Maverick Redux

Outtakes from a conversation with poet Ravi Shankar

Last year, I had the pleasure of speaking with the poet, editor, and memoirist Ravi Shankar for an article about me in Brown Alumni Magazine, entitled simple “Maverick.” Our conversation ranged over my life, work, and thought, and explored some topics of perennial concern, like free inquiry and expression, the black family, and mass incarceration.

We had much to say to each other. Ravi’s challenging questions provoked me to expand on some themes that have been top of mind, and also to reflect on where I am in my life. The main article contains only a small portion of our conversation, but the magazine made the entire transcript of the discussion available to anyone who wants to read the conversation in its entirety. I’ve selected some choice cuts from that transcript to present to you here.

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RAVI SHANKAR: One thing I really appreciate about you Glenn is that you are willing to take an unpopular stance and defend it with logic. You seem to believe that identity politics run amok has driven us apart, rather than providing a platform of equity and despite what others may have inferred about you, I sense a deep humanism and even a tentative optimism in your work. Is that part of the case you are making for black patriotism? I believe you mean this differently than James Baldwin who said, “I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.” You seem to have a more sympathetic view of patriotism.  

GLENN LOURY: Look—here we are. We’re African Americans but we are Americans first. We are not African in any way that’s meaningful. The United Nations, the International Court of Justice, these entities are not going to be involved in adjudicating whatever concerns we have about how we fare in American society. That is a matter that must be worked out within the context of American politics. Yes, our ancestors may have been enslaved, but they were also emancipated. The arc of history is built in such a manner that we who descend from enslaved persons are free and equal citizens of a rich and powerful Republic. This is our home. We must make peace with it. I grew up in a time in the 1960s when there was a lot of talk about separatism. Afro-nationalism.  The grandchild of Marcus Garvey in the exhortations of black Muslims. I'm from Chicago, which was the headquarters for the movement for the Republic of New Africa. Seceding from America? That's fanciful. Not real politics. It's a self-indulgent pipe dream. We are literally the richest and most powerful people of African descent on the entire planet. We have ten times the income on average of the typical Nigerian. There’s an enormous black middle class and black billionaires. Woke racialism claims the American Dream doesn’t apply to blacks, which is a patronizing lie that robs us of agency and authenticity and self-determination and dignity. It doesn’t acknowledge that we possess the ability to rise to meet our challenges and carry the torch of freedom. Instead, we are construed as victims.

I understand the suspicion of my critics who claim that my argument acknowledges how white Europeans stole our labor, and then begrudgingly incorporated us into this behemoth of capitalism, and now we’re supposed to be grateful. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying be realistic about where you stand in history. I realize that it was a provocative intervention, but it was generated to a certain degree by the context. I wrote that piece in the summer of 2020, which saw calls to “defund the police,” and white supremacist this, that, and the other. I think it’s really a kind of political immaturity not to accept and affirm the reality of our situation, which is, yes, that we are, first and foremost, Americans.  

Then would you buy into the narrative of American exceptionalism? That there's something about our collective democratic experiment that makes this country somehow both different and perhaps categorically better?

The latter, I would be very cautious about and overall, I'd be very reluctant to use the language of American exceptionalism, although I must tell you that I was just the recipient for the 2022 Bradley Prize, granted by a conservative foundation that’s been around for a while. I received the prize along with Chen Guangcheng, a blind Chinese dissident who’s been inveighing against the depredations of the Chinese Communist Party, and a Hillsdale College historian, College Wilfred McClay, who has written about American political history and culture. The prize is meant to go to scholars who further American exceptionalism, which is why I mention it.

Listen, I would never be a chest thumping, jingoistic, flag waving, America's-the-greatest-civilization-that-has-ever-existed blowhard. America is the Vietnam War and capitalism run amok. Certainly, there are legitimate critiques that could be made about our foreign and domestic policies. However, I wouldn't be shy about affirming the greatness of the American civilization, or the unique contribution to political culture and history, which was the formation of the United States of America at the end of the eighteenth century. The ratification of the Constitution and the framing of the structures of government here are remarkable and we can observe that when people get to vote with their feet and move around, they don’t mind coming here. A lot of immigrants arrive here and prosper, wave after wave after wave, which I put forth as tangible proof of the virtue and value of this civilization. In asserting that, I am in no way blinding myself to the critical reaction assessment. I’m open to discussion about all these things.

