Saving Liberalism From Itself

By John Rogove

Everyone knows that American civilization is in crisis, but no one can seem to agree on why. Diagnoses of this societal crisis from the left and from the right are diametrically opposed, and this is part of the problem. Indeed, the vehemence of these differing diagnoses is what we usually call polarization: an increasingly radical intolerance for differing ideas and values, and an incapacity for civil exchange of ideas and opinions. The seemingly sensible, and classically liberal, reaction to this state of affairs is to call for a return to the long-standing liberal basis of American civilization: the freedom of every individual to pursue whatever goods he or she values most.

But this appeal to a contentless, value-neutral freedom is, in fact, part of the problem. While our current illiberal situation is a cross-partisan shipwreck, illiberal intolerance is merely the symptom, not the cause. A simple respect for people’s freedom to think, say or be whatever they want is not the solution; this principle, which has long been inculcated in Americans via their education and the surrounding culture, has failed to produce true liberalism. Rather, our illiberal impulses seem stronger than ever. But one very powerful way forward lies in a radical overhaul of American education, and more precisely in a revival of a widely available classical liberal arts education. Liberal education forces us to confront our prejudices and ultimately instills the classical liberal values that will help America on its way forward.

Liberalism and Illiberalism

American political discourse has always been marked by a high degree of partisan polarization, and such polarization has always paradoxically been the hallmark of a society with little real ideological difference between the two major parties, as compared with, say, Europe. But it seems a sort of tipping point in the disintegration of the possibilities of reasonable civil discourse and political disagreement was reached sometime between 2014 and 2021.

One of the most alarming and brutal manifestations of this phenomenon has been a growing tendency to “dehumanize,” rhetorically, those with whom we disagree or those perceived as belonging to the opposing camp. Our political opponents are no longer people with whom we have (sometimes vehement) disagreements on what policies are best for the common good, and against whose wrongheaded ideas the appropriate course of action is voting, lobbying, campaigning and impassioned debate.

Rather, our opponents have morphed into hateful, barbarian enemies of the human race and of the possibility of civilized life—into Satan-worshipping pedophiles who want to use vaccines to implant us with microchips, or into racist homophobes guilty of cis-Christian-white-male privilege, no better than Nazi Klansmen. To engage in civil dialogue with such fiends is already to have conceded far too much to their evil worldview and only lets them spread their venom. If the pesky vestiges of liberal institutions such as due process don’t allow us to outright kill or imprison them, social death at the very least seems the only fate they could possibly deserve.

So, on the one hand we see refusal to engage in debate or exchange of any sort with one’s ideological opponents; on the other hand we have in place of debate or argument the threat of social violence, censorship or physical violence. One thing seems clear: Liberalism is in danger; many of the formally liberal aspects of American society seem like they’re in the process of collapsing in on themselves.

One of the epicenters of this societal collapse is college campuses—which is particularly alarming, as they are meant to be the beating heart of the free exchange of ideas and intellectual or epistemic liberalism. In my own experience as a liberal arts professor at several elite American universities who has taught introductory Great Books courses for almost a decade, something clearly changed around 2017. I always took great pride in staying entirely politically neutral in the classroom, refraining not only from any sort of classroom activism but even from giving any hint as to what my political convictions might be. But the stifling, militant and incurious atmosphere imposed by much of the incoming freshman class that year was unlike anything I’d experienced. Colleagues and administrators, all of whom were on the left and some of whom were far-left activists, agreed (in private conversations) that the students seemed to have “gone crazy,” aggressively policing professors’ language in the manner of ideologically supercharged students during the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

While we professors might have been progressives and leftists, and while we might (or might not) have agreed with the students’ political goals, the values of openness to other viewpoints and free exchange of ideas; the curiosity, humility and reverence required to understand an ancient or foreign text; and the willingness to question one’s beliefs remained sacred inside the classroom and as goals of a university education. These values no longer seem to make sense to many incoming students and to those by whom their opinions have been formed. They even seem to see those values as objective obstacles to their political goals, which they describe as “social justice.”

