Though elite colleges profess a faith in meritocracy and insist that they are engines of class mobility, in practice they reward the already rewarded. A recent study by the economists Raj Chetty, David J. Deming, and John N. Friedman, for instance, revealed that “children from families in the top 1 percent are more than twice as likely to attend an Ivy-Plus college as those from middle-class families with comparable SAT/ACT scores.” As The Harvard Crimson likewise noted some years ago, “roughly 26 percent of members of the Class of 2025 who answered a question about parental income in TheCrimson’s annual freshman survey said their families make $250,000 or more per year—earnings higher than 94 percent of American households.” If Bollinger hopes to engender a consensus in favor of research universities, it is unlikely to be built without the support of the many Americans who attend two-year and non-research institutions and who rightly understand elite colleges as gatekeepers of class privilege.

But even when it comes to the research university, Bollinger’s understanding is woefully out of date. For instance, he insists that it is “expected of a professor…that their scholarship must be made fully available to the public.” However, as anyone who isn’t employed by or enrolled at a university is aware, most scholarly material is not available to the public but instead is available only to those who pay significant access fees to various, oftentimes for-profit organizations. In fact, some of those who have tried to skirt these paywalls have suffered serious penalties. The activist Aaron Swartz, to take the most egregious example, was hounded by the government for downloading and making available millions of academic articles from JSTOR, one of a number of groups that belong to an oligopolistic infrastructure whose business model relies on the free labor of scholars.

This is just one of several instances in which Bollinger ignores the actually existing political economy of the modern research university. Most galling for a history PhD like myself, he makes only passing reference to the jobs crisis that has beset so many disciplines within the humanities and social sciences. In Bollinger’s vision, everyone is either tenured or tenure-track, working on behalf of advancing public knowledge—an untenable position in an environment in which the tenure-track researcher is more the exception than the rule.

Bollinger has for decades been ensconced in hyper-elite universities that, until recently, were able to shield themselves from the degradation of the higher-education system as a whole. He imagines a university defined by “gatherings in the faculty commons, workshops over drafts, formal lectures to attend, and shared social events.” But this world doesn’t exist—indeed, it can’t exist in a context in which the disciplines are failing to reproduce themselves. In the past, even when a wider public audience was often prevented from accessing most scholarly production, professors could assume that there would at least be an academic audience for their work. This audience might have been small, but there was a promise that it would continue to exist in the future. Today, that promise has dissipated, which naturally affects how scholars approach their research. It’s not for nothing that a prominent scholar recently joked to me that “podcasts are the new journal articles.”

That Bollinger does not reckon with the reality of what it means to be an academic in the mid-2020s underlines a key feature of his work: While he has much to say about the glories of scholarship, he is ultimately not interested in the people who produce it. This is a serious problem for his program, because at the end of the day, universities are above all else workplaces, and their defense requires a buy-in from the workers who make them what they are.

The most innovative part of University: A Reckoning is not Bollinger’s analysis of the current state of the American university, but rather his legal arguments about how to protect the university from state interference in the future. Working through a century of First Amendment jurisprudence, he argues that “the constitutional principles of freedom of speech and press” can be used to protect universities from government intrusion.

To understand Bollinger’s position, one must run through a potted history of the First Amendment, which he ably provides. The Supreme Court, he notes, started hearing First Amendment cases only in 1919, when numerous radicals—including the Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs—were prosecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts of 1917 and 1918 for inveighing against US participation in World War I. The cases against Debs and others eventually made their way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that the radicals’ speech was not protected by the First Amendment. By the end of 1919, however, the court had significantly changed course: Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. issued an opinion in which he argued that, first, freedom of speech was necessary to improve knowledge; and second, truth could be discovered only when all ideas were allowed to compete in the marketplace; and third, the Constitution itself was an “experiment” that could function only if ideas were freely exchanged. Thus, Holmes declared, the government could limit free speech only when there was a “clear and present danger” that would be addressed by doing so.

While there were moments in the 20th century when freedom of speech wasn’t respected—Bollinger highlights the McCarthy-era prosecution of Communist Party leaders—he contends that, in general, Holmes’s pro-free-speech perspective carried the day. This was true even in situations that offended many Americans, such as in 1969, when the Supreme Court ruled that it was legal for Ku Klux Klan members in Ohio to openly wield weapons and threaten Blacks and Jews so long as the Klan’s speech wasn’t, as Bollinger puts it, “directed at inciting imminent lawless action.” With this ruling, he notes, the court made it clear that Americans were expected to “live with the most reprehensible ideas, really until they are about to become action.”