What’s problematic for me are the illusions and elisions and coercions and inaccuracies that go into sustaining this myth. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson used the model of consensus governance and the exemplar of a written constitution taken from the over 800-year history of the Iroquois in framing their own drafts of the United States constitution. And in India, where my parents emigrated from, there was a functional participatory democracy in the eastern province of Bihar as early as sixth century B.C. Yet somehow, we consider ourselves the unique inhabitants of the “shining city on the hill” as everyone from seventeenth century Puritan governor John Winthrop to former president Ronald Regan put it. I see an inability to think critically and empathetically, to evolve by acknowledging our collective missteps and shared responsibility in the perpetuation of that myth.

Fair enough.

My perspective is also colored by the experience of my father, who immigrated here in the mid-1960’s; as you know, we’ve had a raft of discriminatory immigration policies in our country, from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act to the Immigration Act of 1924, which used eugenics to justify restrictions on Asian immigration. It was not until the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act that someone like my father was allowed to come to America at all and that was only because he was studying to be a mechanical engineer at Howard University—it’s funny, but as a child, I used to think it was Harvard, but no, he was one of the few Asian students at Howard.

He’s not a gregarious man and doesn’t talk much about that time, but I’ve often wondered what it must have been like for him to move from India to a country where he believed the streets were paved with gold, instead ending up in Washington DC during the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. He was there when Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, and there were the riots, and the National Guard was sent in and buildings all around him were being burned down. I imagine his trip in my memoir, as well as my mother who had an arranged marriage to my father, and left everyone she knew—friends, family, colleagues—to move halfway across the world to live with this stranger who was now her husband. It’s a common immigrant story but it still boggles my mind to imagine that journey.

And speaking of India, I think of how for all its chaos and corruption, it is really a vibrant living model of secular democracy (unfortunately being compromised now by Prime Minister Modi and this new zeal for Hindu nationalism). Still where my grandfather grew up in Coimbatore, there was a local election to city council, and I think there were over one hundred candidates on the ballot. It’s messy and overwhelming, but also more reflective of the great range of belief on the political spectrum.

I’m curious what you would make of Noam Chomsky’s assertion that in the US, there’s basically one party—the business party—that carries out somewhat different variations on the same policies justified by the mass media? What he calls manufacturing consent.

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That happens to be the fervently held position of the lovely lady I’m married to now. We go back and forth—she claims that all the culture war kerfuffle is just deep cover for the common consensus affirmation of the structure of society where the wealthy and corporations get away with low to no taxes, little environmental obligations, etc. And the difference between the Republicans and the Do-Nothing Democrats is thinner than we imagine. That’s her posture—not mine.

I’m a staunch defender of capitalism, and I think there’s a correct answer to the question of socialism vs. capitalism. We can fiddle around the edges of our political structures, but I think the arc of history involves the remarkable transformation in the status of human beings, from the increase in longevity to the way the market has allowed us to avoid the awful disasters of famine. Incontestably, we’ve seen a general improvement in the living conditions of the human species, and that is largely a product of initiative, free enterprise, people pursuing private property and following the rule of law. We have a liberal order that works! And we threaten the goose that's laying the golden egg, when, because of the imperfections and inadequacies of the received order, we threaten to throw it all overboard, we’re making a mistake.

A prima facie case can be found in the developing world; just look at the natural experiments of North versus South Korea, which in 1950 were basically one country. Or East Germany versus West Germany, and what’s happened around the world since the conclusion of the second world war. By the time you get to our contemporary moment, there’s a dramatic difference in what has happened to those societies. I take scholars like Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson seriously; their book Why Nations Fail explores the beneficial power of the inclusive institutions that maintain a civil border in which free enterprise thrives. This is not capitalism without restraint, not a system of governance without taxes and environmental regulation, not a society without a social safety net, etc. When I look at Scandinavia and Northern Europe, I see capitalist countries with a social democratic framework, but I don't see public ownership of the means of production, I don't see the censorship of media, and those other elements.

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Let’s get back to the question of race and mass incarceration, which I know you have done a lot of writing on and which my memoir Correctional is about. Why is it that we have 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its incarcerated people? More than North Korea and Iran and China combined. Why are our rates of recidivism so high? How can we ignore the racial disparity in sentencing and how the explosion in prison growth during the last 40 years has been mind-boggling and happening under the gaze of most Americans? I know that we seem to have plateaued but again, this phenomenon seems deeply anti-democratic.

