This Prof Wants to Win Back the GOP Bros

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In this episode

Nothing animates conservative college students today quite like Turning Point USA. Founded by Charlie Kirk, the right-wing provocateur, the group thrives on an “owning the libs” mentality that is often trained on left-leaning professors. But this brand of conservatism, while big on bellicose taunts, is short on the foundational ideas that have made conservatism such a lasting intellectual tradition. At least that’s the view of Jon Shields, a right-leaning professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College. For conservatism to thrive in the future, Shields argues, professors of all political stripes should help teach the MAGA crowd about Edmund Burke and the other big thinkers who have long provided the conservative movement with meaningful ballast.

Related Reading:

• These Professors Help Students See Why Others Think Differently (The Chronicle)
• Liberal Professors Can Rescue the G.O.P. (The New York Times)
• Inside a Stealth Plan for Political Influence (The Chronicle)
• The Battle for the Bros (The New Yorker)

Guest:

Jon Shields, professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from The Chronicle.

Jon Shields What happens to the right if it loses all of its intellectuals and it becomes completely disconnected from the rich, conservative intellectual tradition? I think that’s the deep problem and it’s one I think the right really needs to attend to.

Jack Stripling On a lot of college campuses today, conservative students seem mostly concerned with “owning the libs.” Turning Point USA, a right-wing group founded by the conservative provocateur Charlie Kirk, has captured the energy and imagination of young men in particular. The group has inspired campus stunts like affirmative action bake sales, in which customers are charged different prices for cookies based on race. This MAGA-style of conservatism is appealing to a certain strain of college bros, and there’s little barrier to entry. You needn’t be versed in the conservative intellectual tradition to join Kirk’s army of campus crusaders. A love of snark and a general skepticism toward the liberal excesses of the academy is sufficient. All of this worries Jon Shields, a professor of American politics at Claremont McKenna College. Shields is a conservative professor who shares the Kirk crowd’s concerns about the academy’s liberal bent. But he’s troubled that modern-day conservatism has been reduced to campus pranks and childish taunts. For the movement to thrive long-term, Shields argues, young people need exposure to the deeper ideas that undergird conservative thought. But can professors really win over the MAGA crowd with books about Edmund Burke? And how might President Trump’s aggressive posture toward higher education complicate matters? I dove into those questions in a recent interview with Shields, who has a lot to say about the left-wing professors and right-wing jokers who tend to dominate campus politics.

Jack Stripling So Professor Shields, thanks for coming on College Matters.

Jon Shields Delight to be here.

Jack Stripling So we’re talking to you at a fascinating, and for some people, I think, frightening moment in American history, and higher education specifically The nation’s colleges and universities are really right in the middle of the larger political debate we’re having in this country. As you know, the Trump administration has targeted colleges for their DEI practices, they’re gutting the Department of Education, slashing research funding, even arresting students who have participated in pro-Palestinian protest. You’re a self-identified conservative professor, who I think shares some skepticism about higher education’s liberal bent. How are you feeling about all of this?

Jon Shields Well, sort of frustrated, I’d say. On the one hand, I loathe Donald Trump. I find him to be a dangerous demagogue, I’m appalled at some conservative academics who’ve embraced him. But I do think the university bears some real blame for what’s happened. I think it’s the case that the humanities curriculum has become much more politicized. That’s true. That’s a real problem. And so, you know, for example, at many universities, I think we have a narrowing of the curriculum around topics that are of special interest to the left. I also think we clearly have a speech problem. There’s too much survey data of students to deny that at this point. You know, there is a climate of self-censorship that’s harmful. And those are truly serious problems. And when you look back and think about what we have collectively done about it in the university, I’d say mostly we’ve kept our head in the sand and pretended like we don’t have a problem. And that’s been a huge mistake. My colleague and friend, John Zimmerman, who teaches history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, he put this well a few years back. He said, if we don’t own our own problems, Ron DeSantis will, and we won’t like what he does with it. So I think it would have been much better if we had admitted that we have a problem here in the university. And then, in the very next breath, talked about the things we were going to do to correct it. And that would have included, I think, sending some real credible signals to the outside world that we’re doing something to address these problems. But instead, I think we’ve mostly just been in denial. And I think that isn’t credible. And I think we’re now paying, I think, a fairly predictable price for that neglect.

Jack Stripling We’ve seen public opinion turning against higher education for years and part of this is due to a perception that higher ed is hostile to conservatives or just doesn’t allow for conservative intellectuals to thrive within the academy. So are you saying that this is sort of the chickens coming home to roost; that higher education brought this political pressure upon itself to some degree?

