Colleges, Maybe Try Teaching!

It’s no coincidence, it seems to me, that the decline of liberal democracy, as a fact and value, has succeeded the decline of liberal education as a fact and value. If we are ever to revive the first, an essential step will be to resurrect the second. The two “liberals,” after all, are the same. They refer to political liberty, as understood by ancient Athens, republican Rome, the American Founders: not libertarian freedom from individual constraint but collective self-government by civic equals. Its opposite is tyranny, arbitrary rule by a single will, a dispensation we’re becoming more familiar with than we had ever thought we’d be.