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.”