Bollinger cites another case that he argues also has relevance to protecting universities. In 1960, L.B. Sullivan, the city commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama—a hot spot of anti-Black racism and civil-rights resistance—sued The New York Times for running an advertisement that criticized the city’s police force for committing numerous injustices. After hearing this case, the Supreme Court ruled that the Times had not committed any violation because, Bollinger explains, the Constitution assumed “that sovereignty resided with the citizenry and not with the government itself.”

In Bollinger’s telling, this ruling indicated that “the authority and responsibility of citizens to exercise self-government meant that public officials could not be permitted to sue citizens for damages or damaging falsehoods about them absent truly extraordinary circumstances.” If public officials were allowed to sue the press and ordinary people, the Supreme Court warned, Americans might become wary of engaging in public debate, which would undermine the foundations of American democracy.

This all makes for interesting reading, but how does it relate to American universities? For Bollinger, these cases, and much of First Amendment jurisprudence, establish a clear reason why universities need to exist—and to be free of government interference. Since there are “no legal checks on speech that disrespects others, urges violence, revels in misinformation and falsehoods, propagates stupidity, or forsakes ideas and norms we all should value,” the university, he argues, has a critical social function: It can serve as a “moderator” able to “help lead and guide the discussion.”

Bollinger contends that this role has traditionally fallen to the press. But today, he notes, the professionalized press, dedicated to disseminating facts about the world, has been supplanted by social-media companies that have little interest in the truth as such. In Bollinger’s view, “this is where the university comes in.” He insists that “universities are a version of the press [that] offer deeper inquiry into public issues and are always on call to serve as a check on government and society.” Therefore, similar to the press, they should be conceived as an additional, and protected, estate—“a fifth branch” of democratic government “as essential as the press to our collective life and success.”

Bollinger’s case for the university is essentially a functionalist one: that universities should be protected from government intrusion because they serve a crucial, moderating function in a society defined by very permissive First Amendment jurisprudence.

There are several significant problems with this argument. For starters, the First Amendment has nothing to say about higher education, and no amount of legal reasoning will change that. Therefore, any First Amendment–based case for the university will have significant limits and will likely face severe pushback. Second, the labor of journalists and of academics are in practice quite dissimilar. In an ideal world, journalists check government and private power through the rapid and timely exposure of information and behavior. Academics, by contrast, engage in years-long research projects that are concerned primarily—as Bollinger well knows—with expanding our knowledge in particular areas of inquiry. Such work might check state and corporate power, but that is not its primary function, nor should it be. Finally, even if universities were reformed to become the referees of public speech, it is by no means clear that this would engender a better, let alone more moderate, society. If the past several decades have revealed anything, it’s that experts often get things wrong—just look at the Iraq War or the 2008 financial crisis. In both of these cases, experts failed to check power and contributed to policies that actively made the world worse.

Bollinger’s program embodies the liberal faith in expertise. Like many liberals, Bollinger assumes that the “correct” ideas, developed, articulated, and promoted by an educated elite–cum–expert class, can impel and preserve good governance. It’s an ahistorical perspective that refuses to take seriously the many failures of expertise that have shaped the 20th and 21st centuries. After all, it was the experts who advanced the arguments that brought us deregulation, financialization, and endless war. Many Americans have thus lost faith in the experts. To paraphrase Anton Chigurh, if the experts we followed brought us here, of what use were the experts?

This leads to the fundamental problem with University: A Reckoning. Bollinger premises his book on defending a liberal “center”—a center defined by its belief that a college-educated elite should make the most consequential political, economic, and social decisions—that has lost its legitimacy. Indeed, his inability or unwillingness to accept this new reality leads him to have little interest in those who could actually defend the university from Trump: the professors, graduate students, and staff who ensure that the university works.

Bollinger, in fact, might be among the most unsuitable people to offer a defense of the university in the present moment. During his 21 years as president of Columbia, Bollinger witnessed multiple graduate-student strikes, one of which was caused by his administration’s unwillingness to recognize their union. Workers, it seems, don’t occupy much space in his imagination, or for that matter in the imagination of most university administrators. In recent years, for instance, administrators at Harvard, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, and elsewhere have shown significant unwillingness to recognize, bargain with, or offer concessions to the workers attempting to unionize their workplaces.

Administrators’ hostility to unionization is unfortunate, because if faculty and graduate students don’t organize with one another and with staff across campus, the American university will continue to decline. One only wishes that Bollinger, when he had the power to do so, had aided instead of impeded the workers who made his university what it was. They are, after all, the people on whom any defense, let alone a remaking, of the university will rely.