A self-governing republic lives by persuasion, not intimidation. The dreadful assassination of Charlie Kirk has prompted reflection on the dangers of political violence in America. A spate of previous political assaults, from the attempted assassination of President Trump to the killing of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman, suggests that this latest outage may not be an anomaly but a feature of an increasingly polarized America. The civic habit of persuasion has become eroded.
Law can mitigate the risk—better security that protects public figures, electoral reforms such as top-two primaries that broaden the power of the median voter at the expense of the extremes, and a renewed federalism that lowers national stakes. Government, however, can only do so much. Law, like politics, is downstream of culture. Civil society must take the lead in addressing the mutual contempt that stokes hatred. Education is our best hope because it can habituate citizens to turn political animus into reasoned disagreement—and at times into consensus. Unfortunately, the illiberal turn in our educational system is currently a source of antagonism rather than a solution to it. Our educational system at all stages fails to model the respectful disagreement that prepares citizens for civic discourse.
The rise of AI today raises the question of when our machines will pass the Turing test, the point at which an examiner cannot tell whether the test taker is a machine or a human. An educational system should aspire to make citizens pass an “ideological Turing test,” demonstrating the ability to present the strongest case for views they reject so persuasively that an examiner cannot infer their own. A person who can do so earns rapport across the aisle by grasping the full force of the arguments that motivate opponents.
Sadly, education at all stages today hinders the ability to pass this kind of test. Begin with law schools. Over recent decades, the focus on legal and political debate that was once at the heart of legal education has declined. The reasons are many. First, the faculty is more ideologically homogeneous, and so are most student bodies. Overwhelmingly uniform and unchanging political perspectives breed intolerance and a lack of interest in other views that a more politically balanced community fosters. Second, diversity, equity, and inclusion programs present other obstacles because they prioritize affect over argument. When one liberal law professor argued against Roe v. Wade because no one would take that side in class, students complained to DEI. That kind of intervention chills professors from injecting dissent into class.
The obstacles are not only ideological and emotional but are also institutional and pedagogical. The Socratic classroom is disappearing. The crusty professor who compelled students to debate—and to defend positions they disliked—has largely vanished. Many law professors now lecture in the manner of an arts and science professor, because with a PhD as well or instead of a JD, their professional identity is not that of a lawyer skilled in argument. Not surprisingly, students prefer not to be grilled, and teaching evaluations now factor into a law professor’s compensation, further disincentivizing vigorous give-and-take.
Universities can still bend the civic arc if they return to their first vocation: truth-seeking through contestation.
The less disputatious and more ideological culture leads to parodic outcomes both at my law school in legal education in general. When Dobbs came down, my school held a panel populated exclusively by opponents of the decision. Our flagship law review devoted an entire issue to critiques of SFFA v. Harvard, the case that eliminated racial and ethnic preferences in higher education. With money provided by a well-meaning donor for dialogue across differences, the school held an election panel with a Democrat against Trump and a Republican against Trump. It had a panel on abortion rights with two strong advocates of abortion rights and a panel on election issues in taxation with two left-of-center tax professors. Even after complaints by one conservative faculty member, this fall features standalone speeches, by a passionately anti-Trump Republican and a passionately anti-Trump Democrat. How can a school model civic disagreement when it presents no disagreement at all on the most critical issues of the day?
From what I hear from colleagues, it is no better elsewhere. Indeed, our professional organizations do not model reasonable disagreement. The Association of American Law Schools offered a showcase panel at its annual meeting with only opponents of the Dobbs decision. When asked why this was, one of the panelists responded, “Because we are right.”
And this absence of debate is occurring at professional schools where professional incentives should encourage relentless disputation. One cannot be a good lawyer unless one understands the other side’s strongest arguments as well as one’s own. Legal skill requires playing one’s opponent’s moves. Indeed, a great lawyer thinks several moves ahead, thinking of the response to his response in an exhilarating and exhausting spiral of reasoning. Anyone who goes through that process gains increased respect for the best arguments on the other side.
Matters are even worse at the undergraduate level. There, faculties are even more politically homogeneous than they are at law schools. There is no need to address counterarguments to orthodoxy because law and judicial opinions based on contrary views are not part of the curriculum. Several studies—from scholarly working papers to journalistic investigations and think-tank reports—have examined college syllabi across many institutions and fields, and detected left-wing bias in assigned readings and course content. As former Harvard University President Larry Summers recently noted, an investigation of recent journal articles in the field of American studies revealed that seventy-six were critical of America, sixteen were neutral, and none were positive.
