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But that changes for publicly-funded universities when speech veers into targeted harassment that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”

The legal commentator David Lat explained further, writing: “If I repeatedly send antisemitic emails and texts to a single Jewish student, that is far more likely to constitute harassment than if I set up an antisemitic website available to the entire world.”

As a result, what we’ve seen on campus is a mixture of protected antisemitic (as well as anti-Islamic) speech and prohibited harassment.

So if the university presidents were largely (though clumsily) correct about the legal balance, why the outrage?

For decades now, we’ve watched as campus administrators from coast to coast have constructed a comprehensive web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and to support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive.

The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students

Moreover, each of the schools represented at the hearing has its own checkered past on free speech. Harvard is the worst-rated school for free expression in America

So even if the presidents’ lawyerly answers were correct, it’s more than fair to ask, where was this commitment to free expression in the past?

That said, some of the responses to campus outrages have been just as distressing as the hypocrisy shown by the school presidents

Universities have censored conservatives? Then censor progressives too. Declare the extreme slogans of pro-Palestinian protesters to be harassment, and pursue them vigorously. Give them the same treatment you’ve given other groups who hold offensive views

But that’s the wrong answer. It’s doubling down on the problem.

At the same time, however, it would be wrong to carry on as if there isn’t a need for fundamental change. The rule cannot be that Jews must endure free speech at its most painful, while favored campus constituencies enjoy the warmth of college administrators and the protection of campus speech codes. The status quo is intolerable.

The best, clearest plan for reform I’ve seen comes from Harvard’s own Steven Pinker, a psychologis

He writes that campuses should enact “clear and coherent” free speech policies. They should adopt a posture of “institutional neutrality” on public controversy. (“Universities are forums, not protagonists.”) They should end “heckler’s vetoes, building takeovers, classroom invasions, intimidations, blockades, assaults.”

But reform can’t be confined to policies. It also has to apply to cultures. As Pinker notes, that means disempowering a diversity, equity and inclusion apparatus that is itself all too often an engine of censorship and extreme political bias

Most importantly, universities need to take affirmative steps to embrace greater viewpoint diversity. Ideological monocultures breed groupthink, intolerance and oppression.

Universities must absorb the fundamental truth that the best answer to bad speech is better speech, not censorship

do not protect students from speech. Let them grow up and engage with even the most vile of ideas. The answer to campus hypocrisy isn’t more censorship. It’s true liberty. Without that liberty, the hypocrisy will reign for decades more.

But I do think it’s going to be a while before this virus becomes completely normal. And I’ve never been convinced that this current generation of elderly people will ever get to a place where it is completely normal. If you’re 65 or 75 or even older — it’s really hard to teach an immune system new tricks if you’re that age

And so while we may see excess mortality in the elderly decline somewhat, I don’t think we’ll see it ever disappear for this generation who was already old when the pandemic hit. Many will never develop that robust, long-term immunological memory we would want to see — and which happens naturally to someone who’s been exposed hundreds of times since they were a little baby.

There’s a similar story with measles. There is no routine later-life sequelae, like shingles, for measles. But what we do see is that, in measles outbreaks today, there are some people who were vaccinated who get it anyway. Maybe 5 to 15 percent of cases are not immunologically naïve people, but vaccinated people.

Is it really the case that, as babies, we are fighting off those viruses hundreds of times?The short answer is yeah. We start seeing viruses when we’re 2 months old, when we’re a month old. And a lot of these viruses we’ve seen literally tens, if not hundreds of times for some people by the time we’re adults. People tend to think that immunity is binary — you’re either immune or you’re not. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s a gradient, and your protection gets stronger the more times you see a virus.

We used to think we just had this spectacular immune response when we first encountered the virus at, say, age 6, and that the immune response lasted until we were 70. But actually what we were seeing was the effect of an immune system being retrained every time it came into contact with the virus after the initial infection — at 6, and 7, and 8, and so on. Every time your friend got chickenpox, or your neighbor, you got a massive boost. You were re-upping your immune response and diversifying your immunological tools — potentially multiple times a year, a kind of natural booster.

But now, in America, kids get chickenpox vaccines. So you don’t have kids in America getting chickenpox today, and never will. But that means that older Americans, who did get it as kids, are not being exposed again — certainly not multiple times each year. And it turns out that, in the absence of routine re-exposures, that first exposure alone isn’t nearly as good at driving lifelong immunity and warding off shingles until your immune system begins to fall apart in old age — it can last until you’re in your 30s, for example but not until your 70s.

With Covid, when it infects you, it can land in your upper respiratory tract and it just start replicating right there. Immediately, it’s present and replicating in your lungs and in your nose. And that alone elicits enough of an immune response to cause us to feel really crappy and even cause us to feel disease.

But we could have just set the narrative better at the beginning: Look, you might get sick again, but your risk of landing in the hospital is going to be really low, and if you get a booster, you might still get sick again, but your risk of landing in the hospital is going to be even lower. That’s something I think humans can deal with, and I think the public could have understood it.

But it’s why we don’t see the severe disease as much, with a second exposure or an exposure after vaccination: For most people, it’s not getting into the heart and the liver and stuff nearly as easily.

But it doesn’t have to. It’s still causing symptomatic disease. And maybe mucosal vaccines could stop this, but without them we’re likely to continue seeing infections and even symptomatic infections.

through most of 2020 and into 2021, though. Back then, I think the conventional wisdom was that a single exposure — through infection or vaccination — would be the end of the pandemic for you. If this is basic virology and immunology, how did we get that so wrong?

The short answer is that epidemiologists are not immunologists and immunologists are not virologists and virologists are not epidemiologists. And, in general, physicians don’t know anything about the details.

But this failure had some pretty concrete impacts. When reinfections first began popping up, people were surprised, they were scared, and then, to some degree, they lost trust in vaccines. And the people they were turning to for guidance — not only did they not warn us about that, they were slow to acknowledge it, as well.

It had dramatic impacts and ripple effects that will last for years to limit our ability to get populations properly vaccinated.

the worst thing we can do during a pandemic is set inappropriately high expectations. These vaccines are incredible, they’ve had an enormously positive impact on mortality, but they were never going to end the pandemic.

And now, there’s a huge number of people questioning, do these vaccines even do anything?

For babies born today, though, I really think they’re not going to view Covid as any different than other viruses. By the time they are 20, it will be like any other virus to them. Because their immune systems will have grown up with it.

Instead, we set society up for failure, since people feel like the government failed everyone, that biology failed us, and that this was a crazy virus that has broken all the rules of our immune system, when it’s just doing what we’ve always known it would do.

How do you wish we had messaged things differently? What would it have meant to communicate early and clearly that Covid was a textbook virus, as you say?I think the biggest thing would have been just to say, we understand the enemy.

To say that this is a textbook virus, it doesn’t mean that it’s not killing people. Objectively, it’s still killing more people than any other infectious disease

What it means is that we could’ve taken action based on what we knew, rather than waiting around to prove everything and publish papers in Nature and Science talking about things we already knew.

We could have prepared for November and December of 2020 and then for November and December of 2021. But everyone kept saying, we don’t know if it’s going to come back. We knew it was going to come back and it makes me want to cry to think about it. We did nothing and hundreds of thousands of people died. We didn’t prepare nursing homes because we all got to the summer of 2020 and we said, cross our fingers.

We knew how tests worked. We knew about serial testing and why it was important for a public health approach. We knew that vaccines could have really good impacts once they were around. And if you were looking through the correct lens, we even knew that they weren’t going to stop transmission.

We didn’t have to live in a world where we were flying blind. We could have lived in a world where we’re knowledgeable. But instead, we chose almost across the board to will ourselves into this state of fear and anxiety.

And that really started in the earliest days. Almost the first experience I had was a lot like that movie with Jennifer Lawrence —Don’t Look Up.

none of this was complicated. You just had to ask a simple question: what would happen if you took away all immunity from an adult? Well, once you control for no immunity, adults are going to get very, very sick.

