Selected Public Writing

History & Culture · Politics · K12 Education · Higher Education · Review Essays

History & Culture

Trump Is the Enemy of the American Revolution

The New Republic
8/11/2025
For Trump and his allies, the actual principles of the Revolution matter less than its capacity to signify tribal loyalty by distinguishing “real Americans” from domestic enemies.

Bringing American History Back Home for the 250th

Perspectives on History
07/14/2025
In a new age of nations, how we tell national stories will become more important than ever.

A Usable Past for a Post-American Nation

The Hedgehog Review
6/24/2022
It was the evening before the Fourth of July in the last year of his tumultuous presidency, and I sat in front of my television transfixed and horrified as Donald Trump delivered a speech at Mount Rushmore, ostensibly a celebration of American independence but in fact a call for resistance. Against the dramatic backdrop of the four granite presidential faces and American flags, Trump promised that “the American people…will not allow our country, and all of its values, history, and culture, to be taken from them” by protestors and left-leaning scholars. He condemned so-called cancel culture for demanding absolute devotion to leftist dogma. Two months later, he would reprise that theme at the White House Conference on American History. “Whether it is the mob on the street, or the cancel culture in the boardroom,” Trump proclaimed, “the goal is the same…to bully Americans into abandoning their values, their heritage, and their very way of life.”

Unbecoming American

The Hedgehog Review
4/1/2020
I lived in a world where we could all be American. But that may no longer be the case.

Politics

Donald Trump Is No Longer the President of the United States

Johann’s Substack
2/12/2025
We must accept what is happening

Nonprofits Are at the Core of American Democracy. Now They’re Under Threat

TIME
1/2/2025
The U.S. House of Representatives recently passed a bill that would allow the President to take away the tax-exempt status of any nonprofit organization that he determines is providing material support for terrorism. Although existing law already prohibits American nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) from supporting terrorism, the new bill would remove existing procedural safeguards, effectively allowing the President to shut down any organization based on his judgment alone.

America’s Exclusion Crisis

Liberties
9/1/2021
In the late 1670s and early 1680s, when John Locke first put pen to paper to work on The Two Treatises of Government, he was grappling with a question unnervingly familiar to contemporary Americans. The king, Charles II, had made clear through his policies and actions that he sought to centralize control by establishing an absolutist state modeled on France. English liberties were threatened. By issuing “declarations of indulgence” removing certain legal handicaps on Catholics and others who did not conform with the Church of England, Charles unilaterally canceled laws passed by Parliament. In towns and counties across the country, Charles removed local officials hostile to his policies and replaced them with his allies, bending the apparatus of the English state to his will. His critics decried these actions but were powerless to stop them. Worse, his brother James, next in line to the throne, threatened to build on Charles’s policies. What could be done?

Tocqueville, Violence, and the Contemporary Crisis of American Partisanship

Tocqueville
7/28/2021
At the end of Volume I of Democracy in America, in a section entitled “On Republican Institutions in the United States: What Are the Chances of Their Survival,” Alexis de Tocqueville offered his readers some optimism. While the particular form of the Union was a historical “accident,” he wrote, “the republic seems to me to be the natural state of the Americans.” Compared to Europe, where republicans claim to speak for an imagined “people,” in the United States the term republic refers “to the tranquil reign of the majority.”

Will We Still be American after Democracy Dies?

Public Seminar
7/7/2020
There is a real possibility that American democracy will die come November. I hope not. I pray not. But I worry. Many scenarios that would have once appeared fantastic, now seem to be within the realm of the possible. One does not need a vivid imagination to wonder what would happen if the election was contested and its outcome was either unknown or unaccepted. Imagine that Russian meddling, creaky electoral systems and bungled counts, combined with Republican efforts to reduce access to the ballot, produced an outcome in which both Joe Biden and Donald Trump claimed victory.

The Next Victim of the Coronavirus? American Exceptionalism

The Washington Post
5/3/2020
Discarding this myth can be a good thing — if we restore what actually made America great in the past

The war on Christmas is a civil war

USA Today
12/21/2017
We used to be able to share Christmas with everyone, regardless of faith. I want that back.

