I began life in a Michigan college town, and I may spend the rest of it in another one. It surprises me to put the matter this way, because the two places do not seem similar: Alma, a small town far too vulnerable to globalization and deindustrialization, and Ann Arbor, a rich city that seems, at first glance, far too insulated from everything. One of Michigan’s lovable qualities, of course, is its tendency to transform across relatively small distances: the beach towns to the west seem to belong to another order of things than the picturesque or dingy farm towns only so many miles to the interior, the Upper Peninsula constitutes its own multiple worlds, and so on. Still, the two towns feel particularly dissimilar. You could reduce them to battling stock personages in any number of morality plays: red vs. blue America, insular past vs. centerless future, one awful phase of capitalism vs. some later awful phase of it. At least, you could do that until very recently—less than a year ago, as I write this. Now, as we’ll see, they face the same axe.
“College town” is one of those terms that is useful because it’s somewhat empty. Or, more generously, it’s a handle for many sorts of cargo. Historian Blake Gumprecht, setting out to survey The American College Town in his 2008 study by that name, suggests that the name properly applies to any school where “the number of four-year college students equals at least 20 percent of a town’s population.”11xBlake Gumprecht, The American College Town (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 2. Gumprecht admits that this cutoff is “arbitrary.” The next scholarly book that I was able to find on the subject uses a somewhat more expansive definition:
Traditionally, Americans have viewed college towns as one of three principal kinds or a combination of the three. The first is a campus closely connected to a city or town and within its boundaries. In the second, the campus “is located next to a city or town but remains somewhat separate from it.” In the view of architect William Rawn, Yale would be an example of the first type, and the University of Virginia, on the edge of Charlottesville, of the second. Finally, perhaps the most common type of college town is one in which the college or university may be near a locality yet essentially unconnected to it. Duke and Rice Universities are offered by Rawn as examples of this model.22xJames Martin, James E. Samels and Associates, The New American College Town (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019), 3.
To which I say: Rice? Rice in Houston? That Rice? If the biggest city in Texas is a “college town,” then everywhere is. Better to be a little arbitrary.
The Pervading Life
Between the too-arbitrary and the too-expansive, there is the conveniently vague. For Wikipedia, the college town is one where an institution of higher learning “pervades” the life of the place. Good enough. I like this verb, “pervade.” In cities or towns that have enough other things going on—places we wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, call “college towns”—it’s rather the place that pervades the school. The Twin Cities, where I used to live, pervade the University of Minnesota and Macalester College; they pervade Hamline and Bethel and St. Thomas and Metro State. Grand Rapids pervaded Calvin University, where I did my undergrad, just as Milwaukee and Columbia pervaded Marquette and the University of South Carolina, respectively, where I acquired the qualifications that are supposed to license me to teach undergraduates in my own right. (At Marquette, we liked to scare ourselves by reminding one another of the campus’s proximity to one of Jeffrey Dahmer’s last known residences.) Duke University does not quite pervade Durham, where I used to live, to the extent that the University of North Carolina, where my wife used to work, does Chapel Hill. To return to my two starting examples, the University of Michigan has satellite campuses in Flint and Dearborn, although it likes to forget this fact at budgeting time. It does not, however, pervade these cities, whereas it absolutely suffuses Ann Arbor. What suffused Alma, in my childhood, was the smell of the Pine River and the stench of the Total Petroleum refinery, but with the latter shut down, I assume only river and college remain.
What is it like to be pervaded by a college? Alma College is a prototypical small liberal-arts college, or SLAC: founded in the late nineteenth century, a vestigially Protestant institution still somewhat attached to a mainline denomination (the Presbyterian Church, USA). It has a pretty campus with a decent amount of green space, human-scale class sizes, and a handful of reasonably famous alums. The only SLAC-standard quality it misses is a rumored former Underground Railroad stop, such as you would find at Knox College or Oberlin—both the town and the college came along too late for that.
