Like many others, I’ve begun to worry about the fate of higher education in American society. Having spent most of my professional life in academia, my instinct is to regard the university system as sacred – as Wisdom’s Workshop, to borrow the historian James Axtell’s recent book title. Liberal democracy relies fundamentally on a very well educated citizenry. And modern civilization more generally relies on a significant number of us possessing hard-earned historical perspective on what is true and what is good, and hard-earned scientific perspective on the full reach of human potential.

For 800 years, universities have represented one of the most important institutions for fertilizing and cultivating that perspective, and even protecting it against humanity’s tendency toward self-destruction through war, tribalism, and superstition. Despite how radically our society has changed over that span of time, universities have remained critical in supporting our ability to know ourselves and to know the world better and better, and to steward that knowledge from one generation to the next. That is what makes the university system sacred. As modern civilization’s primary workshops of wisdom, universities are designed to safeguard the primary sources of human progress. Any threat to the university system should worry us. Today, there appear to be multiple, and the most frustrating thing of it is, those threats seem to be mostly self-imposed.