This week I’m rounding up the biggest faculty scandals to hit the press recently, setting off academic freedom alarm bells. Today, we’re covering the ongoing Jason Arday scandal and the questions it’s raising and the suspensions it’s causing; a soft ban in Florida on anal sex talk in the classroom; Tyler Austin Harper releases a scathing essay on why he quit being a professor; a tenured professor being fired in cuts to departments he doesn’t belong to; and professors suing politicians for using social media to get them fired.

Let’s dive into the top open inquiry news stories we’re watching this week at HxA.

The Jason Arday scandal first prompts questions about integrity; his death then prompts questions about blame.

Perhaps some of the biggest news to hit higher ed in the past month is the tragic case of Jason Arday. By now, you probably know that Arday was hired by the University of Cambridge in 2023 as the youngest black professor in the university’s history, at just 37 years old and eight years after earning his PhD. He taught sociology there after a professional pivot from physical education. Then last month, a Substack post from Nathan Cofnas blew the lid off the scandal, showing side-by-side comparisons of his doctoral thesis to that of Paula Zwozdiak-Myers, showing plagiarism. From there a scandal erupted over the plagiarism, the legitimacy of his hiring at a top university, the integrity of his scholarship, and a too-good-to-be-true personal backstory.

Tragically, after resigning from his post amid the controversy, he died last week (presumably by suicide, though the exact cause of death has yet to be reported).

The initial coverage spanned various legitimate questions. Early reports indicate there was a cover-up of sorts, after a Times Higher Education story of Arday’s plagiarism was spiked due to legal threats from Arday. After the news finally broke in July, coverage largely focused on the integrity of faculty hiring and scholarship pitted against the juxtaposition of a scholar who studies race differences in IQ outing a scholar who studied racial inequality.

Since his death, however, the conversation has shifted to whom is to blame. Some academics are arguing that coverage “moved beyond legitimate questions of academic integrity into personal ridicule and vilification,” with the Cambridge chancellor compared the coverage to a “racist feeding frenzy.” Journalists are defending their role reporting on a legitimate scandal at a top university, saying that blaming the media misses the point:

For people on the left, it’s sure easier to talk about the feral excesses of the right-wing press than the willful gullibility of certain elite progressives. But both contributed to the Arday disaster. Denying that won’t protect the left. It will just leave leftists out on a limb that grows ever more shaky.

As of last week Cambridge committed to reviewing its faculty recruitment process. The scandal had a tragic end, yet it has struck a nerve because of how many areas of contention within the academy it is emblematic of, including ideological homogeneity acting as blinders to scholarly scrutiny and criticism, while simultaneously acting as an exemplar for anti-DEI advocates to latch on to. Tyler Austin Harper pointed this out in the Atlantic:

Arday was fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals, for whom he served as a mirror in which they could see their own goodness. And he was fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives who saw him as a test case for their own obsessions with an academic apparatus that they believe is not meritocratic enough—which is to say, not white enough.

The right would have us believe that the Arday scandal is a story of affirmative action taken to its most caricaturish conclusion. Many progressives see it as something else: a racist witch hunt in which self-righteous zealots with suspect motives hounded a man to death. The problem with these narratives—and it is a sticky problem—is that they are both right.

On August 20, Cofnas shared on X that he had been suspended from his position at Ghent University as a result of his writings about Arday. The day before, Ghent University put out a statement explaining their position on Cofnas, stating:

…we wish to be clear about the values we uphold as a university. Ghent University stands for respect for human dignity and opposes discrimination, hatred and racism. We attach great importance to academic freedom and to open academic debate, even when views are controversial. However, that freedom is not unlimited. It goes hand in hand with responsibility and may be restricted in order to protect the rights of others.

The statement was updated on August 20 to note that Cofnas had been suspended as a “precautionary measure” and the university will be launching a disciplinary investigation. The statement doesn’t even try to veil the fact that Cofnas is being suspended for his unpopular public views rather than any alleged academic misconduct (despite his views being well known to the university at the time of his hiring). Scholars should not be disciplined for calling out the academic misconduct of another scholar; no scholar has a “right” for their scholarship to not be publicly criticized, regardless of the personal views of the critic. Apparently, academic freedom at Ghent University is only protected for those whose values are aligned with the university’s.

South Florida State College: Don’t talk about anal sex in the classroom.

Vinita Prabhakar has been teaching the short story “Bettering Myself” by Ottessa Moshfegh in her literature class for three years, a book which includes a scene of anal sex between the narrator and her ex-husband. But at the start of the spring semester, the “certainly racy” story caught the attention of South Florida State College (SFSC) president Fred Hawkins. Prabhakar was promptly suspended and was told that her contract wouldn’t be renewed. She spoke with Josh Code at The Free Press, explaining how her case has impacted her colleagues and why challenging readings are necessary for student learning:

I think there is a climate that has been created of, “Shoot, can this be on the syllabus?” You have a lot of second-guessing. A lot of whispering in the hallways about what’s next.