Jon Shields Well, I would say in part. I mean, I do think we bear some responsibility. Obviously, there are problems happening on the right, too. The right’s going, certainly movement conservatism has gone in a reckless and dangerous direction. Donald Trump is, as I mentioned, a dangerous demagogue. Clearly, there are deep and profound problems on the American right. And when I say this, I don’t mean to make light of those really deep and profound problems. But yeah, I do think that the university needs to, like any institution, it needs to think of ways to enhance and preserve its public legitimacy. And we should have been better, I think, custodians of the university. And I think it ... I do think there are some really illiberal currents in the university and so now it’s time I think we need to attend to those in a serious way or else I think these problems will just continue to fester and get worse.

Jack Stripling And you’re saying these critical things about Trump and the political movement as it exists now from the position of someone who identifies as a political conservative and intellectual conservative, correct?

Jon Shields: That’s right.

Jack Stripling: So I want to ask you specifically about the conflict between the Trump administration and Columbia University. He has since picked fights with a lot of universities, but this is a significant one. In March, the Trump Administration canceled about $400 million in federal grants and contracts to the university, saying it had failed to rein in antisemitism on the campus. That led to negotiations in which the university acceded to a number of demands. One of the agreements was to expand intellectual diversity of the faculty with an eye toward reinforcing what the university described as fairness in Middle East studies. It sounds like a university under financial threats from the federal government is agreeing to hire a particular kind of professor. specifically professors who might be more sympathetic to the Trump administration’s positions on a number of issues, like Israel. I’m wondering what you make of that?

Jon Shields I do think some of these fields have been captured by a fairly ideological group of folks. You know, Middle East studies is a good example. And there certainly needs to be more pluralism in higher education. But bringing that about is really challenging for a lot of reasons. I mean, for one, those who are most concerned about the pluralism in the university tend to be university presidents, deans, et cetera, those who worry about the sort of public legitimacy of their institution. They have to deal with outside actors, right? Alums, politicians, et cetera. But professors are the ones who do the hiring. And they’re often a lot less concerned with the sort of public legitimacy of the university, right. They often just simply replicate themselves.

So that’s one problem. But it’s also the case that there aren’t many, you know, if you’re trying to hire conservatives, there aren’t many in the PhD pipeline. And why is that the case? I think there’s sort of a structural story there as well. I think when conservatives get to college as undergraduates, they often are required to take courses in the social sciences and humanities. And when they do, they often discover that they like those courses less than their liberal peers. You know, they take Intro to Sociology, or they take American History. And those courses are often framed around progressive concerns and interpretations. And so conservative students tend to not like them nearly as much as, again, their liberal peers. And this isn’t just my speculation. There was a really good study done recently on liberal arts colleges, and it was trying to predict the factors that best predict undergraduate major. It was interested in why some students choose to major in biology and others choose to major in literature. And it found that the single best predictor of undergraduate major was students’ politics. With conservatives sorting into STEM fields, liberals and progressives much more likely to sort themselves into the social sciences and humanities. And so just as, you know, the nation is sorting themselves, you know, as citizens — we sort ourselves into blue states and red states and different kinds of communities — undergraduates are also sorting themselves in colleges and universities, right? They’re sorting themselves into different majors. And so it’s not surprising that we find, you know, more conservative professors in the natural sciences than we do in the social sciences and the humanities. You know and at the same time I think young conservatives are pushed away from the university by the populist right, you know, who says the university is just deeply corrupt and they should stay away from it and do something else. So that said, a lot of these fields struggle, even if they wanted to, even if they wanted to hire conservatives or non-progressives, they would have a tough time doing it because there are so few in the pipeline. And so I’d say in a way, the biggest source of bias in the university is structural. It’s not primarily workplace discrimination. It’s not like Middle East studies departments are looking at lots of files of non-left PhD candidates and throwing them in a pile. They’re just not there. So that’s a really profound problem. So to go back to your question about Columbia, even if they really wanted to broaden the faculty and hire a different ideological mix of young faculty, that would be really challenging.

Jack Stripling I’m wondering about what you’re saying about conservatives sort of dividing themselves through the majors. Part of me wonders is that, oh, they encounter these courses and these professors are super liberal and so they’re turned off by it. Or is it that the very notion of studying things within the realm of sociology, of studying human behavior through a lens of things like race and gender and class, is a turnoff. But it’s also inherent in the discipline itself — that there’s a rejection of what the discipline does, and that may be political or it may not be.

