Guest essay: A liberal academic tells what’s wrong with liberal academics, and newsrooms

By Johnathan Zimmerman

Earlier this month, I read the single sharpest criticism of the American university I’ve encountered in many years. And it wasn’t even about the American university.

It’s an essay that appeared in the Economist by former The New York Times opinion editor James Bennet, who was forced out in 2020 after he published an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) calling for the use of the military against violent protesters. Bennet ran the op-ed not because he agreed with it (he didn’t) but because he believed the newspaper had a duty to provoke debate, and — most of all — because he thought his readers could come to reasoned conclusions about it.

That’s the foundation of the small-l liberal creed: Since none of us has a monopoly on truth, we need to let everyone determine it on their own. But in the era of Donald Trump, who thinks he’s right about everything, journalists started to imitate him. They knew the truth, especially about Trump, and their job was to make sure other people knew it, as well.

I’ve seen the same trend play out in higher education, ever since Trump’s surprise presidential victory in 2016. Faced with an existential threat to our democracy, we can no longer indulge the liberal ideal of debate across our differences. What’s to debate, really? Trump is wrong … and we are right. Get with the program.

Full disclosure: I detest Donald Trump. Like the vast majority of college professors, I’m a Democrat. I disagree with Trump about immigration, abortion, and almost every other major political issue. And I remain outraged by his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

But I don’t try to impose my views of Trump — or of anything else — upon my students. My job is to help them arrive at their own reasoned view of the world, which might not accord with mine. And like Bennet, I thought my institution had the same goal.

We were wrong. The small-l liberal principle is no longer dominant at our universities, any more than it is at our newspapers.

I realized that something important had changed a few years ago, during a chat with a fellow education professor about the term Latinx. He argued that schools should teach students to use that word instead of Latino or Latina — which are gendered — or Hispanic, which connotes Spanish colonization.

I told him that I understood why he favored the new term, as do many other academics. And surely, I added, everyone should have the right to describe their backgrounds with whatever words they choose.

But most Americans who descend from Latin America don’t endorse — or even recognize — the term Latinx, as a 2020 Pew survey confirmed. I asked my colleague if that made him doubt whether we should tell students to use it.

“Not at all,” he replied. “It just shows how much work we have to do.”

That might seem like a small matter, but it speaks volumes about our moment. If we know what’s good — and bad — why pretend otherwise? We should tell it like it is, so our students get on board. We have so much work to do.

Affirmative action? Good. Gender-affirming medical care? Also good. The border wall is bad. And so is anything else associated with You Know Who.

And if you demur, you are a bigot. Ditto for anyone who provides a “platform” — that is, airtime — to the haters, which places their targets in danger.

That’s what Bennet was told when he ran the op-ed by Cotton. The next day, the Times’ writers’ union declared that Cotton’s op-ed was “a clear threat to the health and safety of the journalists we represent.”

In the heat of the moment, Bennet apologized for the “pain” he had caused them. But now he regrets that statement, as he wrote in the Economist. “Opinion journalism that never causes pain is not journalism,” Bennet explained. “It can’t hope to move society forward.”

His comment reflects another founding premise of small-l liberalism: The best route to progress is a full and free dialogue — even when it hurts. In a democracy, we can’t make anything better unless we can talk to each other. We need to trust that messy and difficult discussions will yield a more just, fair, and informed outcome than anything that you — or I — can imagine on our own.

And when journalists stop trusting the public, the public stops trusting them. The same goes for our universities, which have lost much of the popular admiration they used to enjoy.

That’s not because we harbor legions of hateful antisemites, as Republican lawmakers told three university presidents at a congressional hearing earlier this month. It’s because we have framed the world as a contest between love and hate, with good people on one side and bad on the other. The essential purpose of universities — and of newspapers — is to question everything. We can’t do that well if we’re also giving the answers.

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Johnathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania.