“To the extent that the Academe remembers its ancient origins, it must know that it was founded by the polis’s most determined and most influential opponent,” Hannah Arendt wrote, referring to Plato, in “Truth and Politics.” Originally appearing in the pages of The New Yorker in 1967, the essay was perhaps one of the most-assigned texts in university classrooms at the height of liberal panic over the so-called post-truth age. 

“Truth and Politics” was featured in a 2020 Harvard Kennedy School course held in an overflowing auditorium — the largest class I ever worked for as a teaching assistant. The syllabus promised to impart an understanding of how ignorance is manufactured in the public sphere. “You’ll be asked to consider what sort of policies are justified in keeping the public ignorant and which ones aren’t,” the instructor wrote. “When is it permissible for the government to keep secrets from us? Here is also where you will learn about forms of public ignorance that arise from prejudice and ideology.” Students were asked to consider whether we would be better off in an epistocracy ruled by the trustworthy knowers instead of a democracy ruled by the unruly demos. 

Hannah Arendt did not share Plato’s dream that the university should be a training ground for rulers who would eventually seize power and vanquish the threat of democracy. Against Plato’s belief that philosopher kings could justly rule alone through rational deliberation, Arendt defended an “enlarged mentality” that arose from contributions from a diversity of perspectives. She believed that those perspectives could be grounded in a shared reality, a “common world” established by the university along with the media and the judiciary. Arendt’s idea of the university was in a sense a post-political fantasy. In her view, “truthtellers” stood apart from the realm of power and the struggle over resources, just as for Habermas the rational deliberator existed outside the reach of state control and corporate interest. 

Since the time of the Manhattan Project, as Erik Baker has convincingly argued, American academia has accepted its role as an ideological state apparatus in the U.S. imperial project: universities are increasingly dependent on Department of Defense funding, produce knowledge deployed in wars of conquest and counterinsurgency, and police student and faculty criticism of this militarized mission. Yet, in the Harvard Kennedy School class, we pretended that we could sit around discussing issues that concern the public with unclouded judgment — even as we worked within an institution that consistently reproduces existing power structures, furnishing the ruling elite with C.V.s that catapult them straight to the White House and the Department of State. In the past few years, universities have repeatedly demonstrated that they were ready to surrender any emancipatory element, from DEI to freedom of association, when faced with political (and financial) pressure. 

Fashioning themselves as refuges of truth in line with Arendt’s vision, educational institutions have weaponized their supposed neutrality against calls for justice and freedom from within. Campus conflicts over the last decade — from anti-sexual violence campaigns to union drives to Palestine encampments — have shown that universities’ doctrine of neutrality functions as a vehicle for disciplinary power. In May 2024, after months of clamping down on student encampments and all forms of pro-Palestine activism, universities convened task forces to draft restrictions on speech and organization, carefully wordsmithing the resulting restrictions as measures to protect neutrality. “The University and its leaders should not issue official statements about public matters that do not directly impact the University’s core function as an academic institution,” decreed Harvard University, defining that function as “seeking truth through open inquiry, debate, and the careful weighing of evidence.” As the university went on the defensive, treating political claims as improper speech, private grievance, or acts of disorder, it also opened up an opportunity to reclaim the university for the demos. 

Campus politics must be credited with the ignition of what Jacques Rancière called subjectification, a process that defines someone as a subject of wrong and then allows the wronged to articulate a demand. It creates, as Rancière says, “not a place for a dialogue or a search for a consensus in a Habermasian fashion,” but rather a stage “for the handling of a wrong and the demonstration of equality.” In 2018, eighteen women demanded institutional accountability after being harassed by Professor Jorge Domínguez at Harvard. In 2024, Palestine Legal recorded over a thousand requests for protection against silencing of pro-Palestine speech at universities. In both cases, individuals, as part of movements, argued that they were being denied equal standing in their communities. 

The ideal of the university as existing outside politics is morally bankrupt. We can no longer pretend we study on Arendt’s campus, and all the better for it. We each have to lay a partisan claim to the university and build power to seize its operations in the service of public interest. 

Last semester it was my turn to teach “Truth and Politics.” In a smaller course at the University of Pennsylvania, a handful of students and I parsed the liberal fantasy of doing politics without politics in the university and beyond, interrogating ideals of deliberative democracy and public reason. The course ended with Simone Weil’s On the Abolition of All Political Parties — a text that perturbed nearly all my students with its distaste for collective organization and characterization of partisanship as ignorance. The ridiculousness of the neutrality doctrine peeked behind Weil’s exaggerated prose (“It is when we desire truth with an empty soul…that we receive the light”) and reflected off the buildings surrounding us, each of which was emblazoned with the name of a corporation.