We seem to have reached a pivotal moment in the long-running battle for the soul of the American university.

On the one hand, our country’s elite institutions of higher learning are in exceptionally low repute as a new academic year dawns. Public trust in them is at all-time lows, applications and donations have suffered at top schools, and many trustees and alumni are unhappy. Harvard, Penn, Cornell, UCLA, and an unprecedented number of other elite universities are searching for new presidents at the same time, and not by coincidence.

The immediate cause of much of this has been the horrendous response of many leading universities to explosions of anti-Semitism on their campuses in the course of the war between Hamas and Israel. But the trouble was building long before that. For much of the past decade, they have been embroiled in controversy over speech restrictions, politicized faculty hiring, woke radicalism in teaching and administration, and much more. 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.

It is too soon to say whether the tide could turn in a meaningful way. But that makes this an ideal time to take stock of the modern struggle over the American university—to consider what it has been for and against, how it has taken shape, and where it now seems to be headed.

The crisis of the academy began in earnest a little after the middle of the 20th century, when elite universities gradually decided to surrender to their radical critics and turn themselves over to people who had sworn to destroy them. A useful marker of when and how this happened might be a tale related in these pages half a century ago by the Yale Law School professor Alexander Bickel. Writing in COMMENTARY in November 1972, Bickel described a crowd that had gathered in front of the ROTC building on an elite campus he declined to name. He wrote:

At this university, as elsewhere in this time, some members of the faculty and administration had undertaken to discharge the function of cardinal legate to the barbarians, going without the walls, every so often, to negotiate the sack of the city. On this occasion, with the best of intentions, members of the faculty joined the crowd and participated in discussing the question of whether or not to set fire to the building. The faculty, I gather, took the negative, and I assume that none of the students arguing the affirmative could have been deemed guilty of inciting the crowd. The matter was ultimately voted upon, and the affirmative lost—narrowly. But the negative taken by the faculty was only one side of a debate which the faculty rendered legitimate by engaging in it. Where nothing is unspeakable, nothing is undoable.

Bickel was concerned particularly with the battle over free speech. But in that moment, in the early 1970s, he saw something with greater clarity than we tend to see it today. He saw that at the core of what was changing in the university was the self-understanding of faculty and administrators, and therefore the self-understanding of the university as an institution.

He saw that the people running the university were gradually choosing to cooperate with the people who wanted to burn it down. Rather than stand on the wall and defend the campus, they decided not only to negotiate with their would-be executioners but ultimately to invite them in—and to suggest to them that instead of destroying the university, they could just inherit it over time and, by votes of the faculty, turn it into what they wanted it to be.

At issue between the two sides in that conflict was a dispute about the chief purpose of the university, and a related dispute about its relationship to the larger society.

Academic traditionalists—the people who had long run things—shared a general sense that the foremost purpose of the university was teaching and learning in pursuit of greater knowledge of the truth and in an effort to form better human beings and citizens in its light. And they thought this work would strengthen and reinforce our society by deepening its comprehension of its own ideals and institutions and equipping it with a more enlightened and responsible elite.

These were never the only goals of the university. Higher education has always had a complicated mix of ambitions and uses. But these were implicitly taken to be crucial and primary goals, particularly of our leading schools. And they were goals that both defined and constrained what happened on campus.

The radical activists confronting them opposed this understanding. They were academic revolutionaries, rather than academic traditionalists. Such people  have sought to deprioritize the traditional pursuit of knowledge and the shaping of students in its light. Instead, they have wanted to prioritize the pursuit of social transformation of a particular sort—the liberation of the oppressed from their oppressors in every realm of life. And they want to shape the students to be handmaids to that purpose.

The means toward that end are not limited to teaching and learning. Both political expression and social action outside the classrooms and study halls and libraries are taken to be very much in the university’s purview because they serve the ends of social liberation. This isn’t to say the places of study on campus are left alone to continue in their historical role; no, teaching and learning are also to be directed toward social transformation and not the pursuit of truth. As a result, such teaching and learning begin by begging many fundamental questions—by assuming the answers rather than pursuing them. Large swaths of the humanities and social sciences now work this way and have very little patience for people who insist on treating their closed questions as open.

