Category: Education

In a brief essay for the latest issue of Commonweal, I consider the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk and make the case that “robust discourse” in academic settings can never be entrusted to political pundits. Instead, colleges and universities need to defend “substantive principles like toleration, moral freedom, and openness to doubt,” and doing so will require institutional recommitment to teaching advanced literacy and the “slow-paced rituals of humanistic learning”:

In my view, colleges and universities already have monuments to “open, robust discourse.” They’re called libraries. In their quiet stacks, one can find John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice not far from Robert Nozick’slibertarian response, Anarchy, State, and Utopia. Library patrons can read Frantz Fanon’s defense of political violence in The Wretched of the Earth, but they can also pick up a copy of Hannah Arendt’s On Violence, her rejection of bloodshed in the pursuit of political power. Spirited disagreement can be found on every American campus. We simply need to pull it off the shelf.

I realize how naïve this may seem amid the chorus of articles reporting that college students can’t read selections from demanding books, let alone entire volumes. Even so, colleges must promote their own literate vision of “robust discourse” and hold firm to their identity and mission against opportunistic political actors. They make a grave, self-destructive error if they accept that intellectual life is best represented by a tent emblazoned with the insincere taunt “Prove Me Wrong.”

This essay picks up on some ideas that I considered years ago in a review of Zena Hitz’s book Lost in Thought—that review remains one of my favorite contributions to Commonweal. On a related note, I was happy to be consulted alongside Hitz and others for a report in The Guardian on the state of humanities education at US universities.