Campus isn’t Congress - The Jewish Standard

Harvard University’s President Alan Garber recently acknowledged what many have long observed: there are very few conservative voices on his campus. While this admission may seem like a gesture toward balance, it misses the deeper problem. The crisis in academia isn’t about the ratio of progressives to conservatives. It’s about the erosion of the university’s core mission: the pursuit of truth through disciplined, open inquiry.

This wake-up call isn’t an appeal for ideological quotas or token opposition. The university is not a political debate club. It’s the place where young minds are formed by rigorous engagement with complexity, rather than being indoctrinated into any particular creed. The problem today is not that there are too few conservative ideologues to match the progressive ones. The problem is that ideology has overtaken inquiry altogether.

There was a time when students protested against the academic establishment, and that was healthy. It reflected a youthful demand for moral clarity, for responsiveness, for reform. Faculty stood apart from the protests, often defending the norms of scholarship, reason, and institutional order even as they listened and responded. The creative tension between student activism and academic restraint made universities dynamic and intellectually alive.

Today, that dynamic has collapsed. Faculty, administration, and students now often march in lockstep. They share the same political language, the same assumptions, the same enemies. And so, even when student protests cross the line into harassment, disruption, or even violence, there is no counterbalance. No adult supervision. No institutional spine.

When certain minorities — most notably Jews — are singled out for derision, when intimidation on campus becomes normalized, no one steps in. There’s no authority figure willing to say, “Enough.” You get university leaders like Claudine Gay, who famously could not articulate a simple moral stance on whether calling for genocide violates school policy. When even the president of Harvard can’t clearly distinguish between right and wrong, you have to ask: where are the adults in the room?

The role of the university is not to amplify the passions of the crowd, but to temper them with thought, evidence, and discipline. And the role of professors is not to foist their politics on students, but to train them in critical thinking. A good professor should be able to present both sides of a controversial issue with clarity and fairness, such that students genuinely do not know where they personally stand. That is not cowardice, it is pedagogical integrity.

Unfortunately, this ideal is vanishing. More often, professors wear their politics like badges of honor. Courses are designed not to explore complexity but to affirm a moral narrative. Dissent is not merely unwelcome, it is dangerous. And students quickly learn that the way to academic success is not by questioning, but by agreeing.

This phenomenon is not only intellectually dishonest, it is corrosive. A classroom should be a space where ideas are tested, not sanctified. The purpose of higher education is not to produce activists but thinkers. Students must be taught how to evaluate competing claims, how to separate fact from feeling, and how to live in a world where truth is often uncomfortable.

When universities abandon this mission, they lose their credibility. They become partisan institutions, no different from advocacy groups or political parties. And the public takes notice. Trust in higher education is declining — not because Americans don’t value knowledge, but because they see the system trading its scholarly integrity for ideological conformity.

The solution is not simply to hire more conservatives. The solution is to restore academic open-mindedness as a fundamental virtue. That means defending intellectual diversity, not as a political gesture but as an academic necessity. It means teaching students that serious thought requires wrestling with uncomfortable ideas. And it means insisting that universities rise above the culture war, rather than becoming a battlefield in it.

Let politicians do politics. Let the ivory tower remember its purpose: not to preach, but to teach. Not to incite, but to enlighten. Not to echo the passions of the age, but to challenge them in the name of truth.

Daniel Friedman of Teaneck is a professor of political science at Touro University.

Opinion

comments