The academic revolutionaries understand the university to exist in a fundamentally oppositional or critical relation to the larger society. They see it as operating on society more than in it, and as charged with breaking down the inherited order of our society and liberating people from its illusions and strictures.

The radical students and faculty whom Bickel confronted more than half a century ago at first saw the university itself as one of those strictures of the inherited order, and they wanted to tear it down, too. But gradually, as they themselves came to inhabit the university as a place to spend their lives, they came to see it as an instrument of critique and deconstruction. 

The difference between the traditionalists and the revolutionaries is in some respects a matter of emphasis. In the first place, there was always an element of critique in the traditional academic ethos—after all, the pursuit of truth requires a willingness to break with the crowd or call out its failings. And, to be fair, there is a great deal of genuine intellectual exploration in the work of the academic revolutionaries.

But this difference of emphasis makes an enormous difference in practice, especially in the conduct of university administrations—not just the parts of schools dedicated to teaching and learning, but the departments that manage these heavily staffed and highly regulated institutions and their often-sprawling physical plants. Mid-level administrators have also become increasingly politicized under the influence of the revolutionary academic ethos.

It was the connection between that liberationist vision of the university’s purpose and progressive politics that gave the campus revolution of the 1960s and afterward its force. Because it was a movement of the left, and of the young, it proved very difficult for the self-consciously liberal mid-20th-century university to resist. But this movement never spoke for the entire academic left, and it still doesn’t. Many people—in some disciplines, surely most people—who choose to devote their lives to academic work are liberals who are still drawn to something more like the traditional academic vision.

As the left in general has grown less liberal, though—by which I mean less tolerant of dissenting views and less interested in the defense of unpopular opinions—these academics have found it more difficult to articulate the traditional academic ethos. In losing the vocabulary of liberalism to the terminology of radicalism, they have allowed the university’s self-understanding—its own description of its purpose—to be defined in the terms of the academic revolutionaries. So while many professors continue to do the traditional work of pursuing knowledge and forming students in its light, many questions of policy and administration in the university are resolved by, or in the direction of, the academic revolutionaries. Those revolutionaries have therefore gradually become the administrators of the academy. So when questions arise about what the university should be, they decide the answers.

The university was not destroyed, but rather transformed, by the revolution of the past half-century. It has kept its trappings but replaced its ethos. The titles, the modes of governance, the deans and faculty senates, the tenure, the graduation gowns, and the ivy-covered buildings are still there. But they are now mostly populated by men and women with a very different understanding of the goals of the institution from that of their predecessors a few generations ago.

It is crucial to grasp this character of the revolution if the modern-day champions of the traditional academic vision are going to fight back effectively, because fighting back effectively will need to mean reinhabiting the university—populating regions of its faculty and administration with traditional academics again. In a sense, it will demand that academic traditionalists do some of what the revolutionaries did: act on a critique of the institution not by burning it down but by finding ways to occupy it and then to transform it from within.

The cost of failing to understand this character of the challenge would be grave. It would cause today’s traditionalists to fight against the university rather than to fight for the university—to risk destroying what they love in the very effort to save it.

To avoid that, they have to admit that they do love the university. People who are willing to put up with what today’s dissenting academic traditionalists endure in order to teach and learn can be acting only out of love, or else they are afflicted with a form of madness. But they also have to reckon with how this institution they love has been deformed: not just with the results of its deformation, but with the ways in which it came about.

The structure of Bickel’s anecdote offers a useful framework for thinking about the struggle for the soul of the university. He described it as a struggle between insiders and outsiders, between defenders and invaders. But in the early 1970s, he could already see the beginnings of a reversal of roles. That reversal is now thoroughly advanced.

The academic traditionalists, who are naturally inclined to think as insiders both in the university and in the larger society, are now outsiders. The revolutionaries, who are naturally inclined to operate as critics, are insiders, the people who run things. The traditionalists have to move from the outside to the inside somehow and take responsibility for the future of the institutions the radicals have dominated and corrupted.

