Mark Lilla does not conform to any intellectual stereotype. The professor of humanities has critiqued left-wing identity politics, yet decries the rightward shift of conservatism. His classes attract conservative students, but he himself identifies as a liberal. And in recent years, Lilla has emerged as one of the most provocative voices in debates about politics and higher education.
Professor Lilla first gained widespread attention for his 2016 New York Times op-ed, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” in which he argued that Hillary Clinton’s fixation on diversity and identity politics contributed to her election loss to Donald Trump. The piece drew sharp criticism from many on the left, with some accusing Lilla of dismissing the importance of racial justice and other identity-based movements.
In his 2017 book, “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics,” Lilla expanded on these arguments, contending that liberals’ emphasis on identity had undermined their ability to create a broad, unifying vision for the country. As he told the New Yorker, “We cannot do anything for these groups we care about if we do not hold power. It is just talk.”
More recently, Lilla has turned his attention to what he sees as the declining presence of conservatives and conservative ideas in higher education. He first wrote about the topic in a 2009 Chronicle of Higher Education piece titled “Taking the Right Seriously,” in which he lamented the absence of courses on conservative political thought at major universities. “Over the past decade, our universities have made serious efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on the campus (economic diversity worries them less, for some reason). Well-paid deans work exclusively on the problem. But universities show not the slightest interest in intellectual diversity among faculty members,” Lilla wrote.
Fifteen years later, Lilla’s perspective has evolved. He’s observed the rightward shift of the conservative movement and now questions whether there are intellectual conservatives whose opinions are even worth including in academia. In a September Chronicle symposium on political diversity in academia, he wrote that “genuine conservatives who fit within the long tradition of thought that includes Edmund Burke, David Hume, and Michael Oakeshott are increasingly rare birds.” While he still advocates for admitting conservatives into the academy, his reasoning has shifted towards using open dialogue as a means to moderate their opinions.
To me, this unique position—as both a critic of left-wing identity politics and a skeptic of modern conservatism—made Lilla a compelling subject. So, I sat down to talk to him about the perceived trends surrounding conservatives in academia.
An Ideological Journey
Lilla grew up in a working-class family in Detroit, initially considering himself a left-of-center Democrat. “But that meant something different where I grew up,” he recalls, setting the stage for our discussion on his personal journey, the changing face of conservatism, and the challenges facing ideological diversity in higher education.
His perspective shifted dramatically during his college years at the University of Michigan. “I’m getting lectured about the working class by some kid who lives on the rich side of town, who has just gotten back tanned and rested from spring break,” he said.
This experience, coupled with his discovery of neoconservative magazines, led Lilla to temporarily align with neoconservative thought. Yet his views were continually evolving. As he witnessed the changes in the Republican Party in the 1980s, he found himself shifting back towards the left.
Today, Lilla finds himself in an unusual position on campus. “Now the students who select my courses tend to be center-right on the spectrum,” he wrote in his September Chronicle essay, “mainly because at Columbia, which has no prominent conservative professors, I am one of the few (they tell me) to make them feel respected and free to speak.”
Anti-Intellectualism on the Right
Despite being perceived as a “friend of conservatives” on campus, Lilla admonishes the right as it exists today. “The intellectual element to the conservative movement in Washington has pretty much disappeared, and it’s become a populist party and an unthinking party,” Lilla told me. “So now it’s hard to recommend what books you would read by a contemporary conservative that would be serious and thoughtful and nuanced and with a good historical sense.”
Lilla elaborated on this shift in his Chronicle essay:
“Conservatism, in the old sense, has not changed. Rather, Republican politicians, many think tanks, and right-leaning young people who live online have abandoned the tradition and embraced instead Trumpian populism and far-right reactionary influencers who recycle many old fascist ideas.”
Lilla finds himself increasingly playing the role of a liberal foil to his predominantly right-leaning students. “There’s a lot of things to correct or challenge them on or get them thinking about,” he said, referring to the more radical, populist texts his students often engage with. This includes works by figures like Bronze Age Pervert and Patrick Deneen, who Lilla sees as representative of a more extreme and less intellectually rigorous strain of conservative thought.
He laments that this dynamic has led to a narrowing of perspectives in his classes—a narrowing to the right, rather than the left like most Columbia classrooms. “My conservative students don’t think of left-wing responses to some of their positions because there’s no one in the room articulating them,” Lilla explains. “So I end up having to articulate those positions myself. They’re very smart, but they’re not hearing the other side often.”
This rightward and narrowing shift in the perspectives of those who call themselves conservatives, Lilla argues, complicates the already challenging task of integrating right-leaning thought into university discourse. In his Chronicle essay, he states that the benefit of having more conservatives on campus would actually be the moderation of opinion on the right by forcing these right-leaning students to engage with ideas outside of their online echo chambers.
The Subtle Exclusion and Unwelcoming of Conservatives
Lilla has faced a subtler form of discrimination in his own career for holding views that, while not necessarily right-leaning, challenged the academic orthodoxy.
