Description:
With this collection of 40 columns written for RealClearPolitics from 2014 through 2025, Peter Berkowitz offers a short history of the decline of liberal education in America and provides a concise case for, and sketches measures essential to, reclaiming it.
The essays clarify liberal education's aims, structure and content, and spirit. They illuminate the stakes for freedom and democratic self-government in America, placing contemporary controversies about higher education--especially at the nation's most selective colleges and universities--in their larger intellectual and political context. And they explore the variety of dysfunctions that plague 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 hollowing of the curriculum.
Berkowitz pays special attention to the surge of antisemitism on campuses following Iran-backed Hamas's October 2023 massacre in southern Israel. He examines the ensuing public reckoning with the sorry condition of American higher education. And he delves into the Trump administration's clashes with Columbia, Harvard, and other universities over antisemitism; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and free speech and intellectual diversity.
Throughout the book, Berkowitz proposes reforms for returning colleges and universities to the mission that best serves the public interest, which is to equip young people to thoughtfully exercise the rights and discharge the responsibilities of freedom.
Brief description:
Peter Berkowitz is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also a columnist for RealClearPolitics and director of studies for The Public Interest Fellowship.
From 2019 to 2021, he served as director of the Office of Policy Planning in the United States Department of State, executive secretary of the department's Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior adviser to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Berkowitz is a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters and a 2017 recipient of the Bradley Prize. He is the author of Explaining Israel: The Jewish State, the Middle East, and America; Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation; Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War; Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism; and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist.
In addition, he is the editor of seven collections of essays on political ideas and institutions and has written hundreds of articles, essays, and reviews on a range of subjects for a variety of publications.
Berkowitz taught at George Mason University School of Law from 1999 to 2006, and in Harvard's Department of Government from 1990 to 1999. He holds a JD and a PhD in political science from Yale University, an MA in philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a BA in English literature from Swarthmore College.
Review Quotes:
"Reclaiming Liberal Education in America is, like Peter Berkowitz himself, a B-2 Spirit bomber over the field of ideas: elegant from every angle, devastating to weak arguments, a thrill to read and observe. Marvel and cheer."
--Abigail Shrier, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren't Growing Up
"If we want a 'liberal' society disposed to negotiate political controversy with open ears rather than inflame it with blind prejudice, then we need universities to educate citizens accordingly. In this book, Peter Berkowitz shares more than a decade's worth of perceptive reflection on what's gone wrong in culturally strategic higher education, and what it will take to put it right. Anyone who cares about the future of the West should read it."
--Lord Nigel Biggar, CBE, professor emeritus of moral theology, the University of Oxford
"No one has charted the alarming decline of liberal education in the United States more clearly, or written more eloquently about its political implications, than Peter Berkowitz. In these lucid essays, he probes the causes of the current crisis, warns of the danger it poses for a democratic experiment that requires a certain degree of character and competence in the citizenry, and proposes necessary reforms."
--Mary Ann Glendon, professor emerita of law, Harvard University