Epistemic liberalism—an unconditional respect for free inquiry and what Oliver Wendell Holmes first called “the marketplace of ideas”—is at once the heart of a properly functioning university, and the center of the possibility of civil exchange in a free society in general. If education has the task of producing the kinds of citizens capable of responsible self-governance, of civil exchange of ideas in the public sphere and of respect for opposing views, respect for such principles is all the more important in a university setting. Yet, if students and administrators in this setting do not accept these values and reject their very foundations, there can be little hope for their survival in the public, political sphere. On the contrary, as Allan Bloom, following Tocqueville, argued, the university must be a sanctuary, free from the reductive and inquisitorial political enthusiasms of society outside its walls.

The specific risk to epistemic liberalism in a democratic society is the suffocating tyranny of majority opinion—the majority either of society at large or of one’s in-group. As Keith Whittington puts it, citing John Stuart Mill, “every sect, every nation, every generation is convinced of its own shared opinions, even as those outside the boundaries of those communities think that those ideas are ‘not only false but absurd.’ It is easy for the Christian in a Christian nation, the democrat in a democratic nation, the liberal in a liberal polity to imagine that their most cherished commitments are obviously true.” Education, both secondary and higher, is the most critical and effective, if not the only rampart against such homogenizing and stultifying tendencies.

The purpose of free speech in a republic is to check power, to allow for free, informed and vigorous debate concerning elections and policies. In one sense, free speech is not suffering at all today. From colonial times through the last quarter of the 20th century, free speech was limited: Obscene and vice-inducing speech were restricted or suppressed, but the range of acceptable opinions expressible in raucous and contradictory debate was, outside of a few specific periods, broad. Now, it is the opposite: Obscene and vicious speech (which more often than not does not mean “speech,” as in logos, at all, but rather images and acts) suffers not only near-limitless toleration, but an almost sacralized encouragement in the name of self-empowerment and free self-expression; whereas the range of ideas it is acceptable to express has drastically dwindled—whether because some ideas are considered beyond the pale in the way that obscenity once was, and expressing them will bring social and professional death, or because we increasingly lack the ideas and language to describe and defend them.

This leads naturally to the deeper question of free speech in the university, where the “marketplace of ideas” becomes most pertinent, and most paradoxical. On the one hand, nowhere else than in scientific and scholarly inquiry, whose nature and ideal is the absolutely unbiased search for truth (and the preservation and transmission of the skills, culture, objects and other conditions of this pursuit), is the absolute freedom of thought and argument more essential. On the other hand, nowhere is mere freedom as an ideal and absolute horizon more woefully inadequate; and its inadequacy is such that it reveals the broader insufficiency of the ideal and practice of freedom for the health and preservation, not only of a good society, but even of a free liberal society. For while conservatives like Rod Dreher or liberals like Mark Lilla and Whittington all lament what they see as the attacks on freedom by “woke” social justice warriors or by their mirror image on the racist, violent or conspiracy-mongering right, what such critics miss is that the targets of their criticism, despite appearances, share their values and philosophical premises—which are liberal.

What strikes us first about them when we look at their attitude toward civil exchange is their formal illiberalism—the illiberal way in which they attempt to shut down debate and impose their views on others by means of a sort of intellectual terror (through “cancellation,” threats of social and professional death and other forms of intimidation or violence). Protestations at such apparent illiberalism are fully warranted and understandable; however, my thesis is that they do not go far enough in their understanding of what is happening, and remain blind to the nature of the phenomenon they rightly find disquieting, precisely because of this shared premise. This is because, while the form of this discourse is illiberal, its content is not—in fact, it is just a more radical liberalism, or more precisely, a radicalization of liberalism’s philosophical premises. The positive content of superficially illiberal individuals’ understanding of the good (of what a good or desirable human life looks like, and of what an individual should aspire to in life) is ultimately liberal. But while the content of their beliefs is liberal, their way of attempting to impose their beliefs on others is the only thing that is illiberal.

