Jim Sleeper, a lecturer in political science at Yale University, teaches a seminar on "Journalism, Liberalism and Democracy" and wrote about the election for AlterNet and Salon. He is the author of "The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York."

Serious criticism is always due for “identity politics” that deepen racial divisions even while claiming to bridge them and that chills open inquiry and expression, on campus or off. But such criticism has hardly been too long in coming: Many have been offering it for decades, as I did 20 years ago in "Liberal Racism, How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream."

Legitimate criticism of overreactions to racism needs to account for other real concerns that have angered and frightened some groups.



Before identity politics was bureaucratized into color-codings of public life and pedagogy that license too much of our citizenship along race-group lines, it was trying to affirm and defend valuable group memories and belongings against degradation by a racism so routine and grinding that it was often unremarked by its carriers. As Justice Harry Blackmun noted in the Bakke decision in 1978, justice must be sought racially at times on the way to being achieved universally.



Legitimate criticism of overreactions to racism needs to keep abreast of recent developments that have angered and frightened some young Americans anew into demanding “politically correct” solutions. Their critics and news media shouldn’t over-dramatize and blame such excesses as causing a new conformity and “correctness” that are actually being imposed on society and on liberal education itself, not by identity politics but by extreme market pressures on society and on liberal education itself.

For all their faults, American universities remain among the few places where our society’s reigning paradigms, concentrations of power, and generally accepted injustices are examined and interrogated rigorously, fairly, and openly -- not merely denounced or dismissed by a few immature students and ideologically-impassioned teachers.

The political demagogues and pundits who cite those denunciations to make sweeping generalizations about the liberal academy only weaken public support for universities’ and political dissenters’ ability to stand somewhat apart from both markets and the state, as well as from widely popular assumptions and arrangements.

If we really want to deepen democratic trust and ''the use of reason beyond the calculation of self-interest,” as the political philosopher Allan Bloom put the challenge, “it is necessary that there be an unpopular institution in our midst that...resists our powerful urges and temptations.''

Bloom meant the university. Its critics should respect his admonition enough to stop blaming our society’s political and social crises on campus-based demands for color- and gender- coded justice that reflect the crises far more than they cause them.

Correction: An earlier version said the Bakke decision occurred in 1973.





Join Opinion on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/roomfordebate.

