Liberty And Justice For All is an academic and intellectual enterprise focused on making sure that what has happened in the American academy—and which has now spilled out into American streets—does not take over and destroy our free and decent polity.

By now, the American academy is in some respects a lost cause. Tenured radicals who got their toehold by appealing to demands for diversity have largely taken over and discarded any pretense of intellectual diversity. They deny the legitimacy—and sometimes the humanity—of those who disagree with them. They have built a left-wing intellectual monoculture that increasingly persecutes conservatives and is now threatening liberals and any others who resist what George Orwell prophetically called “smelly little orthodoxies.”

Those who have signed the Open Letter below—a mix of conservatives, liberals, and unclassifiable academics and writers—are putting their names to a statement that both articulates what is under attack and offers an intellectual defense of those necessary ideals and institutions on which a free society depends. We do so in the hope that a silent majority of the American people remains committed to our inheritance, and that others can be persuaded to renew that commitment in this new time of troubles.