In his new book about universities, former Yale Law School Dean Anthony Kronman rounds up the usual suspects for an unusual reason. Many have surveyed our campuses, strewn with canceled speakers, “decolonized” curricula, and toppled monuments and concluded that the feelings of aggrieved activists are being treated “as trumps” by craven professors and administrators.
Kronman, too. But he foregoes the usual next move of extolling the free exchange of ideas. A university, he knows, isn’t a speaker’s corner in a public park. Kronman’s model is the academic seminar, in which one has not just a right but a “duty to object” when speakers substitute feelings for arguments. Arguments “must be supported by reasons that everyone in the class can evaluate.”
Students must be initiated into a community in which only such reasons have authority. Mere exposure to partisans, moving merchandise by hook or by crook in the marketplace of ideas, does nothing to shape that kind of community.
Kronman’s Education’s End (2007) addressed this failure. Universities were to aim at not only “the transmission of knowledge” but also “the explanation of life’s mystery and meaning through the careful but critical reading of the great works … that we have inherited.” Alas, universities don’t so aim. Devoted to specialized research, professors fear that the question of life’s meaning is idle. Swayed by political correctness, they seem to believe our cultural inheritance is less impressive than oppressive.
The Assault on American Excellence draws out an unstated implication of Education’s End: Universities should be forthrightly aristocratic. Inquirers into life’s meaning want to live better, so their inquiry assumes, provisionally, that there are “grades of excellence in the work of being human.” It assumes that “there is a form of education that increases [one’s] chances of becoming an excellent human being.” And Kronman doesn’t flinch at the conclusion that those who receive such an “education in human excellence” are “better equipped” than others to govern.
Kronman anticipates a plausible objection to the “aristocratic idea that some are more human than others.” Isn’t that what the slave master says? To this question, Kronman has two answers.
First, although the slave master thinks that some are more human than others, so does most everyone. Parents want children to find fulfillment not only as salaried employees but above all as human beings. They work, then, to cultivate a child’s humanity, a task at which they understand one can succeed to a greater or lesser degree. The insight that one can be better and worse at being human can be perverted. But it is also, Kronman thinks, undeniable. Defenders of equal rights, among whom Kronman counts himself, would be unwise to rest their case on denying the undeniable.
Second, democracies, left to their own devices, tend to push their love of equality into every area, not only undermining distinctions but also “reverence for human excellence” altogether. Here, Kronman draws on that unrivaled analyst of democracy, Alexis de Tocqueville. Excellence is valuable for its own sake. But students who encounter great thinkers, and see how their ideas differ from ours and from each other’s, also acquire something of immeasurable value in democracies, “a wider frame of reference than the constantly shifting scenes of daily life allow; and a measure by which to weigh things other than the applause of the crowd.”
But won’t students taught to think in terms of “natural aristocracy” develop an insufferable sense of their own superiority? It’s bad enough for the bigness of their heads that they got into a school like Kronman’s Yale. Do they need to hear of an “order of excellence in human works and human beings” too?
On the contrary, Kronman shows how far from arrogance a student who takes books seriously can get. She must read “as if she were a third person, neither the author nor herself, but one as yet uncaptured by the commitments of either.” Kronman imagines the student judging a case in which she is also a litigant, recognizing both her capacity to judge and her fallibility. A student who reads in this spirit great works that challenge her assumptions and challenge each other gets an education in excellence, not an education in smugness.
Education’s End acknowledged big obstacles to persuading universities to rededicate themselves to the study of big questions through great books. But Kronman was optimistic back then, in part because he thought political correctness was fading. He doesn’t mention that prophesy here. But by paying sustained attention to the “intensified campaign for ever more equality that has washed over higher education in the last decade or so,” Kronman quietly acknowledges that his prediction was wrong. The Assault on American Excellence deserves many readers. But even fans will wonder, if the forces against which Kronman contends are both stronger and more deeply rooted than they were in 2007, how his arguments can prevail.
Jonathan Marks is a professor of politics at Ursinus College.