I don’t doubt that almost immediately, other colleagues felt like, “Oh, let’s go back to our syllabus and just assign ‘The Gift of the Magi’ and ‘The Story of an Hour’ on repeat.”

Those stories are terrific, but a classroom where you’re reading those things on repeat is perhaps a less complete one. In other words, if you’re only assigning those things out of fear that there will be retribution for assigning something else, I don’t think that’s good.

When faculty are sanctioned for teaching completely relevant content in their classrooms, the result is a culture of self-censorship, not free inquiry. We’ve seen this play out before, and we must stand against bans on classroom content.

Prabhakar is suing SFSC and Hawkins in federal court with the backing of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Her lawsuit alleges a violation of Florida’s Campus Free Expression Act; Prabhakar wants to be reinstated along with payment for compensatory and punitive damages.

Tyler Austin Harper contributes a hit to academic quit lit.

You’ve also probably come across “that essay” if you’ve been online the past two weeks. Tyler Austin Harper, formerly of Bates College, now of The Atlantic, dropped his essay on quitting his professor job. This isn’t Harper’s first foray into this space — he’s been writing about these issues for years. But this lengthy essay outlines in great (sometimes comical) detail the real excesses and issues plaguing open inquiry in academia, including a faculty search committee’s weighing a candidate’s racial identity more heavily than their actual scholarship. He also showcases how the DEI bureaucracy impacted his job and the campus culture, and eventually what he came to see as the hollowness of it all as a university drifts from its purpose toward a political agenda.

These critiques, however, are not coming from the right. A self-identified socialist, Harper explains in a follow up interview with The Chronicle of Higher Education where he’s coming from:

It really was being at Bates and slowly realizing that what we might call an intersectional version of progressivism was just a grand charade to mask real political and economic problems at both Bates specifically and higher education writ large. I did the work. I read a lot of alternative pedagogy. I quit using grades in my classes. I agreed with some of these critiques, and I still agree with some of them. But it became apparent that it was quite convenient to latch on to these things rather than confront the simmering class warfare on campus.

Financial woes used to fire tenured faculty at the New School.

Tenure for faculty is a fundamental protection for academic freedom that affords faculty the necessary job protections needed to freely inquire, develop their teaching practice, and conduct their research. Increasingly, however, tenure protections are being weakened in statehouses across the country and rules are being stretched to terminate tenured faculty. At the New School in New York, tenured professor Sanjay Reddy was fired along with 18 other faculty.

The New School said that the firing is in accordance with its faculty handbook that allows the firing of tenured faculty if there are “serious financial considerations or curricular change(s)” that require the university “to discontinue an academic department/program or college/school,” according to The New York Times.

Reddy finds this reasoning suspect. He was the only economics professor let go, and his department wasn’t directly impacted by the restructuring. AAUP representative Mark Criley told The New York Times that “a bureaucratic restructuring that leads to the selective elimination of faculty members really puts academic freedom in jeopardy,” especially professors “who have displeased administrators or trustees or donors,” which Reddy did, having criticized the university’s finances for years, which is exactly the kind of speech tenure is supposed to protect.

Reinstated Austin Peay State University professor sues politician who called for his firing on social media.

A theater professor at Austin Peay State University was one of dozens of faculty fired when social media posts in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder at Utah Valley University last fall drew attention from politicians. Darren Michael was fired just two days after making a Facebook post showing a screenshot of an article written by Kirk saying that gun deaths are a necessary downside to the second amendment. The university cited “reputational damage” to the university as the cause. Michael already successfully sued the university, gaining position reinstatement and a $500,000 settlement. Now, Michael is suing Tennessee Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn for leveraging her political power to get him fired, Inside Higher Ed reports.

Share

Have campus news related to open inquiry that we should be aware of? Share it with us by sending a quick email to communications@heterodoxacademy.org

Justin McBrayer: Good to see many of you. Thank you for joining us for the faculty value viewpoint diversity, but how can we make it the norm on campus discussion? There’s an awful lot to say here. We’re joined by some experts in the field. We’re going to have a really great discussion. So let me welcome you and tell you a little bit about Heterodox Academy events and what we do. As you know, Heterodox Academy hosts live events at conferences and events on campus, but we also do an awful lot virtually. We’ve got nearly 9000 members across the English speaking world. And so we’re engaging with members weekly in virtual ways, in addition to our newsletters and our reports. And for today’s discussion, I want to remind everyone to follow the HxA way.