Of course, by and large, babies didn’t get very sick from this disease.Babies are immunologically naïve, but they are also resilient. A virus can tear up a baby, but a baby can repair its tissue so fast. Adults don’t have that. It’s just like a baby getting a cut. They’ll heal really quick

An adult getting a cut — you go by age, and every decade of age that you are, it’s going to take exponentially longer for that wound to heal. Eventually get to 80 or 90 and the wound can’t even heal. In the immunology world, this is called “tolerance.”

why are all these organ systems getting damaged when other viruses don’t seem to do that? It’s natural to think, it’s Covid — this is a weird disease. But it’s much more a story about immunity and how it develops than about the virus or the disease. None of our organ systems had any immune defenses around to help them out. And I think that the majority of post-acute sequelae and multi-organ complications and long Covid — they are not the result of the virus being a crazy different virus, but are a result of this virus replicating in an environment where there were such absent or exceedingly low defenses.

Is it the same whenever we encounter a virus for the first time?Think about travelers. Travelers get way more sick from a local disease than people who grew up with that virus. If you get malaria as a traveler, you’re much more likely to get really sick. You don’t see everyone in Nicaragua taking chloroquine every day. But you definitely see travelers taking it, because malaria can be deadly for adults.

What about, not severity, but post-acute complications — do we have long malaria? Do we have liver complications from dengue?

The really hard part of answering that question is there’s just not enough data on the frequency of long-term effects, because nothing like this has ever happened at such scale. It’s like everyone in Europe and North America suddenly traveled to a country where malaria was endemic.

Or think about H.I.V. It essentially kills your immune system, and once the immune barriers are down, other viruses that used to infect humans would get into tissues that we didn’t like them to get into. If there wasn’t such a clear signal of a loss of CD-4 T cells to explain it, people might still be scratching their heads and going, man, I wonder why all these patients are getting fungal infections. Well, there’s a virus there that’s depleting their immune system.

Covid is absolutely waking the world up to this — to the fact that there are really weird long-term sequelae to viruses when they infect organ systems that would normally be protected. And I think we’re going to find that more and more cancers are being attributed to viral infections.

It wasn’t that long ago that we first learned that most cases of cervical cancer were caused by H.P.V. — I think the 1980s. And now we have a vaccine for H.P.V. and rates of cervical cancer have fallen by two-thirds.

what about incidence? We’ve talked at a few points about how important it is to think about all of these questions in terms of the scale. What is the right scale for thinking about future long Covid, for instance, or other post-acute sequelae?

I think the absolute risk, per infection, is going down and down and down. That’s just true.

he U.K.’s Office of National Statistics, which shows a much lower risk of developing long Covid now, from reinfection, than from an initial infection earlier in the pandemic.

the worst is definitely behind us, which is a good thing, especially for people who worry that the problems will keep building and a lot of people — or even everyone — will get long Covid symptoms. I don’t think there’s a world where we’re looking at the babies of today dealing with long Covid at any meaningful scale.

a lot of the fear right now comes from the worst cases, and there’s a lot of worst cases. Even one of the people that I know well, I know in their mind they’re worried that they’ll never recover, but I think objectively they are recovering slowly. It might not be an eight month course. It might be a year and a half. But they will get better. Most of us will.

There are a few important take-aways. First, this one didn’t come from the government, it was a private case by a video game maker that sued Google over its terms for getting access to the Google Play app store for Android, decided not by a fancy judge with an Ivy League degree but by a jury of ordinary people in San Francisco. In other words, private litigation, the ‘ambulance-chasing’ lawyers, are vital parts of our justice system.

Second, juries matter, even if they are riskier for everyone involved. It’s kind of like a mini poll, and the culture is ahead of the cautious legal profession. This quick decision is a sharp contrast with the 6-month delay to an opinion in the search case that Judge Mehta sought in the D.C. trial.

Third, tying claims, which is a specific antitrust violation, are good law. Tying means forcing someone to buy an unrelated product in order to access the actual product they want to buy. The specific legal claim here was about how Google forced firms relying on its Google Play app store to also use its Google Play billing service, which charges an inflated price of 30% of the price of an app. Tying is pervasive throughout the economy, so you can expect more suits along these lines.

And finally, big tech is not above the law. This loss isn’t just the first antitrust failure for Google, it’s the first antitrust loss for any big tech firm. I hear a lot from skeptics that the fix is in, that the powerful will always win, that justice in our system is a mirage. But that just isn’t true. A jury of our peers just made that clear.

Nor can a university with a commitment to academic freedom prohibit all calls for political violence. That would require it to punish, say, students who express support for the invasion of Gaza knowing that it must result in the deaths of thousands of civilians. Thus Gay was correct in saying that students’ political slogans are not punishable by Harvard’s rules on harassment and bullying unless they cross over into intimidation, personal threats, or direct incitement of violence.

Gay was correct yet again in replying to Stefanik’s insistent demand, “What action has been taken against students who are harassing Jews on campus?” by noting that no action can be taken until an investigation has been completed. Harvard should not mete out summary justice like the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: Sentence first, verdict afterward.

The real problem with Gay’s testimony was that she could not clearly and credibly invoke those principles because they either have never been explicitly adopted by Harvard or they have been flagrantly flouted in the past (as Stefanik was quick to point out)

Harvard has persecuted scholars who said there are two sexes, or who signed an amicus brief taking the conservative side in a Supreme Court deliberation. It has retracted acceptances from students who were outed by jealous peers for having used racist trash talk on social media when they were teens. Harvard’s subzero FIRE rating reveals many other punishments of politically incorrect peccadillos.

Institutional neutrality. A university does not need a foreign policy, and it does not need to issue pronouncements on the controversies and events of the day. It is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. When a university takes a public stand, it either puts words in the mouths of faculty and students who can speak for themselves or unfairly pits them against their own employer.

In the wake of this debacle, the natural defense mechanism of a modern university is to expand the category of forbidden speech to include antisemitism (and as night follows day, Islamophobia). Bad idea

Deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. Outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn’t want to hear “hate speech.” Even the apparent no-brainer of prohibiting calls for genocide would backfire. Trans activists would say that opponents of transgender women in women’s sports were advocating genocide, and Palestinian activists would use the ban to keep Israeli officials from speaking on campus.

For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This requires five commitments.

Free speech. Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom. It might start with the First Amendment, which binds public universities and which has been refined over the decades with carefully justified exceptions.

So for the president of Harvard to suddenly come out as a born-again free-speech absolutist, disapproving of what genocidaires say but defending to the death their right to say it, struck onlookers as disingenuous or worse.

Since universities are institutions with a mission of research and education, they are also entitled to controls on speech that are necessary to fulfill that mission. These include standards of quality and relevance: You can’t teach anything you want at Harvard, just like you can’t publish anything you want in The Boston Globe. And it includes an environment conducive to learning.

The events of this autumn also show that university pronouncements are an invitation to rancor and distraction. Inevitably there will be constituencies who feel a statement is too strong, too weak, too late, or wrongheaded.

Nonviolence.

Universities should not indulge acts of vandalism, trespassing, and extortion. Free speech does not include a heckler’s veto, which blocks the speech of others. These goon tactics also violate the deepest value of a university, which is that opinions are advanced by reason and persuasion, not by force

Viewpoint diversity. Universities have become intellectual and political monocultures. Seventy-seven percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences describe themselves as liberal, and fewer than 3 percent as conservative. Many university programs have been monopolized by extreme ideologies, such as the conspiracy theory that the world’s problems are the deliberate designs of a white heterosexual male colonialist oppressor class.

Vast regions in the landscape of ideas are no-go zones, and dissenting ideas are greeted with incomprehension, outrage, and censorship.

The entrenchment of dogma is a hazard of policies that hire and promote on the say-so of faculty backed by peer evaluations. Though intended to protect departments from outside interference, the policies can devolve into a network of like-minded cronies conferring prestige on each other. Universities should incentivize departments to diversify their ideologies, and they should find ways of opening up their programs to sanity checks from the world outside.

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

A fivefold way of free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity, and DEI disempowerment will not be a quick fix for universities. But it’s necessary to reverse their tanking credibility and better than the alternatives of firing the coach or deepening the hole they have dug for themselves.

Sometimes the methods of imposing it were brutal, scholars say. At school in many French colonies, children speaking in their mother tongue were beaten or forced to wear an object around their necks known as a “symbol” — often a smelly object or an animal bone.

Still, many African countries adopted French as their official language when they gained independence, in part to cement their national identities. Some even kept the “symbol” in place at school.

