What, in a time of rising authoritarianism and increasing censorship, are the guarantors of free expression—of, that is, a free society? There’s the press, first and foremost, both the chief beneficiary and champion of free speech. There’s an independent judiciary willing to stand up for the right to dissent and to speak and write freely. Public libraries and librarians do their part every day, resisting efforts to control what can be read. Booksellers and publishers do the same.

But, by Lee C. Bollinger’s account in his short but powerful book University: A Reckoning (Norton, Jan. 20), no institution, apart from the press, is so closely bound with the fortunes and intent of the First Amendment as our system of higher learning. The university, he writes, is premised on a commitment “to preserve and advance knowledge about the human condition, about life and the natural world, and to pass human knowledge and the capacities to pursue it on to succeeding generations.” No society has ever been more dedicated to free speech for all as America’s. Just so, no institution has been more devoted to the pursuit of free inquiry and the free exchange of ideas than America’s extraordinary network of universities and colleges.

For that very reason, it seems, both the press and America’s universities are under siege by the Trump administration. As Bollinger—a distinguished legal scholar and the former president of the University of Michigan and Columbia University—tells Kirkus, “If you look not just at what has happened with universities, but also what the Trump administration has done with respect to media, to law firms, or even to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, they’re trying to control both information and opinion, as well as viewpoints that are perceived as against what Trump believes in. There’s a motive, apparently, of suppression of opinion, of opposition. That strikes at the heart of democracy and the heart of the First Amendment, which is supposed to assure that we respect differences of opinion. Some [opinions] are hard to live with, but we learn to live with them—and we’re better off for living with them.”

Enter the university, which has always thrived on principled disagreement, on the dialectic of opposing thought that yields some better way of seeing the world. As Bollinger puts it in the book, to be a citizen of the university “you must be considered, thoughtful, open to alternatives, and welcoming of arguments that might lead you to have a change of mind.” In that regard, a good academician, he continues, knows that there’s nothing wrong in being wrong so long as one is willing to course-correct to what is true, whether that truth comes from students, fellow faculty members, or the larger community of scholars who hold each other to account. This sort of academic temperament is akin to judicial temperament, and with the same goal: to arrive at what is true, verifiable, and real while defending one’s intellectual home against assailants who insist that there’s only one truth that derives from some political or religious doctrine of choice.

In this system of institutional thinking, a professor’s primary duty is to both defend and contribute to knowledge and its processes. Secondary allegiance is owed to the larger academic community, one’s peers, who judge the merits of such contributions. Only then does the academician owe fealty to a home institution, which might seem a surpassingly odd idea to a doctrinaire loyalist. Indeed, Bollinger notes, “No other sector of society is organized along these lines.” He adds, “The university is dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge, and the experts themselves are largely running the show.” In a time when expertise is derided—just think of the current federal assault on children’s vaccines—this is a nearly revolutionary idea.

Asked whether the widespread complaint that conservative thought is suppressed on campuses has any merit, Bollinger has a nuanced reply. “One of the points of the book,” he says, “is that you really have to understand that our natural impulses are not to be tolerant. It’s very hard to be open-minded. It’s very easy to have beliefs, to be firm in those beliefs, and to reject and oppose any other beliefs. Just like the First Amendment itself, universities have to be abnormally tolerant, abnormally open-minded. One of the things that’s defining about free speech is just how extreme it can be. In America, you can say anything, and it’s protected—and some of the most vile and obnoxious things are said. In universities, we want people to develop a special kind of intellectual character that makes it possible for them to be open to new discoveries, ways of thinking about things. All of that requires a culture. It requires norms. It requires collective commitment. And it requires constant effort.”

Bollinger continues, “You can make a fair criticism that on many university campuses, certain viewpoints are disfavored by the majority of the people, whether they’re students or faculty. We should address that. But that does not justify the efforts of the government to seize control of universities and…start dictating what it is that will be taught, who will be hired, what students will be admitted. That’s a level of intrusion that is completely disproportionate to the problem.”

If the First Amendment will continue to guide our society, Bollinger urges in University, three conditions must be met. First, society must learn to embrace the value of learning and the quest for knowledge. Second, we all must learn to control our natural impulses to reject contrary ideas without weighing them. And third, as he writes, “using all the techniques at our disposal (other than government censorship) for organizing our collective discussions in the most beneficial and productive ways, we must find and hold the ‘center,’” the middle course that offers and proposes dialogue instead of vituperation and threats.

Universities have brought some of the current storm down on themselves, Bollinger acknowledges, by not making enough effort to explain themselves beyond the campus gates. Universities benefit society in countless ways—especially, these days, through biomedical and technological research and discovery. They could do more, Bollinger suggests, by bringing expertise to bear on other public issues. And for all the worn tropes about absent-minded professors and their impractical ways, the knowledge that swirls around campuses has everything to do with addressing ills from economic inequality to climate change and beyond.

“One of my main goals in writing this book is to develop a conception of universities,” Bollinger tells Kirkus. “That conception understands what it is that we are trying to do as a society, and it appreciates just how wonderful, but how delicate and fragile, universities are. Most people, I think, just don’t realize how successful they have been. I want universities to be much more expansive in the ways in which they interact with the public, explaining what it is that we do. And I want universities to stand up for the First Amendment, and to stand up for it collectively. I want to see more confidence, more resoluteness, and more sense of an identity that demands respect and regard and resistance against anybody—especially the government—that would try to take that away.”

Gregory McNamee is a contributing writer.