The degradation of liberal education in America is anything but a niche public-policy concern.

Like all rights-protecting democracies – and especially as a 21st-century great power with globe-spanning interests – the United States requires a host of highly-trained individuals to keep its government functioning, military operating, economy churning, and civil society thriving. Essential men and women perform manual labor, offer basic services, and run small businesses. In addition, the nation needs physicists, chemists, and biologists; lawyers, doctors, and business executives; teachers, software engineers, and architects; journalists and civil servants; military officers, politicians, diplomats, judges, and religious leaders; and many more.

To acquire the professional skills necessary to fill key roles in America’s advanced industrial society, individuals must typically obtain a four-year college degree. Prestigious undergraduate programs, which incubate America’s highly credentialed elites, purport to offer the requisite professional training – or requisite introduction to professional training – within the framework of liberal education.

When true to its mission – transmitting knowledge, invigorating the moral imagination, cultivating independent thought, fostering toleration and civility – liberal education serves the public interest by making experts of all sorts more informed, thoughtful, and judicious. When it betrays its mission – indoctrinating, administering political litmus tests, encouraging a haughty self-regard among those who toe the party line, and mocking and punishing dissent – liberal education subverts the public interest. A doctrinaire liberal education sends into the world young men and women who confuse their reflexes, preferences, aversions, biases, and conceits with the last word and only acceptable outlook on citizenship, government, and justice.

Consequently, remedying liberal education’s rampant dysfunction – suppression of free speech, disregard for due process in cases involving allegations of sexual misconduct, and politicization and hollowing out of the curriculum – should unite left and right. Hectoring professors and sanctimonious administrators promulgating an illiberal campus orthodoxy – supplemented by a critical mass of students selected for their fervent illiberalism – involve a gross abuse of power. Over the long term, the higher indoctrination on campus diminishes elites’ ability to meet their obligations as good citizens, as private sector professionals, as government officials, and as fair-minded human beings.

City Journal editor Brian C. Anderson summarizes the grim situation: “[P]oorly educated students, frequently facing lousy prospects for remunerative work and........

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