Where Progressive Illiberalism Reigns

The spate of lawsuits and administrative complaints accusing colleges of tolerating antisemitism on their campuses has made for a busy summer for the lawyers who represent colleges and universities. But what has been good for their business has been much less good for the higher education institutions in which they work.

Lawsuits against many of this nation’s most prestigious institutions have shined a harsh light on the progressive illiberalism that has become a defining feature of their educational cultures. Or maybe it would be better to say that those suits offer colleges and universities an opportunity to re-examine and revive their commitments to liberal virtues like tolerance, open-mindedness, skepticism, curiosity and the avoidance of political orthodoxy.

The conflicts that challenge those commitments will surely return with the start of the new academic year.

In the short term, litigation can encourage colleges and universities to make necessary policy changes and institute new approaches to protect free inquiry, free speech and religious freedom. However, it does not guarantee the kind of deep examination and culture change required for higher education to recommit itself to liberal values.

Let me be clear: I’m not suggesting a nostalgic return to the liberalism of an earlier era.

All of us, whatever our views of that kind of liberalism, have benefited enormously from the deep and penetrating criticisms that, over the last several decades, have illuminated liberalism’s blind spots, exclusions, insensitivities and complicity in the protection of inequality and inequity. The question now is how we can incorporate what we have learned into a revived and reformed liberalism appropriate for the era in which we live.

Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Marc C. Scarsi used a suit brought by Jewish students against the University of California, Los Angeles, to deliver a stern warning about what happens when that is not done. The suit arose out of UCLA’s handling of pro-Palestinian encampments in the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel.

Scarsi began his opinion with a shocking pronouncement.

“In the year 2024,” he wrote, “in the United States of America, in the state of California, in the city of Los Angeles, Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” The judge called that fact “unimaginable” and “abhorrent.”

Scarsi painted a devastating picture of a campus where protesters were allowed to establish checkpoints and require passersby to wear a specific wristband to cross the territory they controlled. People who supported the existence of the state of Israel were not allowed to cross those checkpoints.

As a result, they could not access the library, get to classes or in some cases take their final exams.

A campus with checkpoints used to separate groups of students based on their political beliefs or religious convictions surely is not a campus committed to protecting the liberal value of tolerance or one with much of an understanding of the history that informed early liberal thinkers.

To offer but one example of that history, consider what the English philosopher John Locke said in 1689: “The toleration of those that differ from others in matters of religion is so agreeable to the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to the genuine reason of mankind, that it seems monstrous for men to be so blind as not to perceive the necessity and advantage of it in so clear a light.”

As the historian Jeffrey R. Collins explains, “The liberal tradition has long understood religious toleration to be the foundational historical condition allowing for the rise of individual rights. The right to individual religious autonomy, liberty, or free choice—once attained—directly implicated closely related rights, such as free association and free speech.”

The commitment to ensuring tolerance was made clear by George Washington in 1790 when he wrote to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, R.I. He expressed his wish that “the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

As Scarsi made clear, the “good will” and freedom from fear that Washington described may have been more easily realized in Newport in 1790 than it was on the UCLA campus during the 2023–24 academic year.

The students who sued UCLA said that they had stopped using the central quad on the campus because they believed they could not “traverse the encampment without disavowing Israel,” or they needed to disavow their religious beliefs to be safe on the UCLA campus.

Scarsi warned of an “imminent risk that such exclusion will return in the fall with students, staff, faculty and non-UCLA community members.”

The judge gave UCLA a choice: either ensure that all programs, activities and campus areas are available to Jewish students or “stop providing those ordinarily available programs, activities and campus areas to any students.”

But the problem of a fading commitment to liberal values and religious tolerance at UCLA is not their problem alone.

That is illustrated by what a federal judge in Massachusetts said on Aug. 6 when he cleared the way for a lawsuit to proceed faulting Harvard University’s handling of “an outburst of antisemitic behaviors on the … campus” last fall and spring. As was the case at UCLA, what happened at Harvard, the judge said, “caused many Jewish and Israeli students to fear for their personal safety and hindered their ability to complete their academic studies.”

And, to offer one more example, last month New York University settled a case brought by Jewish students about what their suit described as “a steadily increasing incidence of antisemitic attacks at NYU” over the past 10 years and the university’s failure to enforce its antidiscrimination policies. As a result, the lawsuit alleged that Jewish students had been subject to “pervasive acts of hatred, discrimination, harassment and intimidation” in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The settlement terms require the university to create a new Title VI coordinator position. A statement from the university also confirmed that NYU will be “updating the discussion of antisemitism in NYU’s Guidance and Expectations for Student Conduct document and including antisemitism in training … that is mandatory for all NYU students and staff. Furthermore, NYU has committed to send an annual message from the Office of the President to NYU students, faculty and staff conveying NYU’s ‘zero tolerance’ for antisemitism.”

That is all to the good. Still more is needed.

Unless colleges and universities are willing to tackle the illiberalism among their faculty, students and staff, as highlighted by the situations at UCLA, Harvard, NYU and other institutions, there will soon be more business for their lawyers. And one way or the other, much work will remain to be done before everyone on campus can “sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”