This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 14, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Universities are valuable institutions, and yet there are some of the right who view universities

as an enemy that may be in part because of the failure of universities to deliver

so-called liberal education where reason is used as a guide rather than simply a tool for

defeating intellectual opponents.

Jonathan Marks is author of the new book,

Let's Be Reasonable, a conservative case for liberal education.

We spoke last month.

The subhead of your book is a conservative case for liberal education and you don't use those two terms

in the kind of opposition that we're used to seeing them placed in. So help me understand what you mean when you say liberal education.

Well, is education for the shaping of reasonable people.

Now, as a conservative, I'm one of those conservatives who looks back to the tradition of the Declaration of Independence, which we speak up as a liberal tradition, right?

Not Nancy Pelosi, liberal, but liberal democratic.

And my understanding of the declaration

is of a document uncommonly open to reason. So Jefferson wrote not that document been another of the free

unbounded exercise of reason and understood that to be consistent with and

supportive of liberal principles that is the more to be

a consistent with and supportive of liberal principles. That is the more you thought them through,

the more you'd like them and the better to be it defending them.

So where have we fallen down? Where have we failed to deliver that kind of education, not just to young people, but to everyone?

Well, my main interest is in the university, so I've thought especially of how universities have tended to let us down at times.

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