And their illiberalism is at least partially the result of their education—an education whose structure, ideology and goals are unambiguously liberal. While education ought to reflect the wide diversity of ideas available in the marketplace of human opinions, the simple presence of such ideas—and above all, the ideal of their free competition in such a marketplace—is, while necessary, not sufficient for producing students and ultimately citizens capable of open-mindedly and critically evaluating, debating and understanding them. The paradox we face is the following: Americans are educated to liberalism in a system that understands freedom (and material prosperity, from which it is conceived to be inseparable) as the highest good and as the only absolute good; and yet, this system has produced an increasingly illiberal citizenry and student cohort.

Defining Freedom

The theoretical problem, as I see it, is that freedom—what Isaiah Berlin called negative freedom, defined as the simple absence of external coercion—as an end in itself is not a sustainable or coherent goal. Freedom is not so much a value or a virtue itself as it is the indispensable condition for the exercise of all virtues and for the attainment of the human good. Contentless freedom as an end in itself is inherently relativistic and leads to the illiberal nihilism rampant in American society today. What the “progressive” enemies of formal liberalism are trying illiberally to impose on others is nothing more than the only possible understanding of the good that has been taught to them by their education to liberalism, radicalized or brought to its logical conclusion: total atomistic, individual self-determination, solipsistic choice as the highest good and end in itself. Since they learn that this freedom to choose can be good or morally pure only if it is totally contentless and indeterminate, the only moral good becomes this sort of purely solipsistic self-determination.

But, since these people were raised in a society and in an education system where this kind of contentless liberalism has been ceaselessly presented to them as the highest and most uncompromisable of goods, they see no problem in using illiberal means to force others to acquiesce to their views. Not doing so, in their view, is tantamount to a crime against their absolute right to self-determination, on which no compromise is possible precisely because it is the highest (and only) good imaginable. The ideological and philosophical horizon has been so reduced that any opposing idea is literally inconceivable.

This also helps to explain why, as I mentioned above, the domain of free expression has greatly expanded when it comes to what was formerly considered obscenity or indecency, but noticeably contracted when it comes to the articulation of unpopular ideas. Self-expression, no matter how base or obscene, is understood to be the highest moral activity in which one can engage simply because it is (apparently) freely chosen. Because of this self-grounding self-expressivity—which, in the absence of any real intellectual openness or rigor or capacity for self-mastery, is usually the expression of impulsive emotion or prejudiced opinion—any viewpoint or argument that would challenge the desirability or goodness of such expression is understood to be beyond the pale of acceptable opinion in a liberal, democratic society.

This state of affairs is the reason why liberal critiques of so-called wokeness are fruitless and self-defeating: The “woke” understand themselves to be carrying out their crusade in the name of (a radicalized version of) the very same “tolerance” and “openness” in the name of which the liberals attack them. In both cases, the contentless ideal of the good, supported by the ideal of the “marketplace” of ideas as an end in itself, wins out over the original idea behind the desirability and virtue of epistemic liberalism—the idea that certain ways of living may be deemed better or worse than others, more or less favorable for human flourishing, and that such an end is of such high importance that no ideas should be excluded from consideration in order to discover it.

Moreover, people on the religious right, such as Dreher, fall into the same relativistic trap. Religious conservatives’ bottom-line resistance to something like same-sex marriage, for example, is ultimately argued in terms of religious freedom, as opposed to natural rights arguments that appeal to the common good, natural reason and human nature. These relativistic arguments are bound to fail, because they are essentially the same as, say, arguments in favor of female genital mutilation or a cultist’s refusal of modern medicine (or, ultimately, arguments in favor of same-sex marriage itself). Christianity presents itself as another lifestyle choice that needs to be respected along with all the others. Religious conservatives assume the same contentless liberal understanding of the common good, and for this reason they refrain from trying to convince anyone in the public sphere that their intimately held conviction is objectively or universally right.

