'Wrongthink' and other issues at liberal institutions

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Further to professors Gary Saul Morson and Morton Schapiro’s argument for classrooms as a venue for the “unending exchange-and testing-of ideas”, here’s a fairly nuanced piece on the issue of illiberal liberalism.

Sahil Handa, a Harvard student who’s working on a book about the campus conformity crisis, has commented on Persuasion about liberal institutions’ allegedly illiberal behaviour. Click here to read the whole piece. If you don’t, the highlights are below:

** Traditional liberal media and universities are increasingly criticised for “deeply illiberal behaviour (such as) firing staff for wrongthink, caving into indignant mobs, and blithely mocking the values and interests of large swathes of the United States”.

** They are increasingly said to act “out of a mixture of weakness and stupidity” in the face of “a humourless, identitarian ideology” on the part of the students. But, says Mr Handa, this narrative is “somewhat misleading” because the subtext is…