At the festival, Le Magnific and other standup comedians threw jibes in French and ridiculed one another’s accents, drawing laughter from the audience. It mattered little if a few words were lost in translation.

“What makes our humor Pan-African is the French language,” said the festival’s organizer, Mohamed Mustapha, known across West Africa by his stage name, Mamane. A standup comedian from Niger, Mamane has a daily comedy program listened to by millions around the world on Radio France Internationale.

“It’s about survival, if we want to resist against Nollywood,” he said, referring to Nigeria’s film industry, “and English-produced content.”

Today, more a third of Ivorians speak French, according to the International Organization of the Francophonie. In Tunisia and the Democratic Republic of Congo — the world’s largest French-speaking country — it is more than half.

But in many Francophone countries, governments struggle to hire enough French-speaking teachers.

Still, Ms. Quéméner said French had long escaped France’s control.“French is an African language and belongs to Africans,” she said. “The decentralization of the French language is a reality.”

At the Hip Hop Académie, a youth program founded by the rapper Grödash in a Paris suburb, teens and children scribbled lyrics on notepads, following instructions to mix French and foreign languages.

Hip-hop, now dominating the French music industry, is injecting new words, phrases and concepts from Africa into France’s suburbs and cities.

“Countless artists have democratized French music with African slang,” said Elvis Adidiema, a Congolese music executive with Sony Music Entertainment. “The French public, from all backgrounds, has become accustomed to those sounds.”

“French is about to make a big leap, and she’s wondering how it’s going to go,” Mr. Laferrière said of the French language. “But she’s excited about where she’s headed.”

“They, not she. They are now multiple versions of French that speak for themselves. And that is the greatest proof of its vitality.”

That's unrealized profits for companies that invested in the energy infrastructure, betting on a longer life span, plus potential lost income for investors who bought stock in the utility companies. 

Globally, up to 50% of the currently used and planned fossil fuel-dependent power plants would have to be phased out earlier than their planned lifetime to limit climate change to below 2 degrees warming. Taking only coal into account, this represents assets worth between $150 billion and $1.4 trillion.

Making exact assessments of the size of the problem is difficult because it remains unclear which path policymakers will take. And what should be included in estimates — the value of minerals left in the ground? Unrealized company profits? Or even combustion engines that will no longer be of use? 

"The point is not whether there is a financial bubble, but whether it will burst or not. And what kind of actions governments and financial supervisors will take, and central banks also, will make it burst or not.

A case in point are the money managers set up to handle retirement for billions of people globally: Pension funds are tasked to hold their clients' money and turn a profit from the investments. That means investing the proceeds into stocks on the market.  But with large chunks of the market tied to the fossil fuel industry, a lot of the money is invested in coal, oil and gas. And this money could lose value under ambitious climate policies.

"A pension fund in Europe could be exposed as much as 48% to companies that could be at risk of stranded assets," said Irene Monasterolo. The professor of climate finance at Utrecht University is part of a large and growing group of academics and experts drawing out the risks to the wider financial system posed by these carbon assets

Mark Carney, the former Bank of England governor, is largely credited with kicking off a public debate on the financial stability concerns due to climate change. Speaking in front of London's insurance executives in 2015, he called for more transparency on climate risks — information that should then feed back into climate policies in reference to risks in financial markets.

Thus far, these risks haven't been resolved. Speaking with DW, Monasterolo warned that the amount and intricate interconnectedness of carbon assets could lead to a disastrous outcome.

"The problem with fossil fuel is that it's worth between $16 trillion to $300 trillion, depending on how you calculate. So it's massive," said Joyeeta Gupta, an economics professor at the University of Amsterdam. But this industry is also the base for a huge pile of financial wealth. 

Regulators seem to have caught up with the warning calls. In late November, the European Central Bank threatened to fine about 20 European banks for mishandling climate risks, Bloomberg reported. But returns on investment could stack pensioners against tough climate action.

Most large central banks globally now require their banks to stress test their business models for climate scenarios. But what is essentially at odds, said Monasterolo, is the "long-term dimension of climate change versus the short-term decision-making in policy and in finance."

The long period of transition in Germany's west turned polluting smokestacks into tourist attractions. The former mine in Essen was turned into a museum and event location — a new asset for the region, and a change that put the public good over short-term profits. 

“Write a five-paragraph essay on Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse.’” Too generic? Well, how about “Write a five-paragraph essay on the theme of loss in ‘To the Lighthouse’”? Too high-schoolish? “Add some bigger words, please.” The product might not be ready to turn in the moment it is born, fully formed, from ChatGPT’s head. But with enough tweaking — either by the student or by the machine at the student’s demand — chances are the output can muster at least a passing grade.

Which of these uses are okay? Which aren’t? The harnessing of an AI tool to create an annotated bibliography likely doesn’t rankle even librarians the way relying on that same tool to draft a reflection on Virginia Woolf offends the professor of the modern novel. Why? Because that kind of contemplation goes closer to the heart of what education is really about.

the core of the question colleges now face. They can’t really stop students from using AI in class. They might not be able to notice students have done so at all, and when they do think they’ve noticed they’ll be acting only on suspicion. But maybe teachers can control the ways in which students use AI in class.

Figuring out exactly what ways those ought to be requires educators to determine what they care about in essays — what they are desperate to hear. The purpose of these papers is for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, from hard facts to compositional know-how, and for teachers to assess how their pupils are progressing. The answer to what teachers want to get from students in their written work depends on what they want to give to students.

ChatGPT is sort of in a class of its own, because it can be almost anything its users want it to be so long as they possess one essential skill: prompt engineering. This means, basically, manipulating the machine not only into giving you an answer but also into giving you the kind of answer you’re looking for.

The next concern is that students should use AI in a manner that improves not only their writing but also their thinking — in short, in a manner that enhances learning rather than bypasses the need to learn at all.

This simple principle makes for complicated practice. Certainly, no one is going to learn anything by letting AI write an essay in its entirety. What about letting AI brainstorm an idea, on the other hand, or write an outline, or gin up a counter-argument? Lyndsey Cook, a senior at Ole Miss planning a career in nursing, finds the brainstorming especially helpful: She’ll ask ChatGPT or another tool to identify the themes in a piece of literature, and then she’ll go back and look for them herself.

These shortcuts, on the one hand, might interfere with students’ learning to brainstorm, outline or see the other side of things on their own

But — here comes a human-generated counterargument — they may also aid students in surmounting obstacles in their composition that otherwise would have stopped them short. That’s particularly true of kids whose high schools didn’t send them to college already equipped with these capabilities.

Allow AI to boost you over these early hurdles, and suddenly the opportunity for deeper learning — the opportunity to really write — will open up. That’s how Caleb Jackson, the part-time student for whom Perplexity has been such a boon, sees it: His professor, he says , wanted them to “get away from the high-school paper and go further, to write something larger like a thesis.”

maybe, as one young Ole Miss faculty member put it to me, this risks “losing the value of the struggle.” That, she says, is what she is scared will go away.

All this invites the most important question there is: What is learning for?

Learning, in college, can be instrumental. According to this view, the aim of teaching is to prepare students to live in the real world, so all that really matters is whether they have the chops to field jobs that feed themselves and their families. Perhaps knowing how to use AI to do any given task for you, then, is one of the most valuable skills out there — the same way it pays to be quick with a calculator.

If you accept this line of argument, however, there are still drawbacks to robotic crutches. Some level of critical thinking is necessary to function as an adult, and if AI stymies its development even the instrumental aim of education is thwarted. The same goes for that “value of the struggle.” The real world is full of adversity, much of which the largest language model can’t tell you how to overcome.

more compelling is the idea, probably shared by most college professors, that learning isn’t only instrumental after all — that it has intrinsic value and that it is the end rather than merely a means to one.

Every step along the way that is skipped, the shorter the journey becomes, the less we will take in as we travel.

This glummest of outlooks suggests that AI will stunt personal growth even if it doesn’t harm professional prospects.

While that doesn’t mean it’s wise to prohibit every little application of the technology in class, it probably does mean discouraging those most closely related to critical thinking.

One approach is to alter standards for grading, so that the things the machines are worst at are also the things that earn the best marks: originality, say, or depth of feeling, or so-called metacognition — the process of thinking about one’s own thinking or one’s own learning.

Hopefully, these things are also the most valuable because they are what make us human.