Seeing the struggle for the university in this light can clarify the challenge that academic traditionalists now confront. And it can also help us think about the latest phase of that challenge, which is just beginning.

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This struggle for the soul of the university has proceeded through several distinct phases.

At its outset, in the 1970s and into the ’80s, the attack on the traditional academic ethos took the form of an aggressive moral relativism on campus. This was an assault on the first premise of the traditional purpose of the university: the notion that there is real knowledge of the truth to pursue. It was the voice of a radical academic left that still understood itself as having an outsider’s voice, even as it gained control of the elite academy. It insisted that arguments for the pursuit of knowledge—that is, the arguments of academic traditionalists—were just masks for efforts to protect entrenched power. These ideas did not just emanate from those studying political and social power. They came as well from English and philosophy departments that were consumed by excitement for the radical relativism of deconstructionist thinking. It attacked the central intellectual principle of study itself: that we are to learn so that we can discern meaning and understand the world better.

In that early phase, this attack still involved largely a negative teaching—a denial of the traditional ambition of the university. In the late 1980s, Allan Bloom could argue in The Closing of the American Mind that the essence of the crisis on campus was that “relativism has extinguished the real motive of education.” But he could see the beginnings of something more. “It is not the immorality of relativism that I find appalling,” Bloom wrote. “What is astounding and degrading is the dogmatism with which we accept such relativism.”

That dogmatism soon came to the fore. In the 1990s, as the academic revolutionaries grew more comfortable with their dominance of the university establishment, they also became more comfortable wielding academic power on behalf of their liberationist politics. This first took the form of administrative power, particularly over student life, as an assortment of dogmatic requirements for diversity and sensitivity coalesced into what soon came to be derided as “political correctness.”

That very derision, the fact that in the 1990s our society was still capable of treating political correctness as a ridiculous joke, helped to keep it in check and even to send it into hiding for a time. But it came out of hiding with a vengeance and quickly became the authoritarian face of the academic revolution that has increasingly dominated campus life in this century.

That has been evident to traditionalists within our elite universities throughout the past 20 years, as they have found themselves increasingly exiled, silenced, and trampled by faculty activism and administrative power. But it broke into public view over the past decade in two distinct but related waves of excess and abuse—a wave of repression and then a wave of coercion.

The wave of repression involved the curtailment of the sorts of views that could be expressed both by professors and by outside speakers on campus. It came to be understood as “cancel culture,” or a sustained assault on free expression. It involved, in essence, an assertion of power on behalf of the revolutionary view of the university’s purpose: People who wanted to treat as open those questions that the struggle for social liberation insisted were closed were deemed threats to campus culture, their presence intolerable, and action to silence them not only permissible but praiseworthy.

The second wave involved the emergence of formal bureaucratic structures to enforce “diversity, equity, and inclusion” rules. These imposed a set of progressive political formulas as official university dogmas, complete with the practical equivalents of mandatory loyalty oaths.

Such blunt deployments of raw power seem a long way from relativism. Victims of today’s academic mobocracy might well wish that their tormentors were merely relativists. But of course, as Allan Bloom understood, the campus relativism of the 1980s is thoroughly continuous with the campus totalitarianism of this era.

Because the wave of cancellations and the wave of DEI rules have involved repressive and coercive power, academic traditionalists have tended to respond to them with arguments on behalf of freedom. That has been necessary and understandable up to a point. But it is ultimately insufficient, and it threatens to mislead us about the nature of the problem in the university. The irony that it is now conservatives who argue for free speech on campus tells us something about the great reversal that Bickel saw coming five decades ago. But his insight should warn us away from relying too much on undifferentiated arguments for freedom. Remember the aphorism he ended with: “Where nothing is unspeakable, nothing is undoable.”

The university cannot be understood as just another platform for saying anything you want. We have a lot of those now. What we don’t have enough of are venues for engaging in teaching and learning in pursuit of knowledge of the truth. Not all expression serves that purpose, and so not all expression belongs in the university. There is room for standards and for boundaries. But such standards on campus, just like open inquiry and expression on campus, have to exist in the service of the search for truth. That criterion argues for very broad tolerance of expression and speech. But it also suggests that the question of expression and speech is not the key question before us.

