In a review of P.E. Moskowitz’s book The Case Against Free Speech in the New Republic, Jacob Bacharach writes
While I cannot help but find the pretensions of student activists in these privileged enclaves [of the university] to a shared subaltern status with America’s poor and oppressed to be weirdly self-congratulatory, I am also increasingly convinced that both student activists and the newspaper columnists who despise them are right to identify campuses as vanguards of contested space, precisely because they function, in Moskowitz’s formulation, as microcosms of the broader society and testing grounds for social change. The Case Against Free Speech does these students a good service by taking their complaints—and their deliberations—as seriously as it does, because it demonstrates that many of them have arrived at one central, penetrating observation: Campuses are critical not because they are where the population is the most oppressed and most vulnerable; campuses are critical because they are where dangerous, racist, even genocidal ideas go to be washed clean. They provide an imprimatur of respectability. There is a reason why reactionary conservatives, their interlocutors in the legacy media, and the billionaire backers of both, are so eager to get into colleges in the first place.
To what extent and since when is the extra-disciplinary legitimization of ideas a central function of the university? I wonder if concepts of the “marketplace of ideas” have tended to include or exclude the university, given that the implicit intellectual or memetic Darwinism inherent in the idea seems to pull against the modern constitution of the university, an academic pluralism that seeks to give equal dignity to all disciplines, regardless of their possession Baconian virtues.