Instead of arguing for their beliefs concerning what is good for human beings in society in terms of reason, the common good and human happiness and flourishing, Christians do so only with reference to a revealed truth that can be true only for the believer, and they present such truths as not absolutely true for all people but as true for them. They claim respect for these beliefs not “on the merits” but as following from the respect due to everyone’s right to free self-determination in a liberal society. When county clerks (as in the famous case of Kim Davis in 2015), bakers or wedding photographers recuse themselves from providing their services to a same-sex wedding, they do so in the name of contentless freedom, which means they have already withdrawn their truth-claims from the public sphere and are now content to cling to them as their own personal, private inclinations and tastes.

And so, as a result of this entire situation, dialogue between the two sides becomes totally impossible; it degenerates into a “war of positions,” as Antonio Gramsci described, and becomes simply a matter of identitarian one-upmanship, with no rational dialogue possible. Identity replaces reasoned discourse, and shared civil space becomes impossible. Static identity—personal and tribal—rather than reason becomes the site of conflict and confrontation. Such is the state of society today.

The Arts That Make Us Free

Intellectual liberalism, on the contrary—open and civil debate that lets the most reasonable and plausible ideas rise to the top—requires cultivation of the intellectual virtues: for example, curiosity, intellectual honesty and courage, openness to contrary arguments and viewpoints, intellectual humility, insightfulness, memory and concentration. In other words, the cultivation of a society that is classically liberal in the modern sense requires the cultivation of intellectual virtues that are liberal in the ancient sense—liberal in the sense of the liberal arts, the arts that liberate us. It seems to me that education is a very important, if not the only, way to remedy the problems of modern liberal society—to temper society’s liberalism precisely in order to save it. 

The traditional role of education as the teaching of self-mastery and intellectual rigor in the name of truth-seeking has been forgotten by mainstream educational institutions. Since at least the beginning of the 20th century, American education has fallen prey to a contentless, utilitarian and pragmatic self-understanding. This pragmatic or utilitarian education, the only goal of which is the acquisition of contentless “skills,” is partially responsible for the inability of people to talk to one another, to understand and critically evaluate other viewpoints and to deliberate on the common good.

The inculcation of virtue, and more particularly of intellectual or epistemic virtue, is critical both for the perpetuation of liberalism in higher education and for the broader possibilities of civil exchange in a well-functioning politically liberal democracy. Further, making a liberal arts education widely available—not only to those who are to become the political and cultural elites, as Plato envisioned, but to as much of the population as materially possible—is the only proper means of inculcating such virtues. Good scholars—or even simply good readers—make for better citizens.

The liberal arts are “liberal” in the ancient sense of “liberating.” As Cicero argued, they free the mind from the shackles of ignorance, prejudice and received opinion, and they befit a free person as opposed to a slave. This doesn’t mean that liberal arts can only be studied in a society that is stratified by unalterable class structures such as slavery. On the contrary, the significance of this point is that the liberal arts are the study of subjects thought to be worthy as ends in themselves, requiring leisure and material means, as opposed to merely utilitarian studies subordinated to other ends.

Since practical sciences and techniques (including social sciences) are not ends in themselves but are rather subordinated to other ends, they are morally neutral—they can be put to good or bad use, and they do not improve, except accidentally, the person who studies and masters them. The key difference is that the liberal arts are meant to liberate their practitioners; by contrast, the practical sciences are meant to give their practitioners the keys to the domination of nature and of others.

For the ancients, the study of these liberating arts befitting a free person had a double advantage: They were inherently good and desirable because they involved the disinterested pursuit of the truth as an end in itself, and they prepared people to deliberate about the common good and to make wise and prudent political decisions, which are based neither on enslavement to the passions such as fear or envy nor on subjection to prevailing opinion or to what seems superficially to be true. 

The intellectual virtues are less well known than the virtues of character, or moral virtues. The moral virtues are important for democratic self-government and for the very maintenance of a liberal society. “Virtue” in Greek is arété, literally meaning “excellence,” and from it is derived the word “aristocracy,” which is literally the idea that the best should rule. “Best” means greatest in virtue and character, both moral and intellectual; the idea of a purely hereditary aristocracy is a historical perversion of this moral and political ideal. Behind the idea of a sustainable liberal democracy lies the idea of a universal and egalitarian aristocracy—of a society that is able to govern itself because each of its citizens is capable of such self-governance.

