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  "path": "/2026/03/13/universities-flawed-but-valuable/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-13T09:26:40.000Z",
  "site": "https://dailynous.com",
  "tags": [
    "Academia",
    "conservatism",
    "criticism",
    "politics",
    "power relations",
    "sexual harassment",
    "social progress",
    "universities",
    "Universities: Flawed but Valuable",
    "Daily Nous"
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  "textContent": "Should academics be more conservative? One way to characterize conservatism is as an appreciation of enduring institutions and widespread social practices, flawed as they may be—and which are constituted and maintained by human beings, flawed as they may be—that have actually managed to bring about some things we value.* If that’s what we mean by conservatism, then yes, says Maya Krishnan, a philosopher at the University of Chicago, in a recent essay at The Chronicle of Higher Education: academics should be more conservative, especially about the academy. “The present moment for universities is a dangerous one,” says professor Krishnan, owing to commercial, technological, and political threats. But contributing to the vulnerability of universities to these threats is that academics are good at finding problems, academics skew left, and, she says, “the standard idiom of leftist critique makes it hard to explicitly name anything flawed as good.” So “it sometimes seems as if we think that rehearsing condemnations and self-condemnations is equivalent to virtue, and that having anything good to say about the university counts as selling out.” She herself has felt this: For a long time, it was hard for me to say anything good about academe, even while I was preparing to dedicate my life to it. That’s because when I was in graduate school at Oxford, I ended up filing a sexual-harassment case. For my trouble I was sent a sarcastic letter by one of Oxford’s senior proctors, a theology don known for his cruel wit, which he put to effective use in dismissing my case…. The university is the power structure. The university is the Man. That’s how I felt in those days when, at philosophy-department receptions, I would hold a paper plate laden with soggy baby carrots and pretend to focus on talking to my fellow students, while monitoring the distance between me and certain men. But no matter how cynical I became about the university, it never occurred to me to leave. Why not? Because when I sat in classrooms and heard my Kant professor talk about self-consciousness in the first Critique and my Aristotle professor lecture on the vision of the good in Metaphysics Lambda, I felt that I was in the presence of something valuable. This value was..\n\nThe post Universities: Flawed but Valuable first appeared on Daily Nous.",
  "title": "Universities: Flawed but Valuable"
}