Our Universities are the Crown Jewels of Civilization

And the barbarians are coming for them

OUR UNIVERSITIES ARE THE CROWN JEWELS OF CIVILIZATION

And the barbarians are coming for them

Glenn Loury

Editors’ note: This essay began as remarks made by Prof. Loury at an event at his home institution, Brown University. This is an edited and expanded transcript of those remarks.

At what point did higher education lose the general public, and why? I don’t know the answer to that question. It seeped away by degrees. We didn’t get here in a day.

What is clear now, however, is that the barbarians are at the gates, and the crown jewels of civilization are in their sights. “We’re gonna bring down Harvard, we’re gonna bring down Columbia, we’re gonna bring them to their knees, we’re gonna cut off their funding”—what kind of funding are they talking about? They’re not cutting off the Middle East Studies Department. They’re cutting off the School of Engineering, they’re cutting off the Physics Department, they’re cutting off the people who’re generating the big grant money from the federal government—the healthcare and sciences and so forth.

So, what’s the argument in favor of such cuts? “They’re woke.” As if there were no wisdom in a critical engagement with society. As if the intellectual function was purely to be in the service of whatever populist mantra is gaining public assent in the moment. “They’re woke.” I think it is mischievous in the extreme for these guys to go through the precious crown jewels of our civilization with a sledge hammer.

Now, I’m not going to call them fascist; that would be too facile. But Christopher Rufo deposes the president of Harvard University with a tweet? I don’t have a brief for Claudine Gay as a great intellectual paragon. But I say Harvard University is a crown jewel of human civilization on this planet today. Deposing Gay with tweets? It’s beneath contempt.

So—you want to sneer at the universities? This is where the mastery of our intellectual inheritance resides. You’re going to give them the back of your hand? You don’t know what the eff you’re talking about. You don’t know what you’re doing.

So, to return to the initial question: When did higher education lose the general public? I don’t know. But is there blame enough to go around? Yes.

However it’s worth pointing out that I was against shouting down Ray Kelly when he came here to speak at Brown. I don’t think federal judges should be prevented from speaking at Stanford Law School because they’re conservatives. But there were not enough faculty like me to prevent these outrages. And the examples could be multiplied.

Moreover, many people think we’re arrogant, supercilious, smug, self-satisfied, so sure of ourselves. I think there’s merit in Michael Sandel’s critique of merit. I think the academic know-it-alls—when they lord it over people, when they tell them they’re getting what they deserve, when they tell them they need to learn how to use a laptop, and so on—cultivate the reaction of contempt that they have to live with afterwards. I think there’s some of that.

The results are easy to see. Who wants to go around campaigning for the cancellation of student loans now? Who wants to defund the police? Who wants to say looting is okay? The people who said and did those things helped to contribute to the environment that we find ourselves in right now. They played a part in cultivating this reaction. But it is a reaction. It’s the barbarians at the gates. They’re rummaging through our precious crown jewels of intellectual achievement, and they need to be stopped.

So, yes, we made this bed that we’re lying in to some degree. The arrogance and the know-it-all-ism and the contempt for a heterodox opinion.

Now, as I implied above, I plead not guilty to that charge, and there are countless professors like me. I have been speaking up in heterodox ways for a long time, and I encourage it in my classes. I think students take my classes in part because they know that there’s going to be a safe environment to be able to have more than one opinion. And I try to model this in my own intellectual practice. The basic idea is humility. I don’t know everything. Let me listen. Let me hear what other people have to say.

I used to teach a seminar called Free Inquiry in the Modern World. It was all about the foundation. Plato. John Stuart Mill. John Milton. Even Alan Bloom. And the point was to explore a problem. The problem is that you say in public what you think about something controversial and people will harbor estimates of your character based upon your willingness to speak that way. And you know that this is the case. And everybody knows that you know that this is the case. And that’s a game that has equilibria that are characterized by you not saying what you really think. Because the only people willing to say what they really think are people who are known to have socially unacceptable views, associated with antisemitism or racism or sexism. As a result, you won’t say what you think about this or that because you don’t want to be thought to be that kind of person. You end up with a situation in which nobody who is not that kind of person, but who nonetheless thinks this discredited thought, is willing to say what they think. The incentives work to make that a stable arrangement. That’s a problem. I’ve called it the problem of self-censorship.

I want my students to see how the problem of self-censorship works so they can circumvent it and not let it spoil the precious opportunity that we have to learn from each other in a seminar where we’re talking about complicated and controversial and sensitive matters. We want them to be able to know that the collective outcome of conversation is spoiled to the extent that the individuals in the conversation are cowed into silence.

I teach this, I preach this. I try to exemplify it in my own practice. Countless other professors conduct themselves similarly. As I said, there is blame to go around for the public’s loss of confidence in higher education. But we must not allow ourselves to be talked into forgetting that our universities and the experts that they house are devoted to conserving, curating, transmitting, and augmenting the traditions of philosophical inquiry, literary and artistic expression, and scientific discovery that make up our civilization. As such, our universities are the crown jewels of our civilization.

Yet here we are in 2025 and “the chickens are coming home to roost” in that crown. What we’re talking about, of course, is Christopher Rufo. I mean no disrespect—he’s a journalist, and he’s been very successful as an activist. The governor of Florida has recruited him to be an advisor about changes to the state’s higher education system. I don’t mean to be personal; it’s not personal. But he can’t carry the book-bag, intellectually speaking, of some of these professors whose research he is disrupting, perhaps fatally disrupting in some cases. So, if we allow his voice to be determinative of what’s happening in our institutions, if we allow his vision for higher education to define the future of our universities in this country, then we’ll have a much bigger problem to contend with than “wokeness.”

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Glenn C. Loury is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences and Professor of Economics at Brown University. As an academic economist, Professor Loury has published mainly in the areas of applied microeconomic theory, game theory, industrial organization, natural resource economics, and the economics of race and inequality. As a prominent social critic and public intellectual, writing mainly on the themes of racial inequality and social policy, Professor Loury has published over 200 essays and reviews in journals of public affairs in the U.S. and abroad.

His books include One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America (The Free Press, 1995); The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Harvard University Press, 2002, reissued in 2021 with a new preface); Ethnicity, Social Mobility and Public Policy: Comparing the US and the UK (ed., with Tariq Modood and Steven M. Teles, Cambridge University Press, 2005); and Race, Incarceration and American Values (M.I.T. Press, 2008). His latest book is his memoir, Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative (W. W. Norton & Company, 2024). His forthcoming book, Self-Censorship, will appear with Polity in July of this year.

Glenn’s first essay for the Journal of Free Black Thought was our inaugural essay. His most recent was “The Case for Black Patriotism,” published in November of last year. Other essays in JFBT include “The Ghost in the Machine” and “What’s at stake in the ‘Conversation about Race’ that I’ve been having with John McWhorter?”