A New School Year

It is the beginning of a new school year, and I must admit I am anxious. I love seeing the bright faces of first year students. So young—fresh out of high school, wide-eyed and ready to begin their college careers. But they are stepping onto campuses as universities and colleges face an unprecedented assault on their mission and purpose. Dark politics shadow the excitement of the start of the term. And students, faculty, staff and administrators are walking on eggshells because of it.

At least two reasons motivate these attacks: 1) to break the back of campuses as ideal places of political independence and 2) to muddy how our students learn and what they take to be knowledge. All with the aim, I believe, to make college students more compliant to authoritarian rule or, at least, compliant to the authority of traditions as conservatives understand them.

Ever since the student movements of the mid-20th century college campuses have been seen by conservatives as the last (and, perhaps, most dangerous) bastion of liberal radicalism. Some version of William Buckley’s God and Man at Yale (1951) has been written over the successive decades decrying college campuses as the primary reason for the intellectual and moral decline of America. Instead of learning the “classics” and “the best which has been thought and said,” students, these people believe, are being indoctrinated by radical leftists (and their students like me) who retreated to the safety of universities after the social movements of the 1960s.

Their students end up questioning authority and, on occasion, protesting policies as they seek to hold government and others accountable.

The goal has been, and continues to be, to bring these institutions, faculty, and their students to heel.

The Trump administration has expended a lot of energy trying to corral institutions that could hold power accountable. And that has involved an all out assault on universities. They have attacked revenue streams (from federal financial aid, federal funding of the sciences to impacting the enrollment of international students), admissions policies, and what is being taught in classrooms. The end of affirmative action has directly affected who has access to campuses (just a glance at the demographics of the first year classes at Princeton, Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley and Stanford offers a sense of the impact). The steady drumbeat of war against DEI (and the threat of lawsuits) has been used to bludgeon universities into compliance.

The aim has been to destabilize American higher education, to accelerate policies of austerity that would lead to contraction, and to reorder and limit who has access, especially to elite universities and colleges.

In addition to all of this, we witnessed the harsh reaction to student protests. In response to the horrors of October 7 and to the scale of Israel’s military retaliation and its historic treatment of Palestinians, students across the country engaged in campus protests against what they saw as an unfolding genocide. Some set up encampments and staged sit-ins. Others marched.

Accusations of anti-semitism were hurled about. Students, it was claimed, had made campuses unsafe for Jewish students. Others accused those who protested of failing to understand history or having their minds sullied by the “nonsense” of postcolonial theory. And many of those young people were punished. Some were expelled. Others lost internships and job offers. I saw for the first time in my 20+ year career at Princeton, seniors embargoing their senior theses out of fear of reprisal.

The Trump administration used the accusation of antisemitism as justification for withholding millions of dollars of allocated monies to universities (a recent whistleblower exposed how the administration cooked the investigations of universities accused of breaking the law). And students found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. Campus protests quieted even as Trump attacked Venezuela, strangled Cuba, and launched a war of choice against Iran. Students have become more cautious (and rightly so) even though the current reality has proven them right.

Ironic, isn’t it? Antisemitism has been used in the conservative attack on universities.

All of this has happened at the same time we have witnessed an assault on how and what we teach on campuses. In defense of “western civilization” and “the classics,” some conservatives have decried the relevance of fields like Black Studies and Women Studies. This goes hand and hand with book bans and the Trump administration’s attack on public history. The Washington Post reported on the impact all of this has had on Black studies. Major programs and departments have been shuttered or diminished at universities across the country. “For three straight years,” the Post reported, “students received fewer than 700 degrees in African American studies nationally, the lowest level in the last two decades.”

In addition, we hear the demand for “view point diversity” that has given more power to politically conservative voices who see campuses as overrun by radicals (I should note that political conservatism is NOT the only measure of conservatism on campus. Someone can vote for Democrats and still have a very conservative view of, say, the discipline of English).

My point in writing all of this is simple: we begin this school term in the midst of a storm. Students are arriving on campuses in a moment when everything seems unsettled.

I keep reminding myself that no matter the darkness of our days—no matter the attempts by some to browbeat students and faculty into submission—my task is to cultivate a spirit of inquiry in my students and to equip them with the cognitive virtues that will allow them to live lives of meaning and purpose. To help them see and understand the world in all of its magnificent diversity and to view themselves in the most expansive of terms—to teach them that they contain multitudes.

This, I know, is dangerous, especially for those who want our babies’ backs bent.