We deeply value the norms of serious intellectual engagement, and we encourage everyone engaged in this discussion to make your case with evidence, to be intellectually charitable with those you disagree with, to be humble, to be constructive, but at root bottom to also be yourself. I encourage everyone who’s going to be asking questions and for our panelists too, not to self-censor, tell us what you really think and try to do so in a careful evidence-based way. Furthermore, we are a membership organization. We would love for you to be part of our circle. If you are a graduate student, if you’re a faculty member, if you’re staff at a university, please join HxA if you’re not currently a member. It’s free to join.

We’re a group that advocates for open inquiry in higher education, and I think you’ll really find a sense of community and collegiality across the HxA members. Also join our Substack or our newsletter if you’re not subscribed there. We have some cool events coming up. Let me tell you about one virtual and one in person. Tomorrow we have a virtual member discussion about heterodox assessments in the classroom. You need to register to have access to that discussion. There’s a QR code on the screen. Grab that if you can join us tomorrow for this virtual conversation. and then the denouement of our work this year is going to be our national conference in April.

We’re really excited about the work that we’re putting together there and we’re going to have a great main stage feature for you. If you’re interested in being part of that conference, I encourage you to register. If you’re interested in being on stage or offering you a workshop as part of that national conference, grab the QR code that you see on your screen now. The abstracts are open for a couple more weeks. Okay, with that said, I’m Justin McBrayer. I’m director of university partnerships here at Heterodox Academy. Delighted to welcome all of you to our conversation. Let me quickly introduce our panelists and then we’ll get right to the show. We’re joined first by Shiri Spitz Siddiqi. Shiri is one of my colleagues at Heterodox Academy.

She’s an experimental social psychologist specializing in moral and political psychology. She joined HxA because she views its principled, nonpartisan approach as crucial for the fulfillment of the university’s purpose. Informed by her deep familiarity with several psychological literatures, Shiri develops original research analyses around HxA’s core mission and values. She enjoys writing about psychological science for a broad audience, and contributes regularly to our HxA Substack, Free the Inquiry. I can also say she’s a fantastic colleague who gives insightful comments on pieces that I’ve put together for HxA, so I’m very grateful to have her join our conversation today. We’re also joined by Ashley Rubin.

If you’ve been in higher ed reform conversations over the last six months or so, You surely know Ashley Rubin. She’s an HxA member and a professor of sociology at the University of Hawai‘I at Mānoa, as you could probably tell by looking at her background here on Zoom. She’s an interdisciplinary social scientist studying the history and sociology of prisons and other criminal punishments, drawing on organizational theory, law and society, and punishment and society scholarship to explain how penal practices change and persist across United States history. She’s the author of The Deviant Prison from Cambridge University Press and Rocking Qualitative Social Science from Stanford.

She holds a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy from the University of California at Berkeley. And finally, we’re joined by Jesse Smith. Jesse’s a sociologist and assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at The Ohio State University. His work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Marriage and Family, Sociology of Religion, and Socius, as well as popular outlets such as Public Discourse and Law & Liberty. He has published research on topics such as the heterogeneity of religious nationalism, moral socialization of young adults, and transmission of religious belief and practice between generations.

His current focus is on the ways that dominant paradigms in academic research lead to systematic errors and blind spots in bodies of social scientific knowledge. So Jesse, Shiri, Ashley, thank you for joining us. Here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to pose a few questions to our panelists to get our conversation started. Then we’ll pivot into Q&A with our audience. So we have a Q&A function built into chat. If you have a question at any point in time, go place it in the Q&A chat. Members will be able to upvote the questions that they most want the panelists to address, and I’ll pivot to pulling out some of those questions towards the back half of our time together will end at about 25 minutes past the next hour. So that’s our run of show.

Okay, we’re together to talk about a report that Heterodox Academy recently released on faculty attitudes about the value and impact of diversity in higher ed. So just to be clear, this was not a report about whether faculty are in fact diverse religiously, socioeconomically, politically or the like. So this was not about the diversity of faculty. It was about how faculty think about diversity and in particular, whether they value it and if so, which kinds of diversity they value and the like. Marisa will put a link to the full report in our chat if you haven’t had a chance to get to it yet. But Shiri, since you were one of the researchers knee deep in this project, can we just start with kind of the background?

What made Heterodox Academy interested in this set of issues? Why did we take the time to put this together? Just give us some of the genesis of this project.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah, I would say I was eye-deep in this report. But yeah, so as you mentioned, this was not a report looking at, you know, the reality, the actual distribution of faculty political views or religious views, demographic, anything like that. There already exists a good amount of work on that. But what we noticed is that there wasn’t a lot of work that actually looked at how faculty themselves think about diversity in different ways in their work. And because faculty are just so heavily and directly implicated in any kind of reform we might want to pursue related to viewpoint diversity, and also because the conversation around viewpoint diversity has become so polarized and the heat has just turned so way up on this topic.