My impression is that it’s an excellent school, slightly overpriced for the location. The only parts of Alma College that I can really vouch for are the library, where I first read about the films of Akira Kurosawa, and the bookstore, where I bought a tape of the self-titled third Velvet Underground album, far too young in both cases, and therefore at the perfect time. In the summers, its weight room was so easy for us local high schoolers to sneak into that I suspect the ease was intentional on someone’s part—another small act of gown-to-town benevolence. I never paid tuition to the place, but for these reasons, I will die in a minor and unpayable sort of debt to it. At its best, the small college in a small college town functions this way for the nonstudent residents, as a slightly mysterious world within the world that, while pursuing its own ends, expands everyone’s sense of what is possible. The college calendar makes a pleasant polyrhythm against the calendar of the seasons, the schedule of the high-school football team, and the motorik pulse of daily nine-to-five town life.
Someone Else’s Utopia
For this to happen at all, the college has to be its own distinct place, present and familiar but in some ways opaque. The small liberal-arts college, whatever else it is, is always the hopelessly scrambled remains of someone else’s Utopia. It’s a carved-out community where a group of students and teachers try to figure out what it would mean to give some transcendent idea—Plato’s forms, Calvin’s God, Newton’s law-abiding universe, the revivalist blessed community of the early-nineteenth-century abolitionists—its proper place in daily life. Some utopias would secede from the wider world if they could, while others hope to save that world by applying the pressure of their own example. In America, especially the utopia-mad America of the nineteenth century, the second instinct has dominated. Eugene M. Lang describes the founding of early American SLACs as follows:
Liberal arts colleges—like many other colleges and universities—have their philosophical roots in a tradition that began in New England over three hundred years ago with the establishment of the first enclaves for educating privileged white males. Their select young students were groomed in a tightly disciplined Anglo-Saxon educational tradition that was presumed to instill qualifications for leadership of a theocratic community. While imparting knowledge, their academic regimen was also intended to develop personal character and intellect—to turn out what continues to be confusingly styled “the whole person,” prepared to function knowledgeably within a framework of civic responsibility.33xEugene M. Lang, “Distinctively American: The Liberal Arts College,” Daedalus, vol. 128, no. 1 (133–50), 134.
This is not my idea of Utopia—I do not wish to be governed exclusively by whites, men, white men, or any other such demographic sliver, nor to have a state religion. But at least it is an ethos. The otherworldly character of the liberal-arts college’s mission is obvious enough here: young Puritan theocrats studying, among others, older Puritan theocrats so that they can responsibly govern a Puritan theocracy. We are talking about shining cities on hills here. The SLAC makes up one component in a uniquely American fusion of utopianism as a tool of social reform, education as a tool of social mobility, and free real estate.
We know what can happen when elites with a sense of mission are brought together and left unchecked. At best, they may develop into high-minded public servants blinkered, to one degree or another, by privilege. At worst, they maraud, they rampage, and they are insufferably pretentious about it. A place that sets out to be Utopia risks being dystopia more, perhaps, than other places do.
Cynicism is easy. But what is cynicism to make of, say, Berea College: established by radicals, open to white women and students of color before the Civil War had even finished, tuition-free to those students who accept work-study jobs? Online, one can find scattered complaints of “white savior mentality” among the professors and not-so-scattered complaints about the town’s lack of amusements. Having grown up in a town of a similar size, I don’t doubt that Berea bores some of its inhabitants silly. But it is, in the deepest sense, not only not boring but also positively entrancing that Americans in the nineteenth century created a place set aside for the liberal education of poor and marginalized people, and that Americans in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries continue to sustain it in the face of a cultural consensus increasingly hostile both to the whole idea of liberal education and to the whole idea of poor people.
Town-and-Gown Tension
Still, where there is distinction, there is the possibility of conflict. Thus, the famous town-gown tension, which, historically speaking, alters completely in meaning without fully going away. A nonstudent living in medieval Oxford would have valid reasons for regarding the students as an oppressor class. Students in those days carried on like outlaw biker gangs.44xAn overview of recent research can be found in Sam Knight, “Medieval Oxford’s Murder Rate,” The New Yorker, March 12, 2024; https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-the-uk/medieval-oxfords-murder-problem. The college boys of the old Confederacy furnish some of American history’s most colorful and regrettable examples here. Writing in 1928 about the early years of Athens, Georgia, and the University of Georgia, Ellis Merton Coulter declares:
[I]t was only natural that the boys of considerable wealth, the sons of planters, predominated and gave the school its outstanding character. The student’s almost unrestricted control of money added much to make him ungovernable. He could snap his fingers at fines, and always have enough money left to buy anything Athens had to sell.55xEllis Merton Coulter, College Life in the Old South (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1928), 90, 106, 123, 130, 334, passim.
