Public Writings

First Things , April 9, 2024   When I was at All Souls College at Oxford some years ago I had a conversation during a Saturday evening...

Law & Liberty, March 18, 2024 Tacitus at the beginning of his Annals , after brilliantly summarizing all of Roman history in the space...

The Harvard Crimson , January 29, 2024 If you are a Harvard undergraduate, the question in my title might not be top of mind. In the...

Law & Liberty, January 18, 2024 For a number of years now pleasant young women (or persons identifying as women, or with female-sounding...

The Good Society , vol. 31, no. 1 (2022) The teaching of virtue in the Renaissance was certainly more generic and more bookish. The texts...

The Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2023 Claudine Gay, the president of my university, is under attack for academic dishonesty. She is...

First Things, November 15, 2023 Recently a book of mine underwent a perplexing treatment in the New York Review of Books. Normally one is...

Law and Liberty , November 13, 2023   If, like me, you are a conservative living in the world of academe, you tend to take a dark view of...

Law & Liberty, November 2, 2023 Harvard, which FIRE recently ranked near the bottom for academic freedom among leading US universities,...

The New Criterion , September 2023 A c lassic debate among historians of Rome attempts to answer the question of how this city-state on...

Public Discourse, August 3, 2023 We need to study history as a subject in its own right, acquiring a deep appreciation for the story of...

The Wall Street Journal, July 19, 2023 In my 38 years teaching at Harvard, I have only twice met members of Harvard’s governing boards,...

Law & Liberty, May 30, 2023 When most Americans hear the expression “liberal conservative,” they think of it as an oxymoron at best, at...

First Things , May 12, 2023 King Alexander III of Macedon is beyond doubt among the greatest figures in world history. But was he a great...

Principia: A Journal of Classical Education 2.1 (Spring 2023) Francesco Patrizi of Siena (1413–1494) was the most important political...

The Wall Street Journal , January 13, 2023   Now that Republicans control the House, what can they do to regain Americans’ trust in...

Law & Liberty, November 14, 2022 Quick, who do you think wrote the following? To use the classroom … as a sort of ersatz political...

First Things, August 25, 2022 I was profiled recently in the Wall Street Journal , which was an interesting experience for a...

First Things, August 2, 2022 I learned the following ten lessons about democratic society from the pandemic. Some of these things I...

Law & Liberty, July 20, 2022 The Civics Alliance has just published, in time for the Fourth of July, its American Birthright , a model...