Faculty today is not only left-leaning but also invested in identity politics. Many, if not most, recent humanities hires at my own institution examine their subject through the prism of identity, such as race and gender, or identity-adjacent perspectives, such as colonization. The dominance of these perspectives, combined with the administrative perspective of DEI, crowds out conservative viewpoints.
A campus suffused with identity norms struggles to sustain the relentless truth-seeking that is the foundation for modeling reasoned disagreement. The question becomes not what the best-reasoned view is, but who is harmed by the view. Focusing on harm moralizes disagreement and makes it easy to dismiss those who disagree as bad people, a perspective guaranteed to lead to polarization and contempt. Debate also dissipates as people self-censor out of fear of being thought morally suspect. And if identity groups begin with different perspectives, they are likely to move toward the more radical perspective by self-segregation, according to Cass Sunstein’s law of group polarization. Campuses that should above all be the places that force people to doubt, instead become places where people become not only more certain of their certitudes, but more certain of their rectitude in believing those certitudes.
K-12 teachers are the products of higher education. There is considerable evidence that schools of education emphasize social justice and identity frameworks in teacher preparation. What occurs in universities today thus shapes K-12 education now and in the future.
Universities can help heal our civic culture by getting back to their own truth-seeking mission. Essential to that objective is debate over controversial matters, which encompass much of what develops at the frontier of social sciences and humanities. Law schools could readily return to a culture where students are compelled through Socratic dialogue and more formal debates to steelman their arguments by adopting the opposing side. In class, they should be assigned a side irrespective of their personal views. The experience will help them pass the ideological Turing test.
How can a school model civic disagreement when it presents no disagreement at all on the most critical issues of the day?
It is less challenging than one might think to incorporate this model into many undergraduate courses. Politics classes often require students to exchange views on controversial topics. History assignments can require students to debate the causes of such events as the Civil War. Economic classes can examine the persuasiveness of Keynesianism versus monetarism. Any face-to-face debate allows students to become more comfortable with disagreement. And oral assessment of dialectic has additional advantages in an age where written assignments risk being engineered by AI.
As important as what higher education should add is what it should subtract. Since a focus on identity is a barrier to argument, not only should all DEI offices be shuttered, but all university-sponsored identity groups should be terminated. Of course, nothing prevents students from choosing to get together on any basis they wish, but the university should not encourage the mind-forged manacles of identity.
To be sure, it will be difficult to address these problems in education. Universities are bureaucratic institutions resistant to rapid transformation, and tenure guarantees the entrenchment of identity perspectives. But the turmoil at universities today, caused by anti-Israel and in some cases antisemitic protests, the Trump administration’s leveraging of federal funding, and the advent of AI, provides the opportunity for the most significant improvements in decades.
Creating centers of heterodoxy on campus is the most effective accelerator of change. The best model is the James Madison Program in American Ideals at Princeton University. It not only sponsors scholars with heterodox views but also hosts debates and panels with sharp disagreement. It also brings in visiting faculty members who will teach courses that foster discussion of political philosophy and the causes of significant historical events. The wealthy should step up and fund more such centers on campus, ensuring that they are run by people like Robert George, who prevent such initiatives from becoming yet another mechanism for entrenching orthodoxy.
State legislatures should follow the examples of those that have created alternative colleges and centers within their flagship universities, such as the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership at Arizona State; the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University; and the School of Civic Life and Leadership at the University of North Carolina. Like the James Madison Program, these schools and centers offer not only ideological diversity but also course programming that fosters a civic education and fills a gap in the current university curriculum.
To be sure, these projects are small, particularly compared with the behemoth size of state universities. But if centers gain the ability to create their own majors, they can compete against the rest of the university. And many students want to breathe the pure serenity of intellectual argument unclouded by identity sorting.
Universities can still bend the civic arc if they return to their first vocation: truth-seeking through contestation. A democracy only functions well if its elites model respectful disagreement. That kind of respect is the first step to creating a political atmosphere free from fear and threat. This atmosphere is itself conducive to the willingness to compromise on which pluralist democracy depends.
Our educational system, particularly our great universities, is an incubator of these elites. But they have singularly failed to prepare their graduates for the great enterprise of democratic deliberation among people of fundamentally different views. A university that chooses argument over orthodoxy helps ensure that ballots—rather than threats—govern our political life.