These two visions of the university intertwine on most American college campuses today. Professors in the humanities and social sciences engage in highly specialized research, attempting to push knowledge into new areas — and many view this effort as a project that involves and requires liberating individuals from the dead weight of received prejudices.

The result is that academics usually end up pursuing scholarly agendas that are the furthest thing from anything that could be described as “conservative.” The imperative to advance knowledge demands that research contributes something new. Meanwhile, the tendency to relegate all received truth claims to the category of prejudice leads to suspicion even of the established findings of the previous generation of scholars.

At least as much as ideological bias, it is this relentless drive to break from the past and push further in the pursuit of knowledge that fuels the radicalism of liberal arts scholarship, especially in the humanities. “Yet another dissertation on death and existential anguish in King Lear? That sounds boring. Oh, you mean you’re deconstructing the play to reveal the heretofore hidden grammar of cisnormative oppression in the text? Now that’s interesting and fresh!”