Ideas Uncorked: Reclaiming Liberal Education in America Book Launch

featuring

Join The Hoover Institution in DC for the next session in the Ideas Uncorked monthly happy hour series that brings together preeminent scholars from the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and the best from California Wine Country.

This is an in-person only series at the Hoover Institution's Washington, DC office.

ABOUT

is the Tad and Dianne Taube Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He is also a columnist for RealClearPolitics and serves as director of studies for The Public Interest Fellowship.

From 2019 to 2021, he served as the director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, executive secretary of the department’s Commission on Unalienable Rights, and senior advisor to the secretary of state. Berkowitz is a member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters and a 2017 recipient of the Bradley Prize. He is author of Constitutional Conservatism: Liberty, Self-Government, and Political Moderation; Israel and the Struggle over the International Laws of War; Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism; and Nietzsche: The Ethics of an Immoralist. In addition, Berkowitz is the editor of seven collections of essays on political ideas and institutions and has written hundreds of articles, essays, and reviews on a range of subjects for a variety of publications.

is the Washington Bureau Chief of RealClearPolitics and Executive Editor of RealClear Media Group. Carl is a past recipient of the Gerald R. Ford Journalism Prize for Distinguished Reporting and the Aldo Beckman Award, the two most prestigious awards for White House coverage. Previous positions include executive editor of PoliticsDaily.com, D.C. bureau chief for Reader's Digest and White House correspondent for both the Baltimore Sun and National Journal. He was a 2007 fellow-in-residence at Harvard University's Institute of Politics, a past president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and is a published author.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Peter Berkowitz offers a short history of the decline of liberal education in America and provides a concise case for, and sketches measures essential to, reclaiming it.

The essays clarify liberal education’s aims, structure and content, and spirit. They illuminate the stakes for freedom and democratic self-government in America, placing contemporary controversies about higher education—especially at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities—in their larger intellectual and political context. And they explore the variety of dysfunctions that plague American campuses, including censorship, curtailment of due process for those accused of sexual misconduct, invidious and unlawful allocation of benefits to students and faculty based on race and other forms of group identity, and politicization and hollowing of the curriculum.

Berkowitz pays special attention to the surge of antisemitism on campuses following Iran-backed Hamas’s October 2023 massacre in southern Israel. He examines the ensuing public reckoning with the sorry condition of American higher education. And he delves into the Trump administration’s clashes with Columbia, Harvard, and other universities over antisemitism; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and free speech and intellectual diversity.

Throughout the book, Berkowitz proposes reforms for returning colleges and universities to the mission that best serves the public interest, which is to equip young people to thoughtfully exercise the rights and discharge the responsibilities of freedom.