Before the Trump administration’s sweeping demands for reform in the Ivy League, before “it depends on the context,” before the tentifada, before the occupation of Hamilton Hall, before Yale administrators tried to railroad a law student over a “trap house” party, before students screamed at Erika Christakis for imaginary racial insensitivity, before the KKK hoax at Missouri and the Black Justice League occupied the president’s office at Princeton—before the last decade of theatrical campus social-justice activism, there was the campus sexual assault panic.
Fueled by ludicrous viral statistics like the claim that one in five female students would be sexually assaulted during her time on campus, President Barack Obama’s Department of Education issued federal guidance requiring universities to crack down on the supposed epidemic of sex-based violence. The infamous Dear Colleague letter published in April 2011 defined sexual harassment as “unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature,” including but not limited to “verbal, nonverbal, or physical conduct.” Writing in 2016, Peter Berkowitz contrasted such a rule and its dubious justifications with a “properly liberal education,” which would include “campus life” revolving around “the premise that students are free and equal individuals, rather than categorizing them as oppressors or oppressed.”
A decade later, it’s clear that Berkowitz saw to the heart of the matter. A fellow at the Hoover Institution who had been elbowed out of Harvard in a barely veiled act of political bullying, Berkowitz has collected his essays reflecting on the state of American higher education in Reclaiming Liberal Education in America.
The volume shows more than anything how the habits of mind and hypocrisy on matters of principle across the American campus had their roots in that now-forgotten panic. The idea that Harvard and Yale had equivalent rates of sexual assault to war-torn nations was so absurd, its rapid acceptance should have been a sign of eroded critical thinking among the intelligentsia; the notion that the proper response was to institute kangaroo courts and micromanage student speech is, in hindsight, an obvious indication that universities would govern themselves in accordance with whatever satisfied the left flank of students and bureaucrats. The Manichean oppressor-versus-oppressed grand theory of everything is omnipresent today, and Berkowitz was right to see its roots in campus policies that systemically favored “oppressed” accusers over presumptively guilty men—a pernicious form of “equity” before the term went mainstream in 2020.
Each essay addresses a different element of the campus crisis, usually hooked to scandals now forgotten but which once helped solidify the popular perception that universities were ideological monocultures, stifled dissenting speech, discriminated against unpopular causes, sneered at the notion of Western civilization, and have generally been taken over by zealous mediocrities. Several recount students and professors ushered out of the academy on thin pretenses of anonymous complaints; many others reveal that universities consider bespoke pseudoacademic disciplines crucial to their mission and basic courses in civics and literature superfluous if not oppressive.
Of course, this was not the first time campuses had flared up with radical activist zeal—or even the first time administrators capitulated. Armed takeovers and bombings of campus buildings in the 1960s were met with accessions to extremist students’ demands, which is how many schools ended up with academic departments now dedicated to propagating anti-American and anti-Western drivel. Students for a Democratic Society and its violent offshoot the Weather Underground dispersed, occasionally after its membership served prison time, into faculty lounges and administrative offices.
Yet today faculty and administrators—the latter group having multiplied manifold—are more ideologically uniform than ever. The protesters are running the show. Accordingly, “campuses suffer from a variety of dysfunctions,” as Berkowitz writes in his preface. Among these: “curtailment of due process”; “attacks on free speech”; an “invidious and unlawful allocation of benefits to students and faculty” based on unchosen characteristics; the “politicization and hollowing of the curriculum” such that universities are factories producing shallow ideology rather than learning. To these you can add a militant and reflexive opposition to standards, which produces grade inflation, “accommodations” for anyone who can slap a clinical label on their shortcomings, and schools’ dalliance with test-optional admissions.
But perhaps above all is the pervasive moral confusion that has made itself apparent since October 7, 2023. “Progressive students and faculty … expressed enthusiasm for, and demonstrated solidarity with, the jihadists and their barbarism,” Berkowitz writes. This “scandalous spectacle … defies easy explanation,” but it can be understood. Hatred of Jews “provides a partial answer,” but a full accounting recognizes that “offshoots of multiculturalism spawned at our universities have further stoked resentment, poisoned moral judgment, and inculcated self-righteousness.” It is the very rejection of our Western inheritance, and the conditional morality that rises on campus to take its place, that explains the nascent bloodlust. “The multicultural mindset” of identity-competition and grievance “fuels anti-Israelism as part and parcel of its pronounced anti-Americanism.”
This is not sustainable. Education and barbarism are incompatible. Nor can the American people be expected to continue tolerating, much less subsidizing, the systematic production of professionals and elites who reject the creed that binds us, and actively work to undermine it. That is simply inimical to training people to be free and equal citizens—the very definition, the sine qua non, of liberal education.
Reclaiming liberal education, therefore, requires a touch of particularism. “American colleges and universities have no obligation to educate—indeed, they have decisive reasons to deny admissions to—students who despise individual freedom and equality under law, seek to sow discord and undermine America’s political institutions, or serve as spies and collaborate to steal intellectual property,” Berkowitz writes. These are all real threats, though they differ in kind and degree. Credentialing and providing a platform for those who want to undermine the very society that makes universities possible (and necessary) is self-defeating. Universities do not exist in a vacuum, and won’t long exist if we pretend they do. American citizens are therefore perfectly right to demand that liberal education in America remain American in this minimal way.
For those who do want to see this nation thrive, liberal education means “maintain[ing] communities of scholarship, teaching, and learning that carry out their inquiries, conduct their classes, and govern themselves in a manner consistent with the principles of individual freedom and equality under law on which America was founded.” Open inquiry is crucial, but must be directed. It must have a purpose.
For anyone interested in understanding the substance of that purpose, and how universities can better align themselves with a vision of liberal education worthy of the name, Berkowitz’s essays are essential reading. While at times they seem like disparate critiques of an easy punching bag, the withering arguments of this volume, properly understood, constitute a comprehensive vision of reconstruction.
Reclaiming Liberal Education in America
by Peter Berkowitz
RealClear Publishing, 240 pp., $28
Tal Fortgang is a legal policy fellow and adviser to the president at the Manhattan Institute.
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