Common Ground

Today, we hear from Martha Jones, the Society of Black Almuni Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and formerly a professor at the University of Michigan. Jones brings some of her experience especially at that latter institution to bear on our topic today: politics on college campuses. We’re lucky she does. There’s been a lot of talk about campus politics, on both the left and right. On the right, we often hear about so-called liberal snowflakes who can’t bear to hear arguments that they don’t agree with, so they attempt to banish conservative speakers from their campuses and threaten to undermine the principle, the right, of freedom of expression. And on the center-left, we hear from some critics that identity politics is the problem: that students are so obsessed with the dynamics of personal identity and are thus incapable of or uninterested in the hard work of coalition building, sustained organizing, especially on the left. This latter position was stated pretty succinctly by the liberal c