Yes, we have plateaued at the turn of the twenty-first century. I’ve written about this in a book Race, Incarceration, and American Values out with MIT Press. It was based on some lectures I gave at Stanford University in 2007. At that time, I was in a rage about the over-incarceration of African Americans in the United States. I traveled to the Center for Prison Studies in London, where data has been collected on the incarceration rates for various countries around the world and something like what you just said is true, but there are many ways of saying it. The bottom line is that we rely on the punitive reaction to social disorder to an extent that is unrivaled in world history. Really. These are massive institutions. But I also said that this can’t be the end of the discussion. We need to ask about the root causes and living conditions and family structures of those who have ended up in prison.

I believe you wrote somewhere that “a million cases, each one rightly decided, can still add up to a historic wrong.”

That’s right! That’s an old quote from me and I do still believe that. Regarding mass incarceration, you’re right, that under Ronald Regan, Bill Clinton, the prison population increased. You see the curve just going up and up and up. Of course, crime is part of the story, but crime peaks in the late 1980s and starts declining, but the curve of incarceration continues to go up. It has finally flattened and started to turn down.

Based on my experience, I found that it's not just the numbers of incarcerated people but the institution itself, which fosters dysregulation, not rehabilitation. It feels like an investment in failure. We have been discussing Norway—there are no life sentences there, so they are incentivized to help heal those who have committed crimes. These people are given a trade, access to mental health counselors, and relative freedom. I mean—semi-facetiously—some of those prison compounds are nicer than walk-ups I lived in Brooklyn. But here we believe in punishment.

I think this punitive streak is part of the Puritan legacy in our country. They came over with England’s bloody codes and still practiced the sanguinary punishments—public floggings and dunking and branding and executions. Banishments into the wilderness of those who would not conform. And once you were guilty you were additionally marked with the shame of being criminal. Think of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, marked for life by her crime.

Actually, it was the Quakers, who were the liberals of their time, who believed that this legacy was quite barbaric. They decided to use prisons, which up until that time had been used to hold someone temporarily for trial as in the Tower of London, as the actual punishment itself. They believed that through the application of work and silence—elements that we still see today in the use of prison labor at below market wages and the use of solitary confinement, e.g. institutional segregation—a soul could be redeemed. There’s the linguistic connection there of course—the penitentiary and the penitent. But I think it’s worth noting that the two great moments of the growth of prisons in the US came in the post-Reconstructionist South after the Civil War and then on the heels of the Civil Rights Movement. That can’t be a coincidence.

You’re absolutely right that we have been over-investing in incarceration, and we don’t have any expectation that the process of confinement is going to be to the betterment of a criminal. We’re punishing them so it’s meant to be punitive. You could make an argument on the other side that asks why we should have a social policy that invests in education and healthcare and general life enhancements of the quality of life for someone in prison? Why should you have to break the law first before being eligible for the benefits of such policies? Isn’t that wrong-headed to reward bad behavior by helping people who are now confined because they broke the law. It begs the question: if I'm doing this for the incarcerated, why am I not doing it for everybody?

It seems we are getting it all wrong—over-incarcerating those who have mental health issues or drug problems instead of addressing their underlying issues. Why shouldn’t we be a more forgiving people? Isn’t it punishment enough to be away from your friends and family in confinement? Do you really need the casual sadism of the correctional officers, or the neglect of health needs, that only will make it harder for you to reintegrate into society? How about the ripple effect that mass incarceration has had on generations of families?

There’s a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, Vesla Weaver, who coined this term “frontlash” about how punishment and surveillance have been used to circumvent civil rights advances. In the 1960s you had the end of Jim Crow and consensus within American politics that we are going a different direction on the race question. There were winners and losers in that shift. So when there were race riots and cities in which the reaction was disorder, they could enact policies that sublimated concerns about racial dynamics into seemingly colorblind concerns about crime. This is really a George Wallace kind of argument; because they could not crack down directly on blacks because this would be seen as racist, they use the public order maintenance ruse as cover. This was the reactionary response to the successes of the civil rights movement. That's one argument.

But something is missing, which is that there was a lot of support within communities of color for punitive responses to the upsurge in crime and violence that one sees through the 1970s and the 1980s. For example, the crack versus powder cocaine sentencing disparity is well documented. It was about how much weight would trigger a mandatory minimum prison sentence, and it was a 100-to-one ratio. Someone with five grams of crack would face the same sentence as someone with five hundred grams of powder cocaine. That was enacted and you can argue that it was racially disparate punishment.