The liberal arts and their cultivation of intellectual virtues will not necessarily make one a good person in the same way as the moral virtues, the virtues of character, will. One can be both cultured and wicked. But the intellectual virtues will make a person more intellectually honest, insightful, patient, curious, capable of following and constructing an argument and of weighing both sides of an issue. Some of them are morally neutral, although far less so than the pure skills provided by a STEM education, and many of them overlap with moral virtues.

For example, the intellectual courage necessary to challenge one’s own prejudices and strongly held beliefs is close kin to the moral courage necessary to face physical danger in order to protect the defenseless and even closer to the moral courage necessary to go against the grain of received opinion, or the opinions of one’s social or professional circle, in order to assert what one thinks is true or right. Such courage becomes one of the most important and most difficult things to cultivate in a liberal democracy where the element of opinion, especially of majority or collective opinion, reigns supreme as an absolute and implacable despot—in this country where, as Tocqueville observed, “the majority lives in the perpetual utterance of self-applause.” Describing the tyranny of opinion in a democracy, Tocqueville warns:

Under the absolute sway of one man the body was attacked in order to subdue the soul; but the soul escaped the blows which were directed against it and rose proudly superior. Such is not the course adopted by tyranny in democratic republics; there the body is left free, and the soul is enslaved. The master no longer says: “You shall think as I do or you shall die”; but he says: “You are free to think differently from me and to retain your life, your property, and all that you possess; but you are henceforth a stranger among your people. You may retain your civil rights, but they will be useless to you, for you will never be chosen by your fellow citizens if you solicit their votes; and they will affect to scorn you if you ask for their esteem. You will remain among men, but you will be deprived of the rights of mankind. Your fellow creatures will shun you like an impure being; and even those who believe in your innocence will abandon you, lest they should be shunned in their turn. Go in peace! I have given you your life, but it is an existence worse than death.”

Herodotus discovered, when comparing cultures in the 5th century B.C. in the world’s first study in cultural anthropology, that nomos—“custom,” “law” or “way of life”—is “king”—that despite the great diversity of customs and of beliefs about what is right or good among diverse peoples, the one thing that all had in common was the opinion that their beliefs were the right ones. Several decades later, Plato’s Socrates defined philosophy as the replacement, on an individual level, of opinion (doxa) by knowledge, which he defined as a true belief accompanied by a reasoned argument (logos) explaining why we hold it true.

However, Socrates goes on in the “Republic” to elaborate on Herodotus’ insight, saying that each person’s strongest passion is the love of or preference for “one’s own”—family, country and, perhaps strongest of all, opinions. Nomos is doxa on a collective level, and vice versa; one’s attachment to one’s own stubborn opinions is doubly determined both by one’s own narcissism and by the tyrannical pressure of public opinion or of one’s in-group. Arguing and maintaining the courage to go against this powerful current is no easy thing, but the study of philosophy is honed precisely to that task; and, as Aristotle described, the only way to acquire a virtue or a character is through habituation. Constant and regular study is just such a habituation. 

Advantages of a Liberal Arts Education

A liberal arts education today has specific benefits for intellectual virtue and thus for promoting pluralism, civil exchange and democratic self-governance. Indeed, patience, intellectual humility, openness to strange opinions and arguments and hermeneutic generosity are precisely among the virtues needed to foster respect for political pluralism and a healthy democracy. One of the methods and effects of such an education is to get people out of their comfort zones, allowing their opinions and prejudices to be challenged in a way that makes them, precisely, uncomfortable. Philosophy is, by its very essence, the practice of questioning one’s own opinions and those of one’s in-group, a practice which requires training in the specific skills of intellectual virtue.