The inadequacy of free-speech arguments alone has come into clearer focus over the past year, as it has become increasingly evident that we are in a new phase of the campus crisis. This phase had an unusually distinct starting point: It began on October 7, 2023.

Hamas’s savage attack against Israel unleashed an explosion of anti-Semitic hatred on many elite American campuses, and the response from most university administrators was at best a tenuous, anemic reticence. Campus leaders suddenly rediscovered their relativism—anti-Semitism depends on the context, you may recall the president of Harvard saying. This was matched by a newfound zeal for free speech. After years of enforcing dogmatic restrictions and requirements, presidents of universities suddenly found themselves telling members of Congress that it wouldn’t be right to censure even open calls for genocide.

Thus, the terms of the free-expression debate seemed to reverse yet again, with campus conservatives demanding university action and progressives insisting on neutrality if not outright support for hateful, threatening speech. This reversal has been illuminating. Academic traditionalists have demanded restrictions on threats and hatred that undermine the pursuit of knowledge. But the academic revolutionaries who administer most elite universities have acted on the conviction that their institutions must advance a critique of unequal power relations and stand with the cause of liberating the oppressed of the world.

Here’s the key: They weren’t disagreeing about the importance of free speech. They were disagreeing about the purpose of the university. That is what they have been disagreeing about from the beginning. It’s what the campus radicalism of the 1960s and ’70s was about; it’s what the debate over relativism was about; it’s what the fights about cancel culture and DEI have been about, too.

If the university exists above all to engage in teaching and learning in pursuit of knowledge of the truth and in an effort to form adult human beings and citizens in its light, then it cannot just serve as a platform for political activism or insist that no truth exists beyond power. It cannot silence serious arguments for the mere reason that those arguments question received elite wisdom or compel acquiescence to dogmatic political doctrines. It cannot abide hateful threats to the safety of students.

But if the university exists to advance a radical liberationist ideology, then it can and should do precisely these things. Indeed, this is what a portion of the campus left—a portion prominent in powerful faculty committees and in university administration—does think the purpose of the university is.

Fortunately, it is not what everyone on the campus left thinks the purpose of the university is. And it is not what the campus center, or right, or most students, parents, trustees, policymakers, or citizens think the purpose of the university is.

The only positive effect of the campus crisis that followed October 7 has been the clarity it has provided. We have entered a phase of the university crisis in which this character of the dispute is clearer than ever. And it is therefore a phase in which the potential for some effective action against the academic revolutionaries and in defense of the traditional ethos of the university may be greater than it has been in half a century.

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What might such action look like? Here is where we can learn a lesson from the academic revolutionaries themselves. If the forms and trappings of the university have not changed all that much through this revolutionary era but have come to be inhabited by some faculty and administrators with a radically misguided notion of the purpose of the institution, then an effective resistance and response would need to involve those forms and trappings becoming inhabited instead by some faculty and administrators committed to the traditional ideal of the purpose of the university.

Unfortunately, in this respect we are not going to see a mirror image of what Bickel witnessed in the 1970s. Academic traditionalists are not about to be invited by today’s administrators and senior faculty to inherit the university from them. They should welcome the genuine openness to their work that some university leaders have begun to show. But they’re also going to have to invite themselves, and to get themselves invited by insiders and outsiders—such as trustees or state legislators—who are in a position to create space for 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.

The pathbreaker was the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State University. Launched in 2017 with strong backing from then-governor Doug Ducey and key state legislators, SCETL is a new freestanding academic unit within a major state university. It has the power to do its own hiring, promotion, and tenure. It can approve courses and grant degrees. It’s not an outside organization at the margins of a university but an inside institution with a claim on a portion of a flagship state school.

