It’s been obvious for decades that both our K-12 schools and our colleges and universities are overmatched by the magnitude of our moment—from the disruption of work and community by amazing but frightening technologies, and also from the neglect of our shared civic inheritance, perhaps wrought by our affluence and our ease. But the particular challenges of the last several years have revealed in much sharper detail the hollowness of our educational institutions. Our once great universities have been exposed as emperors without clothes. At present, the sole ticket to teaching the next generation is having written a jargon-filled dissertation read by no more than a few dozen people in an increasingly rarified field. And it’s evident to increasing numbers of Americans that such a system is absurd.
At the same time, many of these universities claim that no meaningful debate about capital-T truths could be allowed. As a result, they’ve substituted silly, new, and untested theories and narratives for the older traditions and enduring debates. Today, at far too many elite universities—which signal status above all, as if diplomas were Gucci handbags—free will, individual agency, forgiveness, personal improvement, and cross-cultural pollination are obliterated by omnipotent determinisms. This is the kind of education that led academics at the Smithsonian to create a graphic for children that portrays America as irredeemably racist and asserts that rugged individualism, the nuclear family, and hard work are “internalized aspects of white culture.” The message was clear: success is always a privilege and never the result of hard work or community or faith or parents or grandparents or any of the amazing voluntary organizations that are the beating heart of America. Such virtues as self-reliance are supposedly unattainable for minorities. This is the hogwash that the recipients of the most advanced degrees from our most prestigious universities wish to preach.
This cloistered elite believes that the world must be remade by academics, because, they tell us, for our entire history privileged oppressors ran roughshod over the oppressed and marginalized, and now the oppressors must be brought low to atone for history’s sins. This is a faith without guardrails, without external scrutiny, without grace, and certainly without a promise of reconciliation. This faith requires a life of constant moral struggle against the devil and the world, but without any accompanying eschatology of hope. There is no heaven and no messiah.
This religiosity has colonized humanities departments across supposedly secular institutions of higher education—ostensibly dedicated to the search for truth, the exploration of ideas, and the advancement of human flourishing. Instead these institutions have devoted themselves to inquisitions and struggle sessions where students are urged to catalog microaggressions and to conflate comfort with safety. Faculty who dare to treat students like adults with a sense of grit and a grand sense of potential face professional consequences. Administrators police language. Hiring committees compel credal statements that disavow basic American truths. Academic conferences provide safe spaces instead of thought-provoking forums; admissions officers devise formulas to rank students based on race, gender, class, and other external characteristics; administrators respond haplessly to mobs wielding the hecklers’ veto to shut down deliberation and debate about the big and meaningful and interesting questions that young people have given up four years of their lives to think about. All the grandest reasons to go to school are what they want to shut down.
The grotesque moral confusion on so many campuses after the October 7 massacre of 1,200 Israelis, and the taking 251 hostages, fits a familiar pattern. The acceptability of the speech depends on the speaker; individuals from oppressed groups are given leeway to target so-called oppressor groups through disruption and threat. This victimology allowed pro-Hamas factions—supposedly the oppressed—to target, intimidate, and harass Jews, who are the oppressors in the morally backward universe of American campuses. In late October, 2023, terrified Jewish students at Cooper Union were locked in a library while a mob banged on doors and spat out anti-Semitic slogans. And the absurdities at Columbia are practically too numerous to count: constant anti-Semitic babble, taking janitors hostage, disrupting classes, and vandalizing buildings—with no real consequences for the perpetrators; putting one of the biggest faculty cheerleaders of the encampments in charge of the core curriculum; offering the disruptors food instead of arresting them; the president apologizing to the protesters instead of to the students she had been charged to educate—and whose education the protesters sought to prevent.
This behavior on the part of universities is a recipe not just for exacerbating the crisis of public trust in higher education, but also for trying to persuade the broader public that the humanities are pointless, that the humanities are anti-truth, that the humanities want to commit suicide. It’s hard to imagine a better playbook for souring the public on higher education than the recent foolishness at Columbia. In this upside-down system, an oppressor’s speech is violence, but for the supposedly oppressed, even violence is just speech. It’s a crass degradation of the First Amendment culture we’ve been blessed to inherit.
Harvard, Princeton and Yale were founded as seminaries, and many of their humanities departments are seminaries once again, only less interesting ones. The doctrine they embrace is both insecure and oppressive in its prohibition on wrestling with big and meaty subjects and pursuing answers to hard and enduring questions about dignity, agency, theology, brokenness, love, and community. Many in the academy seem poised to double down on fanaticism, and anti-Semitism is always a canary in the coal mine when observing such fanatics.