For example, reading any old or foreign Great Book—be it Plato’s “Republic,” Sophocles’ “Antigone,” the “Bhagavad Gita,” Euclid’s “Elements,” Ferdowsi’s “Shahnameh,” Tacitus’ “Histories,” Saint Basil’s “On the Holy Spirit,” Pascal’s “Pensées,” Madame de Lafayette’s “Princesse de Clèves,” Al-Farabi’s “Attainment of Happiness,” Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary,” Aristotle’s “Politics,” Newton’s “Principia” or Descartes’ “Discourse on Method”—demands, even in translation, a mental and sometimes emotional opening and reaching that we are unlikely to find elsewhere. Texts outside our particular cultural moment force us to transcend the opinion-magma of our place, time and sociopolitical milieu—to think beyond and against ourselves. They also force us to think through what is accidental and what is essential in a work or an argument, what is truly outdated or culture-specific and what is universal.

In short, these books allow us to see and to understand our own condition both from the outside and from a higher standpoint. If we adopt the long view represented by these texts, we are forced to seek and evaluate the human good and the truth as their authors understood, presented and reached for it. We are forced both to think seriously about the good as such and to expose ourselves to possibly alien conceptions of it. The act of mental empathy required to get out of our comfort zone and understand these old and foreign books helps us think against our own culture and prejudices. Further, understanding these authors as they understood themselves—as arguing for positive conceptions of the good—forces us to transcend our liberal relativism at the same time.

Another decisive spiritual advantage of a liberal arts education is that the liberal arts “tradition” is anything but monolithic: The great thinkers of the past are not in agreement with one another and do not represent a homogenous tradition from which liberal modernity has somehow freed us, opening us to plurality. On the contrary, the diversity of the content of the great works of the past, even within the Western tradition narrowly conceived—even in, say, 4th-century Greece alone—stands in stark contrast to contemporary uniformity of thought and tastes.

While this uniformity and thoughtless prejudice is being imposed by morally earnest and militantly uncurious students and educators, in my own experience and in that of my peers, this anti-intellectual militancy is not coming from the universities themselves. For this reason, right-wing polemicists who rail against universities and the radical, dogmatic education students are supposedly receiving there are not only incorrect, but they are objectively allies of the censorious social justice warriors they rail against. Both groups share the same liberal premise of the radically individualistic right to choose anything, and both have blindly followed those liberal prejudices into dangerous post-liberal territory.

One practical effect of this has been that conservative students increasingly simply avoid matriculating at elite colleges and universities, staying in a bubble of the like-minded and becoming increasingly isolated in an alternate reality where conspiracy theories and anti-science attitudes are more prevalent. Meanwhile, their progressive counterparts are already coming into college fully radicalized and refusing to think, expending most of their intellectual and moral energy policing the speech of their community and wielding a denunciatory illiberal stick at the canon, at their professors and at any ideas contrary to their own idea of social justice. So, contrary to what many right-wing polemicists would have us believe, the problem does not only, and perhaps not even principally, lie with the education being offered by the universities.

Challenges—and Solutions—Facing Liberal Education

It is of critical importance to shore up liberal arts requirements in higher education, but there are two obstacles to achieving this goal. First is the strictly practical problem of getting colleges and universities to keep, expand, adopt or readopt such requirements. Recall that the Ivy League colleges all required the sort of mastery of Ancient Greek and Latin that would today be expected of a graduating classics major for admission to undergraduate study until around the turn of the 20th century.

The second challenge facing a revival of liberal arts education is the deeper issue that students are entering college already laden with hostile prejudices. This would seem to indicate that the root of the problem lies in high school or even earlier, and therefore it needs to be addressed there.

The first potential solution to these challenges is to put pressure on universities not only to create, consolidate or expand their own liberal arts programs, but also to instate admissions policies that would in turn put pressure on secondary schools, and most especially elite feeder schools, to change their curricula. This might be done through convincing large donors and boards of trustees of major universities and colleges to put pressure on university administrators by making their funding conditional on such changes.

