This week, students will return to campuses across the country. And the rest of the nation will be watching. With a presidential election looming and a destructive war waged by one of the country’s closest foreign allies ongoing, much attention will be paid this fall to college campuses, to protest encampments and campus speakers, to the excesses and enthusiasms of college sophomores. Which raises the question of why? Why the obsession with what goes on at a handful of college campuses, often framed in terms of “campus culture wars”?
The terms of our fixation are peculiar. Is there really one culture that characterizes several thousand campuses—community colleges, liberal arts colleges, research universities, for-profit universities, and so on—or even just a significant swath of them? The historian Samuel Catlin put it even more bluntly in an essay earlier this year: “the campus” he claimed, “does not exist.”
Now…