Jon Shields I don’t think it’s inherent in the discipline. I think the progressive interest and theories have become baked into the discipline. But actually I’d say that sociology should be the natural home of particularly cultural conservatives. You know, if you’re interested in culture, in a way, I would say that’s sort of the main interest, one of the most important interests for conservatives. Conservatives tend to be obsessed with culture. You know they worry about the family and religion and these core social institutions. You know, sociology is the main place you can — right, that’s what sociology should be about, is studying these.

Jack Stripling But if you’re interested in culture, it doesn’t seem like it’s a far walk from there to say you’re interested in how things like race and class and gender shape culture. And I can see a conservative saying, this course is about race and class and gender; it’s liberal.

Jon Shields Yes, but it’s not clear to me that conservatives aren’t interested in gender or race. I would say that they are actually quite interested in those things. I mean, they’re not merely interested in those things, they are also interested in, as I mentioned, family and religion and such. I think it has more to do with the way those courses are taught. Here’s one bit of evidence to consider. Amy Binder is a sociologist who studies campus conservatives. And in particular, campus activists. So she studies, you know, conservative undergraduates who get really engaged in activism. And one of the things that struck her about those folks is that, you know, on the one hand, they’re deeply interested in politics. It’s not like they’re not, but they also tend to avoid these kinds of courses, right, courses in the social sciences and the humanities, despite, right, having a real deep interest in politics, including race and inequality. And I think conservatives are interested in those things. But again, I think those courses tend to be, you know, framed and taught in ways that they find narrow, and don’t simply engage them and excite them, I think, in the way that they to progressive students.

Jack Stripling You know, we’ve been talking a lot about the faculty. But you mentioned students, and I wanna bring them into this conversation. When we look at college campuses today, so much of the conservative political energy is around a MAGA-style brand of conservatism. This is sort of the Joe Rogan crowd, the Charlie Kirk crowd. What are your thoughts on that specific brand of conservatism, and why do you think it’s become so popular on college campuses?

Jon Shields Yeah, that’s a good question. I think here, you know, the slow disappearance of conservative faculty really matters. As late as the 1980s, you know, conservative professors were still a sizeable minority on a lot of campuses, and they tended to be the custodians of the conservative intellectual tradition. But today, their numbers are really in decline. You know, at many universities, there are not conservatives in many disciplines. And that means that there are very few courses that expose young students to the conservative tradition of social and political thought. And you know, Mark Lilla once quipped, you know he was looking at the catalog at Columbia University and he says you know if you do that you see course after course of classes on postcolonial thought, but nary a one on conservativism. And I say this because I think it really matters for conservative students. Because if they’re deprived of any real education in what is best in conservativism. You know, if they are not reading Burke, if they aren’t reading Hume, if they’re not reading Milton Friedman, who is teaching them to think and behave like young conservatives? I would say the answer is Turning Point USA. It’s Charlie Kirk.

Jack Stripling Most people will know this, but Charlie Kirk is the founder and president of Turning Point USA. And this is a conservative group. It’s very popular among college students. The group’s gained attention for a lot of provocative stunts. There was a chapter at Clemson University, for example, that hosted an affirmative action bake sale where students sold cookies that were priced differently based on a customer’s race. They’re also behind the Professor Watchlist, which tracks professors that the organization accuses of advancing a leftist agenda. And this has led to the harassment of some professors. It’s seen by many as an attack on academic freedom. But there’s no denying that Charlie Kirk is an influential and powerful figure in the conservative movement right now. And I think for a lot of young conservatives, he’s the future of the political party, the political movement. Are they wrong about that?

Jon Shields Yeah, I mean, I think he represents, I think, the “MAGA-fication” of the campus right, right? I mean, he’s the one who is, I think, exciting a lot of young conservatives and he’s providing a really shabby education. You know, I mean basically he reduces conservativism to mocking liberals. And I think he’s deepening the alienation of young conservatives from the university, right? I mean he’s teaching them to have contempt for it and I think reproducing some of the social patterns I described earlier, right? I mean, he’s encouraging young conservatives to have contempt for the university. And certainly he’s not telling young conservatives, you should go out and become a professor one day, right? I mean, that’s not the education he’s providing. So I think it’s a deeply troubling pattern, and again, unfortunately, I don’t think there are many conservative professors around to try to subvert people like Charlie Kirk. I think their absence has created a space for him. And he sees that opportunity.

