Alex Gourevitch rightly dissects the retooling of progressive language—“safety,” “trauma,” “hostile environment”—into instruments of suppression. He also sharply traces the bipartisan convergence around limiting dissent based on this language. One need not agree with every chant on the quad to see the peril in allowing subjective discomfort to supplant the principle of expressive freedom.

Nevertheless, Gourevitch’s essay suffers from a shallow historical memory. In citing Lee Bollinger’s fulsome comments about the legacy of 1968 at Columbia, Gourevitch misses the deeper ways that our institutions absorb and deflect dissent. Appropriating the language and energy of social movements to limit campus protest has been a continuous aspect of the American university since the 1960s. Through student sit-ins in the early 1960s to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s, higher education institutions honed a variety of techniques for neutralizing student movements, including freezing funds for select student groups, delegitimizing autonomous initiatives that operated outside faculty and administrative oversight, and channeling agitation into academically sanctioned programs. And like today, universities often did all this while using the rhetoric of student activists, whether “social action” in the 1960s or “moral responsibility” in the 1980s.

The point is that the university does not merely contain a disciplinary apparatus; it is a disciplinary apparatus. Far more than a site of knowledge production, the modern university functions as a mechanism of social control, ensuring that dissent is only tolerated if properly credentialed, routed through appropriate channels, or domesticated, for example, by “time, place, and manner” restrictions. The effect is to render dissent guilty until proven innocent, and inherently suspect and punishable the moment it breaches these and other tacit institutional bounds. While Gourevitch takes aim at administrators, faculty governance serves its own disciplinary ends. The imagined divide between professors and administrators obscures the fact that both are engaged in transmitting this hidden curriculum.

In other words, what may seem today like the sudden onset of institutional schizophrenia—liberal ideals masking illiberal tactics—is really the modern university’s whole raison d’être. Politically committed students excitedly enter institutions that style themselves as committed to free inquiry, open debate, and the cultivation of independent thought through a liberating and liberal education. What they confront, in reality, are institutions governed everywhere by disciplinary mechanisms: layers of hierarchy, gatekeeping of speech and knowledge, and the containment of dissent through procedural control. The uncomfortable truth is that the modern American university’s repression of protest is not a betrayal of its mission but the foundation of it.

Gourevitch rightly insists that protest is a democratic necessity, not a discretionary privilege. But on many college campuses, protest and others modes of democratic practice are still treated as a distraction from learning rather than part of it. What we need is a revival of the teach-in, a model of the university that placed dissent, protest, and deliberation at the heart of education and inseparable from how the institution governs.