Ten Secrets to Academic Success | Celebrate Old-Fashioned, Academic Liberalism

Others in the series:

#1: Remember Why You’re Going to College

#2: Give Yourself the College Orientation You Deserve

#3: Great Debates About Great Books Yield Deep Knowledge, Sharp Minds and Constructive Citizens

#4 Make for Yourself a Teacher – Acquire a Friend

#5 Turn It Off! Managing Social Media, Middle East Minefields, and Political Difference

#6 Fighting Educational Malpractice Personally: What Do I Do with a Politicized Prof – or Teacher

#7 Fighting Educational Malpractice Institutionally: A Consumer Rights Issue

#8 Distinguishing Fair Criticism of Israel from Anti-Zionist Antisemitism

The bile’s been building for decades. Many Americans have lost faith in America. With so many stuck in the depths of despair, deaths of despair from suicide, drug abuse and alcoholism are soaring — especially among students. I can’t recognize this political world where progressives don’t believe in progress and conservatives don’t conserve institutions. I can’t recognize an America where people treat politics as religion pitting “good” against “evil,” religion feels increasingly politicized, historians keep bashing America, not explaining its successes and hope is a stranger.

 In the academic world I once worshiped, the crisis feels particularly acute. After Oct. 7, when protesters assaulted Jewish students; when college presidents, who imposed long lists of unacceptable phrases, suddenly championed “free speech” for Jew-bashers; and when some billionaires finally revolted, headlines emphasized the anti-Zionist mania.

But, beware, framing this struggle as about Israel, soft-pedals the illiberalism and anti-Americanism. They burn American flags with Israeli flags. Last year, when launching “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream,” I recorded a video. I said this doctrinaire, often-bullying anti-Zionism dominating academia “isn’t just a Jewish crisis” and “isn’t just a Zionist crisis,” but it’s “a crisis of liberalism” threatening academia too. Somehow, TikTok decided my two-minute-riff “violates our Community Guidelines” by passing on “misinformation.” My appeal remains unanswered.

 A small group of ideologues punches far above their weight — in the academic and media circles most treasured by American Jews — and by you, my students. They call themselves “Progressives.” Actually, they’re illiberal liberals undermining the liberal values essential to healthy democracies, thriving universities, and happy, fulfilled people too.

Although the term has been hijacked, twisted, perverted, most Americans are “liberals.” “Liberal” is from the Latin root “liber,” free. Most Republicans and Democrats take the Declaration of Independence’s proclamations for granted. We agree that we’re all inherently equal. We know that such equality spawns essential rights, including the right to participate actively in politics. And we all desire and deserve a life of goodness and quality with ever-expanding liberties, as among our keys to pursuing happiness.

Most debates in American history, past and present, have been more about means – how do we get there? Americans champion these values and goals, which create millions of worthy individuals forming what some call “civil society,” others call “democracy.”

The Yale president turned Major League Baseball commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, said: “A liberal education is at the heart of a civil society, and at the heart of a liberal education is the act of teaching.” A “liberal education” must be liberal — broad, open-minded, inviting questions, not imposing answers, while covering various fields. And second, it should prepare students to be productive citizens in liberal democracies, pursuing truth while living with its messiness; taking strong stands while respecting others who might disagree; and mastering today’s knowledge while acquiring tools to keep questioning, learning, updating.

These definitions of liberalism and of liberal education clarify why the stakes are so high in fighting for the soul of the university – and how toxic the anti-Semitism of both left and right are to democracy and America – not “just” its Jews.

Anyone, from Tucker Carlson to your indigenous studies professor, who demonizes “the” Jews, violates the Declaration of Independence’s fundamental tenets while breaking the covenant essential to civil society. Democracies, especially American democracy, run on individualism tempered by responsibility, with individual rights leading to individual successes, that then improve the collective.

Ideologues judging people by their particular group then rationing rights or even respect to them based on group identity are fundamentally illiberal and un-American. Their decade-long pity party and Victimization Olympics have raised a bitter, alienated, paralyzed generation. That so many such sourpusses dominate social media and classrooms today threatens America’s future. An authoritarian, oversimplified media universe, and a university privileging political correctness over truth, will raise generations of soulless, intolerant, robotic partisans, more committed to defending their tribe and getting revenge than understanding or improving our world.

The true liberal education parents and students, professors and administrators must demand relies on reason and cultivates doubt. The medieval philosopher Maimonides taught: “Our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object that is to penetrate it.” That vision has power, purity and mystery.

Maimonides also advised: “Teach your tongue to say ‘I do not know,’ and you will progress.” Genuine education requires humility, asking good questions, freeing ourselves from preconceptions, using our reason to sharpen arguments and follow the truth.

I once took a course on the history of the Mongol Empire. I had no idea what I was getting into – which made it fun. Entering this alternate universe filled with obscure tribes, forgotten empires and exotic nations also sharpened my understanding of American and Jewish nationalism.

And trust in doubt. Certainty is the best friend of bovine conformists, trendy influencers and fanatic politicos; it’s the enemy of the ever-exploring and evolving student-citizen. Two centuries ago, the Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Breslov said: “If you believe breaking is possible, believe fixing is possible.” Doubt doesn’t weaken but strengthen, it doesn’t depress, it stretches. It urges you to plunge deeper into a problem, double-check your assumptions, and bolster your vision.

Just decades earlier, in a different universe, the Jew-hating French philosopher Voltaire called doubt “an uncomfortable condition, but certainty … a ridiculous one.” Liberal educators taught me to delight in that quote, even if Voltaire, indulging in hateful certainty, said that “the” Jews, “all of them,” are “born with raging fanaticism in their hearts, just as the Bretons and the Germans are born with blond hair.”

This, then, is the model I’ve lived and learned by – and you can too. Sift intelligently. Learn what you can from everyone – even Jew-haters and hypocrites. Trust reason, follow real facts and keep calibrating your moral compass along the way.  And don’t stop doubting the fanatics, while resisting the well-credentialed, mis-educated mob’s desire to keep bashing your people, and your own country too.

Gil Troy, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. Last year he published, “To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream” and “The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath.” His latest, “The Essential Guide to Zionism, Anti-Zionism, Antisemitism and Jew-hatred” was just published and can be downloaded on the JPPI Website.