Jack Stripling You’ve argued for students to get more Edmund Burke and less Charlie Kirk, essentially. And I wonder if you can highlight the distinctions there. You have mentioned that Kirk’s whole mode is sort of an antagonism toward liberals — an “owning the libs” kind of philosophy. What would a more robust intellectual tradition look like in comparison to that?

Jon Shields Yeah, that’s a good question. I’d say that conservatism and liberalism is really an old quibble about the kinds of creatures that we are, and both see something, I think, that’s true about us human beings. The liberal notices that we can make choices, and those choices often reflect reasonable differences over how to live a good life, and so we want a culture and state that respects that pluralism and that diversity. Conservatism, rightly understood, begins with an insight about human beings as well. And they notice that unlike other creatures, we’re born without really knowing how to live. We are instinctually impoverished and we’re prone to be somewhat wayward. And so we turn to our customs, our traditions, our social institutions, which have developed over oceans of time and those institutions both restrain us, but also guide us. And those institutions are hard to build and easy to destroy. So conservatives, I think, you know, tend to worry about those who want to radicalize them in some way or change our traditions in some profound way. And so, you, know, we conservatives worry about, you know, the decline of marriage. We worry about the decline of religion. You know, we oppose defunding the police, we want to preserve classical education, and so on. But there’s also, it’s a big tradition, and there’s a lot of recurring tensions in conservative thought that I think are especially sharp today. One obvious tension is how we conservatives think about our relationship to liberalism. After all, liberalism is our tradition. And so conservatives, I think, should think about how we preserve what’s best in our liberal tradition.

But I guess I’d say, you know, the tension that’s more relevant to your question about Charlie Kirk is conservatives’ relationship to radicalism. You know, on the surface, radicalism seems at odds with conservatism. But sometimes conservatives can come to the conclusion that some of our most venerable institutions can’t be saved. You know, they’ve been so compromised and so there’s nothing left to conserve. So sometimes conservatives can support radical change. And usually it’s, they’re fairly, you know, judicious about making these kinds of judgments. You know, even somebody like David Brooks, a sort of moderate Burkian thinker and op-ed columnist for the New York Times, will say this about our healthcare system. You know he’ll say like, our healthcare is just so broken, we just need to start again. But I think today there’s this sort of, on the populist right, thinkers like Charlie Kirk and others who think that many of our core institutions can’t be saved, you know, and they just want to burn things to the ground. And I think that in the end, there’s a kind of nihilistic impulse there. I think their judgment is just profoundly wrong. You know, they have, they catastrophize everything. And imagine that our institutions are, I think, much more broken than they actually are. And of course this is an impulse we see on the left too, but I think it’s, in a way it’s more harmful to conservatism. Because if we conservatives aren’t defending society’s core institutions, then it’s not clear we’re doing the work we’re supposed to be doing in our society.

Jack Stripling Stick around, we’ll be back in a minute.

BREAK

Jack Stripling There’s a broader skepticism of institutions, I think, across both parties now. But at the same time, higher education is an institution. And it’s an institution that conservatives really seem to loathe. I’m wondering what the future is if the party and the movement defines itself in opposition to higher education.

Jon Shields You’re also pointing here, Jack, to a deeper class divide that’s opening up within our political system. You’re pointing to a diploma divide, where the right is increasingly courting voters down the class ladder. And it’s interesting, because we often think about this problem in reverse. We think about the Democrats’ challenges reaching working class voters. And, you know, I feel like a day doesn’t go by where there isn’t an op-ed in The New York Times that’s trying to figure out, okay, how do we Democrats and liberals get working class voters back into our tent? But the right has this problem except in reverse. You know, what happens to the right if it loses all of its intellectuals and it becomes completely disconnected from the rich conservative intellectual tradition? I think that’s the deep problem, and it’s one I think the right really needs to attend to.

Jack Stripling Well, it’s based on class, but it’s also based on — is swagger the word? There was a piece you may have seen in The New Yorker in March called “The Battle for the Bros” that was all about the left sort of losing the Joe Rogan crowd. I’m wondering if Jon Shields can win over the Joe Rogan crowd either. Is the conservatism you’re selling appealing at all to a more radical antagonistic brand of conservatism? I mean, do you have any hope of engaging with the bros? Can you win the bros over Jon Shields?

Jon Shields Probably not, but I …

Jack Stripling He says in front of a giant stack of books.

