Today, we hear from Martha Jones, the Society of Black Almuni Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University, and formerly a professor at the University of Michigan. Jones brings some of her experience especially at that latter institution to bear on our topic today: politics on college campuses.

We’re lucky she does. There’s been a lot of talk about campus politics, on both the left and right. On the right, we often hear about so-called liberal snowflakes who can’t bear to hear arguments that they don’t agree with, so they attempt to banish conservative speakers from their campuses and threaten to undermine the principle, the right, of freedom of expression. And on the center-left, we hear from some critics that identity politics is the problem: that students are so obsessed with the dynamics of personal identity and are thus incapable of or uninterested in the hard work of coalition building, sustained organizing, especially on the left.

This latter position was stated pretty succinctly by the liberal critic Mark Lilla recently in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in an article titled “How Colleges Are Strangling Liberalism.” Martha Jones and I reference that piece because it does sum up the critique from the center-left quite well, and it relates to Lilla’s widely discussed and debated piece in the New York Times, “The End of Identity Liberalism.” We also address the future of free expression on campus: where Jones thinks that debate is headed, and how, in the wake of Charlottesville, it’s entered the mainstream.