These are the same students Coulter has already described, variously pelting faculty with stones, driving terrified women and children out of a temperance meeting, and provoking duels. “The rule barring Negroes from the campus was most likely the only one the students assisted the faculty in enforcing,” he writes elsewhere, and, late in the book, he describes faculty and students coming together to repress “a group of Negroes” who sought to attend classes, whom he portrays as having been inflamed by the Freedman’s Bureau. Here, as in an action movie, two groups shown throughout the book as rivals—faculty and students—team up against a common enemy. In this way, Culture and Tradition must often bring former foes together to repress decency and common sense. I searched Coulter’s book in vain for terms such as “rape” and for period-appropriate euphemisms like “outrage.” Perhaps nineteenth-century University of Georgia boys conducted themselves better than any other group of frequently drunken young rich boys, let alone frequently drunken young sons of the plantation, have ever done. Or perhaps this sort of violence would have ruined Coulter’s presentation of Old South college boys as high-spirited but essentially noble Cavaliers.66xAn altogether more winning side of Athens, Georgia—as the bohemian paradise that spawned R.E.M., the B-52s, Pylon, Oh-OK, and other great post-punk bands—may be seen in historian Grace Elizabeth Hale’s affectionate study Cool Town: How Athens, Georgia, Launched Alternative Music and Changed American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).
As a kid, I learned about town-gown tension from the movie Breaking Away (1979), in which Indiana University frat boys have nothing better to do than start riots with the town boys and everyone is inexplicably devoted to bicycle racing. As a sports movie, a romantic comedy, and a bildungsroman, and as a testament to the odd, flat beauty of the Midwest, Breaking Away holds up fabulously and always will. Nobody should mistake it for a sociological treatise.77xIndiana journalists have a lot of fun with this topic, as they should. See, for example, Mike Leonard, “How True Was Breaking Away?,” Bloom Magazine, March 8, 2018; https://www.magbloom.com/2018/03/blooms-greatest-hits-how-true-was-breaking-away/. I read the college boys in the movie as almost exact stand-ins for the meanest of my middle-school classmates and never noted the contradiction. The kids who most plagued me were not necessarily college bound—although, at that age, I didn’t think that I was, either.
There must have been town-gown tension between the place where I grew up and the liberal-arts college I didn’t go to, but it was off my radar. The one incident I remember sharply is far more ambiguous in its implications than “the townies were uncivilized” or “the students were snobby.” Like many of the most pleasant memories I have of my adolescence, it involves a gas station more or less right in the middle of town, where, I know not how, one of the smart, underachieving stoners of my acquaintance found a job as a cashier. He promptly secured a job for another smart, underachieving stoner, whereupon the place became, for months, until management cracked down, an intellectual and cultural salon for my town’s smart, underachieving stoners and also their goody-goody churchgoing friends who did not smoke. You would drink fountain soda at employee-discount rates while listening to David Bowie and Phish on the tape player: What, if you had no girlfriend, could be more urgent than this?
One night, I was having a heart-to-heart with yet another of these fellows, a talented visual artist who looked like Let It Be–era John Lennon after a good shave, when a group of college-age women we didn’t know—therefore, students—walked past us. They were loud, probably drunk. One of them turned and looked at us, flashed us her rear, then kept on walking, without addressing a word to us.
