What Liberals Can Do to Root Out Illiberalism in Higher Education
What Liberals Can Do to Root Out Illiberalism in Higher Education
And why it matters.
We liberals do a good job reminding voters of the deeply fragile nature of our democratic republic. But we’re less willing to take on illiberal tendencies on our own side, particularly among students and faculty at leading universities.
Universities were originally designed in part to be bulwarks of liberal democracy. Harvard—which has been very much in the news of late—says its fundamental purpose is to “educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society.” No matter where you stand on the political spectrum, though, it’s harder and harder to take these sorts of declarations all that seriously these days. We all have our own reasons: the sense that universities have bastions of far-left politics, ever-growing administrative bloat that drives up the cost of a college education, an increased focus on technical education over pure research—you name a criticism, it’s probably been leveled at the universities. And they’re not all wrong.
If modern universities are serious about fulfilling their self-proclaimed civic roles and responsibilities, Democrats should remind university leaders that they would do well to take a number of steps to concretely demonstrate such an interest.
They would want to instill in students a belief that, in a multiracial liberal democracy, it is essential to treat people as individuals, not members of racial, ethnic, or religious groups. Because Americans come from every corner of the planet, every individual, no matter their background, deserves to be treated equally under the law.
They would want to teach students that a democracy has no inherited privileges. On the contrary, to maintain the faith of its citizens, institutions of higher education would want to tap into the talents of people of all backgrounds and preserve open channels for upward mobility.
They would want to teach students that freedom of thought is essential in a liberal democracy, and that institutions should never impose political tests when hiring individuals.
Finally—and importantly—they would want to teach students that open dialogue and free speech are critical to persuading fellow citizens in a democracy.
In practice, elite institutions of higher education too often push in the opposite direction on each and every one of these fronts. It started, as many troubling things do, with the best of intentions. After Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, colleges wanted to open their doors to more black students, a welcoming and positive impulse.
But instead of following King’s own prescription for addressing past injustices—“A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” of all races that would disproportionately benefit black students—elite institutions wanted to save money and adopted programs of explicit racial preference instead. Moreover, higher education elites flipped King’s commitment to social mobility programs as a way of addressing a history of racial oppression on its head. Under Harvard’s racial preference program, recently struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court as a violation of the Civil Rights Act, 71 percent of Harvard’s black and Hispanic students came from the richest one fifth of the black and Hispanic families nationally. This worldview, now ingrained in the upper echelons of elite universities, explains how and why Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, the Exeter-educated scion of a wealthy Haitian family, became the exemplar of overcoming disadvantage.
Social critic Walter Benn Michaels captured this mindset in a story about a Harvard student who was discouraged that his classmates did not seem interested in supporting the efforts of custodians and food workers to win higher wages. But then the student used a racial angle and began to get traction. “[T]he only way I can get them at all interested in this thing is by saying, ‘Most of these people are black,’” the student said. Michaels concluded: “Harvard students can’t see underpaid workers as a problem unless they can see the problem as racism.”
Elite higher education’s view of race came to be embodied by a particular hierarchy of groups within the nonwhite population that—while rooted in history—has unfortunate side effects. Educated elites have abandoned “people of color” as a concept in favor of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) because Asian Americans are seen as “white adjacent.” For that reason, during the Supreme Court litigation challenging racial preferences, some liberals made tortured excuses for the fact that Harvard’s admission system routinely rated Asian American applicants as less likely to have such subject attributes as "integrity, helpfulness, courage, kindness, fortitude, empathy, self-confidence, leadership ability, maturity, or grit."
The valid idea that race matters in American society has been taken to an extreme, setting off a series of dominoes that undercut other fundamental principles of liberal democracy. During the reign of Senator Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, higher education leaders proudly stood up against the idea that their faculty should take loyalty oaths as a condition of employment. But today, colleges themselves routinely ask prospective candidates to take a twenty-first century loyalty oath to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI). This might seem reasonable enough—we want professors to value diversity, and to be inclusive—but in practice the exercise too often becomes a political litmus test in which would-be faculty members must attest allegiance to the idea that race-conscious policies are the only fair path forward for America.
Colleges have also imposed narrow rules around the types of speech that will be tolerated on campus when it comes to issues of identity. No one tries to shout down Grover Norquist for his position on tax policy. But certain issues involving race and gender identity bring out a desire to shut down speech. At MIT, a University of Chicago geophysicist was disinvited from giving a lecture about climate science because he opposed racial preferences—a position, Pew found, that is held by 73 percent of Americans. “In other words,” wrote David Brooks, “the views of the large majority of Americans are not even utterable in certain academic parts of the progressive subculture.” Harvard has been notorious for constraining speech and came in dead last of more than 200 universities in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)’s free speech rankings in 2023.
To get back on track, Democrats should urge elite colleges to recommit themselves to promoting fundamental liberal democratic values. Teach students what it means to be an American: that anyone from anywhere can be an American so long as they embrace the broad principle of the American Creed, which values nondiscrimination, freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and social mobility.
Democrats might hesitate to take on illiberalism on the left, lest they be seen as “echoing right wing talking points.” But if sensible criticism of extremism on the left as well as the right has always been warranted on the merits, the politics of confronting campus illiberalism may have shifted since the October 7 atrocities in Israel. People who didn’t follow campus culture closely, or who thought left-wing illiberalism was overblown, watched in horror as 34 Harvard student organizations put the entire blame for the attack on Israel—and all within hours of the slaughter of hundreds of Jews by Hamas. It raised the question, as former Harvard dean Harry Lewis noted, of where colleges have gone wrong. Why is antisemitism not a serious problem in “hospitals or libraries,” he wrote, but nevertheless a major issue on campuses like Harvard’s?
Democrats need to reassure mainstream voters that in addition to standing for basic liberal democratic principles like voting rights, the peaceful transfer of power, and a free press, they are willing to take a tough stand against illiberalism—no matter where it comes from.
Richard D. Kahlenberg is a professorial lecturer at George Washington University and is working on a book about the future of affirmative action for PublicAffairs Books.