President Milliken’s conversation with Beverly Gage

President Milliken shared the following post on his Substack, “The Gold and the Blue, Volume 22,” on July 15, 2026.

I recently sat down for a discussion with Beverly Gage — the John Lewis Gaddis Professor of History at Yale, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, and the co-chair of Yale’s Committee on Trust in Higher Education. You can watch our conversation here.

Just days after the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, we spoke about Professor Gage’s timely new book, “This Land Is Your Land: A Road Trip Through U.S. History,” that describes her visits to roughly 300 historic sites across 19 states. A few key ideas stood out from our conversation. A form of conscientious patriotism is at the heart of her book. The book’s title comes from the timeless Woody Guthrie song, one of love for America, and also of protest and critique. And Professor Gage says we tend to forget the second part. Her guiding question is whether you can know American history fully — confront its darkest chapters as well as its greatest triumphs — and come away loving your country? Ultimately, her answer is yes, and she makes the case that patriotism shouldn’t belong to any one political group. Nor should it mean celebrating our nation blindly without reckoning with its shortcomings.

California figured prominently in our conversation. American author Wallace Stegner once wrote that “California is like the rest of America, only more so.” During our conversation, Professor Gage explained her initial vision for the final chapter was to show how California simultaneously gave birth to the modern progressive and conservative strands of American politics. Northern California was home to the Black Panthers, the New Left, and the gay rights movement; while Orange County conservatism, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan were on the rise in Southern California. These competing ideologies have been core to both California’s history and America’s. Unfortunately, Northern California was featured less prominently in the final version due to COVID altering Professor Gage’s plans and forcing her to skip several stops in the state.

Our conversation then turned to Professor Gage’s work as the chair of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, which published an influential report earlier this spring. Anyone who cares about the future of universities should read the report. Its candor is refreshing. The committee concluded that declining public confidence in higher education is real, urgent, and not simply the result of outside political forces. It points out how some of higher education’s actions have alienated many. Although that kind of self-scrutiny is uncomfortable, it’s also essential to fixing the real problems across higher education.

What connected both parts of our conversation was something Professor Gage said about how history helps cultivate the habits of mind we need most on campus right now: curiosity, empathy, and the capacity to engage seriously with people whose views differ from your own. She spent a decade writing a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, a man she often disagreed with. That project required her, as she put it, to understand how he saw the world — not to sympathize or agree, but to understand. That’s what historical thinking demands of us, and it’s what rebuilding public trust in higher education requires: Honesty about the past, genuine curiosity about perspectives unlike our own, and a willingness to examine ourselves critically.

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