Caleb Jackson only wants AI to help him write his papers — not to write them for him. “If ChatGPT will get you an A, and you yourself might get a C, it’s like, ‘Well, I earned that C.’” He pauses. “That might sound crazy.”

Dominic Tovar agrees. Let AI take charge of everything, and, “They’re not so much tools at that point. They’re just replacing you.”

Lyndsey Cook, too, believes that even if these systems could reliably find the answers to the most vexing research problems, “it would take away from research itself” — because scientific inquiry is valuable for its own sake. “To have AI say, ‘Hey, this is the answer …’” she trails off, sounding dispirited.

Claire Mischker, lecturer of composition and director of the Ole Miss graduate writing center, asked her students at the end of last semester to turn in short reflections on their experience in her class. She received submissions that she was near certain were produced by ChatGPT — “that,” she says as sarcastically as she does mournfully, “felt really good.

The central theme of the course was empathy.

Yet the most striking illustration of this convergence is the harmonious relationship between the European center right and Giorgia Meloni, the leader of the post-fascist Brothers of Italy, who became prime minister of Italy last year. As soon as she indicated that she would not disrupt the bloc’s economic policy and would be supportive of Ukraine, the European People’s Party was willing to work with her — and its leader, Manfred Weber, even sought to form an alliance with her. The center right, it turns out, doesn’t have a problem with the far right. It just has a problem with those who defy E.U. institutions and positions.

Such thinking is behind the hardening of migration policy. But it is also influencing Europe in a deeper way: The union has increasingly come to see itself as defending an imperiled European civilization, particularly in its foreign policy. During the past decade, as the bloc has seen itself as surrounded by threats, not least from Russia, there have been endless debates about “strategic autonomy,” “European sovereignty” and a “geopolitical Europe.”

figures like President Emmanuel Macron of France have also begun to frame international politics as a clash of civilizations, in which a strong, united Europe must defend itself.

Supporters of the bloc tend to see European unity as an end in itself — or to assume that a more powerful European Union, long idealized as a civilizing force in international politics, would automatically benefit the whole world

as the union unites around defending a threatened European civilization and rejecting nonwhite immigration, we need to think again about whether it truly is a force for good.

Sometimes Black students must be protected not only from words, but words that sound like other words. In 2020, Greg Patton was suspended from teaching a class in communications at the University of Southern California. The reason was that one of his lectures included noting that in Mandarin, a hesitation term is “nèi ge,” which means “that …” and has nothing to do, of course, with the N-word. Several Black students said they felt injured by experiencing this word in the class.

The offense can even be 100 years in the past. In 2021 at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, some Black students were upset when walking past a boulder on campus that was referred to as a “niggerhead” by a newspaper reporter in 1925, when that term was common for large, dark rocks. The school had the boulder removed.

In cases like those last two, it seems that Black students are being taught a performed kind of delicacy. If you can’t bear walking past a rock someone called a dirty name 100 years ago, how are you going to deal with life?

In my view, the solution is not to decide whether to penalize all hate speech or to allow all of it regardless of whom it is addressed to. Administrators should certainly decry and penalize not just antisemitism but racism on campuses when it is severe and pervasive and constitutes conduct.

Google’s generative-AI-powered search is the true nightmare for publishers. Across the media world, Google generates nearly 40% of publishers’ traffic, accounting for the largest share of their “referrals,” according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of data from measurement firm SimilarWeb. 

“AI and large language models have the potential to destroy journalism and media brands as we know them,” said Mathias Döpfner, chairman and CEO of Axel Springer,

His company, one of Europe’s largest publishers and the owner of U.S. publications Politico and Business Insider, this week announced a deal to license its content to generative-AI specialist OpenAI.

publishers have seen enough to estimate that they will lose between 20% and 40% of their Google-generated traffic if anything resembling recent iterations rolls out widely. Google has said it is giving priority to sending traffic to publishers.

The rise of AI is the latest and most anxiety-inducing chapter in the long, uneasy marriage between Google and publishers, which have been bound to each other through a basic transaction: Google helps publishers be found by readers, and publishers give Google information—millions of pages of web content—to make its search engine useful.

Already, publishers are reeling from a major decline in traffic sourced from social-media sites, as both Meta and X, the former Twitter, have pulled away from distributing news.

, Google’s AI search was trained, in part, on their content and other material from across the web—without payment. 

Google’s view is that anything available on the open internet is fair game for training AI models. The company cites a legal doctrine that allows portions of a copyrighted work to be used without permission for cases such as criticism, news reporting or research.

The changes risk damaging website owners that produce the written material vital to both Google’s search engine and its powerful AI models.

“If Google kills too many publishers, it can’t build the LLM,”

Barry Diller, chairman of IAC and Expedia, said all major AI companies, including Google and rivals like OpenAI, have promised that they would continue to send traffic to publishers’ sites. “How they do it, they’ve been very clear to us and others, they don’t really know,” he said.

All of this has led Google and publishers to carry out an increasingly complex dialogue. In some meetings, Google is pitching the potential benefits of the other AI tools it is building, including one that would help with the writing and publishing of news articles

At the same time, publishers are seeking reassurances from Google that it will protect their businesses from an AI-powered search tool that will likely shrink their traffic, and they are making clear they expect to be paid for content used in AI training.

“Any attempts to estimate the traffic impact of our SGE experiment are entirely speculative at this stage as we continue to rapidly evolve the user experience and design, including how links are displayed, and we closely monitor internal data from our tests,” Reid said.

Many of IAC’s properties, like Brides, Investopedia and the Spruce, get more than 80% of their traffic from Google

Google began rolling out the AI search tool in May by letting users opt into testing. Using a chat interface that can understand longer queries in natural language, it aims to deliver what it calls “snapshots”—or summaries—of the answer, instead of the more link-heavy responses it has traditionally served up in search results. 

Google at first didn’t include links within the responses, instead placing them in boxes to the right of the passage. It later added in-line links following feedback from early users. Some more recent versions require users to click a button to expand the summary before getting links. Google doesn’t describe the links as source material but rather as corroboration of its summaries.

During Chinese President Xi Jinping’s recent visit to San Francisco, the Google AI search bot responded to the question “What did President Xi say?” with two quotes from his opening remarks. Users had to click on a little red arrow to expand the response and see a link to the CNBC story that the remarks were taken from. The CNBC story also sat over on the far right-hand side of the screen in an image box.

The same query in Google’s regular search engine turned up a different quote from Xi’s remarks, but a link to the NBC News article it came from was beneath the paragraph, atop a long list of news stories from other sources like CNN and PBS.

Google’s Reid said AI is the future of search and expects its new tool to result in more queries.

“The number of information needs in the world is not a fixed number,” she said. “It actually grows as information becomes more accessible, becomes easier, becomes more powerful in understanding it.”

Testing has suggested that AI isn’t the right tool for answering every query, she said.

Many publishers are opting to insert code in their websites to block AI tools from “crawling” them for content. But blocking Google is thorny, because publishers must allow their sites to be crawled in order to be indexed by its search engine—and therefore visible to users searching for their content.To some in the publishing world there was an implicit threat in Google’s policy: Let us train on your content or you’ll be hard to find on the internet.

All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in

In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias

on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether

the internet knocked the industry off its foundations. Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes.

far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage:

the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.

One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down.

leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around

This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.

Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered

. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred

This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified.

as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters.

here have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions

The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.

As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change. He saw that as the gradual work of many years, but I think he is mistaken. To overcome the cultural and commercial pressures the Times faces, particularly given the severe test posed by another Trump candidacy and possible presidency, its publisher and senior editors will have to be bolder than that.

As a Democrat from a family of Democrats, a graduate of Yale and a blossom of the imagined meritocracy, I had my first real chance, at Buchanan’s rallies, to see the world through the eyes of stalwart opponents of abortion, immigration and the relentlessly rising tide of modernity.

the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole.

It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe.

The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact.

It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other.

I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing.

Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. That is not true of the institution today – it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise.

Most important, the Times, probably more than any other American institution, could influence the way society approached debate and engagement with opposing views. If Times Opinion demonstrated the same kind of intellectual courage and curiosity that my colleagues at the Atlantic had shown, I hoped, the rest of the media would follow.

