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Every year at this time I am privileged to appear as a guest lecturer for my friend Adam Daifallah’s course on the history of conservative thought at McGill University. Below are lightly edited excerpts from tonight’s lecture.

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In his essay, “What are universities for?” philosopher Leszek Kolakowski writes: “The greatest danger is the invasion of an intellectual fashion which wants to abolish cognitive criteria of knowledge and truth itself. The humanities and social sciences have always succumbed to various fashions, and this seems inevitable. But this is probably the first time that we are dealing with a fashion, or rather fashions, according to which there are no generally valid intellectual criteria.”

The counter-culture of the 1960s drew a bright line between all past and present understanding of what universities were for. Standing on one leg, one might say that in the past universities felt it was their mission to teach students how to think, and in doing so it was considered natural to use as a teaching guide, as the 19th century cultural critic Mathew Arnold put it, “the best which has been thought and said” in our culture. Arnold’s dictum governed my own university experience in the golden age of university expansion between 1945 and 1960. My courses were blessedly free of ideology, and devoted to cultivation of students’ critical faculties through exposure to a variety of opinions.