Pushback at cancel culture is leading to new educational initiatives

A BLOG POST by a self-professed liberal, atheist 19-year-old student put culture warriors in a spin in January. She described her transfer from an elite, liberal-arts college to a Christian college in Michigan. Conservatives said it showed young people were sick of leftist indoctrination. Liberals pointed to the fact that the student’s mother was an anti-vaxxer, who boasted online that this was the reason for the transfer.

Beyond these skirmishes, the case of the student, Jane Kitchen, raised questions about what good a liberal-arts education is in America today. Ms Kitchen arrived at Bryn Mawr College in Philadelphia in 2019, and loved much about it. But she was surprised at the cultural virtue-signalling and lack of intellectual inquiry. Even before covid, “I didn’t sit around with my friends all night arguing about big questions like I thought I would,” she wrote. “It was assumed that we all agreed on the answers.”

Because she did not want to accept a two-week quarantine and a mask mandate on her return to college, she spent a depressed year at home, and decided to transfer. Many of the colleges operating normally were religious. Still, she took a chance on Hillsdale, where she found an intellectual diversity that she had missed. She told a professor that she had privately objected to a point in class but had not...