicated to the history of reproductive rights will also become a site of activism if the professor turns their lectern into a soapbox. Pontificating on current events before captive student audiences is both unprofessional and an asshole move — as per philosopher Aaron James’s precise definition of the type: a person who “allows himself to enjoy special advantages in social relations out of an entrenched sense of entitlement.”

Doing the job of an academic requires checking one’s politics at the classroom’s door — not because a professor’s political opinion is a dirty secret, but because once politics are allowed in, the discussion ceases to be academic and becomes something else. In fact, the more a professor’s politics are a matter of public knowledge — which is not uncommon, as many academics are also public intellectuals — the more stringently they should depoliticize their classrooms. To check one’s politics at the door is not to compromise one’s values; it is to make room for another kind of value.

Nonacademics often dismiss a discussion by calling it “merely academic,” by which they mean it is theoretical or speculative, lacking immediate practical implications. But conducting such debates is our profession’s main reason for being. Modern colleges are secular shrines to curiosity for curiosity’s sake. They make possible discussions free from utilitarian demands, practical exigencies, and real-world constraints. The existence of such spaces is a precious, fragile, and relatively recent achievement, barely 150 years old. Undermining it by turning our institutions into activist hubs would not only be a profoundly self-defeating move but also a significant loss to society as a whole.

But it’s one thing to claim that academics should neutralize their politics in academic settings; it’s quite another to state (as Fish sometimes does) that the routine, nonactivist work conducted in such settings is politically neutral. If the point of academic work, as he defines it, “is to go down intellectual paths wherever they lead, to challenge received wisdom, to confer analytical skills, to build systems of analysis, to formulate and test hypotheses,” then the job we do is political through and through.

It is political not in the vague sense in which “everything is political,” but in a more specific and concrete way. The set of values implied by Fish’s job description — celebration of curiosity, irreverence toward tradition, creative experimentation — are neither natural nor self-evident. They are grounded in the historical tradition of Enlightenment liberalism, making them as political and contingent as any other set of values. The reason they often don’t feel that way (especially to academics) is that the modern research university, as both an institution and a cultural way of life, is so thoroughly the creature of this tradition. We take its values for granted.

To say that research universities are liberal institutions to their core is not to imply that the knowledge they produce or the methodologies they espouse would have met with the approval of an Immanuel Kant or a John Stuart Mill. It’s impossible to imagine either thinker endorsing the tenets of structuralism, critical theory, deconstruction, French feminism, or posthumanism. But here’s the point: Even as scholars in these fields rigorously critique and seek to overturn key aspects of the liberal-Enlightenment tradition, they do so through its embodied institutional organs. They publish their views in peer-review journals, engage in critical dialogues at scholarly conferences, and mentor the next generation of academics to become participants in the same intellectual culture. In short, they adhere to the rules of the academic game that took shape in conjunction with the rise of the modern research university in the late 19th century. If this institution endures despite the theoretical challenges to the liberal-Enlightenment principles that underpin it, it is because these principles sustain the very practice of critique.

One upshot of this argument is that even the most energetically anti-liberal academic thinkers — whether conservative, leftist, identitarian, etc. — are, in fact, fighting the good liberal fight. For, what matters is not so much the ideas they teach and write, but the institutional and cultural framework through which they approach, debate, and publish those ideas. The practice is the message.

Another consequence is that the daily labor performed by academics who have no particular political axe to grind is nonetheless political, as it implicitly expresses and upholds a system of contingent values and institutions. Rorty is right: The modern research university is not, and has never been, a depoliticized zone. It is political because the freedom to interrogate any idea and the right to pursue a course of inquiry wherever it leads are political values.

At this point, it would be reasonable to question whether we are still using “politics” in the sense described earlier — as public deliberation on pressing policy issues. We are not; the term, as I’ve used it in the last couple of paragraphs, refers more broadly to struggles between competing moral visions of the ideal society. Given this shift, a natural objection follows: Isn’t the tension between Fish and Rorty, which I’ve described as substantive, merely semantic? Aren’t they using the same word, “politics,” but mean different things by it?

True. But what this objection misses is that the boundary between issues classified as political in Fish’s narrow and topical sense and those deemed political in Rorty’s looser and fuzzier sense is constantly shifting in response to changes in society at large. In American history, alcohol consumption was once an urgent, policy-shaping political matter. Today, after advocates of temperance and prohibition have been reduced to a small and ineffectual minority, drinking has ceased being a central social concern, political or otherwise. Alcohol and its effects have remained the same; it’s the social conversation that shifted.

By the same token, the reason Fish can characterize routine academic work as apolitical is that cultural opposition to the liberal-democratic worldview, broadly conceived, is at present still relatively marginal in most Western democracies. In these countries, as the political philosopher Alexandre Lefebvre writes, “liberal principles, values, and sensibilities have become so pervasive as to be mistaken for common sense or even human nature.” That is, political struggles tend to be waged within the broad parameters of a worldview that has come down to us from the revolutionary 18th century, and which gave us both republican governments and research universities.

However, if, say, religious clerics were to regain the clout they had in the early 18th century, or if the much-discussed postliberal turn — spearheaded by figures such as Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and Yoram Hazony — were to become a reality, the true political foundations of the research university would be thrown into sharp relief. This kind of process is now underway in my home country, Israel, and is a fait accompli in nations like Turkey and Hungary. The recent rightward turn in North America and Western Europe suggests that more-robust Western democracies may follow suit. Should such a realignment take place, the issue in debate will no longer be whether certain ideas — for example, critical race theory — should be taught, but the very existence of a space dedicated to free criticism and intellectual innovation.

The best way colleges can help forestall this troubling prospect is to vehemently protect the integrity of the academic sphere as a space apart that should remain free of outside interference and political intervention, while insisting, at the same time and with equal force, that academic work and political activism are distinct activities that should remain separate. Keeping politics out of the classroom will not, on its own, save democracy. But it will help one of its signature institutions defend itself against illiberal critics while staying true to its core liberal mission.