What did this gesture mean? Contempt was encoded in it, obviously. (Only in male fantasy and pop culture—but I repeat myself—could mooning qualify as flirtation.) Two teenagers with nowhere more interesting to sit on a weekend evening than the stoop outside a gas station: Let us remind them of what they will never have access to. We looked, to them, like people who at best would study accounting at Davenport University, or “business” at Lansing Community College, or who would answer one of those once-ubiquitous TV ads imploring us to enjoy the freedom of the independent trucker. These young women, hemmed in on all sides by the threat of male sexual violence, wanted a safe way to test the boundaries of that hemming-in and correctly judged the two of us as no threat to the four of them: That is a somewhat more sympathetic, Dworkinite reading of the situation, and probably true. But either way, the gesture was baldly classist, an exercise of power. There is no reading of it that is not an insult; you can make it somewhat better only by thinking of it as misdirected revenge on the many guys who had probably insulted them.
On this score, I’m not sure our flasher was successful. My friend’s response to her briefly visible, panty-clad buttocks was one of the most emotional displays I have ever seen, so total as to make one question the idea that even the rawest physical desire is necessarily simple or shallow. For a moment, he was wonder-struck and said nothing, merely looked at me as though we had both just seen a UFO and he needed me to confirm it. Then, long after the women had walked away, he began to apostrophize them, in a voice as full of longing as Hank Williams’s: “Please come back. I’ll pay you. I have a bag of weed in my pocket,” and so on. There are many ways to expand a person’s sense of what’s possible.
In this moment, I knew myself, really for the first time, as a townie. Within a few years, I had already shaken off that identity. So, I think, did my friend. It takes all the sting out of being a townie when it is an option rather than a fate. We, like untold millions of others, were both able to move back and forth between town and gown because Americans effected a fundamental change in our sense of who college is for. What is most striking about the threefold typology of American college students offered in Helen Horowitz’s much-cited Campus Life (1987) is that, today, most college students are—her word—“outsiders”:
The term college life has conventionally been used to denote the undergraduate subculture presumably shared by all students. My study clarifies that college life, in fact, is and has been the world of only a minority of students.88xHelen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York, NY: Knopf, 1987), x.
The earliest American college students were, to use Horowitz’s term, “college men”—basically, rich boys—gradually joined, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, by “outsiders” and “rebels.” Horowitz rather diplomatically describes the reaction of the “college men” to this incursion:
They have perceived the especially diligent student as the “grind” and the student seeking faculty friendship as the “fisherman” or “brownnose.” Such terms of derogation have been necessary because college life has always had to contend with a significant number of students who have wanted no part of it—the outsiders. To the early colleges came some men for whom higher education was intended, those studying for the ministry. By the early nineteenth century their numbers increased, as poor men, often in their twenties, came off the farm, fired by the ambition to become ministers. Either by inclination or out of fear, the future ministers avoided the hedonism and violence of their rowdy classmates.… College was for them not a time for fun, but a period of preparation for a profession. They focused on academic, not extracurricular, success; sought the approval of their teachers; and hoped, by dint of hard work, that achievement in the future would compensate for the trials of the present.99xIbid., 13–14.
To me, the whole purpose of college is to serve these “outsiders.” The world of the “college men,” as Horowitz defines it, has seemed vestigial, or, at worst—at “Greek-or-geek” schools, where the “geeks” are nevertheless so numerous that you barely need to bother with the Greeks—avoidable. The point of campus life, as I know it, is everything that lies outside the scope of campus life as Horowitz defines it.
That’s because, in the nineteenth century, the outsiders (and, later, the bohemians) overwhelmed the “college men,” in school and out of it. Colleges themselves played an essentially honorable role in this story—or, at least, what is dishonorable about their role comes from a failure to completely fulfill it. Marilynne Robinson describes this change in eulogistic but fundamentally accurate language:
Liberal education was for a very long time reserved to an elite—whence the word “liberal,” befitting free men—who were a small minority in Western societies. Gradually, except by the standards of the world at large, Americans began democratizing privilege. As Tocqueville remarks, heaven shares out by chance those high gifts of intellect and culture that had previously been associated arbitrarily with status and advantage, which are now manifest as a vastly more generous endowment. We need only allow the spread of learning to see the potential for brilliance in humankind.1010xMarilynne Robinson, “Save Our Public Universities,” Harper’s, March 2016; https://harpers.org/archive/2016/03/save-our-public-universities/.
