What I want to know is why The New York Times lets opinion columnist Bret Stephens lie about higher education institutions.

I understand this is a strong charge, and perhaps it’s unfair. Maybe Stephens is merely uninformed and parroting bad information.

I’m thinking these things because we recently had the rare occasion of a pundit (Stephens) being challenged in real time by two experts (Tressie McMillan Cottom and M. Gessen) in the form of a three-way conversation printed under the headline “‘It Is Facing a Campaign of Annihilation’: Three Columnists on Trump’s War Against Academia.”

The conversation is moderated by Patrick Healey, another Times journalist, who gives Stephens the first word on the question “What went wrong with higher ed? How did colleges become such easy pickings?”

Stephens hearkens to the infamous Yale Halloween incident from 2015, when students committed the grave error of speaking intemperately to university administrators about a communication that seemed to authorize racially insensitive Halloween costumes over the objections of students.

Stephens wonders why these students weren’t expelled or at least suspended, justifying a crackdown for what may have been a break in decorum but was undeniably the exercise of free speech. Stephens ostensibly is against the threats of the Trump administration against Columbia University and others, and yet here he is essentially authorizing the administration rationale of punishing institutions that are not sufficiently punitive toward protesting students.

The voice of reason appears in the form of Cottom, both an active professor at the University of North Carolina and a sociologist who studies higher education. In the words of Kevin Carey, “Reading Tressie McMillan Cottom debate Bret Stephens on higher education is like watching Steph Curry play H.O.R.S.E. against a barely-sentient lump of gravel.”

Cottom counters with lived experience over Stephens’s fever dream: “I have taught the most quintessentially tense courses my entire academic career. My course names often have the words race, class and gender in them. I do this as a Black woman. I have never had a problem with students refusing to have debates. It could be that I am a uniquely gifted pedagogue but I reject that idea.”

This becomes a pattern throughout the exchanges, where Stephens makes something up and then Cottom and/or Gessen knock it down. Later on, Stephens goes on an uninformed rant about the lack of value of degrees with the word “studies” in them before going on to extol the virtues of humanistic study in the spirit of Matthew Arnold: “It means academic rigor, it means the contestation of ideas, it means a spirit of inquiry, curiosity, questioning and skepticism. Outside of a few colleges and universities, I’m not sure that kind of education is being offered very widely.”

That Stephens is extolling the virtues of rigorous thought and questioning while parroting ill-informed tropes about higher education does not occur to him. Cottom again corrects his misapprehension with verifiable data: “It is worth pointing out that data on labor market returns really challenge the well-worn idea that such degrees are worthless. We love the joke about your barista having a liberal arts degree, but most of the softness among those degree-holders disappears when you look at state-level data and not just starting salaries after graduation.”

Cottom goes on to acknowledge that there are some problems with the kinds of institutions she wrote about in Lower Ed: The Troubling Rise of the For-Profit College in the New Economy, after which Stephens jumps in with my favorite nonsense of the entire deal before being again, corrected—more gently than he deserves—by Cottom:

It is worth pausing here to consider how untethered Stephens is from the truth with saying the Columbia and Berkeley are “essentially factories of Maoist cadres.” One would think that if this were the case, they would be overwhelmingly churning out graduates in those dubious “studies” majors.

Let’s go to the data.

Top majors at Columbia: political science, economics, computer science, financial economics

Top majors at Cal: computer science, economics, cellular biology, computer and information sciences, engineering

The wokeness … it burns! Actually … it’s nonexistent.

I don’t know if Stephens has convinced himself of a fantasy based on a selective accounting of what’s happening on campus, promulgated by his center-right anti-woke fellow travelers, or if he is simply a liar, but either way, he is demonstrably out of touch with reality.

Stephens consistently authorizes the “logic” of the authoritarian, even if he disagrees with the specifics of the punishment. The idea that he would claim the mantle of the protector of rights is an irony beyond understanding.

Stephens concludes, “When diffident liberal administrators fail to confront the far left, the winners ultimately tend to be on the far right.”

I take a different lesson from all of this, namely that diffident administrators found some utility in the scolding of figures like Stephens as a rationale to crack down on student dissent and protect a status quo of administrative authority. If student demands are inherently unreasonable, they don’t need to be dealt with. I seem to recall a very popular book that invented an entire psychological pathology on the basis of a handful of campus incidents in order to delegitimize student speech people like Stephens didn’t like because it threatened authority.

This was the core weakness, and it is coming home to roost, because the most important asset institutions have in defending themselves against the attacks of the Trump administration would be the students—provided there was a reservoir of trust between students and administrations, which, in many cases, there isn’t.

The whole thing is a mess, and an existential one for universities. Stephens seems to think it’s possible that the current actions by Trump are “a loud shot across the bow of academia to get it to clean up its act.” This is, I fear, only additional delusion.

I’d ask leaders of institutions who they think is going to be a bigger help in this situation, people like Stephens, who seem to believe that at least some measure of the arbitrary punishment is deserved, or the people who live and work in their communities, who understand the mission and importance of what these institutions try to do.

Listen to the experts, particularly those on your own faculty, not the pundits.