You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

This fundamental honesty was vital for readers, because it equipped them to make better, more informed judgments about the world. Sometimes it might shock or upset them by failing to conform to their picture of reality. But it also granted them the respect of acknowledging that they were able to work things out for themselves.

The Atlantic did not aspire to the same role as the Times. It did not promise to serve up the news of the day without any bias. But it was to opinion journalism what the Times’s reporting was supposed to be to news: honest and open to the world.

Those were the glory days of the blog, and we hit on the idea of creating a living op-ed page, a collective of bloggers with different points of view but a shared intellectual honesty who would argue out the meaning of the news of the day

They were brilliant, gutsy writers, and their disagreements were deep enough that I used to joke that my main work as editor was to prevent fistfights.

Under its owner, David Bradley, my colleagues and I distilled our purpose as publishing big arguments about big ideas

we also began producing some of the most important work in American journalism: Nicholas Carr on whether Google was “making us stupid”; Hanna Rosin on “the end of men”; Taylor Branch on “the shame of college sports”; Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the case for reparations”; Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt on “the coddling of the American mind”.

I was starting to see some effects of the new campus politics within the Atlantic. A promising new editor had created a digital form for aspiring freelancers to fill out, and she wanted to ask them to disclose their racial and sexual identity. Why? Because, she said, if we were to write about the trans community, for example, we would ask a trans person to write the story

There was a good argument for that, I acknowledged, and it sometimes might be the right answer. But as I thought about the old people, auto workers and abortion opponents I had learned from, I told her there was also an argument for correspondents who brought an outsider’s ignorance, along with curiosity and empathy, to the story.

A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.

In the age of the internet it is hard even for a child to sustain an “innocent eye”, but the alternative for journalists remains as dangerous as ever, to become propagandists. America has more than enough of those already.

When I looked around the Opinion department, change was not what I perceived. Excellent writers and editors were doing excellent work. But the department’s journalism was consumed with politics and foreign affairs in an era when readers were also fascinated by changes in technology, business, science and culture.

Fairly quickly, though, I realised two things: first, that if I did my job as I thought it should be done, and as the Sulzbergers said they wanted me to do it, I would be too polarising internally ever to lead the newsroom; second, that I did not want that job, though no one but my wife believed me when I said that.

there was a compensating moral and psychological privilege that came with aspiring to journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness, despised as they might understandably be by partisans. Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were

On the right and left, America’s elites now talk within their tribes, and get angry or contemptuous on those occasions when they happen to overhear the other conclave. If they could be coaxed to agree what they were arguing about, and the rules by which they would argue about it, opinion journalism could serve a foundational need of the democracy by fostering diverse and inclusive debate. Who could be against that?

The large staff of op-ed editors contained only a couple of women. Although the 11 columnists were individually admirable, only two of them were women and only one was a person of colour

Not only did they all focus on politics and foreign affairs, but during the 2016 campaign, no columnist shared, in broad terms, the worldview of the ascendant progressives of the Democratic Party, incarnated by Bernie Sanders. And only two were conservative.

This last fact was of particular concern to the elder Sulzberger. He told me the Times needed more conservative voices, and that its own editorial line had become predictably left-wing. “Too many liberals,” read my notes about the Opinion line-up from a meeting I had with him and Mark Thompson, then the chief executive, as I was preparing to rejoin the paper. “Even conservatives are liberals’ idea of a conservative.” The last note I took from that meeting was: “Can’t ignore 150m conservative Americans.”

As I knew from my time at the Atlantic, this kind of structural transformation can be frightening and even infuriating for those understandably proud of things as they are. It is hard on everyone

experience at the Atlantic also taught me that pursuing new ways of doing journalism in pursuit of venerable institutional principles created enthusiasm for change. I expected that same dynamic to allay concerns at the Times.

If Opinion published a wider range of views, it would help frame a set of shared arguments that corresponded to, and drew upon, the set of shared facts coming from the newsroom.

New progressive voices were celebrated within the Times. But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them.

The Opinion department mocked the paper’s claim to value diversity. It did not have a single black editor

Eventually, it sank in that my snotty joke was actually on me: I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters.

Out of naivety or arrogance, I was slow to recognise that at the Times, unlike at the Atlantic, these values were no longer universally accepted, let alone esteemed

After the 9/11 attacks, as the bureau chief in Jerusalem, I spent a lot of time in the Gaza Strip interviewing Hamas leaders, recruiters and foot soldiers, trying to understand and describe their murderous ideology. Some readers complained that I was providing a platform for terrorists, but there was never any objection from within the Times.

Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it.

Today’s newsroom turns that moral logic on its head, at least when it comes to fellow Americans. Unlike the views of Hamas, the views of many Americans have come to seem dangerous to engage in the absence of explicit condemnation

Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm.

After the profile of the Ohio man was published, media Twitter lit up with attacks on the article as “normalising” Nazism and white nationalism, and the Times convulsed internally. The Times wound up publishing a cringing editor’s note that hung the writer out to dry and approvingly quoted some of the criticism, including a tweet from a Washington Post opinion editor asking, “Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies”?

the Times lacked the confidence to defend its own work

The editor’s note paraded the principle of publishing such pieces, saying it was important to “shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life”. But less light is what the readers got. As a reporter in the newsroom, you’d have to have been an idiot after that explosion to attempt such a profile

Empathetic reporting about Trump supporters became even more rare. It became a cliché among influential left-wing columnists and editors that blinkered political reporters interviewed a few Trump supporters in diners and came away suckered into thinking there was something besides racism that could explain anyone’s support for the man.

After a year spent publishing editorials attacking Trump and his policies, I thought it would be a demonstration of Timesian open-mindedness to give his supporters their say. Also, I thought the letters were interesting, so I turned over the entire editorial page to the Trump letters.

I wasn’t surprised that we got some criticism on Twitter. But I was astonished by the fury of my Times colleagues. I found myself facing an angry internal town hall, trying to justify what to me was an obvious journalistic decision

Didn’t he think other Times readers should understand the sources of Trump’s support? Didn’t he also see it was a wonderful thing that some Trump supporters did not just dismiss the Times as fake news, but still believed in it enough to respond thoughtfully to an invitation to share their views?

And if the Times could not bear to publish the views of Americans who supported Trump, why should it be surprised that those voters would not trust it?

Two years later, in 2020, Baquet acknowledged that in 2016 the Times had failed to take seriously the idea that Trump could become president partly because it failed to send its reporters out into America to listen to voters and understand “the turmoil in the country”. And, he continued, the Times still did not understand the views of many Americans

Speaking four months before we published the Cotton op-ed, he said that to argue that the views of such voters should not appear in the Times was “not journalistic”.

Conservative arguments in the Opinion pages reliably started uproars within the Times. Sometimes I would hear directly from colleagues who had the grace to confront me with their concerns; more often they would take to the company’s Slack channels or Twitter to advertise their distress in front of each other

This environment of enforced group-think, inside and outside the paper, was hard even on liberal opinion writers. One left-of-centre columnist told me that he was reluctant to appear in the New York office for fear of being accosted by colleagues.

An internal survey shortly after I left the paper found that barely half the staff, within an enterprise ostensibly devoted to telling the truth, agreed “there is a free exchange of views in this company” and “people are not afraid to say what they really think”.)

Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy.

The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious

Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias

By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”

sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.

The Times’s failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative’s concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it.

A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics. But I delivered the message. There are many things I regret about my tenure as editorial-page editor. That is the only act of which I am ashamed.

I began to think of myself not as a benighted veteran on a remote island, but as Rip Van Winkle. I had left one newspaper, had a pleasant dream for ten years, and returned to a place I barely recognised.

The new New York Times was the product of two shocks – sudden collapse, and then sudden success. The paper almost went bankrupt during the financial crisis, and the ensuing panic provoked a crisis of confidence among its leaders. Digital competitors like the HuffPost were gaining readers and winning plaudits within the media industry as innovative. They were the cool kids; Times folk were ink-stained wrinklies.

In its panic, the Times bought out experienced reporters and editors and began hiring journalists from publications like the HuffPost who were considered “digital natives” because they had never worked in print. This hiring quickly became easier, since most digital publications financed by venture capital turned out to be bad businesses

Though they might have lacked deep or varied reporting backgrounds, some of the Times’s new hires brought skills in video and audio; others were practised at marketing themselves – building their brands, as journalists now put it – in social media. Some were brilliant and fiercely honest, in keeping with the old aspirations of the paper.

critically, the Times abandoned its practice of acculturation, including those months-long assignments on Metro covering cops and crime or housing. Many new hires who never spent time in the streets went straight into senior writing and editing roles.

