“The Mowing-Devil, or, Strange News out of Hartford-Shire” (1678) | Folger Shakespeare Library Digital Collections / CC0 1.0
Genocide; Zionism; antisemitism; settler colonialism; structural racism; apartheid. “Divest now!”; “Hamas, we love you! We support your rockets too!”; “Anyone who sympathizes with Hamas is an antisemite”; “Red, black, green, and white, we support Hamas’s fight”; “Globalize the intifada”; “Using Gazans as a human shield is a war crime”; “From the river to the sea”; “Support Israel’s right to exist”; “To exist is to resist”; “Kidnapped.” These are the chants, slogans, arguments, accusations, threats, free speech, hate speech, dog whistles (take your pick) heard across the nation’s campuses in the fall of 2023, including my own.
Where is the university in all this? What can it possibly do to sort out the political, historical, and moral complexities of this situation? Is it reasonable to expect it to? Finally, are the calls for “norms of civility,” “time, place, and manner,” or the “Chicago Principles” a sufficient response? Or does the university have a broader, more substantial obligation?
When I first sat down to write this essay, it seemed obvious to me that the university did, in fact, have a more substantial obligation to weigh in and provide some sort of edification. That is not to say that it should take a position on the war in Gaza or embrace divestment. In fact, I agreed with the wry observation of an embattled provost during another troubled era (the 1960s), who responded to protesters by saying, “the University of Wisconsin does not have a foreign policy.” Nor for that matter does the University of Chicago. Its Kalven Report, which has since become known as the founding document of the Chicago Principles, restates the position with this simple guidance: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic” (University of Chicago 1967). To be a “home” and “sponsor” of critics is no small task. Indeed, it requires an energetic defense of those who call out injustice, including protections from doxing, hiring boycotts, and the like. It also requires us to recognize something more fundamental: the moral character of the students themselves—their claim to our respect, support, and sympathy—even or especially when we disagree with them. But to demand that the university become “itself the critic,” as many protesters do, struck me as a fundamental misunderstanding of the university’s historical ethos, not to mention its responsibility to its multiple and varied constituencies.
While I recognized the prudence of Chicago’s refusal to take a position, I was troubled by the free-for-all it seemed to sanction, limited by not much more than “time, place, and manner,” or a proscription against the harassment of individuals. Holding the line at this bare minimum—even to the point of resisting calls for codes of civility in campus protests—is intended to restrain the heavy hand of the university’s administration and ensure that even the most offensive points of view get a hearing. That’s all well and good. But in my experience, that model tends to generate more heat than light for both the participants and those they seek to persuade. Anger, of course, has its value; it creates visibility and pressure. It expresses moral outrage in a way that often moves issues to the top of an institutional or governmental agenda. But on its own, it is not necessarily a mechanism of persuasion. That—addressing the conundrum and possibilities of persuasion—is precisely where the distinctive resources of a university are best deployed. And so, I wondered why a university couldn’t do something more. Why couldn’t it live up to the aspirations distilled in Lux et Veritas—Yale’s motto (and many like it)?
Among the many explanations (or rather accusations masquerading as explanations) I heard over those weeks of protest—including from “entitled students,” “feckless administrators,” and “radical faculty”—was that Columbia University’s “woke curriculum” had somehow failed its students. Surely if there were a problem, it seemed obvious to many that the curriculum was the answer. And if the problem couldn’t be addressed in the classroom, then just what was the raison d’être of the university in the first place?
Columbia is a difficult place to lodge that accusation, if for no other reason than because it is one of the last universities in the United States that has maintained a robust commitment to a mandatory core curriculum, grounded in the animating ideas, debates, and great books of Western civilization. There is a certain irony in watching the demonstrations at Columbia take place in front of Butler Library, with the names of Homer, Herodotus, Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Cicero, Vergil chiseled into the lintel above them. Many of those writers are assigned as part of the required literature-humanities reading list. So it is likely that the protesters had already read them or, more tantalizingly, were in the process of reading them in their tents as the protests unfolded. Imagine, if you will, a protester curled up in her sleeping bag—or, for that matter, former university president Minouche Shafik within earshot of the cacophonous student protests on Columbia’s campus—reading Sophocles’s exquisitely calibrated play Antigone, both of them contemplating the competing claims of the higher law and the laws of men.
“There is an expectation that an immersion in the ‘Great Tradition’ leads to a certain kind of socialization,” a friend of mine on the Columbia faculty told me. “But it’s just not true.” Even if it were true, one can just as easily discover a more rebellious tradition in the very same Columbia reading list, which includes Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecraft, Karl Marx, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as the founder of the “Great Tradition,” Socrates. All of this may be beside the point. Lionel Trilling—the sort of person one might expect to be sympathetic to the former line of argument—observes that even the most subversive books tend to become domesticated when they are taught in a college classroom, where they are subject to its tidy rituals of lectures, blue books, papers, and grades. The “wild cry of rage” in such literature is often “heard by our students and quite thoroughly understood by them as—what shall we eventually call it?—a significant expression of our culture” (2000, 387; emphasis in original). It isn’t just the bland generality of the response that bothers Trilling; it is the eagerness of his students to embrace what should trouble them far more than it does:
I asked them to look into the Abyss, and, both dutifully and gladly, they have looked into the Abyss, and the Abyss has greeted them with the grave courtesy of all objects of serious study, saying: “Interesting, am I not? And exciting, if you consider how deep I am and what dread beasts lie at my bottom. Have it well in mind that a knowledge of me contributes materially to your being whole, or well-rounded, men.”
