Cynthia Burack
An emerita professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies delivers a searing account of how the modern university lost its way. A decades-long insider in the academy, she argues that the progressive disciplines she once devoted her life to helped erode intellectual freedom and open inquiry.From the classroom to the dean’s office, she shows how faculty and administrators fostered a culture of grievance, elevated activism over scholarship, and enforced ideological conformity in the name of social justice. The result is predictable: a campus environment where illiberal practices were institutionalized, dissent was discouraged, debate was constrained, and students were taught what to think rather than how to think.Writing with unusual honesty about her own complicity in today’s higher-education crisis, she traces how these changes unfolded and why so few were willing or able to resist them. Yet this is not only a critique-it is also a call to action. As she concludes, if universities are to survive as places of genuine learning and knowledge production—and to have any standing to challenge illiberal ideas on the right—they must acknowledge what went wrong and recommit to free speech, academic freedom, and the open exchange of ideas. 6