But a lot of black representatives supported it. Charles Rangel, who represented a district in Harlem, supported it when he moved to Harlem because he had seen firsthand the kind of violence and harm to his communities that the drug trade had caused. If you look at the data on political contests in states which had been redistricted, to see if the laws are more or less punitive when political participation from black people in that state has been enhanced due to voting and civil rights, what you find is that association is not what you might think. What he finds is that association is not what you might think. You might think more black voters, less punitive law, but in fact the trend goes in the opposite direction.

We see that echoed in the argument about defund the police and so on. We live in urban communities where there are murders and carjackings and robberies and so on. The residents want more police. Of course, they want police who are not going to abuse them, because they are outraged by police violence and police brutality. But they want someone to answer when they call 911. Because they're the ones who are suffering the consequences of most of the violent crime that goes on in the cities.

I’m complicating the simple story that after the end of slavery, you had the black codes and southern states not wanting to accept the citizenship status of the newly free blacks, which led to the rise in the incarcerated population and then at the end of the civil rights movement in the 1970s, you are seeing this rise in incarceration. I think that’s too simplistic. Still my outrage is reflected in that book I wrote and what it says about American values that we sit idly by while under our watch there is this institutional transformation which is truly historic, going from a half million to 2 million under lock and key in a 20-year period. We basically allowed it to happen, allowing politicians to run for office waving a banner saying I’m going to lock them up, three strikes and you are out, mandatory minimums, super predators…

Don’t forget about “law and order.” For some reason, I always found that the most chilling euphemism. Why do you think we aren’t more forgiving as a people?

It's what it is. I mean, the incarcerated are disqualified from housing benefits, from Pell Grants, support for post-secondary education, certain jobs, the list goes on. In some jurisdictions they are prevented from being able to cast a ballot. They're basically ex-communicated. I agree with you but discussing it is not enough. Here’s something I’ve been doing in response to questions like this.

There’s a gentleman named Johnny Pippins, who is serving an expected 30 years at Iowa’s Anamosa State Penitentiary for felony murder. He was part of a group that committed some robberies and during one of them, someone was killed. He was 15 years old at the time and he’s [41] years old now. I’ve written about him. During his time in prison, he's completely reformed himself, gotten a college degree, gotten a master's degree, and been accepted to a PhD program in social statistics at the University of Iowa. He writes for publication where he's been working as a research associate and he’s applying for grants. He’s literally transformed himself over the course of a quarter century of confinement. However, to pursue a PhD program, he needs to be on campus. He can't do it remotely. He needs to be able to go to class.

We decided that we would try to use our good offices, such as they are, to bring this case to the attention of Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker. Recently, The Chicago Sun Times ran an editorial signed onto by the editorial board appealing to the Governor to do exactly what we suggested. We mounted a campaign and have gotten hundreds of signatories to a letter. It's very straightforward. We say listen, this is an exceptional case. It's an opportunity to do something that is not just kind but that is also affirming. He has paid his debt, now let him contribute to society, this kind of idea. So even in my relative conservatism, what I'm saying, I'm still advocating. I'm proud to be able to use the little network that we've generated around my Substack newsletter to try to get the word out on this.

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I’ve been working with the formerly incarcerated on reentry and there’s this sense that if you have a misdemeanor or a felony conviction, it’s going to follow you for the rest of your life. You should be happy flipping burgers. I struggle wondering if we're inherently uncharitable.

Yeah, I don't have an answer on that. And especially when you consider that in some of the quarters that are most conservative, they're also most religious and they're Christian. And you might think that that Christian charity orientation would militate in favor of a more charitable response to social transgression.

I served for years on the board of Prison Fellowship Ministries, which is a ministry to philanthropic enterprise started by Chuck Colson, who served time in prison as the first member of the Nixon administration to be incarcerated for Watergate-related charges and was converted to an evangelical Christian while in prison. He started this ministry and approached me in the late 1990s, and I served about five years on their board. But the contrast between that organization's ethos, whose model was Christ hanging on the cross being crucified, forgiving the guy next to him who is a common thief or whatever. You get saved through Christ, and I don’t think you have to believe in the magic of people going to heaven to see the metaphor that's built into that story, which is what we believe as Christians. It requires us to adopt a more charitable posture. You're not defined by your worst moment in your life. We're all susceptible to the temptations and snares, dead ends, and so forth and so on.