All these recruits arrived with their own notions of the purpose of the Times. To me, publishing conservatives helped fulfil the paper’s mission; to them, I think, it betrayed that mission.

then, to the shock and horror of the newsroom, Trump won the presidency. In his article for Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger cites the Times’s failure to take Trump’s chances seriously as an example of how “prematurely shutting down inquiry and debate” can allow “conventional wisdom to ossify in a way that blinds society.

Many Times staff members – scared, angry – assumed the Times was supposed to help lead the resistance. Anxious for growth, the Times’s marketing team implicitly endorsed that idea, too.

As the number of subscribers ballooned, the marketing department tracked their expectations, and came to a nuanced conclusion. More than 95% of Times subscribers described themselves as Democrats or independents, and a vast majority of them believed the Times was also liberal

A similar majority applauded that bias; it had become “a selling point”, reported one internal marketing memo. Yet at the same time, the marketers concluded, subscribers wanted to believe that the Times was independent.

As that memo argued, even if the Times was seen as politically to the left, it was critical to its brand also to be seen as broadening its readers’ horizons, and that required “a perception of independence”.

Readers could cancel their subscriptions if the Times challenged their worldview by reporting the truth without regard to politics. As a result, the Times’s long-term civic value was coming into conflict with the paper’s short-term shareholder value

The Times has every right to pursue the commercial strategy that makes it the most money. But leaning into a partisan audience creates a powerful dynamic. Nobody warned the new subscribers to the Times that it might disappoint them by reporting truths that conflicted with their expectations

When your product is “independent journalism”, that commercial strategy is tricky, because too much independence might alienate your audience, while too little can lead to charges of hypocrisy that strike at the heart of the brand.

It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism

The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.

there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense. The exercise of a reporter’s curiosity and empathy, given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments. The best ideas and arguments would win out

The journalist’s role was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury. In its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?

Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of  free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it.

They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on

The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.

And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be

To be more valued by their peers and their contacts – and hold sway over their bosses – they need a lot of followers in social media. That means they must be seen to applaud the right sentiments of the right people in social media

The journalist from central casting used to be a loner, contrarian or a misfit. Now journalism is becoming another job for joiners, or, to borrow Twitter’s own parlance, “followers”, a term that mocks the essence of a journalist’s role.

The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand

What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.

By contrast, the old newsroom ideology seems cynical on its surface. It used to bug me that my editors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any person in power was a lie.

And the pursuit of objectivity can seem reptilian, even nihilistic, in its abjuration of a fixed position in moral contests. But the basis of that old newsroom approach was idealistic: the notion that power ultimately lies in truth and ideas, and that the citizens of a pluralistic democracy, not leaders of any sort, must be trusted to judge both.

Our role in Times Opinion, I used to urge my colleagues, was not to tell people what to think, but to help them fulfil their desire to think for themselves.

It seems to me that putting the pursuit of truth, rather than of justice, at the top of a publication’s hierarchy of values also better serves not just truth but justice, too

over the long term journalism that is not also sceptical of the advocates of any form of justice and the programmes they put forward, and that does not struggle honestly to understand and explain the sources of resistance,

will not assure that those programmes will work, and it also has no legitimate claim to the trust of reasonable people who see the world very differently. Rather than advance understanding and durable change, it provokes backlash.

The impatience within the newsroom with such old ways was intensified by the generational failure of the Times to hire and promote women and non-white people

Pay attention if you are white at the Times and you will hear black editors speak of hiring consultants at their own expense to figure out how to get white staff to respect them

As wave after wave of pain and outrage swept through the Times, over a headline that was not damning enough of Trump or someone’s obnoxious tweets, I came to think of the people who were fragile, the ones who were caught up in Slack or Twitter storms, as people who had only recently discovered that they were white and were still getting over the shock.

Having concluded they had got ahead by working hard, it has been a revelation to them that their skin colour was not just part of the wallpaper of American life, but a source of power, protection and advancement.

I share the bewilderment that so many people could back Trump, given the things he says and does, and that makes me want to understand why they do: the breadth and diversity of his support suggests not just racism is at work. Yet these elite, well-meaning Times staff cannot seem to stretch the empathy they are learning to extend to people with a different skin colour to include those, of whatever race, who have different politics.

The digital natives were nevertheless valuable, not only for their skills but also because they were excited for the Times to embrace its future. That made them important allies of the editorial and business leaders as they sought to shift the Times to digital journalism and to replace staff steeped in the ways of print. Partly for that reason, and partly out of fear, the leadership indulged internal attacks on Times journalism, despite pleas from me and others, to them and the company as a whole, that Times folk should treat each other with more respect

My colleagues and I in Opinion came in for a lot of the scorn, but we were not alone. Correspondents in the Washington bureau and political reporters would take a beating, too, when they were seen as committing sins like “false balance” because of the nuance in their stories.

My fellow editorial and commercial leaders were well aware of how the culture of the institution had changed. As delighted as they were by the Times’s digital transformation they were not blind to the ideological change that came with it. They were unhappy with the bullying and group-think; we often discussed such cultural problems in the weekly meetings of the executive committee, composed of the top editorial and business leaders, including the publisher. Inevitably, these bitch sessions would end with someone saying a version of: “Well, at some point we have to tell them this is what we believe in as a newspaper, and if they don’t like it they should work somewhere else.” It took me a couple of years to realise that this moment was never going to come.

There is a lot not to miss about the days when editors like Boyd could strike terror in young reporters like me and Purdum. But the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that editors now tremble before their reporters and even their interns. “I miss the old climate of fear,” Baquet used to say with a smile, in another of his barbed jokes.

I wish I’d pursued my point and talked myself out of the job. This contest over control of opinion journalism within the Times was not just a bureaucratic turf battle (though it was that, too)

The newsroom’s embrace of opinion journalism has compromised the Times’s independence, misled its readers and fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.

The Opinion department is a relic of the era when the Times enforced a line between news and opinion journalism.

Editors in the newsroom did not touch opinionated copy, lest they be contaminated by it, and opinion journalists and editors kept largely to their own, distant floor within the Times building. Such fastidiousness could seem excessive, but it enforced an ethos that Times reporters owed their readers an unceasing struggle against bias in the news

But by the time I returned as editorial-page editor, more opinion columnists and critics were writing for the newsroom than for Opinion. As at the cable news networks, the boundaries between commentary and news were disappearing, and readers had little reason to trust that Times journalists were resisting rather than indulging their biases

The Times newsroom had added more cultural critics, and, as Baquet noted, they were free to opine about politics.

Departments across the Times newsroom had also begun appointing their own “columnists”, without stipulating any rules that might distinguish them from columnists in Opinion

I checked to see if, since I left the Times, it had developed guidelines explaining the difference, if any, between a news columnist and opinion columnist. The paper’s spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, did not respond to the question.)

The internet rewards opinionated work and, as news editors felt increasing pressure to generate page views, they began not just hiring more opinion writers but also running their own versions of opinionated essays by outside voices – historically, the province of Opinion’s op-ed department.

Yet because the paper continued to honour the letter of its old principles, none of this work could be labelled “opinion” (it still isn’t). After all, it did not come from the Opinion department.

And so a newsroom technology columnist might call for, say, unionisation of the Silicon Valley workforce, as one did, or an outside writer might argue in the business section for reparations for slavery, as one did, and to the average reader their work would appear indistinguishable from Times news articles.

By similarly circular logic, the newsroom’s opinion journalism breaks another of the Times’s commitments to its readers. Because the newsroom officially does not do opinion – even though it openly hires and publishes opinion journalists – it feels free to ignore Opinion’s mandate to provide a diversity of views

When I was editorial-page editor, there were a couple of newsroom columnists whose politics were not obvious. But the other newsroom columnists, and the critics, read as passionate progressives.

