‘Reclaiming Liberal Education in America’

This is the preface to the author’s new book, “Reclaiming Liberal Education in America,” published on Sept. 29 by RealClear Publishing.

The problem with liberal education

This book features 40 RealClearPolitics columns that I wrote between 2014 and 2025. Each chapter provides a snapshot of the plight of liberal education in America. Together, they form a short history of liberal education’s decline and provide a concise case for, and sketch measures essential to, reclaiming it.

The essays clarify liberal education’s aims, structure and content, and spirit by reporting on and assessing events and ideas. They illuminate the stakes for freedom and democratic self-government in America, placing contemporary controversies, especially at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities, in their larger intellectual and political context. And they propose reforms for returning colleges and universities to a mission that best serves the public interest, which is to educate young men and women for the rights and responsibilities of freedom.

Higher educational dysfunction

American campuses suffer from a variety of dysfunctions. A few of the essays in this book examine colleges’ and universities’ curtailment of due process for those accused of sexual misconduct. A number explore colleges’ and universities’ attacks on free speech and their invidious and unlawful allocation of benefits to students and faculty based on race, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and gender. Several deal with colleges’ and universities’ politicization and hollowing of the curriculum. Many of the most recent essays revolve around the surge of antisemitism on campus following Iran-backed Hamas’ October 2023 massacre in southern Israel. These examine the ensuing public reckoning with the sorry condition of American higher education. And they delve into the Trump administration’s clashes with Columbia, Harvard, and other universities over antisemitism; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and free speech and intellectual diversity.

The mounting dysfunction at America’s colleges and universities has created a bizarre situation. The nation’s elite institutions of higher education have gone well beyond leaving many students ignorant of the nation’s founding principles and sustaining political institutions. For some time now, numerous classes, academic writings, and even fields of study have disposed students to despise those principles and institutions.

Definitions

To begin to reclaim liberal education in America, it is useful to recall basic terms and concepts.

Start with “education.” The English word derives from two Latin words, one (educare) meaning to train or to mold and the other (educere) to lead out or to draw out. A well-wrought education does both. It develops habits of mind and character crucial to satisfying the natural desire to understand. It fosters curiosity about the familiar and the far away. It transmits essential knowledge. It enlivens the imagination. It promotes disciplined study, reasoned inquiry, and lively debate. It brings disquieting as well as exciting discoveries. It invites engagement with provocative contentions – those that support our beliefs from unexpected angles as well as those that call into question our favored notions from confounding perspectives. It fortifies the ability to think for oneself, which is inseparable from exchanging opinions with individuals of diverse sentiments and points of view. It makes one more human and more one’s own person.

Liberal education – particular definition

The term “liberal” indicates an education that fosters virtues of freedom and equips students to prosper in and maintain free societies. It hearkens back to the classical curriculum, developed in Greece and Rome and formalized in the Middle Ages, consisting of the quadrivium, which encompasses arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy, and the trivium, which includes grammar, logic, and rhetoric. In its modern form, liberal education presupposes that human beings are by nature free and equal and therefore organizes a community of scholarship, teaching, and learning grounded in toleration, civility, and due process. It cherishes free speech, which not only gives individuals the opportunity to express their opinions but also provides them the chance to listen to other people’s views.

It emancipates students from ignorance and prejudice, but far from equating the past with the superseded and the present with the apex of human achievement, it finds in the inherited treasures of civilization wisdom to guide the improvement of morality and politics in the here and now. It gives pride of place in the curriculum to the principles of political and economic freedom while also exploring the advantages and disadvantages of other forms of government. All the while, liberal education cultivates a lively appreciation of both the fallibility of the human mind and its capacity to overcome biases, correct errors, and form sound opinions. Such an education refines the judgment exercised in pursuing happiness and fulfilling the obligations of self-governing citizens and responsible human beings.

What is America?

“America” identifies the people and the nation for whom the liberal education is primarily intended. In the United States, liberal education is rooted in study of America itself: the nation’s founding principles; constitutional traditions; economic organization; cultural currents; multireligious, multiracial, and multiethnic population; and, not least, citizens’ persistent struggle – from the nation’s birth to the present – to form a more perfect union. This point of departure is sensible because acquisition of moral and political knowledge proceeds best from the local and particular to the general and comprehensive. To understand America well it is necessary to explore Western civilization, in which the nation is rooted. Since understanding one’s country and one’s civilization involves understanding the alternatives, and because understanding oneself is bound up with understanding the variety of ways of being human, liberal education in America must also explore other peoples, nations, and civilizations.

How liberal education in America benefits Americans and foreign students

While liberal education in America as it ought to be prepares students to prosper as free and equal American citizens, it has much to offer and much to receive from students from around the world. Knowledge about America and its experiment in ordered liberty as well as acquaintance with the humanities, social sciences, and sciences will stand students from abroad in good stead – whether they return home or remain in America – as they enter the workforce and launch their adult lives. And the United States benefits from hosting foreign students, both from the distinctive outlooks they bring to campus and from the spirit of America they take back to their home countries.

At the same time, American colleges and universities have no obligation to educate – indeed, they have decisive reasons to deny admissions to – students who despise individual freedom and equality under law, seek to sow discord and undermine America’s political institutions, or serve as spies and collaborate to steal intellectual property.

Proper goals of American liberal education

Liberal education in America ought to advance the public interest in a variety of ways. It ought to equip individuals for self-government in both senses – to master their passions and manage their private affairs, and to contribute to the full range of tasks to which citizenship and democratic politics in a free country give rise. It ought to clarify how American freedom creates the conditions in which liberal education can thrive. It ought to demand accuracy in gathering and rigor in scrutinizing facts – the shameful facts as well as the admirable and inspiring ones – about freedom and democracy in America. And it ought to maintain communities of scholarship, teaching, and learning that carry out their inquiries, conduct their classes, and govern themselves in a manner consistent with the principles of individual freedom and equality under law on which America was founded.

As in “Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America” (2025), my first book with RealClear Publishing, I have lightly edited the columns that comprise this book for clarity and provided footnotes to replace some of the links in the originals. I have for the most part refrained from including footnotes where readers can easily search online for quoted writings based on information supplied in the text.

Acknowledgments

It is a pleasure to again thank the people and the organizations without whom this book would not have seen the light of day or would have appeared but in inferior form. RealClearPolitics Executive Editor Carl Cannon gave me wide latitude to explore liberal education in America, and the RCP editorial team – first Tom Kavanagh and then Cathi Warren and Anne Welty – did their best to ensure that my explorations complied with the requirements of grammar and propriety. The Hoover Institution at Stanford University has provided me a professional home for almost two decades and, from the beginning, Tad and Dianne Taube graciously supported my research and writing. Every essay is better for the attention given to it by my Hoover colleague Emily “Sleevs” Messner. Jacob Leon again provided valuable proofreading services.

This time around so did Eliana Aiken, Meredith Kottom, and Linda Berkowitz. Regular conversations with my friend Stanley Kurtz sharpened my understanding of the pathologies from which our colleges and universities suffer, the standards to which they should aspire, and the reforms best calculated to arrest their decline and reorient them around the imperatives of liberal education. This RCP book, too, was made possible by a generous grant from The Paul E. Singer Foundation.

Disclaimer

Readers may be interested to know that in 2000 I filed a breach-of-contract lawsuit in Massachusetts state court against Harvard University. A brief account of the dispute, a timeline from June 1996 to October 1999, and a variety of pertinent documents can be found here. Let the reader judge.  

This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.