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David Brooks
The Atlantic
Today, the teachers I’m talking about tend to feel like dissidents within the academy, like they are doing something countercultural. That’s because at most schools, humanistic education has been pushed into the remote corners of academic life. It’s not that people woke up one morning and decided to renounce the humanistic ideal, it’s just that other goals popped up. It was easier to fundraise for them, easier to sell them to tuition-paying parents. The idea of forming students into the best version of themselves sort of got left behind.
The good news is that things are changing. There is an interesting pattern in the history of higher education: Universities reform after confrontations with barbarism.
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Sociology has long taken on society's biggest questions — inequality, social movements, declining birth rates — questions Pamela Paul notes shape political and cultural fault lines. But according to one sociologist quoted in the piece, the field has drifted from producing "intellectuals who think deeply and insightfully about the world" toward producing technicians and activists instead — prompting him to wonder aloud whether the discipline should simply be liquidated. The essay ties this to a critical spring report from Vanderbilt and Washington University describing a pattern of politicization across the social sciences.
Johns Hopkins University is undertaking an ambitious push toward ideological pluralism, most visibly through its new School of Government and Policy, opening in Washington, D.C. around 2027-28 under dean William Howell, who has recruited heterodox scholars like economist Peter Arcidiacono, whose empirical findings on affirmative action provided evidence in the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Harvard.
One year after Columbia signed its resolution agreement, the university remains something of an example, for others in the sector and for the Trump administration. But what many have called Columbia’s capitulation hasn’t been a full win for either side.