I urged Baquet several times to add a conservative to the newsroom roster of cultural critics. That would serve the readers by diversifying the Times’s analysis of culture, where the paper’s left-wing bias had become most blatant, and it would show that the newsroom also believed in restoring the Times’s commitment to taking conservatives seriously. He said this was a good idea, but he never acted on it

I couldn’t help trying the idea out on one of the paper’s top cultural editors, too: he told me he did not think Times readers would be interested in that point of view.

opinion was spreading through the newsroom in other ways. News desks were urging reporters to write in the first person and to use more “voice”, but few newsroom editors had experience in handling that kind of journalism, and no one seemed certain where “voice” stopped and “opinion” began

The Times magazine, meanwhile, became a crusading progressive publication

Baquet liked to say the magazine was Switzerland, by which he meant that it sat between the newsroom and Opinion. But it reported only to the news side. Its work was not labelled as opinion and it was free to omit conservative viewpoints.

his creep of politics into the newsroom’s journalism helped the Times beat back some of its new challengers, at least those on the left

Competitors like Vox and the HuffPost were blending leftish politics with reporting and writing it up conversationally in the first person. Imitating their approach, along with hiring some of their staff, helped the Times repel them. But it came at a cost. The rise of opinion journalism over the past 15 years changed the newsroom’s coverage and its culture

The tiny redoubt of never-Trump conservatives in Opinion is swamped daily not only by the many progressives in that department but their reinforcements among the critics, columnists and magazine writers in the newsroom

They are generally excellent, but their homogeneity means Times readers are being served a very restricted range of views, some of them presented as straight news by a publication that still holds itself out as independent of any politics.

And because the critics, newsroom columnists and magazine writers are the newsroom’s most celebrated journalists, they have disproportionate influence over the paper’s culture.

By saying that it still holds itself to the old standard of strictly separating its news and opinion journalists, the paper leads its readers further into the trap of thinking that what they are reading is independent and impartial – and this misleads them about their country’s centre of political and cultural gravity.

And yet the Times insists to the public that nothing has changed.

“Even though each day’s opinion pieces are typically among our most popular journalism and our columnists are among our most trusted voices, we believe opinion is secondary to our primary mission of reporting and should represent only a portion of a healthy news diet,” Sulzberger wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review. “For that reason, we’ve long kept the Opinion department intentionally small – it represents well under a tenth of our journalistic staff – and ensured that its editorial decision-making is walled off from the newsroom.”

When I was editorial-page editor, Sulzberger, who declined to be interviewed on the record for this article, worried a great deal about the breakdown in the boundaries between news and opinion

He told me once that he would like to restructure the paper to have one editor oversee all its news reporters, another all its opinion journalists and a third all its service journalists, the ones who supply guidance on buying gizmos or travelling abroad. Each of these editors would report to him

That is the kind of action the Times needs to take now to confront its hypocrisy and begin restoring its independence.

The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise

It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work.

After I was chased out of the Times, Journal reporters and other staff attempted a similar assault on their opinion department. Some 280 of them signed a letter listing pieces they found offensive and demanding changes in how their opinion colleagues approached their work. “Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility,” shrugged the Journal’s editorial board in a note to readers after the letter was leaked. “The signers report to the news editors or other parts of the business.” The editorial added, in case anyone missed the point, “We are not the New York Times.” That was the end of it.

Unlike the publishers of the Journal, however, Sulzberger is in a bind, or at least perceives himself to be

The confusion within the Times over its role, and the rising tide of intolerance among the reporters, the engineers, the business staff, even the subscribers – these are all problems he inherited, in more ways than one. He seems to feel constrained in confronting the paper’s illiberalism by the very source of his authority

The paradox is that in previous generations the Sulzbergers’ control was the bulwark of the paper’s independence.

if he is going to instil the principles he believes in, he needs to stop worrying so much about his powers of persuasion, and start using the power he is so lucky to have.

Shortly after we published the op-ed that Wednesday afternoon, some reporters tweeted their opposition to Cotton’s argument. But the real action was in the Times’s Slack channels, where reporters and other staff began not just venting but organising. They turned to the union to draw up a workplace complaint about the op-ed.

The next day, this reporter shared the byline on the Times story about the op-ed. That article did not mention that Cotton had distinguished between “peaceful, law-abiding protesters” and “rioters and looters”. In fact, the first sentence reported that Cotton had called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”.

This was – and is – wrong. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can take the Times’s

Three days later in its article on my resignation it also initially reported that Cotton had called “for military force against protesters in American cities”. This time, after the article was published on the Times website, the editors scrambled to rewrite it, replacing “military force” with “military response” and “protesters” with “civic unrest”

That was a weaselly adjustment – Cotton wrote about criminality, not “unrest” – but the article at least no longer unambiguously misrepresented Cotton’s argument to make it seem he was in favour of crushing democratic protest. The Times did not publish a correction or any note acknowledging the story had been changed.

Seeking to influence the outcome of a story you cover, particularly without disclosing that to the reader, violates basic principles I was raised on at the Times

s Rhoades Ha disputes my characterisation of the after-the-fact editing of the story about my resignation. She said the editors changed the story after it was published on the website in order to “refine” it and “add context”, and so the story did not merit a correction disclosing to the reader that changes had been made.

In retrospect what seems almost comical is that as the conflict over Cotton’s op-ed unfolded within the Times I acted as though it was on the level, as though the staff of the Times would have a good-faith debate about Cotton’s piece and the decision to publish it

Instead, people wanted to vent and achieve what they considered to be justice, whether through Twitter, Slack, the union or the news pages themselves

My colleagues in Opinion, together with the PR team, put together a series of connected tweets describing the purpose behind publishing Cotton’s op-ed. Rather than publish these tweets from the generic Times Opinion Twitter account, Sulzberger encouraged me to do it from my personal one, on the theory that this would humanise our defence. I doubted that would make any difference, but it was certainly my job to take responsibility. So I sent out the tweets, sticking my head in a Twitter bucket that clangs, occasionally, to this day

What is worth recalling now from the bedlam of the next two days? I suppose there might be lessons for someone interested in how not to manage a corporate crisis. I began making my own mistakes that Thursday. The union condemned our publication of Cotton, for supposedly putting journalists in danger, claiming that he had called on the military “to ‘detain’ and ‘subdue’ Americans protesting racism and police brutality” – again, a misrepresentation of his argument. The publisher called to tell me the company was experiencing its largest sick day in history; people were turning down job offers because of the op-ed, and, he said, some people were quitting. He had been expecting for some time that the union would seek a voice in editorial decision-making; he said he thought this was the moment the union was making its move. He had clearly changed his own mind about the value of publishing the Cotton op-ed.

I asked Dao to have our fact-checkers review the union’s claims. But then I went a step further: at the publisher’s request, I urged him to review the editing of the piece itself and come back to me with a list of steps we could have taken to make it better. Dao’s reflex – the correct one – was to defend the piece as published. He and three other editors of varying ages, genders and races had helped edit it; it had been fact-checked, as is all our work

This was my last failed attempt to have the debate within the Times that I had been seeking for four years, about why it was important to present Times readers with arguments like Cotton’s. The staff at the paper never wanted to have that debate. The Cotton uproar was the most extreme version of the internal reaction we faced whenever we published conservative arguments that were not simply anti-Trump. Yes, yes, of course we believe in the principle of publishing diverse views, my Times colleagues would say, but why this conservative? Why this argument?

I doubt these changes would have mattered, and to extract this list from Dao was to engage in precisely the hypocrisy I claimed to despise – that, in fact, I do despise. If Cotton needed to be held to such standards of politesse, so did everyone else. Headlines such as “Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-ed”, the headline of a subsequent piece, should also have been tranquillised.

As that miserable Thursday wore on, Sulzberger, Baquet and I held a series of Zoom meetings with reporters and editors from the newsroom who wanted to discuss the op-ed. Though a handful of the participants were there to posture, these were generally constructive conversations. A couple of people, including Baquet, even had the guts to speak up in favour of publishing the op-ed

Two moments stick out. At one point, in answer to a question, Sulzberger and Baquet both said they thought the op-ed – as the Times union and many journalists were saying – had in fact put journalists in danger. That was the first time I realised I might be coming to the end of the road.

The other was when a pop-culture reporter asked if I had read the op-ed before it was published. I said I had not. He immediately put his head down and started typing, and I should have paid attention rather than moving on to the next question. He was evidently sharing the news with the company over Slack.

