1 In April the Florida
Department of
Education rejected
54 math textbooks
for its K-12 curriculum.
In a statement,
the department
explained: ‘‘Reasons
for rejecting
textbooks included
references to Critical
Race Theory (C.R.T.).’’
Governor DeSantis
noted his approval,
saying the textbooks
‘‘have things like
social and emotional
learning, and some
of the things that
are more political
in there.’’2 From Mill’s
1859 essay: ‘‘That
the only purpose
for which power can
be rightfully exercised
over any member of
a civilized community... is to prevent
harm to others.’’
3 The political
scientist and author
of ‘‘The Bell Curve,’’
a 1994 book in which
he linked societal
success with race
and intelligence.
Murray’s scheduled
campus visits
have in the past
resulted in protests
and disinvitations.4 In 2009, Guilford
accepted a 10-year
$500,000 grant from
the BB&T Bank’s
charitable foundation,
which included
the stipulation that
a course titled ‘‘The
Moral Foundations
of Capitalism’’ would
be taught. Students
majoring in business
and economics
were, upon beginning
their junior year,
given a free copy of
Rand’s novel.13to simply honor or denounce. I’m reveal-
ing myself here as a person whose chords
and arpeggios and scales are always the
history of political thought: John Stuart
Mill’s ‘‘On Liberty’’ is the place to start.
He says that the line between your free-
dom and its end is where it impacts on
another’s freedom.^2 That’s the question
with hate speech: When does it do that?
I’ll also mention Charles Murray.^3 That’s
tricky, because his science has been dis-
credited by his peers, and his conclusions
are understood by many as a form of hate
speech, because he makes an argument
about the racial inferiority of Black people
in their capacity to learn and to succeed
in this society. I think if Murray is invited
to campus, you can picket him, you can
leafl et him, but I don’t think it should be
canceled. The important thing is for stu-
dents to be educated and educate others
about the bad science, the discrediting
of his position, and then ask, Why does
he survive in the academy, and why does
that bad science keep getting resusci-
tated? Those are important questions
for students to ask and then learn how
to answer. at’s what’s going to equip
them in this political world.
Questions about what’s happening on
college campuses keep turning into
questions about politics, which happens
a lot these days but which maybe also
confl ates various things. A debate over
cancel culture on campus, for example,
is a diff erent thing from legislators’
enacting laws limiting what can be
taught in schools. So where are the use-
ful connections and what are the unhelp-
ful confl ations as far as politics and
on-campus issues? Here I think it’s time
to talk about the very serious right-wing
eff ort to use free speech and freedom
more generally as a fl ag for a political,
social and moral project. On campus, for
example, the constant harangues about
cancel culture and wokeness on the left
that you get from the right keep us from
seeing enormous amounts of foundation
money and use of the state to try to con-
trol what is taught, to build institutes and
curriculums that comport with a right-
wing engine. Guilford College, this little
Quaker school in North Carolina takes
half a million dollars from a foundation
in love with Ayn Rand.^4 Every econ and
business major in the college for the
next 10 years had to be given a copy of
‘‘Atlas Shrugged,’’ and at the center of theworld is, what it takes to understand it,
that ideal of a higher education has been
almost completely displaced by the idea
of bits of human capital self-investing to
enhance that capital. To put it in brief,
neoliberalism essentially aims to roll out
education as vocational training, and the
extreme right essentially aims to turn
education into church. What you have in
the middle are a bunch of kids earnestly
concerned with social justice, climate cri-
sis, police violence, screaming into that
context that their views matter, and that
their view should hold sway and if not
dictate curriculums at least dictate the
culture of campus.
How much should students’ views dic-
tate the culture of a campus? I don’t think
they should dictate curriculum. I certain-
ly think that in the open public space of
campus, what students believe and stu-
dent disagreements and student political
and social aspirations for the world will
govern that. If I can add this: We need
to appreciate that young left activist out-
rage about a burning planet and grotesque
inequality and murderous racial violence
and gendered abuses of power is accom-
panied by disgust with the systems and the
rules of engagement that have brought us
here. I don’t think they’re entirely wrong.
#MeToo, with its fl agrant disregard for
due process, did in two years what previ-
ous generations of feminists could not pull
off , which was to make sexual harassment
totally unacceptable in school and work-
places. Black Lives Matter in a summer
pushed America’s violent racial history
and present into the center of political
conversation and transformed the con-
sciousness of a generation. My point here
is that if we just focus on this generation’s
political style, we ignore their rage at the
world they’ve inherited, and their desper-
ation for a more livable and just one, and
their critique of our complacency. But that
remains diff erent from educating that rage
and helping young people learn not just
the deep histories but even the contempo-
rary practices that will make them more
powerful thinkers and actors in this world.
If they’re right about our complacency,
what we still have to off er is knowledge
and instruction and some space in a class-
room to think. is interview has been edited and condensed
from two conversations. A longer version is
online at nytimes.com/magazine.curriculum there had to be a course with
‘‘Atlas Shrugged’’ as the required text-
book. This story has been repeated over
and over. The right is also mobilizing the
state. Not just to cancel math textbooks in
Florida but the ‘‘Don’t Say Gay’’ bills, the
C.R.T. bills. Little episodes about cancel
culture make great tidbits in newspapers,
but they don’t represent this larger and
deeper project of the right of mobilizing
state power and corporations for their
agenda in schools. They also don’t rep-
resent the deeper problem with which
we began: the confusions and the loss
of boundaries between something like
academic freedom and free speech. That
boundary is just totally messed up.
Where should that boundary be? Aca-
demic freedom needs to be appreciated
as a collective right of the faculty to be
free of interference in determining what
we research and teach. Free speech is dif-
ferent. It’s an individual right for the civic
and public sphere. It’s not about research
and teaching. It’s what you can say in pub-
lic without infringement by others or the
state. Now, what’s the mess-up? The right
today is mobilizing state power and using
corporate money to attempt to constrain
academic freedom in the name of free
speech. Now let’s go to the left. The left
has permitted a certain moral, political
strain to gain a foothold in classrooms
where things ought to be more open and
contestatory. That’s where I think there’s
confusion on the part of the left and the
right about whether the classroom is that
civic space for free speech or whether it
ought to be governed by something more
like academic freedom, which is, again, a
faculty right. Then the question is, What
can and should students be able to do
there? My own view is that they ought
to be able to try out their ideas but not
simply have them presented as a politi-
cal broadside. That’s not what class is for.
That’s for civic space.
Has the hyperpoliticization that you
mentioned earlier changed what stu-
dents expect to be getting out of uni-
versity? Which is to say, their willing-
ness to entertain uncomfortable ideas?
The immense hurdle is the idea that your
future income prospects and investment
in those prospects are what you’re in
college to pursue. The second problem
here is that instead of approaching higher
education as a place where you expect
Opposite: From Wendy Brown to be transformed in what you think the