For decades, philosophers have argued that higher education’s value is rooted in its nurturing of the tolerant, democratic citizen, and that it should cultivate within students the requisite “habits of the heart” to sustain our democratic way of life. This belief motivated the National Task Force on Civic Leaning and Democratic Engagement to publish A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future, which argued that “higher education has a distinctive role to play in the renewal of U.S. democracy” as colleges are “the nation’s most valuable laboratories for civic learning and democratic engagement” to develop inter alia the virtue of tolerance in students.

Unfortunately, as of late, something has gone wrong. Recent examples suddenly abound of intolerant and vicious college-educated individuals participating in the movement to destroy American democracy. These contemporary collegiate revolutionaries do not hail from North Korea or the People’s Republic of China but from well-respected U.S. universities. How is it possible that American higher education, the envy of the modern world, has become instrumental in producing the intolerant undemocratic citizen?