Josh Dunn

[Institute of American Civics @utk_civics]

Executive Director Joshua Dunn spoke with @knoxnews Georgiana Vines about our new Civic and Constitutional Thought major. Read more: https://t.co/W0tUtPpRIy

[Josh Dunn @professordunn]

@jon_stewartmill There's a remedial struggle session to certify that you're ready to advance. The Canvas module will be available soon.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

Everyone should read @Tyler_A_Harper’s extraordinary Atlantic cover story, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor.”

It is one of the best accounts yet of how bad American campuses became between roughly 2015 and 2025, peaking from 2020 to 2023. It was a disaster for academic freedom, free speech, and higher education’s credibility. It also helped destroy trust in shared facts, because people stopped believing that our supposed referees would scrutinize claims that fit their own ideology as aggressively as claims from the other side.

Now there is a concerted effort to pretend either that none of this happened, or that it was merely a strange youthful indiscretion we can laugh off, much as people tried to do with the first great age of political correctness.

We must not let them wish it away.

If you experienced the quasi-religious groupthink that overtook institutions supposedly devoted to inquiry, write about it. Record what happened, what people were afraid to say, and why. Otherwise, this period will be rewritten by many of the same people who defended the status quo while casting themselves as brave underdogs. Looking at you, @rottenindenmark, among others. Doing PR work for a $1 trillion industry is not exactly fighting for social justice.

I also have always seen this through a class lens. Elite higher education is a gigantic industry that disproportionately benefits people who are already well-off. Yes, people like me can get through it and have our lives transformed. But we are a small part of the story.

There is an older intellectual history here. Thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse confronted a frustrating problem: the working class often failed to behave as intellectuals expected and an awful lot of working people hated intellectuals. Ordinary Americans liked their country, distrusted elites, and seemed perfectly capable of living without philosopher-kings directing them.

The solution was an newideology that allowed highly educated elites to regard working-class people with contempt while still seeing themselves as champions of the oppressed.

That became academia’s problem when universities built departments, bureaucracies, hiring systems, and professional cultures that treated deeply contestable political doctrines as moral dogma.

You can see the results throughout Tyler’s story: classism, utter contempt for locals, exaggerated self-importance, ordinary disputes transformed into battles of good and evil, and politicized administrators remarkably skilled at weaponizing elite ideology against their own institutions.

Tyler’s piece is both testimony and warning. There are excellent university presidents trying to right the ship, but too many faculty organizations and professional associations still seem to believe the ideology was never the problem—it simply wasn’t imposed consistently enough.

We need to document what happened and build institutions less vulnerable to another episode like it.

Because this was never some weird, isolated campus disaster. It spread into journalism, science, philanthropy, corporations, K–12 education, government, and politics. It damaged the credibility of the institutions we depend on to tell us what is true.

A society that loses faith in its knowledge-producing institutions eventually loses something more important than the reputation of its universities: its ability to see the world as it is.

[Josh Dunn @professordunn]

@varadmehta A bunch of people trying to beat the crowds.

[Josh Dunn @professordunn]

@vkoganpolisci Given the public’s attitude toward higher ed, won’t this hurt the candidates they endorse?

[Josh Dunn @professordunn]

I see some grocery arbitrage in NYC's future.

[Acyn @Acyn]

Mamdani: Today, I am proud to announce a collection of essential staples that will be predictably 30% cheaper at all five of our city-run grocery stores. This core set of goods will include all fresh produce, meat, and seafood, along with 20 other essential items like cheese, milk, and bread.

Here's how it will work. Once a month, our five city-run grocery stores will set prices for this core set of goods at 30% below typical retail prices. No exceptions, no gimmicks. The savings will last for the entire month. That means no weekly fluctuations or sticker shock at the checkout line—not for our seniors living on fixed incomes, nor for the parents who rely on a regular supply of apple slices to keep toddler tantrums at bay.

[H S Joshi @jon_stewartmill]

1/ Insightful post by @professordunn: How the Rich Preserve Liberty

"the wealthy matter not because they are invariably virtuous, but because liberty requires private power strong enough to resist public power."

[John O. McGinnis @joldmcginn]

Joshua Dunn’s generous review of Why Democracy Needs the Rich ranges from Harrison Bergeron to SpaceX and captures a central truth: democracy needs wealth earned through enterprise because liberty needs power outside the state. Book available: https://t.co/9pVyy1x2Wz

[Civitas Outlook @CivitasOutlook]

The wealthy are not always wise, admirable, public-spirited, or possessed of good taste. But in a free society, they help prevent the monopolization of power.

More from @professordunn: https://t.co/QAvF0ARZaM

[Josh Dunn @professordunn]

@yuanyi_z @jgo34 It's been interesting seeing scholars voluntarily demonstrate declining standards in the academy.

[Civitas Outlook @CivitasOutlook]

In 'Why Democracy Needs the Rich,' @joldmcginn has written a book for readers who might otherwise confuse “Harrison Bergeron” with a how-to manual.

Read more from @professordunn: https://t.co/pE4fkKkOly

[Institute of American Civics @utk_civics]

It’s official: The Institute of American Civics is launching an academic major.

Beginning this fall, students can pursue a B.A. in Civic and Constitutional Thought, with a rigorous foundation in America’s political traditions.

Learn more: https://t.co/mU4nPPpnd6

[Josh Dunn @professordunn]

@CivitasOutlook @joldmcginn Cited you in this https://t.co/ggC6vmo2CH.

[Civitas Outlook @CivitasOutlook]

.@joldmcginn' 'Why Democracy Needs the Rich' reminds readers that the wealthy matter not because they are invariably virtuous, but because liberty requires private power strong enough to resist public power.