That’s one way to put it. Another way to put it is that America tried, for a brief moment, to build a welfare state—which is to say, a democratic civilization—and we did a lot of it through our schools. When the tide of opinion turned against welfare states, the school-based parts of our system were the only parts that were widely enough used to survive. Rich and middle-class voters could decide, case by case, how they felt about labor unions, food stamps, social housing, but they needed, or wanted, college for their children.
Public universities seem to have a far more straightforwardly utilitarian relationship to the communities around them than do SLACs. They admit and employ a much larger number of people, including local people; they often have historical links to local farmers through extension programs and the like; they need local people to buy season tickets to their football games. And the result in every place I have lived—paradoxically enough—is that town-gown tension is worse when the town surrounds a large public university rather than an SLAC.1111xThe so-called Research Triangle of Durham, Raleigh, and Chapel Hill may be the exception here: Duke is no one’s idea of a great neighbor, whereas a public university like North Carolina Central is hard for anyone to dislike.
This perception struck me as so paradoxical that I thought I had better test it against other people’s organized perceptions, a.k.a. research by specialists. This could, after all, just be another facet of the so-called “Michigan difference.” The Princeton Review no longer updates its list of universities with the worst town-gown relations, but they have continued to compile a list of schools where town-gown relations are “great.” No single category of school predominates. There are private research universities, small and large private colleges, more- and less-selective public land-grant schools, and military academies, including the United States Naval Academy, which beats everybody. But when SLACs such as Wheaton College (#3) and Assumption University (#5) are combined with smaller, private, selective, and liberal-arts-focused universities like Emory (#9) and Texas Christian (#15), they do just slightly predominate: fourteen out of twenty-five schools. Eight of the slots go to land-grant public schools, including Kansas State (#2), Auburn (#4), and a certain Ohio entity that the University of Michigan would fire me for naming in such a positive context (#24). (The other three are military schools.)
I don’t know whether this constitutes strong enough numerical evidence to justify turning my little observation into a full-blown hypothesis.1212xYou may do your own math here: https://www.princetonreview.com/college-rankings/?rankings=town-gown-relations-are-great. If I were to do so, it would run something like this: People expect a relatively small, selective, and liberal-arts-focused school to be a little weird. But the land-grant college or public university offers itself up as a public service, and is judged, probably unfairly, by different rules; meanwhile, it also crosses into more people’s daily lives more often and more dramatically, and thus offers itself up to be judged. Anthropologists have a useful term, “schismogenesis,” for that tendency of human beings to define ourselves by exaggerating and accentuating our differences from a nearby “other,” often two-thirds imaginary. The University of Michigan gives nonstudent Ann Arborites a lot more opportunities, on an average day, to prop up a flagging ego with a little schismogenesis than Alma College does to Almanians.
Not that there aren’t great reasons to dislike the University of Michigan. As a nontenured lecturer at that school, I am always proud to be associated with my own students and with the other members of my union, with almost all of my tenure-track colleagues, with the staffers who help me at the library or schedule my classes or clean the rooms I teach in or sell me the coffee that (mostly) keeps me from glitching out while I teach, and even with those members of the administration whose offices are humble and public-facing enough that a nontenured lecturer like me has met them. Mostly, day-to-day, I am surrounded by diligent and principled public servants. I am also constantly embarrassed by the people who run the place—the regents and the very top tier of administration.1313xOn former University of Michigan president Santa J. Ono, see, for example, David Jesse and Jack Stripling, “He Wanted a Presidency. He Became a Pariah,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 12, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/he-wanted-a-presidency-he-became-a-pariah?sra=true; and Silke-Maria Weineck, “The Ruination of Santa Ono,” Chronicle of Higher Education, June 4, 2025, https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-ruination-of-santa-ono. Regarding our Board of Regents, see, for example, the University of Michigan Faculty Senate, “SACUA Letter Re: Dawson Termination/Regental Overreach,” January 24, 2025, https://facultysenate.umich.edu/sacua-letter-re-dawson-termination-regental-overreach/; and Quin Zapoli, “The Board of Regents Doesn’t Represent UMich Stakeholders; It’s Time They Do,” The Michigan Daily, February 8, 2022, https://www.michigandaily.com/opinion/columns/the-board-of-regents-doesnt-represent-umich-stakeholders-its-time-they-do/. Regarding former University of Michigan president Mark Schlissel, see, for example, Phil Christman, “The Embarrassingly Banal Fall of a University President,” The Real News Network, January 18, 2022; https://therealnews.com/opinion-the-embarrassingly-banal-fall-of-a-university-president. Regarding the whole lot, see Tom Perkins, “University of Michigan Using Undercover Investigators to Surveil Student Gaza Protestors,” The Guardian, June 6, 2025; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/06/michigan-university-gaza-surveillance. It baffles and enrages me that so much talent and earnestness comes together to create a student culture full of harried young people who let ChatGPT do all their homework for them because they don’t think they have time to get the education they pay for, but who also cut themselves or spiral into depression because they fail a test. It takes more than human ingenuity to make so little of so much. One is tempted to resort to demonology to explain it.
