Institutions, like currencies, derive their value from trust. And like currencies, that trust can be inflated away through reckless issuance of claims that exceed underlying reserves. Something of this sort has happened to our universities, corporations, and cultural institutions over the past decade. Organizations that once commanded broad legitimacy by maintaining neutrality on contested questions have spent down their credibility reserves by picking sides—and demanding everyone else do the same.

This is not a complaint about progress itself. The expansion of civil rights, the inclusion of previously marginalized voices, and greater sensitivity to historical injustices represent genuine civilizational achievements. The question is different: have our institutions confused a particular ideological program with progress itself, and in doing so, undermined the very liberalism that made such progress possible?

The evidence suggests they have.

Consider the transformation of the modern university. Harvard’s recent troubles did not emerge from nowhere. When a university president could not straightforwardly condemn calls for genocide against Jews—responding instead that “it can be [harassment], depending on the context”—something had gone profoundly wrong. Not with one administrator’s media skills, but with an institutional culture that had lost the capacity for moral clarity outside its preferred frameworks. The problem was not that Harvard had become political; it was that it had become political in only one direction, leaving it intellectually unequipped to navigate questions that fell outside progressive orthodoxy.

The pattern repeats across the academy. Entire disciplines now operate within remarkably narrow ideological parameters. Studies by the National Association of Scholars examining over 12,000 tenure-track faculty at top-ranked universities found Democratic-to-Republican ratios of roughly 10:1 overall, exceeding 40:1 in fields like anthropology. One might argue this reflects self-selection by intelligent people toward correct positions. But this is precisely the reasoning that every dominant faction in history has employed to justify its monopoly. The academy’s traditional purpose was to cultivate independent thinking through exposure to competing ideas. Students were meant to encounter Hayek alongside Marx, Burke alongside Rawls—not to emerge with predetermined conclusions, but to develop the intellectual musculature to evaluate arguments on their merits.

The corporate world has followed a parallel trajectory. When Bud Light’s partnership with a transgender influencer triggered a consumer backlash, parent company Anheuser-Busch InBev reported $1.4 billion in lost North American revenue for 2023—and watched Modelo dethrone Bud Light as America’s best-selling beer after more than two decades. When Disney publicly opposed Florida’s parental rights legislation, Governor DeSantis seized control of the company’s self-governing Reedy Creek district, sparking years of litigation before a 2024 settlement. These are not arguments against transgender rights or for particular education policies. They are observations that corporations possess no special competence in adjudicating contested social questions—and that pretending otherwise carries costs.

The language of “psychological safety” has been deployed to justify the suppression of heterodox viewpoints. Google’s firing of James Damore for a memo questioning diversity initiatives—a memo that, whatever its flaws and contested interpretations, attempted to engage with empirical literature—signaled that internal debate on certain topics was impermissible. The message received throughout corporate America was unmistakable: there exist conclusions that cannot be questioned, evidence that cannot be cited, and conversations that cannot occur.

From Singapore to Sydney to Dubai, I watch my students navigate this landscape with a sophistication born of necessity. They have learned which opinions can be voiced in seminars and which must be reserved for private conversations. They understand that certain questions—about immigration, about gender, about affirmative action—are not really questions at all but loyalty tests. This is not education. It is catechism.

The consequences extend beyond institutional culture. When prestigious organizations systematically marginalize centre-right perspectives, they inadvertently validate populist claims about elite capture. The rise of Trump, Brexit, Milei, and their analogues becomes intelligible—even predictable—when institutions appear to speak with one political voice. Every university administrator who conflates diversity of appearance with diversity of thought, every HR department that treats ideological conformity as a job requirement, contributes to the very polarization they claim to deplore.

Think of institutional legitimacy as social capital—accumulated over generations, easily depleted, slowly restored. Universities built their authority over centuries by demonstrating commitment to truth over faction. Media organizations earned trust by distinguishing reporting from advocacy. Professional associations commanded respect by maintaining standards independent of political fashion. This capital is now being liquidated to fund contemporary ideological commitments. The returns may feel satisfying in the short term. The long-term solvency of these institutions is another matter.

There is also an intellectual cost. Good ideas emerge from rigorous contestation. When institutions insulate favored positions from serious challenge, they produce not robust conclusions but brittle orthodoxies. The progressive positions most worth defending are precisely those that can withstand engagement with thoughtful critics. By treating criticism as aggression, institutional gatekeepers do their own causes no favors. They create a generation of advocates who have never learned to argue, only to denounce.

What would a correction look like? Not a mirror-image politicization in the opposite direction—the solution to left-wing institutional capture is not right-wing institutional capture. Rather, a genuine recommitment to institutional neutrality on contested questions. Universities might remember that their purpose is to teach students how to think, not what to think. Corporations might recognize that their competence lies in providing goods and services, not moral instruction. Media organizations might rediscover the distinction between reporting and advocacy.

The liberal tradition that enabled both individual liberty and collective progress rested on a crucial insight: that no faction—however convinced of its own righteousness—should capture the institutions that belong to everyone. John Stuart Mill understood that the “tyranny of prevailing opinion” posed as great a threat to liberty as government coercion. He would recognize our moment instantly.

The path forward requires something unfashionable: the recognition that one’s ideological opponents might occasionally have a point, that good-faith disagreement differs from bigotry, and that the urge to silence rather than persuade reflects weakness rather than strength. Institutions that cannot model these basic intellectual virtues have forfeited their claim to authority. Those that can might yet recover the broad legitimacy that our fractured moment so desperately requires.

The choice belongs to institutional leaders who must decide whether they serve a faction or a civilization. The rest of us will judge their answer not by their statements but by their appointments, their policies, and their willingness to tolerate dissent. The ledger remains open. But the balance is not trending in a reassuring direction.

Institutional Drift: Key Examples

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)