On 2 July 2026, Jennifer L. Mnookin marked her first day as president of Columbia University with a visit to the Rutherfurd Observatory, celebrating “the spirit of discovery and public purpose” and a university of people “following the evidence wherever it leads.” Immanuel Kant, who famously never left Königsberg but never once locked it, sends a letter.

An answer to the question: what is a university?

By Immanuel Kant, Professor of Logic and Metaphysics, addressed to Jennifer L. Mnookin on the occasion of her first day in office

Madam President,

Permit an old professor a word of welcome, and then several words of something else.

I am told you spent your first day at an observatory. This pleases me more than you can know. I once wrote that two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and awe, the more often and steadily we reflect upon them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me.

You have attended, on day one, to the first. I write concerning the second.

I. Of the evidence, and where it leads

Your address speaks of Columbians “following the evidence wherever it leads.” A noble principle — I have staked my life’s work on a version of it. So let us practise it together, immediately, as an exercise.

The evidence: the gates at 116th Street, open to the city from their installation in 1967 until the year 2025, remain shut. A citizen of Morningside Heights who wishes to see Low Library — a building raised in the name of the public good — must now produce papers. Students pass a checkpoint to enter the place that claims to enlarge them. Your predecessors called this safety.

Where does this evidence lead? You are a scholar of evidence law, Madam President; I shall not condescend to you by pretending the inference is difficult.

II. Of enlightenment, and its counterfeit

Enlightenment, I once argued, is humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity — immaturity being the inability to use one’s own understanding without direction from another. Sapere aude! Dare to know! That is the whole of it, and I note with some satisfaction that it would fit comfortably on one of your admissions brochures.

But I also warned of the mechanism by which immaturity persists: it is comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet for me — I need not trouble myself. And if I have an administration that is safe for me, that filters my syllabus for me, that pre-approves my assembly for me, that monitors my speech for me — then I need not be a citizen at all. Merely a customer, warehoused in security.

Guardians who first make their domestic animals dumb, I wrote, then carefully prevent these placid creatures from taking a single step without the leading-strings to which they are tied — such guardians then point to the danger that threatens if the animals try to walk alone. The danger is not so great; but the pointing at it is very profitable.

Students do not come to Morningside Heights to be safe. They come to be transformed — to walk without the leading-strings. A university that will not permit this has not protected its students; it has merely postponed them.

III. Of the public use of reason

Here is my old distinction, which your lawyers may find useful: the public use of one’s reason must at all times be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among human beings.

A university is nothing — nothing, Madam President — if it is not the institutional form of the public use of reason. It is the place where a society argues with itself out loud, before the whole reading public, without first asking the permission of ministers, monitors, or donors. The moment its scholars must reason privately — in the manner of functionaries, within limits set by an external authority, under the eye of a compliance officer — it may still grant degrees, but it has ceased to be a university. It has become what one of my successors in your own blog called a Ministry of Compliance With a Library.

And a gate is the public use of reason made architecture. Open, it says: what happens here is offered to the world, and the world may come and answer back. Closed, it says: what happens here is proprietary. You cannot celebrate telescopes in service of the American Revolution — instruments pointed outward, in the cause of a public — while your own instruments of welcome are pointed inward and bolted.

IV. Of the moral law, and of treating persons as ends

The categorical imperative asks that we treat humanity, whether in our own person or in that of another, always as an end and never merely as a means. Consider, in this light, the recent custom of your institution: students sanctioned in the mass, without distinction of conduct or conscience, so that a settlement might be secured; a neighbourhood excluded, so that a reputation might be managed; a curriculum submitted for external review, so that a funding stream might resume.

In every case persons — students, neighbours, scholars — were used as means to an institutional end. The moral law does not permit this, and neither, I gently observe, does the Core Curriculum, which has been assigning me to nineteen-year-olds for centuries precisely so that they will notice when it happens.

They noticed. It is the administration that did not.

V. Of what may yet be done

I once asked whether we live in an enlightened age, and answered: no — but we live in an age of enlightenment. Allow me to adapt the formula. Is Columbia an enlightened university? Manifestly not. But with a new president, on a new morning, it may yet be a university in the process of enlightening itself — if, and only if, its guardians choose freedom over comfort.

Practical reason being my department, I shall be concrete. Three duties, Madam President, none of which requires a committee:

Open the gates. Physically, on 116th Street, first. The rest follows from it as corollaries follow from a proof.
Declare the university’s end. Not safety — safety is a condition, not a purpose, and a jail supplies it more reliably. Say plainly that Columbia exists to transform, and govern accordingly.
Restore the Core to the centre. Not as a reading list to be endured but as the standing argument of the institution with itself. Your job, before fundraising, before rankings, is to send ambassadors of that argument into the world. They cannot be ambassadors of texts their own university is afraid of.

You looked through a telescope on your first day and saw, I hope, how much there is beyond the campus. The instrument works in both directions: the city has been looking back, through iron bars, for over a year.

The starry heavens you have attended to. The moral law awaits. Do the right thing — dare to.

I remain, with genuine hope and a professor’s punctuality,

Immanuel Kant
(Late of Königsberg, a city he never left and never locked. Available for Contemporary Civilization, week nine, as always.)