Over the years I’ve had many hard things to say about the ambience of wealth and ambition at Princeton University, my alma mater, and about the school’s abandonment of its once coherent curriculum in favor of vague “area requirements.” One thing I never criticized, though, was the habit of conversation among the students. We did teach one another. My introduction to Boethius came not in a classroom but second or third hand, from an enthusiastic English major who was on the wrestling team with my roommate. My introduction to the Pearl-poet came from a classmate who was chatting with me one morning before our Old English class began. Many years later, when my own students asked me what the biggest difference was between their college and Princeton, I answered by saying that it was in the kinds of conversations you would pass by on your way to lunch. At Princeton, I said, you’d overhear a couple of friends talking about the party last night, with one who got so drunk he had to be dragged home, and then you’d overhear another bunch talking about nuclear fusion, or arguing about who was the greatest Russian composer of the 20th century.

Essential to these conversations was an attitude of relaxedness. I could take for granted, in 1980, that no matter what I said about politics, my friends would not for a single moment consider holding my support for Ronald Reagan against me, just as I did not hold against them their support for Jimmy Carter. A whole world of things mattered far more than who happened to be president or whether you believed in more or less intrusion by the national government into economic affairs. Basic decency was more important. Our delving into fields of intellectual inquiry was more important. Our friendship was more important.

Things are different now that political sound and fury have penetrated into what used to be havens of sociality and the habits and rhythms of ordinary life. One of the pressing questions at the turn of the 1900s was not whether all rational adults should participate in the life of the polis, that is, the city or town or village where they lived, since such political life was far more vibrant then than now, and churches, clubs, fraternal societies, beneficent organizations, local bands, family businesses, local baseball and football teams, music halls, and playhouses fairly bristled with action. It was whether all rational adults should participate in politics more narrowly construed: in the blood-sport of political wrangling, enmity, arm-twisting, alliances and counter-alliances, payoffs, and palm-greasing, with fanaticism ever ready to sprout up like poisonous mushrooms. Such political action is inevitable, I believe, nor can a nation pursue the common good without it. But the monster needs to be kept in its place.

Will anyone, left or right, deny that the monster has been permitted, nay encouraged, to enter and to threaten to dominate every area of what was once our common life? It was bad enough in the old Soviet Union, when a rival for your job could rat on you to your superiors should some mild criticism of Stalin escape your lips — or did not, for when cruel people seek occasion to indulge their lusts, they will not be scrupulous in sifting out lies from the truth. It is worse now, when the perfect stranger next to you in class, someone who has no motive other than political hatred, not even the less demonic and more human motive of greed, may be recording what you say, to transmit it to the world, with your picture on it, goading everyone who shares his or her hatred to join in the mass condemnation. So it is that classrooms are silent before the teacher enters. Surveillance is everywhere; and the students fear one another. They have good cause to fear.

Suppose a boy says to a girl, “That’s an awfully attractive dress you’re wearing. What’s your name? Mine’s Tom. Would you like to have lunch sometime?” Actually, he won’t say that. Tom hasn’t been saying anything like that, not for a long time now. He’s been taught that it’s wrong. But he has an additional reason now for not saying it. Someone may overhear it and record it and attempt to destroy his college life.

And then class starts. Suppose the subject is David Copperfield. Inevitably, the business of the relations between men and women, both good and bad, must come up, and since Dickens was no feminist ideologue, who will be comfortable enough to speak? Suppose the subject is Heart of Darkness. Inevitably, matters of race must come up, and the collision of colonialist Europe with Africa. But Conrad was neither a colonialist nor a champion of uncolonized native cultures; he was too honest for either. Who will be comfortable enough to speak? Suppose the subject is The Origin of Species. Suppose it occurs to you that the very title of Darwin’s work is ironic, since the whole notion of a clearly delineated species must disappear, if we accept a theory of evolution by gradual and small incremental changes. Will you speak up? And take the risk that you will be marked and condemned as a troglodyte, dragging your knuckles on the ground as you lurch out of your cave, insufficiently advanced to do real scientific work?

Whether comparable things happen to insufficiently conservative students at a place like Liberty University, I don’t know. I hope not. For such an atmosphere renders education impossible. It is the reverse of leisure. Friendship can be born from a common love of what is good, or true, or beautiful; but only alliances are born from a common political cause, and when one or the other “friend” leaves the cause, the alliance withers away, at best, or turns into the bitterest enmity, at worst. In any case, the classroom must be kept free from all threats of surveillance or reportage. I will suggest two readily available means.

First, there should be no laptops and no cellphones in the classroom. They are quite unnecessary. We have lived well without them. It remains to be seen whether we can live well with them, but we can certainly ask everyone to set them aside for the morning and the afternoon. Even if they did not pose an immediate threat of backstabbing, ratting, tale-bearing, vengeance, and idle cruelty, they encourage in students the bad habit of seeking immediate stimuli, usually in a loud and garish form, and thus discourage the good habits of calm meditation, reading books, easygoing conversation, and quiet wonder.

Second, there should be sanctions against tale-bearing. Simply put, if you are caught recording and publicizing what goes on in a classroom, unless we are talking about actual crime, or if you are caught recording and publicizing a conversation among students without their express approval, you should be either suspended or expelled, depending on the seriousness of the offense. These sanctions should become a part of the college’s code of honor. Just as you should find it dishonorable and despicable to be a cheat, so should you find it dishonorable and despicable to be a rat. The sanctions should extend to the professors themselves, too. Honor above politics; intellectual inquiry above politics; leisure above politics; friendship above politics.

Otherwise, we might as well shut down our colleges as worse than worthless.