In a recent article in the New York Times, Debra Satz and Dan Edelstein—the dean of Stanford University’s School of Humanities and Sciences, and the faculty director of its program in civic, liberal, and global education, respectively—offer a provocative thesis: “By abandoning civics, colleges helped create the culture wars.” The authors lament the decline in the protection of free speech, singling out the disgraceful effort in March by some students at Stanford Law School to silence a speech that Kyle Duncan, a federal judge, was prepared to give to the Federalist Society chapter.

Both authors point to the failure of our centers of learning to develop the “shared intellectual framework” that could help defuse or prevent such incidents, but they offer a dubious remedy: a new (since 2021) program at Stanford called “Civic, Liberal and Global Education,” or COLLEGE, intended to “steer clear of the cultural issues that doomed Western Civ.”

Let us first put this issue in perspective. I doubt that any such program, however well-conceived, would persuade graduate students in UCLA’s psychology department, for example, not to ban Yoel Inbar, a noted professor from the University of Toronto, for his queries into universities’ commitment to the DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) orthodoxy. Nor is it likely that a similar program at Harvard would do much to improve its impoverished culture of free speech, or help prevent a replay of the recent incident in which activists, shouting charges of Israeli “apartheid,” disrupted the convocation ceremony at which Harvard’s new president, Claudine Gay, welcomed new students to campus. What are needed here are not classes but sanctions, requiring violators to make good on Harvard’s public-facing and internal commitment to defend the principles of civilized discourse. As the great University of Chicago president William Rainey Harper put the point in 1892: “The question before us is how to become one in spirit, not necessarily in opinion.”