And, okay. Punishment is a part of the process here and no one's arguing for a kind of disarmament of society and its effort to protect itself and against the depredations of wrongdoers. But that's not the end of the story. That's the beginning of the story. And oh, by the way, what about the victims? How are victims helped by the punitive reaction to the criminal? Punishment doesn't do anything to restore and make the victim whole. And oh, by the way, what about the people who are connected by bonds of blood and identity to the people who are being punished? What about their families? What about their children? We're creating social policy here, not just doing a kind of one-off balancing of right or wrong for the individual.

Yes, it’s hard to see what prison is doing for those nonviolent offenders, those who may have mental health issues or drug problems. Should prison really be a place for the poor and marginalized to be set apart from society? To do what Angela Davis deems does not disappear social problems, such as unemployment, homelessness, illiteracy, addiction, and mental illness, but rather disappears human beings.

I'm a big believer in bibliotherapy and in education to help accelerate healing. I think being able to tell your own story matters, and I am just at a loss at how our current system of mass incarceration adequately addresses whatever antisocial pathologies an individual may possess, especially given the fact that the cultural norms and laws on the books are relative and shift over time. What’s legal in Massachusetts is still illegal in Mississippi which gives the lie to the ideal that we are operating under some universal moral edict. I don’t think inflicting pain on a person who has transgressed should be part of the purpose of a social institution. Do you know how much we spend a year on Rhode Island per incarcerated person?

I’d say around $50,000 a year

Try $82,500 on average, about 75% of which goes towards security, administration, surveillance, etc. That’s over $225 a day! If you gave me that budget, I guarantee that I would provide better outcomes than our criminal justice system.  

That’s a big number. And it makes my point that if you are going to be spending that amount of money to make people's lives better, you don’t just want to target those who have broken the law. You want to make the intervention earlier.

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Beyond your ideas about race and inequality, your work in game theory and macroeconomics, I’m curious about your time at Brown University. Kind of like Clarence Thomas growing up in rural Georgia, you also had a remarkable rise from the inner city of Chicago to working at Harvard University and now holding this distinguished chair at Brown. How do you feel about living and working here?

It’s a poignant question at this moment because I just agreed to a phased retirement package, essentially committing myself to retire after three years.  

Not under duress, I hope!

Oh no, no. I'm going to be 74 on my next birthday. Life is short. What do I want to do with my time? And, you know, I think, well, let me put it this way. When I was in graduate school at MIT in the early 1970s. I had great teachers in economics like Nobel honorees Paul Samuelson and Franco Modigliani, Robert Solow and Peter Diamond, and when these absolute legends reached the age of 70, they all voluntarily stepped down and took emeritus status. It makes sense as a kind of informal norm, because you are drawing a huge salary and taking up the corner office, and you probably are not producing papers the way you might have been 25 years ago. I’m not retiring from life, but I am also not going to be dragged out of the classroom.

What do you intend to do with your time?

Well, enjoy life with my children and grandchildren and my wife of four, going on five years now. We spent some time earlier this summer in Europe and enjoyed it. We were Marseille, which is an amazing city on the Mediterranean. I gave some lectures in London and we've been to South Korea, where I have former students. I also have a memoir well along the way. I’ve written eight solid chapters, and W.W. Norton and Co. is going to bring it out. I’m supposed to deliver before the end of the year. The convenient and unexpected revelation is my podcast and my newsletter, which reaches a whole new swath of people. I continue to receive more invitations to give speeches than I could possibly accept. I could continue to do that and earn an income. I’m not at all worried about the financial side of things.

The truth is that I’ve been teaching since 1976. That was my first year as an assistant professor at Northwestern University. You’re talking about 46 years ago. As I prepare my lectures, as I read the endless string of memoranda that are coming from one administrative office or another about this or that, as I sit through department meetings, I know I’m not going to miss it. I love my students, but maybe I’m a little bored. Who knows? Maybe I’ll run for office. Just kidding! There’s no chance whatsoever about that. I like playing chess. I like playing billiards. I have five children. The oldest is in her mid 50s. And I have six grandchildren, two former college graduates by now. And, you know, my lovely wife LaJuan, is, as I said, a Bernie Sanders Democrat. We have interesting, spicy conversations about politics around the dinner table.

