What Universities Owe to the Liberal Project.

• Author: Chamlee-Wright, Emily

We live in an era fraught with challenge. From a global pandemic to rising authoritarianism and a European war, the world is as fundamentally unsettled as it has been in nearly a century. Domestically, Americans face rising levels of polarization and a media and political party system that are increasingly giving attention and power to illiberal movements, both right and left. We are in the throes of difficult policy discussions about race, immigration, housing, and policing, all of which represent challenges and tensions within the liberal order.

Times such as these are both perilous and rich with opportunity, calling us to think more deeply about the world, to confront hard problems, and to be genuinely open to new solutions. How can we learn from what has gone wrong and improve the world for future generations? How can we keep the norms and institutions of a free and tolerant people strong in the face of fresh threats? How can we continue to move the world toward the good society in which all individuals are free to pursue their own self-interest rightly understood, realize their potential, and mutually prosper? And how can we achieve the pluralistic ideal: the rich, intimate sphere of an "us"--family, friends, and our various communities--without resorting to power and without the anxious fear of a "them."

We are called, in other words, to address questions at the heart of the liberal project.

Universities have a unique and essential role to play in this effort. As Johns Hopkins University president Ronald Daniels (2021, x) observes, universities, like a free press and independent judiciary, are "not merely bystander institutions" in a liberal democratic society, "but deeply implicated in, and essential for, its success." In a moment of rising illiberalism and authoritarianism around the world and here at home, universities "cannot be agnostic about, or indifferent to, the vibrancy of liberal democracy" (9). We agree and offer this essay in that same spirit.

Our argument is straightforward. If universities are to have a future as cornerstone institutions of a free society, they must assert their role as caretakers of the liberal project. Our point is not that it would be nice if universities were to play this role. Our point, rather, is an existential one. The future of higher education and the future of the liberal order are inextricably bound to one another. As goes one, so goes the other. Asserting higher education's caretaker role requires that we name and reclaim the modern university's roots within the liberal tradition. It requires that we stop treating the university campus as a battleground in the culture war. And it requires that the university be a site in which liberal concerns and principles are at the table when addressing critical challenges defining the course of the twenty-first century.

Naming and Reclaiming the Liberal Roots of the Modern Academy

Enlightenment-era liberalism launched, imperfectly and inconsistently, a radical notion: that individuals, by default, deserve respect. This default respect translated--again, haltingly and inconsistently--Into liberal democratic freedom. The political liberal ideal constrains government and populist impulses that would otherwise choke the liberties of individuals and minorities who do not hold the reins of power or conform to popular opinion. Liberalism, however, was more than a political apparatus that constrained power. As it evolved, liberalism also became a mindset, a cultural ethos that privileged openness, curiosity, ingenuity, and intellectual humility.

Economic historian Joel Mokyr describes the emergence of this ethos in his account of the Republic of Letters, an international community of scholars, scientists, philosophers, engineers, and literary figures. Beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing through the eighteenth century, this self-organized society knit itself together by exchanging letters, pamphlets, and published papers. Operating outside the reach of state and religious authority, the Republic of Letters advanced an ethos of curiosity, especially a curiosity about the natural world, and an eagerness to put that knowledge to productive use. Such an attitude clashed with the sentiments of the premodern world, in which state and religious authorities conspired to resist intellectual innovation. Mokyr writes, "One common denominator that most citizens of the Republic of Letters (otherwise a diverse and fractious lot) shared was that they recognized their enemies, the opponents of new ideas and pluralism" (2018, 166). It was this ethos, Mokyr argues, that led to Europe's astonishing boom in innovation and progress in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

Further, it was this liberal attitude of intellectual openness and curiosity that fueled the growth of intellectual salons, particularly in France, which in turn advanced Enlightenment ideas. And it was this ethos, paired with a healthy skepticism of authority, especially authority that flexes its power to shut down rather than open up debate and discovery, that eventually developed and advanced the concept of academic freedom. In the...