I too was moved by Alan Kors’s lament for the contemporary university, but as I read his account of the historical changes he has seen since he arrived at Princeton as an undergraduate in the early 1960s, I wondered if he wasn’t inadvertenly providing a clue to the sorry state of the campus today. Professor Kors describes the pre-Sixties campus as rife with meanness, snobbery, bigotry, racism, and I guess what would soon be called sexism and homophobia. I wonder if many a leftist reading Kors’s description would not say to himself, well, we can congratulate ourselves for ridding the academy of that, at any rate. If things were as bad as Kors says they were, and the campus revolution managed to ameliorate the situation, then some might feel that it was indeed worth it, and that the excesses of today are either the price to be paid or something to be adjusted and ameliorated in turn.

If instead we recognize that there were flaws in the pre-countercultural world, as will ever be the case in human affairs, and that what was needed was not a revolution but a more vigorous practice of traditional moral and ethical ideals, such as fairness, kindness, courtesy, humility, and respect, then we wouldn’t need constantly to be thanking the Sixties and its offshoots, like feminism, for what we may be inclined to see as improvements in our society or in our lives today.

When I got to the end of the essay, where he asks the contemporary academy to be honest in telling parents, “This University believes that your sons and daughters are the racist, sexist, homophobic, Eurocentric progeny or victims of an oppressive society from which most of them receive unjust privilege,” I couldn’t avoid the uncomfortable feeling that, change in vocabulary acknowledged, that was the very state of affairs he described as the case at Princeton during his first years there.