More to say on all of this, but I want to focus on a crucial hot-button issue that came up in both conversations: education. As you may have seen last week, there’s a new Pew poll looking at how the culture wars have affected teachers’ ability to do their jobs. About 40 per cent say that the stress around what can and can’t be taught, and how, is having a major negative impact on their teaching ability. No surprise there; in fact, the only thing I’m surprised about is that the numbers weren’t higher.

But there is also mounting evidence, according to educators I spoke with, that voters are really turned off by the school culture wars, book bans, censorship, and so on. Parents and teachers want educators involved in nursery school through 12th grade to be able to just focus on the basics of their jobs, not the policing of their thoughts, language, and curriculum — and they don’t want more time, energy and resources going into culture wars. As a parent of two children who have gone through the system in New York City, I’d wholeheartedly agree with this. I must say that it really broke my heart that my son’s middle school had two racial justice co-ordinators, but no dedicated art or music teacher.

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everyone will automatically agree about what should and shouldn’t be taught. But 70 per cent of teachers in the Pew study just want more influence over how they can teach. As it is, two in three teachers are opting out of any discussion about political and social topics, and who can blame them?

While there’s a backlash on both sides of the aisle against education as a cultural battleground, I sense that it’s moving even more front and centre as an economic issue. Consider that Harvard now has levels of negative brand buzz that are on a par with Tesla and Boeing, according to a recent summit of university presidents that gathered to grapple with leadership in higher education.

I was quite struck at the American Compass conference by conservative speakers who felt that higher education had become a path towards downward mobility because of the debt that many borrowers have to take on (there’s a lot of truth to that, particularly at the lower levels of the socio-economic ladder, where many more people default and don’t finish their degrees, or end up paying for worthless degrees). One speaker quite rightly pointed out the six-figure salaries being pulled in by white-collar administrators in schools that charge working-class kids too much for too little. He actually called them “vampires”, which may be strong, but gets at the point that education — as David Brooks pointed out in his latest piece, is now a major class-oriented political divide. Brooks has also rightly pointed out in another recent piece that higher education — with its massive administrative overhang — is emblematic of bureaucratic bloat that is costing not only individuals, but society at large.

The understandable vitriol with which I heard people on both sides of the aisle discuss education last week reminded me of Margaret Atwood’s wonderful dystopian novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which Harvard Yard — once a symbol of openness, liberty and debate — becomes the headquarters for the brutal secret police in an autocratic state.

Peter, I know that you, like me, have spent time these past months touring colleges. Any wise thoughts on where the political debate over higher education is heading?