Berkeley is only one of a growing number of universities that have been highlighted as waning in their commitment to free speech. A little over a year ago, Yale came under scrutiny for a notorious case involving a debate about censoring Halloween costumes on campus. And last spring The New Yorker published an in-depth investigation of how a “new” activism at Oberlin College had weakened a sense of open dialogue. A few months before that The Atlantic also ran a big cover story highlighting how “in the name of emotional well-being” college students across the country were now “increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas” they didn’t like.

Such reports have in turn reinforced a longstanding political narrative, which seeks to demean America’s universities as ideologically narrow, morally slack, hypersensitive, and out of touch. For example, commentators like the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat have argued that America’s “university system” is “genuinely corrupt” in relying on “rote appeals to … left-wing pieties to cloak its utter lack of higher purpose.”

But does this widespread portrait of universities as morally weak and anti-democratic—circulating at least since the time of Allan Bloom—really hold true? This vision of American universities is largely inadequate in at least two ways. First, it incorrectly blames increased fragility exclusively on the university system itself and, second, it relies on a reductive caricature of America’s institutions of higher learning.

Undoubtedly a threatened sense of identity has led to a rise of some left-wing students making unreasonable demands in terms of censoring or excluding certain material. For example, at Oberlin College there was increased pressure on administration and admissions to expunge the institution of “imperialism, white supremacy, capitalism, ableism, and a cissexist heteropatriarchy.” As part of this one student prominently called for “trigger warnings” so that students could prepare themselves for emotionally-challenging texts like Sophocles’s Antigone. This call in turn vexed faculty, other students, parents, and administration, generating divisions on campus. Yet a closer look reveals that the fragility of identity politics is far from limited to the left on college campuses.

Identity politics places individual and group notions of selfhood at the center of politics. As the philosopher Charles Taylor has argued at length, the main goal of identity politics is “recognition” or validation of a given identity by others in society. I have written elsewhere about how identity politics (normally associated with American liberalism) is actually a major engine fueling the rise of Trump. The categories of left and right often distort the ways in which cultural trends, like those associated with identity politics, are far more widely shared across American life. While some left-wing groups on campus are guilty of retreating from open dialogue, a conservative-identity movement has likewise tried to buffer students from having to hear ideas that upset them.