Reclaiming Liberal Education in America

by Peter Berkowitz

With this compilation of 40 columns written for RealClearPolitics from 2014 through 2025, Peter Berkowitz provides a brief history of the decline of liberal education in America as well as a case for—and measures essential to—reclaiming it.

The writing brings to light liberal education’s aims, structure and content, and spirit. The essays emphasize the critical importance for freedom and democratic self-government in America, putting ongoing tensions about higher education—especially at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities—in their broader intellectual and political context. They also express the many dysfunctions that haunt American campuses, including censorship, curtailment of due process for those accused of sexual misconduct, invidious and unlawful allocation of benefits to students and faculty based on race and other forms of group identity, and politicization and gutting the curriculum.

Berkowitz takes special note of the rise of antisemitism on campuses following Iran-backed Hamas’s October 2023 massacre in southern Israel. He investigates the ensuing public reckoning with the sorry condition of American higher education. And he dives into the Trump administration’s arguments with Columbia, Harvard, and other universities over antisemitism; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and free speech and intellectual diversity.

Throughout the collection, Berkowitz offers reforms for revitalizing colleges and universities to the mission that best serves the public interest, which is to prepare young people to thoughtfully put to use the rights and act on the responsibilities of freedom.