Jill LePore & David Leonhardt:
Leonhardt: Do you think that what is often described as woke is a real problem, as opposed to merely a problem that the right has managed — to use another word the left likes — weaponize?
Lepore: No, I think — I am in the belly of that beast. I’ve been teaching at Harvard since 2003, and something really changed on campus around 2014. I often talk with colleagues who are close friends about this: What was it that actually changed it?
Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another and possibly catch a professor in saying something that was a violation of what they believed to be a way you can speak, or a thing you can say about something. This entire campus became incredibly prosecutorial to the public shaming stuff. I just think it’s silly to deny that that existed, that it didn’t harm a lot of people, that it wasn’t wildly out of control on many occasions.
Do I still deeply believe in the mission of higher education and that this is an institution whose value to the world in terms of its research and scholarship and the ambitions of education that it stands on? I think those are crucially important. But I think it just surprises me to no end when people are like: Well, there was really never a problem on campuses. I don’t know what college campus they’re talking about.
I think the place I put blame is quite different from the places that the right would put blame. I think the corporatization of higher education has been a real problem, so I have a different understanding of what has gone wrong with higher education. I just think the left has to admit that it has done a lot to make a lot of Americans feel like they do not belong.
Leonhardt: Yeah, and it’s hard to win people over when you’re making them feel that way. I want to get back to the Constitution before we close. While I was reading your book, I made a list in the back pages. I hope you don’t mind that I was writing in a copy of your book about the constitutional amendments that I thought we needed today, and I ——
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Students started showing up, determined that their job in a classroom was to humiliate one another”
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more.