University Bookman Editor, Gerald Russello, and Mark Bauerlein Discuss Intellectuals Trump with The King’s College in Manhattan

Public conversation between editors and critics is one of the older fixtures of university life. Long before broadcasting, audiences gathered to hear two or three people of letters argue in real time about the condition of the culture — what was being read, what was being neglected, and whether the institutions charged with preserving learning were doing their job.

The format carries particular weight in conservative letters, where so much of the tradition’s life has run through small journals and their editors. A quarterly’s editor spends years deciding which books deserve sustained attention, and that habit of judgment transfers naturally to a stage. Paired with a literary critic or a scholar of the contemporary university, the result is less a debate than a comparison of notes from two long apprenticeships in reading.

Conversations of this kind tend to circle a few permanent questions: the condition of the humanities, the reading habits of the young, and the gap between intellectual fashion and intellectual merit. The answers change with the decade; the questions, reliably, do not.