Jon Shields Yeah, I mean, but I guess I’m more worried, you know, just as a professor, about the future leaders of the American right and not about barstool conservatives out there in middle America. And I think that one reason it’s important to teach conservative political thought at its best to undergraduates is, I think, well, one virtue of doing that, of course, it helps the legitimacy problem that the university confronts right now. But I actually, I think, just taking a longer view, if we want a better right one day, if we want a more thoughtful right one day, I don’t see how we get there; if all young conservatives have been exposed to is Charlie Kirk’s version of conservatism, how does the next generation of conservative leaders take some other course if they haven’t been exposed to some alternative to it? And so I think the one thing, you know, I don’t have much power as a professor, right, over the fate of American right, and certainly my colleagues don’t. It seems like the one thing we can do is do what we do best, you know, right, which is to teach undergraduates and to be faithful to our calling. And I would say, Jack, not just teach this tradition in a serious way, but also to reach out and mentor conservative students. You know, like, if I’m a progressive professor, particularly in a red state, the first thing I would do is start developing a course on conservatism, and I would start reaching out to, you know, the Turning Point USA chapter, right, and mentor these kids and talk to them and help them develop better speaker lists. And I think there’s a missed opportunity here for us to reach some of these young students before they go on and take their place in the political class.

Jack Stripling I’m wondering, the spirit of my question, Jon, about can you make headway with this crowd is about whether a pure intellectual conservative tradition can be made cool. Part of what’s happening with Turning Point USA is there’s something cool about it. In the same way that there was something cool about Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on Arsenio Hall or Barack Obama being cool, that had an appeal to 18 to 22-year-olds in a certain political bent. And if you’re trying to sell Edmund Burke, how do you make it cool?

Jon Shields Burke isn’t sexy.

Jack Stripling I’ve seen photos. I agree.

Jon Shields Well, maybe you can’t make it cool in quite the same way, but I think you can use it to expose the vacuity and just emptiness of what Kirk is offering, and maybe that’s enough. Maybe it doesn’t have to be sexy and cool, but precisely because there is wisdom in tradition, it can be profoundly compelling, and again, maybe that’s enough.

Jack Stripling Well, I don’t know where the institution of marriage falls on the cool spectrum. I think it goes in and out of fashion, but I know that you’ve worked with students in talking to them about marriage as one example of the conservative intellectual tradition. Talk to me about what you assign to them and how they respond to it.

Jon Shields Yeah, I mean, I usually teach marriage in a course I call The American Culture Wars. And in that course, I pick about six or seven controversies. And for each controversy, I pick a book by a conservative intellectual and one by a progressive one. And marriage is always one of the controversies that I assign and that I teach. And yeah, marriage is a great topic to really expose students to this tradition because as you know, I think conservative intellectuals are obsessed with marriage. I think it’s as varied as conservatism is across time and place, there’s always a sense that marriage is a core social institution and that the future of our civilization passes by way of marriage. If that institution collapses, there isn’t much hope for us. We’re not going to make it. You know, it’s an institution that’s... it’s hard to build a marriage culture. But as we’ve seen, it’s one that’s very easy to destroy. And I think, particularly in the American context, it’s a weakening institution. And in a way, it is really at the heart of our political troubles to some degree, too. I mean, so much of the diploma divide and so much of our inequality today is connected to the collapse of this institution. And so one of the things I try to impress on my students, too, Jack, is that liberalism and conservatism are, you know, they’re traditions that structure our thinking. There’s room for lots of heterodoxy. They don’t completely determine where we end up. I often tell them, look, I tell my progressive students, you know, you could be concerned about marriage for purely progressive reasons. You know like, you know you can worry about inequality and say, gee, we need a better marriage culture, for example. And likewise I tell this …

Jack Stripling How so? Unpack that for me. What do you mean by that?

Jon Shields Children in single-parent households are at a great disadvantage. But also, here’s a question: Is it a just country in which you have to have a college degree to have a happy family, right? I mean, it’s one of the tragedies of American society, I think, is that marriage has become an elite kind of privilege. People here in my college town in Claremont tend to be married, and so therefore they tend to have lifelong partners and that brings them, as we know, lots of social goods. You know people who are married, they live longer, they’re happier, they’re wealthier. And I think most of my students who come from very privileged backgrounds would consider their life a failure if they didn’t have a stable happy marriage one day. And so I think one of the tragedies of our moment is that this has become just one more luxury good. It’s folks who get college degrees primarily, or disproportionately at least, who get to have lifelong partnerships. And everyone else is, you know, down the class ladder, there’s much more gender distrust, there’s much more hostility, there’s more unhappiness. JD Vance talks about this very powerfully actually in his memoir, right? I mean, for somebody like Vance, the American dream — you know, he went to Yale Law School. But the American dream is not that everyone gets to go to Yale law school, but it should include a happy family.

