SOMETIMES BRET STEPHENS GETS IT RIGHT (and OFTEN WRONG)

We need to restore a culture of respectful argumentation and dissent. It is fading from the classroom and our larger society. It is foundational to our liberal democracy.

I am an avid New York Times reader. I have read the paper almost daily since I was a teen. I start on the front page and work my way through the first section until I reach the opinion essays that are my favorite. Here I find self-identified conservative writers David Brooks and Bret Stephens, among others. I identify myself as a democratic socialist and have been on the left since my early college years, and so I remain. Some on the left might refuse to read these writers simply because they are conservatives. I am not one of those rejectors.

These days, what often passes as conservative has fallen into the sinkhole of extremist idiocy, conspiracy theories, and hate mongering, so what we encounter in its name isn’t conservative in any recognizable sense. Yet there remain classic conservatives who find themselves alienated from the Republican Party and are explicitly anti-Trumpists. In my view, a true conservative is committed to preserving the liberal order and its foundational values – freedom of speech, the rights of the individual, and rational and humane organizations that are necessary for maintaining a respectful and peaceful society. I disagree with the conservative defense of excessive individualism at the expense of the common good, as well as a hyperventilated embrace of authority, militarist power, and nationalism. But I much honor intelligence, and so I willing to read thinkers I disagree with as long as their argumentation evinces that quality. These days, as long as a writer is anti-Trumpist, is intelligent, possesses a rational intellect, and can present a coherent point of view, I am willing to engage that person’s thought. Who knows? A la John Stuart Mill, I might even find myself augmenting or deepening my own views through such engagement. Such is not a bad thing.

I admittedly have a love-hate relationship with Brooks. I often disagree with his conclusions. However, I like his voice, but not unreservedly so. At times, I find him oily and excessively preachy. But Brooks is often dedicated to discussing the values that underlie the issues of the day, not merely the issues themselves as most journalists do. As a life-long leader in the Ethical Culture Movement, it is a standpoint that I too have also adopted as a public thinker and writer.

I see Stephens as further to the right, and I identify with him less. As a case in point, he has been excessively defensive of Israel in the crimes it has committed in the destruction of Gaza and its people. I see hypocrisy in this defense, as he often criticizes Democrats for what he condemns as tribalism on the left while not acknowledging his own.

But a recent essay by Stephens especially caught my interest and won my concurrence. Entitled What We Lost By Abandoning the Culture of Argument (9/17/25), the piece overlapped with my personal experience. Stephens lauds his alma mater, the University of Chicago (Brooks also often references his student days there), for its embrace and commitment to a culture of argumentation. Clearly, Stephens has been a critic of its notable demise in colleges and the public at large – as am I. I remain deeply perturbed by the presence of cancel culture, of a fetish with ideologies that submerge facts, an excessive embrace of legalisms at the expense of broader humanistic sensibilities, and of identitarian politics in which authority is assigned not on the basis of proffered facts or evidence but primarily on one’s race, ethnicity, gender or other identity marker. Often this dubious authority makes an appeal to claimed power inequities, such appeal being another currently fashionable idea that is over-applied. Robust intellectual discourse and debate have been too often taken over by intellectual reductionism, which leaves us impoverished both individually and culturally. These phenomena are most evident on the political right, but honesty compels me to the admission that the left is also not totally innocent in this regard.

Stephens relates the culture of debate at Chicago to the reading of the great Western classics. As he notes, “...nearly every undergraduate could not avoid reading the classics of Western thought. Far from being a form of ideological indoctrination, it was an antidote to it.” Stephens avers that, among other things, reading the classics instilled in the students who read them the importance of argumentation and dissent.

Familiarity with the ideas of the intellectual worthies of classical thought was part of my own development. When I was working on my doctorate in religion at Columbia University, I was tapped to teach Columbia’s course on Contemporary Civilization. “CC,” as it was called, was required of all undergraduates. It was one of the two foundational courses comprising Columbia’s core curriculum.

Columbia was the first university to create such a curriculum, shortly after World War I. It laid out the so-called “great books in chronological order – texts assumed necessary to master to be a well-educated and properly educated citizen. Columbia’s core curriculum preceded that of the University of Chicago and inspired the latter to adopt a related program. The orientation of Contemporary Civilization was primarily philosophical. The second foundational course in the curriculum centered on literature and the humanities, “Lit Hum.”