(398–99; emphasis in original)
Ultimately, the degree to which students are affected by what they read depends on what they bring to their education. “A real book reads us,” Trilling tells us, and he confesses that many of the books he read in his youth “at first rejected me: I bored them. But as I grew older and they knew me better, they came to have more sympathy with me and to understand my hidden meanings” (2000, 385). Trilling made these observations in “On Teaching Modern Literature.” The essay is the lament of a consummate and dedicated teacher of Columbia’s core curriculum; it is filled with an exasperation over the limits of the classroom that borders on despair. As such, it ought to give any advocate pause about the degree to which exposure to a specific curriculum—conservative or radical—shapes the political consciousness of students.
Not too long after the uproar over Gaza began to roil college campuses, I was preparing for a class on John Stuart Mill. I came across this passage in his On Liberty, which I had earnestly highlighted during less troubled times:
He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side; if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion. The rational position for him would be suspension of judgment, and unless he contents himself with that, he is either led by authority, or adopts, like the generality of the world, the side to which he feels most inclination. Nor is it enough that he should hear the arguments of adversaries from his own teachers. … That is not the way to do justice to the arguments or bring them into real contact with his own mind. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them; who defend them in earnest and do their very utmost for them.
(2003, 104–5)
So here it is: the liberal ideal, which in Mill’s account involves a suspension of judgment, rational argument, the completely informed mind. Whatever the strengths and limitations of this ideal, it is the fundamental ethos of the university—an ethos to which we still pay lip service, although, judging by recent events, we no longer hew to it. It seems hopelessly nostalgic now, out of tune with the times, a slender reed in the maelstrom of so much angry rhetoric. Ours is an age that has no patience for persuasion—or the openness and civility upon which it depends. We prefer confrontation, action—ideally direct action—or, as one protester announced to the assembled throng on my campus, “escalation until our demands are met.”
I asked the students in my class what they thought of Mill’s ideal. Without quite saying so explicitly, many of them saw it as good in theory but impossible in practice. Among the more skeptical, it was dismissed (not without reason) as a prescription for passivity. After all, one student told me, “What is there to discuss with them?” This comment came after a painstaking classroom discussion of On Liberty‘s first chapter, where Mill summarizes the reasons for remaining open to the opinions of others. Among them, “Though the silenced opinion be an error, it may, and very commonly does, contain a portion of truth” (2003, 118)—a sentiment to which the same student had readily assented earlier. Perhaps he was thinking that Mill’s admonition was directed more at others than himself.
Suspension of judgment? Rational argument? The completely informed mind? Like so much in On Liberty, Mill’s confident assertions mask a host of questions. Is this a realistic standard? Is this how political convictions work? Does it comport with the “crooked timber” of our humanity? Aren’t we more likely to become hardened against our political adversaries through direct engagement with them rather than more amenable to their arguments? And most importantly for our purposes, is it reasonable to hold the university to this standard? If so, what are the pedagogical mechanisms by which that seemingly elusive goal might be achieved? Today’s undergraduates hardly enter the university as tabula rasa, but often with highly opinionated, twitterized, culturally overheated minds. They are, in short, creatures of the same polarized culture as the rest of us. Must the university then give up the ghost and resign itself to the fact that the very ethos that is at the heart of intellectual inquiry—suspension of judgment, rational argument, the completely informed mind—rarely informs our political convictions?
If a core curriculum of Great Books is not the answer to this particular problem, then what are the resources of a university that might be put to use? Perhaps, I thought—indeed, I have thought for a long time—the university could address Mill’s aspiration by cultivating the ethos and skills of deliberation among its students. This would not ensure either Lux et Veritas or a completely informed mind, but it might contribute to more thoughtful outcomes. It is obvious that what our campuses—and, for that matter, our entire society—lack is the possession of a set of skills by which to structure difficult conversations, much less any interest in doing so. I wasn’t exactly sure about how or even whether that could be done, but it seemed to me that if there were any place this prospect had a chance of succeeding in, it was the controlled environment of a college campus. I imagined the classroom as a more purpose-driven, pedagogical space enlivened by Gerald Graff’s (1992) notion of “teaching the conflicts” or perhaps a laboratory of democracy, conceived and described so powerfully by John Dewey.
This essay was first published in Social Research: An International Quarterly, a John Hopkins University Press publication, in its Summer 2025 edition. Reprinted with permission.
