Hunting White Supremacists in the Academy

"Come, ye philosophers, who cry, ‘All’s well,’ / And contemplate this ruin of a world.” So wrote Voltaire in his poem on the 1755 Lisbon earthquake, which destroyed the city and claimed the lives of up to one-fifth of its population. The disaster, which occurred on All Saints’ Day, ruined the faith of many, and shocked the European mind. It became an occasion for critiquing the philosophical optimism of Leibniz, Pope, and other thinkers of the day.

Similarly, the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a political earthquake that became an existential crisis for many Americans, especially those on the left. In our universities, it caused some scholars to question their faith in liberalism and in the unending progress of American democracy. This was apparently the case for Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth, a pair of academics who agonize over this American earthquake in their new book, It’s Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom. They are anxious to understand “how to reconcile a version of history that moves steadily in the right directions (if sometimes two steps forward, one step back) with one in which a nation’s history can be so easily hijacked.”

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