Contemporary Civilization had the reputation of being the most demanding undergraduate course Columbia College required. It necessitated tackling difficult texts in rapid succession on a weekly basis. The syllabus required reading such luminaries as Plato and Aristotle, St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Charles Darwin, and Sigmund Freud, as well as other thinkers considered foundational to Western thought. The last few weeks of the semester allowed students to choose from a small list of contemporary writers.

As the instructor, I needed to stay ahead of my students. But I have been forever grateful for the experience, however demanding it was. I like to say that teaching Contemporary Civilization at Columbia helped format my mind and inspired a profound love of ideas.

Contemporary Civilization, however, was not without criticism. It was an early target of anti-colonialist ideology, which in ensuing decades has become a major point of contention in academia. The curriculum was lambasted for allegedly reinforcing Western supremacy by the exclusive inclusion of “dead, white, European, males.” (The course list, as I recall, did include women, in particular Christine de Pizan, a late medieval French writer and proto-feminist, and Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is often considered the first modern feminist treatise).

An early criticism of the core curriculum was that its underlying purpose was to further hasten the assimilation of Jews to American (read Protestant) values at the peak of immigration from Eastern Europe. It was estimated that in the early decades of the 20th century, 40 per cent of Columbia’s student body was Jewish. A quota was placed on the number of Jewish students admitted to Columbia, a practice emulated by other universities. The current political fracas around antisemitism at Columbia is not new; it has lamentably had a long history.

Stephens correctly correlates the reading of these texts with enhancing the capacity for dissent and for critical thought. In this regard, he is assuredly correct. Invoking his experience at Chicago, he states, “The curriculum made us appreciate that the best way to contend with an argument was to engage with it rather than denounce it, and that the prerequisite to engagement was close and sympathetic reading.”

How I agree! It is this ethos that lies at the center of the liberal arts, and tragically it seems to be fading from academia and from the culture at large. With a nod to our current condition, Stephens observes that “I came to Chicago when Western Civilization courses were falling out of fashion at other universities, as was the idea that underlay the core: that there was a coherent philosophical tradition based in reasoned argument and critical engagement that explained not only how we arrived at out governing principles but also gave us the tools to debate, preserve or change them.”

Stephens sees the causes of this loss in the transformation of college students into “credential-seeking consumers” and the imperious application of identitarian ideologies that can too readily negate contesting arguments. He also critiques the digital technologies that have siloed information and created personalized ideological bubbles.

Stephens, as far as these positions reflect, is a public thinker I can respect. He then ends his piece with reference to Charlie Kirk. It’s an aspect of Stephens I don’t like. He invokes Kirk to reinforce his own contempt for the woke left, which, admittedly, I have trouble with as well. But Kirk is a poor, indeed repulsive, foil to support Stephens’ discontents. He says of Kirk, “...he was out there, making arguments, inviting discussion, and taking risks.” I would say, “So what?” Kirk was an arrogant, self-impressed, racist, and a homophobe, an espouser of the Great Replacement Theory. According the Pulitzer Prize journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, writing in The New York Times Magazine, Kirk condemned the intellectual capacities of prominent Black women who went to Ivy League universities, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, and TV host Joy-Ann Reid, among them. Kirk asserted that they “did not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously” and had to “go steal a white person’s slot.” I ask, who was this man, who barely attended community college, that he deserved to be so valorized and honored? What has he contributed in the areas of thought or deed to advance civilization? Kirk deserves no more of a hearing than George Wallace of an earlier era. Someone as smart as Bret Stephens should know better.

I cannot close without additional remarks about Columbia University. They are personal and I don’t invoke them lightly. I received two master’s degrees and a doctorate from Columbia. I taught human rights at Columbia to graduate students for 20 years. Columbia is one of the world’s centers of human rights studies, attracting students from across the globe. I loved the classroom, and I loved the elevated intellectual atmosphere that permeates Columbia’s environment. I was proud to have been associated with the great university.

But no longer. Columbia has failed to stand for the very principles implied in the ethical values promoted by the liberal education that I found so attractive and which helped to define the soul of this great university. In the face of Trump’s assault on Columbia, and his withdrawal of hundreds of millions of dollars dedicated to front-line research, Columbia bolted. With the death of Charlie Kirk, Trump required flags to be lowered. Columbia’s newspaper, the Spectator, reported that Columbia University followed suit and lowered its own flag.

I was proud. Now I am ashamed.