Read @professordunn's full review on Civitas Outlook: https://t.co/dNRxNdOO1f

[Josh Dunn @professordunn]

@BrandonWarmke @joshshepperd Yes, famously religious conservatives like . . . David Hume.

[Michael Petrilli @MichaelPetrilli]

Via the excellent @kportermagee

Religious liberty in education: Back to the Supreme Court https://t.co/59Z4FYgrcr @marcportermagee @professordunn @ProfMartyWest @saramead

[Civitas Institute @CivitasInst]

Denigrating the Declaration had a larger purpose. By dismissing its philosophy as a crude fetish from a bygone age, progressives could then dismiss limited government itself. | @professordunn

Read more: https://t.co/MYa2y2JXAy

[Kian Tajbakhsh @k_tajbakhsh]

If @EliLake’s account is accurate, Angela Davis’s selective solidarity—and the hypocrisy beneath it—reminded me immediately of my own experience in American academia.

When I returned to the United States in 2016 after years as a political prisoner in Iran—the longest-held American citizen there, including nearly a year in solitary confinement in Evin Prison under the IRGC, for peacefully promoting human rights, democracy, and an open society—I ended up at a prestigious Ivy League university, where I was unfortunate to find myself among a cluster of faculty concentrated largely in the humanities, Middle East studies, and parts of the softer social sciences. (NOTE: I am NOT generalizing about every faculty member or department across the university.)

What struck me most was not simply that I disagreed with their politics, though I often did. Nor was it only how little many of them seemed to understand about the real political world beyond the sloganeering vocabulary of their own disciplines.

I can tolerate ideological disagreement. I can even tolerate foolishness. And there was plenty of it: puerile ideas about socialism, romantic fantasies about revolutionary politics, and astonishing—sometimes dangerous—ignorance about organizations such as Hamas.

What I found much harder to tolerate was the hypocrisy.

These were people who spoke endlessly about oppression, colonialism, indigenous land, migrants, racial injustice, capitalism, the “Global South,” and the suffering of distant peoples. But their solidarity was highly selective. It was most intense when directed toward people they would never have to know personally: migrants thousands of miles away at the southern border, or faceless “dark” populations somewhere in the so-called Global South, itself an increasingly useless abstraction.

The farther away the victims, the easier the solidarity. The closer the sacrifice came to home, the thinner it became.

I remember the reaction when a migrant shelter housing project was proposed inside the Brooklyn progressive bubble in Clinton Hill. Middle-class radicals, some living in multimillion-dollar brownstones, suddenly discovered the politics of “not in my backyard.” The housing crisis was urgent until the housing was to be built near them.

And then there was me.

An actual political prisoner from Iran—one of the few scholars in American academia with both academic expertise and firsthand experience of imprisonment by the Islamic Republic—interested almost no one. No one wanted to hear my story. Few showed much curiosity about Iranian political prisoners more broadly. And once it became clear that I would not vilify Israel, denounce the United States, or describe every Western institution as part of a neocolonial, white-supremacist, capitalist conspiracy, I was quietly marginalized.

That was the overriding impression left on me: hypocrisy.

An actual housing shortage mattered until someone proposed building housing next door. An actual political prisoner mattered only if he repeated the approved slogans.

I did not.

[Danielle Allen @dsallentess]

1/ The Declaration of Independence sparked the abolitionist movement immediately. Free African Americans used it to end slavery in Massachusetts before the Revolutionary War ended. Read more: https://t.co/Wqxpkg4HgU

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

I’ve always found people who bristle at “American exceptionalism” kind of… weird. Not because I lack self-awareness — I’ve spent my career cataloging every way this country fails to live up to its own rules. But that’s exactly why I love it so damn much. We built a system designed to be shamed by its own founding documents, and it still delivered one of the most spectacular, world-altering runs in human history. A genuine force for human flourishing.

I also found the argument against American exceptionalism to be historically illiterate. Here’s a sample of what we were first at:

• The first large-scale democratic republic in human history — not a city-state, not a monarchy with a parliament bolted on, but a bold continental experiment in self-rule, popular sovereignty, and ordered liberty.

• A written Constitution (1789) with separation of powers and checks & balances — still the oldest national constitution in force anywhere.

• The Bill of Rights (1791): the first time a nation wrote “the government cannot touch these” into supreme law and actually meant it. A dare the world copied — from later rights charters to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

• Public land-grant universities and mass higher education (Morrill Act), opening college to ordinary people no aristocracy would have let near the gates. (but don’t get me started about what happened after we started. Massively federally funding it.)

• Kitty Hawk, 1903 — first controlled powered flight.

• The Moon, 1969 — still the only ones who’ve been there.

• The world’s largest economy since ~1890, powering unprecedented prosperity through grit and genius.

• The assembly line, skyscraper, transistor, personal computer, ARPANET — the backbone of the modern world.

• Telephone, phonograph, GPS — connecting and powering daily life.

• Surgical anesthesia, polio vaccine — saving and transforming millions of lives.

• Jazz, blues, rock ‘n’ roll — brand new American art forms that conquered the globe.

• Hollywood’s dreams, blue jeans, bourbon, and a culture so open a kid like me could devour sushi, burritos, stuffed cabbage, and tabouli in the same week and rightfully think of it all as American.

That’s the part that fills me with genuine love and pride: not just the power or the wins, but the appetite for freedom, creativity, and reinvention. The audacity to say “We the People” and keep trying to live up to it.

What do you love most about this truly exceptional country? 🇺🇸