Introduction to Part 5

Higher education institutions are, or should be, a central element of a liberal, discursive, truth-seeking society. The ones that I know best—Yale, where I taught for 35 years, some where I visited to teach, and the many others that I read about as an interested intellectual and observer—proudly proclaim their fidelity and commitment to these values, which are celebrated in the book by my colleague Anthony Kronman that I review here. But the countervailing pressures—political correctness, sheer cowardice, an earnest desire to mollify agitated students, fear of how negative publicity might affect alumni and other attentive constituencies, and other such considerations—coalesce to create conditions that are inimical to straight-up truth-telling.

Several of the pieces that I present here focus on some all-too-representative instances of these moral evasions and compromises. One weighs in on a widely-publicized imbroglio at Yale in which agitated students confronted and harshly denounced the faculty leader of a residential college (traditionally dubbed the “college master” but officially renamed “head of college” in 2016), ostensibly because his wife had circulated a mild suggestion about how students might better respond to Halloween costumes that offended them. Another article asks where the “adults in the room” are when free speech values on campus are under concerted attack, while another criticizes university leaders who cravenly follow student groups’ political demands to withdraw invitations to distinguished commencement speakers.

Notwithstanding these administrative and moral failures, however, I explain in another piece why universities are probably better equipped than the federal government to design policies concerning sexual assaults on campuses, while at the same time calling attention to the authoritarian excesses of some university leaders, using Valdosta State University as an example. I present a shorter version of my extended case against race-based affirmative action in colleges and universities—a topic I have studied and written about for more than two decades. (I do favor economic need-based preferences.) The Supreme Court is expected to rule decisively on this issue in June 2023.