That’s how I feel on bad days. On good days, I feel as though I live in the place that the talented young writer Emily Zhou described to me in an interview:
Ann Arbor was a counterculture hub in the past. This is now part of the official story the town tells itself, but some leavings of that moment are still alive and genuinely felt radical in a non-recuperable way while I lived there—mostly the cultural rather than the political vestiges.… It felt like the U of M—particularly the music school—was full of people who were tinkering with art at varying levels of seriousness, trying to make it more anarchic and participatory. There was a lot of earnest dilettantism that was occasionally bursting into brilliance, and people had the patience for everything. I lived in student co-operative housing and later with a cadre of artists and composers who put on shows in the living room—one time I subjected an audience of maybe a dozen people to an hour of microtonal organ drone, stuff like that. Sometimes bands would play, sometimes noisy stuff, sometimes more unclassifiable works. In the same house a few years before I moved in, my brilliant friends Grey and Karl staged a production of Einstein on the Beach, a gargantuan, quixotic task that a lot of very talented people—singers and an organist from the music school, dancers—participated in with total seriousness and dedication.1414xPhil Christman, “Interview With Emily Zhou,” The Tourist, December 16, 2023; https://philipchristman.substack.com/p/interview-with-emily-zhou-about-girlfriends. The student production of Einstein on the Beach, an opera by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, that Zhou mentions can be seen here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtA79lg2VuY.
“Earnest dilettantism.” “Patience for everything.” “Gargantuan” and “quixotic” projects done “with total seriousness and dedication.” When a college town lives up to its potential, these are its hallmarks.
In any case, the biggest source of tension between the University of Michigan and its surrounding town is housing. The University of Michigan would like there to be more of it. So would the majority of Ann Arborites, many of them, after all, University of Michigan employees or students who find the city unaffordable. A well-organized minority opposes the building projects that would change this situation, because those projects would lower their property values. They diligently phrase their objections in terms that feel vaguely left coded, complaining that, for example, development pits “out-of-town landlords” against the city, when in fact it pits out-of-town corporate landlords against local landlords. It amuses me that this conflict involves the very trait in which this particular town and this particular gown most resemble each other: the shared desire to appear liberal and public-spirited without bearing the costs and inconveniences of liberality and public-spiritedness.
SLACs have been, for some time, regarded as something of an endangered species. They are threatened by America’s slowing birthrate and, probably more so, by the idea, general among students and promoted by politicians as disparate as Donald Trump and Barack Obama, that liberal-arts degrees don’t work out economically. That this idea may not be true doesn’t stop anyone from repeating it.1515xSee, for example, Dick Startz of the Brookings Institution—hardly a bastion of woolly-minded bohemians, at least by reputation—“Don’t Knock the Economic Value of Majoring in the Liberal Arts,” Brookings Institution, December 4, 2023; https://www.brookings.edu/articles/dont-knock-the-economic-value-of-majoring-in-the-liberal-arts/. But now, unbelievably, the same massive, STEM-oriented, Pentagon-collaborating, corporate-intern-providing universities that a liberal humanist might be tempted to assail face lawsuits and cuts from Washington. I am forced to realize that I want these institutions around to be mad at. The Americans who voted for these cuts may, eventually, be forced to realize the same thing, but we probably shouldn’t wait around for it.