You’ll stay in Providence? I just moved here a few years ago and have grown a fondness for this state, I must say, and my theory is that something of the character of those who founded a place is retained by its current inhabitants, and so Rhode Island being formed by those who were kicked out of their Massachusetts Bay Colony because of their unorthodox beliefs, the Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson-types, bodes well for the spirit of free inquiry that you treasure so much. I mean, the country’s first synagogue and public lending library were created here.

Yes, we are not going anywhere. We just bought this house that we are renovating. I like Providence. I love Brown. To be honest, I need to be in a university community of some kind. So I don’t plan on disappearing but will have a graceful exit. Recently there was a festschrift for me in my department, and there were six panels about my books and writings on affirmative action, political correctness, social capital and around 50 people either zoomed or flew in. So I'm proud of my accomplishments, but I don’t want to be that narcolept falling asleep in the middle of my lectures. Job well done, and let’s move on to the next thing.

I'm in my mid 70s and still vigorous. I could obviously lose some weight. I have blood pressure and borderline diabetic issues and a fatty liver, a little cyst that's perfectly benign, but my wife is good about reminding me to take my probiotics and medication. When you ask me about Brown, I think about coming, in 2005, from Boston University. Ruth Simmons was the president. I was accepted with open arms. I was still doing quantitative economic research at that time and hadn’t become as overtly political as I have now become. Of course, I was always engaged with racial questions, but in my mind, my public utterances have been precipitated by the anti-racist argument and the various simpleminded and frankly condescending diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives on college campuses.

I served on the DEIJ committee at Tufts and I found much of that work valuable myself.

Well, I’m on the record discussing what I think about all of that. You can look at my open rebuttal to Christina H. Paxson, current president of Brown University, after she sent a virtue-signaling, platitude-filled letter after the murder of George Floyd. No one really took issue with my stance and honestly, I have no complaints.  Richard Locke, the Provost, who came in as the Director of the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs, basically recruited me and back then I had a passing interest in international relations and development studies. I participated in the Brown International Advanced Research Institute’s program, which was a series of seminars conducted by Brown faculty around the world, recruiting participants from developing countries all over the world, from South America and Africa, South and East Asia. I co-taught a class on ethnic violence and inequality from a global perspective with the political scientist, Ashutosh Varshney. We invited world class outside speakers to come and address our students. Each of us gave lectures. We bonded with the students. I loved it. That was one of the most gratifying teaching experiences of my career. Brown has been very good to me.

I have one complaint, which is that I haven't, I don't think, been taken as seriously as I wished that I would have been taken by senior administration, when I went on the record to talk about the problems of the gospel and catechism of diversity regimes. On these issues, they are toeing the politically correct line and playing it safe, and following, not leading. It may be very unfair for me to say this ,because I'm sure their jobs are a lot harder than I could even begin to imagine. But I take issue with the various layers of administration in place to deal with this issue. I think it’s overbearing.

Let’s begin with the heavy administrative pressure on “diversity” and what that means. There’s a former Yale professor, Bill Deresiewicz, who has written this book Excellent Sheep about his experiences as a white teacher of literature in college and how he believes that the way we are failing pedagogically is by providing a real education that challenges students. Where we are more in the marketing business and trying to sell our brands to you.

We’re not diverse, not really. There may be superficial diversity but where’s the class diversity? Let’s imagine a religious student and how out of place he’s going to feel on campus, afraid of confessing their faith because of what’s happening with the zeitgeist on campus. Some of this, Deresiewicz attributes to the rise of overbearing, self-aggrandizing administrative structure of provosts, deans, associate deans, and so forth. I don’t claim to have any real expertise on how to structure higher education, but I think there's something to that idea.

I had a professor at the University of Virginia, Mark Edmundson, who has written about how on a college campus being a leader really means being a good follower, to enact the agenda of the Board of Trustees, to raise revenue, things that I think are antithetical to the mission of most universities. When I was a first year there in the early 1990’s, I took classes with Jerome McGann where we read the Marquis de Sade, Jean Genet, Angela Carter, and I don’t think I would dare to put those writers on my syllabus today. I know many of my colleagues who feel like they must walk on eggshells so as not to say something out of step with what the prevailing mood is—and of course my students are more anxious today than ever before—but ultimately, I can’t see how that’s going to be a benefit to the students not to have vigorous intellectual engagement on campus.

We agree about that.

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