“I was given a university-wide appointment as professor of the humanities,” he explains, technically as a part of the religion department. However, his time there was short-lived. “After the first year, a new chairman came in and erased my web page from the religion department, and so I had no home.”
While Lilla is reluctant to attribute this to high-level political reasons, preferring to call it “university politics,” he acknowledges that his ideological leanings played a role. “That was certainly why my website disappeared,” he said.
This type of subtle exclusion, Lilla suggests, is not uncommon in academia. “There’s just a kind of unthinking resistance. Once you see that someone is citing certain things or writing about certain subjects, they associate you with it, and the doors just close,” he explains. “You apply for jobs and you don’t get answers, you don’t get grants, things like that.”
Lilla points to a shift in departmental thinking as a key factor in why conservatives might feel unwelcome in academia. As an example, he had me read out the Columbia Department of History’s “Statement of Values”:
The History Department (faculty, students and staff) is committed to providing an intellectual, professional and social environment that is free from bias, discrimination and abuses of power. We will ensure, to the best of our ability, that the Department acknowledges and actively tries to transform social conditions formed in the past and still prevalent today, under which certain people, due to their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, economic, social, or religious status, find themselves in the world with fewer opportunities than others.
Lilla zeroed in on the word “actively” in the statement. “Now, if you’re a conservative student or a conservative PhD looking for a job. What kind of signal does that send about the environment and the expectations?”
He argues that such explicitly activist stances in official department statements are inappropriate in an academic setting: “That should not be there. It simply should not be there. How people express themselves privately or even collectively, outside of a university setting, is one thing, but you do not send a signal like that.”
Even if a prospective conservative PhD student makes it past an activist mission statement, they face another hurdle: finding a professor excited to be their academic mentor. “Graduate school, after you get past the first couple of years, you’re generally working with one professor or two very intimately, and so you have to be able to develop a bond with them,” he explains. “And just in my experience, there aren’t many professors that are looking forward to having a conservative student and guiding them through.”
Lilla attributes this reluctance to several factors. First, there’s often a fundamental difference in assumptions between conservative students and liberal professors. Additionally, conservative students may come from environments that haven’t prepared them for the broader academic discourse.
“Sometimes because the conservative students who come have themselves been in some kind of bubble. If you had someone from Hillsdale College or someone from Claremont—they come out, not being able to speak to the other side, speaking a very different language,” he said.
This cultural disconnect, Lilla argues, can create a significant barrier. “There’s a culture clash there, which is very unfortunate, and so people don’t go in feeling, a priori equal to the other students.”
For these students, “they only get one shot at this, and it means spending seven to 10 years of your life doing something. A lot rides on this, whether you’ll be accepted and get good recommendations and all the rest.”
To conservative students, he advises, “don’t go in with a chip on your shoulder,” noting that professors with different views may still enjoy intellectual engagement. Lilla warns against forming conservative cliques, stating that it’s “not good for anybody”—not for the departments or the students.
After all, Lilla believes the purpose of a teacher is “not just to be a cheerleader trying to help you join the team and to fill your quiver with all the right answers,” but to be “someone who represents the other side” and promotes “actually learning.”
The Future of Conservative Academia
Despite the challenges (real or perceived) a conservative might face in the academy, Lilla says that it is still important that they try. He acknowledges the value that conservative ideas have in academic settings, pointing to democratic theory as a key area where conservative thought can contribute significantly. Lilla pointed to a tendency in universities to treat democracy as the default, neglecting the study of non-democratic systems that govern much of the world’s population.
He also contends that conservative thought offers a more nuanced approach to societal change, which supports existing social structures and promotes gradual reform over rapid transformation. “If one went slower and worked with what we have,” as Lilla puts it, it might lead to more successful outcomes in addressing social issues. This kind of conservative disposition recognizes that some problems are “conditions of life” that can only be ameliorated rather than completely eliminated.
When I asked Lilla about how conservative thought could be implemented in academia, Lilla said, “You can’t tell a department, you’ve got to hire a conservative.” Instead, he proposed the establishment of institutes within universities dedicated to studying conservative ideas, which would hire professors to teach related classes. In the future, he even sees serious liberal arts education happening “outside of the university.”
“But not on Twitter,” he made sure to add, referring instead to “institutes that are at the periphery of universities.”
As our interview wound down, I expressed to Lilla the idea that conservatives treat discrimination against them in academia like how leftists treat systemic oppression like patriarchy, racism, etc.—with a narrative of victimhood. He agreed, calling it “the right version of that.”
Twitter, in particular, seems to amplify these narratives. Lilla aptly described it as “a cage for cowardly lions,” and advised me, quite seriously, to “stop looking at Twitter.” We agreed that the key is to move past this perception of victimhood and engage directly with academia.
I’ve set up a screen time limit of 30 minutes a day. It’s a start.
Nick Chimicles is a senior at Columbia College studying history and Computer science. He is a Senior Staff Editor and the Director of Operations at Sundial.