Other states noticed. In the last couple of years, legislators inspired in different ways by SCETL’s success have established schools in flagship state universities in Florida, Texas, Ohio, North Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, and Mississippi, and there are likely more to come. These projects are different and diverse, but in each case a new school or academic unit isn’t just staking out a defensible beachhead but truly inhabiting part of a major university that it can govern, up to a point, in accordance with the more traditional academic ethos. These schools have been created with the support of state legislators (and in some cases governors) frustrated with the direction of the academy. But they have channeled that frustration into the construction of new and genuinely academic terrain, from which they can appeal to students and faculty by putting into practice the traditional vision of the university.

This hasn’t been the only strategy deployed in the battle for the university in recent years. Aggressive oversight by legislators, efforts to launch new universities or take over existing ones, and bold investigative journalism have all made a crucial difference and helped create the opportunity for genuine change. But it is the emergence of these new schools of “civic thought” in key state universities that signals a genuinely novel and potentially durable and transformational strategy. It offers a path of not only resistance but renewal and so might have broader appeal than any prior strategy could have.

These schools will be beleaguered, too, and will be perceived as threats by parts of their larger universities. But in fighting for themselves, they will be fighting for the academy, not against it. And they will be able to form cadres of professors and students who will do the same.

The potential to recover ground within some im-portant academic institutions this way is enormous. These newly established schools are already looking to hire more than 200 full-time, tenure-track professors in the coming few years—a scale of new hiring that amounts to an earthquake in the relevant humanities and social sciences. And they look set to do so with an eye toward genuine diversity of views and outlooks, which will create intense demand for scholars inclined to the traditional academic ethos.

And the promise of this strategy has to do not just with the form of academic life but with its substance—not just with the fact that these are all-out schools within leading public universities but with the fact that they are schools of “civic thought.”

This term, “civic thought,” is new, and not all the schools in question have embraced it. But it has emerged from within a deliberative process among some of the people running these institutions, and in response to their need to formulate and articulate their aims. My American Enterprise Institute colleagues Benjamin and Jenna Storey have done more than anyone to put meat on the bones of this concept. Its parameters are being defined by what the Storeys call “the intellectual demands of citizenship,” and it will draw in some respects on work being done by political scientists, sociologists, legal scholars, historians, scholars of English literature, and a variety of others. But it could ultimately take shape in its own distinct terms as its own distinct discipline. It is the academic disciplines that constitute the real power centers on campus, and the emergence of a genuinely new discipline—with its own journals, associations, and career paths—may in time be key to the full potential of this strategy.

But whether or not it emerges as a novel discipline, civic thought is an academic enterprise: It is not about creating a safe space for dissent or freedom, but about enabling a new mode of inquiry that puts the perspective of the citizen front and center, and that has been meaningfully absent from the academy. This is why such an effort should be understood as not just a creature of red-state public universities. It has been drawing significant interest in the broader academy and could in time find a place on both public and private campuses and across the country. It is true that some Republican lawmakers have been the first to see the need and the potential for such efforts, but it is not only conservatives, and certainly not only politicians, who see the problem to which civic thought could offer a solution.

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To maximize its potential reach, the champions of this strategy should keep a few potential pitfalls in mind. They will need to be unabashedly academic, for one thing. As the Storeys have written, “While this innovation has been undertaken to meet political needs, its success or failure will be determined by academic standards.” These schools should strain to avoid becoming conservative ghettos on campus and instead model the traditional academic ethos and see themselves as offering an example of what the entire university should be.

Relatedly, they will also need to reach beyond political theory—which, because it has been marginally more tolerant of right-of-center scholars, has long been the discipline of choice for broad-minded conservative academics. Schools of civic thought will need political theorists, but they should also seek out other humanists and empirical and quantitative social scientists—particularly those eager to treat as open the questions that their disciplines have forced shut in recent decades. The tolerance for open inquiry in these schools, and the sheer scope of their planned hiring, could well transform those fields and attract scholars with a range of views and outlooks.

And these schools will need to find ways to claim the mantle of genuinely liberal education, too. Liberal learning is not the same thing as civic learning. Socrates and Cicero had different aims and different dispositions toward their societies; the Greek elevated individual self-understanding as the foremost path to truth, while the Roman focused on the real-world responsibilities of the citizen. But these two modes of inquiry are deeply related nonetheless, and they need each other more than either tends to recognize.

