Yuval Levin ponders a promising development in higher education.
It has increasingly seemed that many of America’s leading academic institutions are run by people who have no idea why universities exist, and maybe even why our entire society should not be burned to the ground.
On the other hand, the struggle against this tide of madness looks to be gaining some ground at last. The fight to sustain something of the traditional academic ethos, waged with courage and patience by conservatives and some old-fashioned liberals in the university, has felt like a noble yet futile cause for decades. But it has started to make real headway on some important campuses lately, thanks not only to public outrage about the excesses of a politicized academy but also to a novel set of strategies and a willingness to use real political muscle to pursue them. …
… This is what they should seek: not to dismantle the university, to deconstruct its rules, or to blow up its traditions of governance, but to use all of those to reenter and reinhabit at least parts of the university. And, in fact, this is precisely what they have begun to seek in recent years and are unusually well situated and prepared to seek right now.
Some trailblazers have shown the way for decades. Robert George at Princeton University has demonstrated how establishing a beachhead on an elite campus, even if it is relatively small and beleaguered, can attract students and construct a healthy and appealing subculture within a broken institution. A number of others have followed his example, with his help, and have made an enormous difference in the lives of countless students. But more recently, several leading public universities (again, with George’s guidance and help) have taken this model a significant step further and started to demonstrate how the right kinds of applications of political pressure can create even more space for renewal on campus.
