Delbanco on Academic Humility and Higher Ed's Image Problem

Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor of American studies and president of the Teagle Foundation, has spent more than five decades inside elite higher education. In a new essay in the journal Liberties and a follow-up interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education, he delivers an unsparing message to his colleagues: a creeping culture of smugness and complacency is undermining the very institutions it presumes to protect. Opening his essay with a 1968 Richard Hofstadter commencement line—"The very possibility of civilized human discourse rests upon the willingness of people to consider that they might be mistaken"—Delbanco calls for a revival of intellectual humility.

Delbanco locates the shift in the messages universities send students. He contrasts the Puritan-era presidential greeting that reminded students they were "worthless sinners" with today's typical refrain welcoming the "best and brightest." He argues this unearned sense of superiority has widened the gap between elite institutions and the broader public, making them easy targets for political attack. Yet Delbanco does not let universities off the hook, acknowledging that their "rich repertoire of follies"—from trigger warnings to the perception of ideological intolerance—has given critics real ammunition.

The conversation ranges widely: he dismisses the current field of American studies as uninteresting, insists that the core mission of the humanities is teaching rather than the production of new knowledge, and opposes the AAUP's recent decision to endorse a partisan political candidate. He also reveals a personal concession to a changing classroom climate, recounting how he stopped reading aloud a bawdy Benjamin Franklin letter that had once provoked laughter but now left students unsettled.

Between Slander and Self-Inflicted Wounds: The University's Double Bind

Universities' Fragile Public Compact

Delbanco frames the public-relations crisis of higher education as a collision between a decades-long, cynical political attack—dating back to Ronald Reagan in California—and the sector's own complacency. He notes that even institutions with multibillion-dollar endowments and thousands of desperate applicants have responsibilities to society, but a "smugness" that says "I don't owe anybody anything" has taken hold. The result, in his telling, is a vicious cycle: external slander mixes with internal missteps, leaving the public unable to distinguish caricature from reality.

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The Humanities' Identity Disconnect

The Alexander Hamilton Professor is frank about his disengagement from the scholarly community of American studies, which he says would regard Columbia's undergraduate program—rooted in the "old history and literature" model—with "disdain and hostility." More broadly, he challenges the premise that humanities research should mirror the sciences in generating new knowledge. The discipline's primary purpose, he argues, is a teaching mission: transmitting cultural knowledge critically so that students are better prepared for adult and civic life. That view puts him at odds with an academy that often measures prestige by publication, not pedagogy.

The Limits of Institutional Self-Defense

The AAUP's breach of a century-long nonpartisan tradition to endorse a Senate candidate draws a clear rebuke from Delbanco. He sees it as a mistake, though he acknowledges the Kalven Report's narrow exception for threats to a university's core function. He also wrestles with the "familial" defensiveness that makes academics bristle at outside criticism even when they harbor their own doubts. Calling himself "in the confusion business," Delbanco suggests that a proper response to the pressure on universities is not a closed-ranks posture but a genuine renewal of self-questioning and a de-escalation of the culture-war reflexes that alienate the public.

What Delbanco's Diagnosis Means for Campuses and Scholarly Bodies

  • Revisit orientation rhetoric. Delbanco's contrast between humble 18th-century welcomes and today's "best and brightest" language suggests that university leaders can immediately reduce perceived arrogance by modulating the triumphant tone of freshman convocations and public messaging.
  • Clarify the boundaries of scholarly neutrality. The AAUP's move into partisan endorsements, which Delbanco opposes, signals a need for academic associations to rearticulate when institutional neutrality should bend—and to reaffirm that endorsing candidates in the current climate does not meet the Kalven Report's high bar.
  • Re-center the humanities on teaching. Delbanco's argument that the humanities' fundamental mission is transmission, not the production of new knowledge, challenges department chairs and deans to reward classroom excellence as heavily as research output—and to ask whether the current American-studies field, which he largely dismisses, is serving students or a self-referential guild.
  • Confront internal follies without waiting for an external crisis. The combination of real abuse and self-inflicted caricature means universities cannot afford a "family first" defensiveness. Honest internal audits—about trigger-warning culture, ideological narrowness, and the treatment of canonical works—are a prerequisite for rebuilding the public's ability to distinguish reality from caricature.