Conservative Journalist Jason Riley Calls Higher Ed ‘Intellectually Intolerant’ at HBS Talk

Fox News commentator and Wall Street Journal columnist Jason L. Riley discussed “The Trouble of Social Justice” and the decline of higher education in the U.S. at an event hosted by the Harvard Business School Conservative Club on Wednesday.

Riley is also a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a nonprofit conservative think tank based in New York. Wednesday’s event was sponsored by the Adam Smith Society, an offshoot of the Manhattan Institute established in 2011.

“I think to say that higher ed has lost its way in recent years would be a huge, huge understatement,” Riley said. “It’s not just the students. It’s also the adults on campus.”

Riley said he believes that colleges and universities in the U.S. have become more “intellectually intolerant” in recent years.

“I think college ought to be a place where students are exposed to different points of view and where their sensibilities are challenged,” he said. “They learn to grapple with alternative perspectives and formulate coherent responses.”

“On a lot of campuses, that’s not happening,” Riley added. “Instead, students are being taught what to think instead of how to think.”

In his criticism of social justice, Riley targeted affirmative action in college admissions as an example of a “rigged” process perpetuated by discriminatory motives.

“Think about a university admissions process that has one set of criteria for Black applicants and a different set for whites,” he said. “What matters most to the social justice advocate is the outcome, not the process.”

“In fact, to the social justice advocate, the process should be rigged if necessary to get the desired result — such as more racial balance on campus — even if that means discriminating against certain groups to get that outcome,” Riley added.

According to Riley, the problem with diversity, equity, and inclusion practices and affirmative action in the U.S. is not the effort to increase opportunities for historically excluded groups, but instead an issue of “lowering standards.”

“You don’t have a lot of opposition in this country to educational institutions, firms, companies and so forth reaching out to groups that they traditionally had not reached out to in the past, helping to bring those groups up to existing standards, hiring them, promoting them, or whatever,” he said.

“What people do oppose is lowering standards,” Riley added. “They oppose quotas and set-asides, racial favoritism, racial double standards — and that is what DEI has become in practice.”

When asked what he would want to substitute social justice advocacy with, Riley responded that he would want “traditional justice” with a “level playing field.”

“I think Blacks have done much more under colorblind policies than they have under affirmative action policies,” he said. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel here. We can look at what was going on when Blacks were making faster progress. There’s your road map.”

—Staff writer Graham W. Lee can be reached at graham.lee@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @grahamwonlee.