The Need to Reclaim Liberal Education
Peter Berkowitz is one of those rare public intellectuals who doesn’t mind being on the “wrong” side of hot controversies—which is to say, he’s willing to clash with the “progressive” juggernaut. A former professor at Harvard and George Mason Law School, Berkowitz is currently a fellow at the Hoover Institution and a columnist for RealClearPolitics. His new book, Reclaiming Liberal Education in America, is a collection of his essays on higher education written between 2014 and 2025. They give the reader a comprehensive view of the problems that beset our colleges and universities.
He writes, “The nation’s elite institutions of higher education have gone well beyond leaving many students ignorant of the nation’s founding principles and sustaining political institutions. For some time now, numerous classes, academic writings, and even fields of study have disposed students to despise those principles and institutions.” And no, “despise” is not too strong a word. As the book repeatedly shows, college courses are often taught with the objective of turning students into zealots for a thorough transformation of America. Many never hear anything good about our constitutional system, property rights, or free enterprise—only criticisms.A truly liberal education, he states, “fosters virtues of freedom and equips students to prosper in and maintain a free society.”