Second, we should encourage transformation at the elementary, middle and high school levels. This can happen by supporting and encouraging already-existing schools and national and local educational movements that are or could become receptive to a rigorous classical liberal arts approach. This transformation would involve providing financial resources, curricular resources and publicity for such schools and initiatives. Potential allies include the classical school movement, Catholic and other religiously oriented schools, large- and medium-scale homeschool initiatives and movements, cultural literacy movement schools and various character- and virtue-oriented private schools such as the Intellectual Virtue Academy and Hyde Schools.

Alternatively, we can put pressure on elite private schools that serve as “feeder” schools for America’s top colleges and universities. Taking something like Bari Weiss’ anonymous surveys of parents at prep schools as a starting point, we could address tuition-paying parents as well as trustees, donors and boards of governors (in addition to making cases directly to faculty and administration). Weiss, who ironically started her career as one of the most zealous proponents of university cancel culture, describes the extreme pressure exercised by the country’s top private schools on students and parents toward political conformity, often against the privately expressed will of both. The linchpin of this pressure is college admissions:

These are America’s elites—the families who can afford to pay some $50,000 a year for their children to be groomed for the eating clubs of Princeton and the secret societies of Yale, the glide path to becoming masters—sorry, masterx—of the universe. The ideas and values instilled in them influence the rest of us [ ... ] Nothing happens at a top prep school that is not a mirror of what happens at an elite college. [ ... ] “The colleges want children—customers—that are going to be pre-aligned to certain ideologies that originally came out of those colleges,” says a STEM teacher at one of New York’s prestigious prep schools. “I call it woke-weaning. And that’s the product schools like mine are offering.” [ ... ]

The parents in the backyard say that for every one of them, there are many more, too afraid to speak up. [ ... ] “My son knew I was talking to you and he begged me not to,” another Harvard-Westlake mother told me. “He wants to go to a great university, and he told me that one bad statement from me will ruin us” (emphasis mine).

Finally, we should work to reform public schools by lobbying Congress and the Department of Education for changes along the lines of the No Child Left Behind Act and the Common Core—though, of course, a liberal arts curriculum would be very different from those programs in terms of content.

Option one, direct pressure on universities, is the most direct route to reform and has a long pedigree. Humanities programs have been under administrative and financial pressure since the 2009 financial crisis, with entire programs and departments having been sometimes eliminated. Even though most core liberal arts programs have remained in place since their last major reorganization in the 1990s, they are under financial and ideological duress along with humanities departments proper, and are in dire need of defense and support. As Barbara McClay argues, they are under ideological and budgetary attack from both left and right.

The most effective way to bring about the second strategy, the transformation of secondary (and ultimately even primary) education in the U.S., is by implementing this first one, reforming colleges, insofar as such a change can influence admissions policies at even a few top-tier higher education institutions. Pressuring elite private feeder schools of the kind Bari Weiss describes is probably both the most difficult strategy and the one that would have the most decisive effect. But again, one of the most effective ways to influence these prep schools is precisely through reforming elite colleges—and more specifically through changes to college admissions policies that would either put these institutions at a competitive disadvantage with respect to college applicants issuing from schools with a classical curriculum, or force them to modify their curricula. 

Among existing schools and movements that already provide a rigorous classical liberal arts education or could be open to doing so without much persuasion or any sort of implicit coercion, the so-called classical education movement is closest to the type of educational reform being proposed here, and in many cases already embodies it.

The only way to guarantee full access to children everywhere on a mass level, however, would be the mandated public route, which would involve top-down change to the American public school system coming from the Department of Education. Such a policy is not entirely unimaginable; we need only think of recent curricular overhauls like the No Child Left Behind Act and the Common Core—or public schools in Europe, where philosophy and classics are often required subjects.

At any rate, such an ideal of classical intellectual virtue as practiced in an educational setting—an ideal of patience with different and new points of view, of the serious thought needed to get to the bottom of an argument, of the hermeneutic generosity necessary to begin to understand a text written in a different place and time and of the courageous because fearsome idea that the truth might not, after all, correspond to one’s own opinions—is probably one of our best hopes for saving our damaged and endangered republic.