Liberal education needs help resisting the urge to grow cynical, and civic education needs help to resist becoming doctrinaire.

The second half of the 20th century was an era in which the Socratic ethos was more dominant and in which Ciceronian civic thought needed to happen within a framework that understood itself as fundamentally critical and oppositional. That dynamic is now in the process of reversing, thanks to cultural trends that reach well beyond the university. The institutions that house the essential practices of the liberal society will increasingly have to justify themselves in terms of solidarity, and not just individual liberty. So liberal learning that wants to hold its society up to a demanding standard would be wise to make its home within self-consciously Ciceronian institutions that reinforce that society’s foundations.

Students drawn to the very deepest and hardest questions (of whom there will always be only a few) will find their way to schools of civic thought and will encounter teachers ready to receive them. Those teachers will also have to show them that the Socratic quest for self-knowledge, at least in a society like ours, necessarily entails taking stock of one’s role as a citizen and playing it with intelligence and competence. And for all students, these new schools will offer some essential correctives to the modern university and an education that can help address the intellectual needs of our democratic republic.

In the long run, the potential to address those needs may be the most important promise of these schools. That would involve, first and foremost, an intellectual project and a mode of inquiry. But in time it might also have further important practical implications. Our country now confronts a breakdown of political culture that could be addressed only by a civic renewal with deep intellectual foundations. We’re living in a moment that requires nothing less than a re-acquaintance with the American civic project. And so it may turn out that an effective response to the crisis of the university could be the beginning of a response to the larger civic crisis we face, by forging a discipline of inquiry focused on the responsibilities of the citizen, and on reminding us of precisely the truths that we have been forgetting in America.

The emergence of schools of civic thought, and the potential of that field beyond those schools, offers us an opportunity to put to work the people most inclined to advance the intellectual case for a civic revival and to think through its facets. And it offers us an opportunity to expose those people’s work to the rising generation of elites, at least at some of the best universities in America. Students from those universities will become public officials and active citizens. And helping them, on a meaningful scale, to see what pushing back against the degradation of our public life would look like could create enormous further opportunities.

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Of course we should not overstate the promise of this moment. The academic landscape is still awful. The movement now being born isn’t going to unseat the tenured radicals. It isn’t going to take over elite universities and turn them into friendly turf even for old-fashioned liberals, let alone for academics on the right. Both the suppression and the coercion that have characterized life on many campuses in this century are going to continue in most places, including in the places where these new schools are emerging. And our public life more generally shows every sign of persisting in its manic lunacy. Don’t let anybody make you an optimist.

But there are reasons to be hopeful, and to act. And despite the utter madness that has prevailed on some elite campuses over the past few years, there may well be more such reasons today than a decade ago. This new phase of the academic crisis has laid bare the nature of the problem we confront, and it appears to offer a way forward that is both genuinely ambitious and genuinely promising.

It offers a way of using political power effectively—not to assault the university but to facilitate some renewal of it. It offers a way to combine political, civic, and intellectual work to build durable home bases for academic traditionalists on some important campuses, and to build further from there.

It offers the prospect of a mode of liberal education that helps students pursue the truth by starting from the social order they are inheriting, rather than by breaking with it. And so it offers a way to de-emphasize the university’s role as radical social critic and re-emphasize its role in forming more responsible elites. It offers the most promising potential turning point in the fight for the university since the academic revolution began in earnest more than half a century ago.

It offers all of that because it presents us with the chance to act on our love of the university, rather than to turn our society against the university. And conservatives know that acting on behalf of what you love, not against what you hate, is ultimately how you win.

By understanding the sources and the stakes of the fight over the university, we can properly understand it as a fight for the university, and for the possibility of engaging in teaching and learning in pursuit of knowledge of the truth and in an effort to form human beings and citizens in its light. In a time of profound political unseriousness and civic disappointment, that is a cause worth fighting for together.

Photo: AP Photo/Seth Wenig

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