Every job review I had at the Times urged me to step back from the daily coverage to focus on the long term. (Hilariously, one review, urging me to move faster in upending the Opinion department, instructed me to take risks and “ask for forgiveness not permission”.)

I learned when these meetings were over that there had been a new eruption in Slack. Times staff were saying that Rubenstein had been the sole editor of the op-ed. In response, Dao had gone into Slack to clarify to the entire company that he had also edited it himself. But when the Times posted the news article that evening, it reported, “The Op-Ed was edited by Adam Rubenstein” and made no mention of Dao’s statement

Early that morning, I got an email from Sam Dolnick, a Sulzberger cousin and a top editor at the paper, who said he felt “we” – he could have only meant me – owed the whole staff “an apology for appearing to place an abstract idea like open debate over the value of our colleagues’ lives, and their safety”. He was worried that I and my colleagues had unintentionally sent a message to other people at the Times that: “We don’t care about their full humanity and their security as much as we care about our ideas.”

“I know you don’t like it when I talk about principles at a moment like this,” I began. But I viewed the journalism I had been doing, at the Times and before that at the Atlantic, in very different terms from the ones Dolnick presumed. “I don’t think of our work as an abstraction without meaning for people’s lives – quite the opposite,” I continued. “The whole point – the reason I do this – is to have an impact on their lives to the good. I have always believed that putting ideas, including potentially dangerous one[s], out in the public is vital to ensuring they are debated and, if dangerous, discarded.” It was, I argued, in “edge cases like this that principles are tested”, and if my position was judged wrong then “I am out of step with the times.” But, I concluded, “I don’t think of us as some kind of debating society without implications for the real world and I’ve never been unmindful of my colleagues’ humanity.”

in the end, one thing he and I surely agree on is that I was, in fact, out of step with the Times. It may have raised me as a journalist – and invested so much in educating me to what were once its standards – but I did not belong there any more.

Finally, I came up with something that felt true. I told the meeting that I was sorry for the pain that my leadership of Opinion had caused. What a pathetic thing to say. I did not think to add, because I’d lost track of this truth myself by then, that opinion journalism that never causes pain is not journalism. It can’t hope to move society forward

As I look back at my notes of that awful day, I don’t regret what I said. Even during that meeting, I was still hoping the blow-up might at last give me the chance either to win support for what I had been asked to do, or to clarify once and for all that the rules for journalism had changed at the Times.

But no one wanted to talk about that. Nor did they want to hear about all the voices of vulnerable or underprivileged people we had been showcasing in Opinion, or the ambitious new journalism we were doing. Instead, my Times colleagues demanded to know things such as the names of every editor who had had a role in the Cotton piece. Having seen what happened to Rubenstein I refused to tell them. A Slack channel had been set up to solicit feedback in real time during the meeting, and it was filling with hate. The meeting ran long, and finally came to a close after 90 minutes.

I tried to insist, as did Dao, that the note make clear the Cotton piece was within our editorial bounds. Sulzberger said he felt the Times could afford to be “silent” on that question. In the end the note went far further in repudiating the piece than I anticipated, saying it should never have been published at all. The next morning I was told to resign.

It was a terrible moment for the country. By the traditional – and perverse – logic of journalism, that should also have made it an inspiring time to be a reporter, writer or editor. Journalists are supposed to run towards scenes that others are fleeing, towards hard truths others need to know, towards consequential ideas they would prefer to ignore.

But fear got all mixed up with anger inside the Times, too, along with a desire to act locally in solidarity with the national movement. That energy found a focus in the Cotton op-ed

the Times is not good at acknowledging mistakes. Indeed, one of my own, within the Times culture, was to take responsibility for any mistakes my department made, and even some it didn’t

To Sulzberger, the meltdown over Cotton’s op-ed and my departure in disgrace are explained and justified by a failure of editorial “process”. As he put it in an interview with the New Yorker this summer, after publishing his piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, Cotton’s piece was not “perfectly fact-checked” and the editors had not “thought about the headline and presentation”. He contrasted the execution of Cotton’s opinion piece with that of a months-long investigation the newsroom did of Donald Trump’s taxes (which was not “perfectly fact-checked”, as it happens – it required a correction). He did not explain why, if the Times was an independent publication, an op-ed making a mainstream conservative argument should have to meet such different standards from an op-ed making any other kind of argument, such as for the abolition of the police

“It’s not enough just to have the principle and wave it around,” he said. “You also have to execute on it.”

To me, extolling the virtue of independent journalism in the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review is how you wave a principle around. Publishing a piece like Cotton’s is how you execute on it.

As Sulzberger also wrote in the Review, “Independent journalism, especially in a pluralistic democracy, should err on the side of treating areas of serious political contest as open, unsettled, and in need of further inquiry.

If Sulzberger must insist on comparing the execution of the Cotton op-ed with that of the most ambitious of newsroom projects, let him compare it with something really important, the 1619 Project, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia.

Like Cotton’s piece, the 1619 Project was fact-checked and copy-edited (most of the Times newsroom does not fact-check or copy-edit articles, but the magazine does). But it nevertheless contained mistakes, as journalism often does. Some of these mistakes ignited a firestorm among historians and other readers.

And, like Cotton’s piece, the 1619 Project was presented in a way the Times later judged to be too provocative.

The Times declared that the 1619 Project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding”. That bold statement – a declaration of Times fact, not opinion, since it came from the newsroom – outraged many Americans who venerated 1776 as the founding. The Times later stealthily erased it from the digital version of the project, but was caught doing so by a writer for the publication Quillette. Sulzberger told me during the initial uproar that the top editors in the newsroom – not just Baquet but his deputy – had not reviewed the audacious statement of purpose, one of the biggest editorial claims the paper has ever made. They also, of course, did not edit all the pieces themselves, trusting the magazine’s editors to do that work.

If the 1619 Project and the Cotton op-ed shared the same supposed flaws and excited similar outrage, how come that one is lauded as a landmark success and the other is a sackable offence?

I am comparing them only to meet Sulzberger on his terms, in order to illuminate what he is trying to elide. What distinguished the Cotton piece was not an error, or strong language, or that I didn’t edit it personally. What distinguished that op-ed was not process. It was politics.

It is one thing for the Times to aggravate historians, or conservatives, or even old-school liberals who believe in open debate. It has become quite another for the Times to challenge some members of its own staff with ideas that might contradict their view of the world.

The lessons of the incident are not about how to write a headline but about how much the Times has changed – how digital technology, the paper’s new business model and the rise of new ideals among its staff have altered its understanding of the boundary between news and opinion, and of the relationship between truth and justice

Ejecting me was one way to avoid confronting the question of which values the Times is committed to. Waving around the word “process” is another.

As he asserts the independence of Times journalism, Sulzberger is finding it necessary to reach back several years to another piece I chose to run, for proof that the Times remains willing to publish views that might offend its staff. “We’ve published a column by the head of the part of the Taliban that kidnapped one of our own journalists,” he told the New Yorker. He is missing the real lesson of that piece, as well.

The case against that piece is that Haqqani, who remains on the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist list, may have killed Americans. It’s puzzling: in what moral universe can it be a point of pride to publish a piece by an enemy who may have American blood on his hands, and a matter of shame to publish a piece by an American senator arguing for American troops to protect Americans?

As Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, said on the Senate floor about the Times’s panic over the Cotton op-ed, listing some other debatable op-ed choices, “Vladimir Putin? No problem. Iranian propaganda? Sure. But nothing, nothing could have prepared them for 800 words from the junior senator from Arkansas.”

The Times’s staff members are not often troubled by obnoxious views when they are held by foreigners. This is an important reason the paper’s foreign coverage, at least of some regions, remains exceptional.

What seems most important and least understood about that episode is that it demonstrated in real time the value of the ideals that I poorly defended in the moment, ideals that not just the Times’s staff but many other college-educated Americans are abandoning.

After all, we ran the experiment; we published the piece. Was any Times journalist hurt? No. Nobody in the country was. In fact, though it is impossible to know the op-ed’s precise effect, polling showed that support for a military option dropped after the Times published the essay, as the Washington Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, has written

If anything, in other words, publishing the piece stimulated debate that made it less likely Cotton’s position would prevail. The liberal, journalistic principle of open debate was vindicated in the very moment the Times was fleeing from it.