| by Eliyahu V. Sapir
Universities in Western liberal democracies are often described as polarized, politicized, or bureaucratically overextended. These descriptions capture aspects of contemporary academic life, but they fail to identify the more consequential transformation now underway. What has changed is not only what universities believe, whom they protect, or which values they publicly affirm. What has changed is how they understand the nature of institutional authority itself, and more specifically the role of judgment within it.
In the wake of October 7 and the conflicts that followed on many campuses—protests, counter-protests, confrontations, reports of intimidation—administrative responses in North American and European universities began to converge into a familiar script. Statements condemned “all forms of hate,” reaffirmed commitments to inclusion and open dialogue, and announced reviews of policy and procedure, while often declining to specify what had occurred or how it should be interpreted. The incident was acknowledged, but its meaning was suspended.
What is striking in this script is that it does not only defer judgment; it disciplines affect. Neutrality becomes an affective filter: grief, anger, fear, and moral urgency are treated as institutional liabilities, to be cooled into “balance” and “process.” The implied norm is not simply “do not decide,” but “do not feel too sharply.” In this way, procedural authority stabilizes conflict by emptying it of the very responses through which moral meaning first becomes visible.
What is at issue is not a contingent malfunction of otherwise healthy institutions, but a structural transformation internal to liberal authority itself. Liberal institutions have increasingly organized themselves around the promise that moral conflict can be governed without judgment, resolved without interpretation, administered without authorship, managed without responsibility, and justified without accountability. The contemporary university offers a particularly revealing site for this transformation, not because it is uniquely compromised but because it continues to claim moral and intellectual authority even as it reorganizes itself around the systematic displacement of moral decision.
Over the past decade, universities have reorganized their authority around a governing imperative that increasingly defines their institutional behavior: the avoidance of judgment. Where judgment was once exercised episodically, at moments of conflict requiring interpretation, decision, and justification, it has been displaced by continuous ethical governance. Authority no longer appears as something assumed in response to specific disputes. It has become permanent, anticipatory, and procedural. Governance is no longer activated by exceptional cases. It has become the background condition of institutional life.
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