K12 Education

How the Supreme Court Is Making Public Education Itself Unconstitutional

Education Week
7/9/2025
The high court recently took a step toward effectively outlawing public schools

Begin the New School Year with Gratitude for Public Schools

Diane Ravitch’s blog
8/28/2023
I am so excited for the new school year to begin. I admit that I am a bit sentimental when it comes to public schools. That’s because public schools are one of the few institutions that almost all of us have been through, which means that the experiences of schooling connect us within and between generations. There are the common schedules and rituals. There will be the first day of school. There will be school pictures. There will be holidays and dances. There will be field trips. And, of course, homework and tests. It’s part of the growing up experience in America. In a diverse society, it’s easy to focus on our differences. But public schools not only bring diverse people together, they give us something to share for a lifetime.

Restoring the Promise of Public Education

Diane Ravitch’s blog
11/20/2020
The last four years have taught us just how fractured America is. After a decisive but divisive election, President-elect Joseph Biden now begins the most difficult work ever: trying to weave back together a social fabric that has, after years of neglect, come unraveled. Biden has promised “to restore the soul of America.” At the heart of his vision must be a reinvigorated and renewed commitment to the democratic purposes of public education.

Schools Have a Nobler Purpose Than Just Career Prep

Education Week
7/25/2018
Parents need regular reminders of the broader purposes of public schools

Why Do Schoolhouses Matter?

Public Seminar
6/20/2017
The Rise of Public Education in America

The Common Core and Democratic Education

The Hedgehog Review
6/1/2015
David Coleman, a former McKinsey & Company consultant and the current president of the College Board, is one of the key figures behind the recent Common Core State Standards initiative. He has been described as “an utterly romantic believer in the power of the traditional liberal arts,” and Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people of 2013. He is also a former Rhodes Scholar “whose conversation,” Dana Goldstein wrote in The Atlantic, “leaps gracefully from Plato to Henry V,” and who has “advanced degrees in English literature from Oxford and classical philosophy from Cambridge.”

Higher Education

Learning to Grapple with the World

The Raised Hand
4/2/2025
This is the seventh essay in our series addressing the question: “What does every university and college student need to learn?”

A Year Later, Did Our ChatGPT Advice Get It Right?

Inside Higher Ed
1/11/2014
Exactly a year ago, we shared the advice of 11 academics on the then-new ChatGPT. We followed up to see what has changed and what to expect in 2024.

Where Does the Thinking Happen?

Inside Higher Ed
10/11/2023
Johann Neem explores why academe needs discipline-specific responses to ChatGPT

The Beloved, Besieged Humanities Classroom

The Chronicle Of Higher Education
4/21/2023
These are tough times for humanities professors. Flip through The Chronicle and the disillusionment jumps off the page. Post-pandemic students are disengaged. Colleges are cutting humanities programs. Academic libraries, whose stacks used to inspire awe and humility, are reducing the size of their collections.

Do as I Do, Not as I Say? The Wall Street Hypocrisy on Online Education

Academe Blog
5/28/2020
In a recent New York Times column, NYU business school professor Hans Taparia proclaimed (as many have before) that “the future of college is online.” Whenever I hear these words, I think of a student of mine, a dual major in history and anthropology, who testified before my institution’s Board of Trustees about her experience with online education. She transferred, as many students do, from community college, which she had completed online. When I asked her about her experience in a conversation in my office, she admitted that she had no idea how much she was missing until she came to Western Washington University.

Abolish the Business Major!

The Chronicle of Higher Education
8/13/2019
Business is now the largest undergraduate major in the United States. On the face of it, that seems rational. Declining public funding has made college more expensive and has forced students to think about their education as an economic investment. Colleges, in turn, treat students as customers.

Taking It to the Streets: Preparing for an Academy in Exile

ERIC
9/1/2014
For the past century, the academy has found a home in the university–they have been co-constitutive. Rising prices, declining state support, neoliberal assumptions about the value of education and how to fund it, and the growing number of students seeking higher education for vocational purposes have placed pressure on the university as an academic institution. While the total number of Americans holding liberal arts degrees has been constant or even increasing, the percentage of American undergraduates who major in the liberal arts has been in steady decline. The sustained demand for the liberal arts makes clear that there is no “crisis” for the liberal arts; the crisis is their marginalization within the university. With new technologies thrown into the mix, it is conceivable that in a couple decades, the university will no longer be an academic institution at all. In such an environment, it is vital that academics start thinking about ways in which to promote academic research and teaching in the liberal arts outside the university. For-profit corporations are not an option since they would make knowledge a commodity and because they turn students into consumers, violating the core ethical commitments of academics. Instead, something else must be found. With this threat in mind, author Johann Neem offers sketches of four options for an academy outside the university.