The constitutions of liberal democracies owe their moral and institutional foundations to the ideas of Western political philosophers. From Locke’s theory of natural rights to Rousseau’s social contract, from Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers to Mill’s principled defence of liberty and reasoned dissent, these frameworks emerged not just from political necessity, but from intellectual conviction -often nurtured in the lecture halls and libraries of European and American universities.
For centuries, these institutions have served as both fountainheads and guardians of liberal thought. They have cultivated freedom of expression, the spirit of critique, and the value of dialogue – qualities that are not merely academic ideals, but essential to the functioning of any liberal democracy.
And yet, today, universities find themselves under siege.
Across the world, populist leaders have mounted rhetorical and institutional attacks on centres of learning and critique. Donald Trump’s disdain for expert opinion, Viktor Orbán’s crackdown on independent academic institutions, and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s mass purges of university staff are not isolated acts. They are part of a broader populist playbook that seeks to undermine independent sources of authority, question the legitimacy of knowledge producers, and recast complexity as elitism.
These leaders have mastered the art of turning the university into a symbol -not of enlightenment, but of detachment, arrogance, and ideological bias. In populist narratives, the academic becomes an enemy of the people: too theoretical, too liberal, too disconnected from “real life.” This characterisation is not just politically convenient -it’s dangerously effective.
And here’s the deeper irony: the intellectuals who shaped our democratic ideals anticipated this moment.
Alexis de Tocqueville warned of the tyranny of the majority and the pressures of conformity in democratic societies. Mill argued for the protection of minority opinions -not despite democracy, but for its preservation. Hannah Arendt diagnosed the fragility of truth in the face of political power. Karl Popper, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, cautioned that democracy can only be sustained by institutions capable of welcoming dissent and resisting ideological closure.
These warnings were not abstract. They now resonate with uncomfortable clarity.
An ordinary life 