Higher education’s failures are high-profile case studies in our larger crisis of civil society. In institution after institution, in sector after sector, center-left leaders in recent decades went from understanding that most Americans are in the middle on most debates to making the bizarre misjudgment that the loudest voices on the culture-war left were the constituencies to which they were accountable. The result has been that the center-right plurality of Americans understandably judge normies as under assault, and thus they fearfully drift toward greater tolerance of meat-ax approaches from the right, whose illiberalism seems preferable to the illiberalism of the left. This “choice” between two illiberalisms is tragic because it is false.
Yes, intellectually it is false — but practically it may be the only choice available. What major American university can claim to be liberal in its intellectual orientation, can legitimately claim to prize intellectual diversity and to expose students to a wide range of ideas? Maybe the University of Chicago.