But there is some good news: Americans now see these absurdities clearly in ways they didn't just four or five years ago, and they want something better.
What is the purpose of a university? The most important thing that a young person sacrifices in four or four-and-a-half years of college is not tuition dollars. It’s the sacrifice of time at one of the most exciting stages of life. If you gave someone the opportunity to be eighteen or twenty-two again, it’s likely he would have a long list of interesting things to do, places to see, books to read, and subjects to learn. He would want to travel and to have new experiences. And right now, so many universities don’t just indoctrinate young people with nonsense; they waste a key portion of their lives.
Today moms and dads who, five or ten years ago, assumed that college was the inevitable next step for their children are now asking, “What is the purpose of a university?” “What do we want our son and daughters to achieve over the next four years?” Surely they want more than nonsense classes like “Pots, Privies, and Patriarchy: Gender Identity and the Management of Public Sanitation in 13th-Century Europe.” That’s not an actual class (I got ChatGPT to come up with the title), but it’s not especially far-fetched. Deterritorializing Gender in Sydney’s Breakdancing Scene: A B-Girl’s Experience of B-Boying is, for instance, the title of an actual dissertation. And the fact that we can’t tell the difference between the fake and the real tells us quite a lot.
And it’s not just parents: taxpayers too, are asking why so many state and federal dollars are being invested in these woefully inadequate institutions.
Parents, I think, want our universities to do four things for the rising generation. First, to help young people build intellectual frameworks—maps for making sense of the world—and thereby begin to cultivate gratitude for the wonders of the Creation that we’re called to explore and to steward. Second, to prepare them for their initial vocations as twenty-somethings. And it’s wrong to claim that colleges and those who attend them have to choose between preparation for work or preparation for life and citizenship. These two goals can go together, and there is time for both if we get rid of the absurdities and the indoctrination. Third, we ought to help our kids learn how to learn. In our new digital world of rapid technological change, lifelong learning and relearning are going to be required for everyone, and young people must be prepared for that.
And fourth, college should be a place to learn to live together alongside people who have different worldviews. The end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood ought to be the perfect time for learning about different communities of belief and meaning and trying to appreciate complexities and debates—not by minimizing differences, but by seeking to understand each other, wrestling and arguing while remaining friends. Put differently, our universities ought to be precisely the opposite of the monasteries of victimology, tribalism, and identity politics that they are now.
As humans, we’re messy. We’re beautiful and ugly, compassionate and cruel. Our history is complicated. Individual dignity is indeed limitless, but our capacity for depravity has been vast. Our highs are breathtaking, our lows shameful. Life, truly well lived, should be able to make something coherent out of what’s come before us by studying it, discerning the best from it, committing to those enduring principles and working with gratitude to learn to love our neighbors better as we age, whereas the intersectional victimology movement gripping so many universities scoffs at beauty and at redemption and has no room for moral improvement.
We ought to build the opposite. We need to embrace the best of pluralism and debate. We can champion the truth that souls cannot be compelled, but only engaged and loved, respected and persuaded. We can stir and ignite curiosity while preparing the young for service. We can counter the soulless, unhappy futures on offer at so many schools with something grand. We can build institutions that believe in the human and the humane. Instead of descending into the oldest form of politics, the rejection of pluralism and a return to tribalism, we can energetically harvest the best of the American tradition.
In 1790, George Washington wrote a famous letter to the Newport synagogue, one that’s been quoted many times in the pages of Mosaic. His message there was about liberty of conscience, but it’s especially worth remembering in the post-October 7 moment that, for centuries, Jews were viciously persecuted for their faith, but America was an exception. Our first president said Jews were celebrated as full citizens, equal participants in the enterprise of the Republic. Washington noted that this is not merely a policy of toleration, but rather a recognition and a soulful embrace of the conviction that every human has inalienable natural rights.
Such pluralism depends on more than the legal protection of our rights; it also depends on the stewarding, building, and recovering of strong institutions that will cultivate real virtue. Washington wrote, “For happily the government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.” Pluralism means that we must individually, and as members of families and communities, consider and then pursue the good life. Pluralism means that families have the right to make choices about the education of their children. Pluralism means that we can and must build better schools and universities where civic virtue can be cultivated. And then we can live in a society that allows each of our communities to engage in the striving for truth and yearning for virtue that occurs outside of politics. That was Washington’s vision, drawn from the book of Micah, of a land where “every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Adapted from a speech given by Ben Sasse at the Jewish Leadership Conference in New York City, December 8, 2024.