Jack Stripling I want to ask you about a movement that’s been happening over the past decade or so. A number of public universities, including Florida and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have opened centers or institutes devoted to the study of the Western canon and American civics. Republicans tend to love these projects, which are seen as friendly to scholars on the political right. Jon, is this affirmative action for conservative professors?

Jon Shields I’m not sure that’s quite right, but it is creating opportunities for academics who are doing more traditional kinds of research, right? So it’s, I mean, a lot of these institutes, for example, want to hire folks who can teach great books, right? That’s not something just conservatives do, but is something that conservatives often are disproportionately attracted to. So I’d say it’s not conservative action in some narrow sense, right? Where it’s like, there’s some litmus test and you have to be a conservative to get hired and they’re hiring people on the basis of their political allegiances. But it is sort of hiring in areas and fields and it does wanna hire folks who wanna study the kinds of things that conservatives tend to be attracted to. So in that sense, I’d say it’s creating a lot of opportunity for young conservatives.

And so I guess the question is whether all this new opportunity creates some more interest in young conservatives to go out and get PhDs. We’ll see. I think it’s actually a good time for those of us who have bright, center-right undergraduates who are thinking about academia to give it a shot. I do think there’ll be opportunity for conservatives. The question is, is whether they’ll seize it. And that’s unclear to me.

But to circle back to something I suggested earlier, I would say if you look at the younger professors as a whole coming up in the discipline, I say they seem to be more left than prior generations. So I think that means that the university, if I’m guessing and trying to project on where we’re gonna be in 30 years, my best guess, Jack, is that this discipline will be both more left than it is now, and we’ll have fewer conservatives.

Jack Stripling Wow, OK. I don’t know if you’re optimistic about that then.

Jon Shields No, I’m not, but you know, I, I do think there’s another cleavage in the university that’s worth mentioning. And that’s not so much the left-right distinction, which we’ve talked a lot about, but rather the, I think in a way, the deeper divide in the university, which is between normie liberals on the one hand. So these are sort of old fashioned liberals who, whose politics tend to be left, but don’t think that professors should be activists in the classrooms and don’t do research that’s deeply agenda driven, right? So they’re sort of more old-fashioned liberals. They believe that the university should be an open and tolerant place. They believed that there should be conservative professors ideally in the university. They’re committed to liberalism, right? And then I think you have another camp that’s much more oriented toward social justice traditions, and they tend to think that academics should, you know, change the world and that they should push, I think, a more activist kind of orientation onto their students. And I think that’s actually the much deeper and more profound conflict that’s happening in the university now. And, you know I’m rooting for the liberals, you know? I want them to win. And that’s one of the reasons I’m encouraging them to develop courses on the conservative tradition. I don’t think there’s going to be many conservatives around, perhaps, in the next generation. But there will be normie liberals, certainly. And if we conservatives aren’t around to be the custodians of this intellectual tradition, I hope they take up that mantle and take up the task and teach this tradition. I hope they teach Friedman and Burke and Hume and others. And so we’ll see. But I think that’s the best hope for the university.

Jack Stripling Frustrated liberals may save the academy, is that right?

Jon Shields Yeah. And I think their challenge is that they haven’t really seen themselves as a faction or interest group. They’re not a group of folks who are good at organizing and really leaning into university politics. They want to do their research, they want to go home, and they want to kind of do their thing.

Jack Stripling But they may be people who have tended to vote Democratic, but at the end of the day have been skeptical about pronouns, DEI, some of the other things.

Jon Shields Deeply, deeply. And I think they’re actually ambivalent about some of the things that Trump is doing, right? I mean, so I do think it’s sort of on their shoulders to be better custodians of the university, you know, it’s in their hands. And, you know, so I’d say they have to be very careful, for example, about who they hire, you know. It seems to me they have to be careful not to hire faculty who are deeply illiberal and who don’t support the notion that the university should be a tolerant and open community.

Jack Stripling Jon, we’ll keep an eye on this. I appreciate you talking with us today about it. I think it’s a great start to a conversation.

Jon Shields Thank you, Jack.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com.

We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our Chronicle producer is Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.