It is conventional, in an essay of this sort, to turn and blame the thing one wishes to defend for its role in its own ongoing destruction. I don’t think this will wash. Voters who will wreck the sources of their own prosperity are probably not much influenced by anything universities do or do not do. In particular, universities cannot truckle to Donald Trump and remain universities, and even if they tried, they would simply further arouse his fury. My own university, which bragged of its DEI programs for ten years and then promptly cut them when Trump arrived in the White House, is a case in point: It is not as if he is any less inclined to kick us now that we have shown him our belly.
But it is nevertheless true that the liberal-arts college, small or huge, is an essentially humanist enterprise, and that too many of the people who run them have been cowards about admitting it. “Humanism” is most definitely an open thing. It can be Catholic-inflected, Protestant-flavored, Hindu, Stoic. Albert Camus, facing down Nazi occupation and meaninglessness with the same beautifully absurd courage, was a humanist; so was Marx, despite his youthful flirtation with that provincial nineteenth-century superstition known as naturalism; so was Thomas Aquinas; so was Kate Millett; so was bell hooks (a Berea professor). But it is not a meaningless term, either. Richard Dawkins, despite his nostalgic admiration for church buildings, is not a humanist: Nobody who wants you to feel inferior to a bacterium qualifies. Adam Smith, whose free-market economics was part of a more general inquiry into human drives and motives, was a humanist, but James Buchanan, who thought that the “public good” was a manipulative fiction, was not. Charles Darwin sometimes was and sometimes was not, while Herbert Spencer was more consistent: He was always on the wrong side of the line. B.F. Skinner was so anti-humanist as to make a kind of joke of himself.
Briefly, anyone who offers an account of human knowing and being in which we are not comparable in some ways to but actually reducible to machines is not a humanist. Nor is anyone who denies our potential for good, whether by adopting a Schopenhauerian disgust with people as such or by denying the meaningfulness of the distinction between good and evil themselves. Liberal education doesn’t absolutely require political liberalism, but it requires that you think there is such a thing as “freedom,” that it is a thing people rightly aspire to, and that you acknowledge the existence of “people.” It’s a project fundamentally charged with moral language—we educate to liberate, to free our students and ourselves at least from untruths and from the tyranny of the present—and it can’t really be contributed to by people who think those words mean nothing. It can be fruitfully carried on for decades by people who disagree fundamentally, between each other, about what they mean. But every intellectual who denies the meaning of either is, whatever their credentials, fundamentally anti-intellectual. They are just as much a traitor to the humanist enterprise as the professor who uses ChatGPT to write his prompts or his handouts.
To save liberal education requires, finally, that we reckon with the deep-seated anti-intellectualism of our common life. It seems quixotic to write against anti-intellectualism. It is a genuine social problem, or so I posit, but one without a single cause. It’s diffuse. One cannot simply blame it on a single political party, on a single cultural change, a single structural factor, or even—a usually reliable go-to of mine—on capitalism. Many of its forms seem cute and harmless. It comes from various causes and takes various forms. Writing against it is a little like writing against cruelty or greed, against pettiness or dishonesty. But in that very comparison, we can see one reason why it’s so powerful: Whether or not they can apply this knowledge, people know, in a general way, that they shouldn’t be cruel or greedy. They know that these things are temptations to everyone—that they are everyone’s problem. People don’t know that about anti-intellectualism.
To hate the mind, to assign curiosity or disinterested love of a subject no place in one’s account of human motivation, to see every sign of particularity or individuality as “pretentiousness” or “elitism”: All of this is finally anti-human. The university is a town, and the town is a universe. Strange as a college may be, it is no stranger than the most universal human experience: the small child’s obsessive hunger to know. When we turn against one, we turn, ultimately, against the other.