We thought that maybe our intuitive perception of the distribution of views is not true to the way the land actually lays and faculty’s private views about this issue. So that’s why we wanted to study faculty’s actual views about viewpoint diversity.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, nice. It seems like we suffer from a kind of availability bias, where when you sort of self-reflect on whether or not your colleagues, your faculty at large, value diversity, you think of the most, you know, the last few interactions you had, or you think of the loudest voice in the faculty senate room or the like. So to take the time to get outside of our individual limited view and do a systematic survey seems like a really good idea to figure out what faculty really think rather than what we think they think about diversity. Can you give us like an executive summary? What’s the main shape of the findings? What do faculty value diversity? If so, what kinds? Give us some of the main findings from the report.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Sure. So we sort of throughout the report, we were interested in eight dimensions of diversity that we landed on. And these were a mix of demographic forms of diversity as well as intellectual ones. So I have the list here. We asked about theoretical slash methodological diversity, socioeconomic background, race and ethnicity, disability status, gender identity, sexual orientation, political perspectives, and religious views. And for each of these, we randomly assigned people to answer whether they valued these in their in research or in teaching. But the patterns were virtually identical. So we really just collapsed across that.

But we asked people, do you think that each of these makes inquiry in your field better or doesn’t have an effect or it undermines inquiry in your discipline? And what we found was that the number one most widely endorsed form of diversity across disciplines was theories and methods. So over 80 percent of people answered that they think that that form of diversity improves inquiry in their discipline. You know, number two and number three were class and race and ethnicity. Although really every form of diversity was valued by at least 50% of the sample. And that includes religious views that had 53% of respondents saying it improves inquiry. But that’s really like the range of it.

53% to 84% for any given form of diversity, people said it improves their field.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, interesting. So it is interesting that, you know, one of the takeaways is that faculty, by and large, think that diversity in a wide range of ways of understanding diversity is valuable for what they do, either in the classroom, you know, or for their research. And it’s also interesting, Shiri, that the report asks not just about demographic diversity, which I think sometimes when people just say the word diversity, they automatically hear demographic features, right? But you’re also asking about these intellectual features and trying to see how those two compare.

One finding that I wanted to ask you about in particular that I found striking and somewhat troubling, you asked faculty to indicate how many scholars they regularly interface with who disagree with them. On important disciplinary issues. You know, like, are you hanging out with other scholars who don’t think just like you do about particular issues? And you found that nearly 30% of faculty say they don’t regularly interface with people who disagree with them. And then that number was highest among adjuncts, contingent faculty, you know, faculty who may be teaching less humanistic fields like stem. Tell me something about that number, about what you found and why that unevenness in terms of interfacing with people who disagree with you matters.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah. So being HxA, we think everybody should share this value, but what we believe that disagreement is like a superpower for inquiry. It helps us catch bad ideas and it helps us refine and sharpen good ideas. And so we see it as like a good that everybody should have if they’re invested in doing rigorous inquiry and teaching. So it would just be concerning to find that a lot of people somehow aren’t having this experience. They don’t benefit from these conditions that could really improve their inquiry. And we found that almost, you know, three in 10 don’t exist in those conditions. And then on top of that, to find that this good isn’t distributed equally is another layer of concern.

Because it’s not that disagreement is like less valuable just because you’re in STEM. There’s valuable disagreements to be had no matter what area of inquiry you’re in. And then I think we also found that generally the more disagreement people were reporting, more frequent disagreements were related to valuing all kinds of diversity more, but in particular political diversity.

And so if those, if valuing disagreement is in any way related to the way that you teach and like let’s say adjuncts are in this they’re particularly likely to be in this situation of not encountering disagreement very often then we might they might be at risk for having their teaching not be as broad or exposing their students to the true breadth of perspectives and meanwhile most students are taught by adjuncts And so there’s lots of potential problems that this could cause.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, interesting. Jesse and Ashley, I’d like to hear from you, especially given your expertise as social scientists. Can you say something about how diversity of different sorts, whether we’re talking methodological, socioeconomic, political, and the like, how that diversity is actually valuable when it comes to teaching or research? Like, tell us something about the mechanisms or processes that explain how diversity sharpens what we do or improves what we do either in the classroom or in our research.

Ashley Rubin: I can go ahead and start for us. So I would say every perspective, and so that comes from, you know, like your positionality as a person with different demographics, experiences, and so on, as well as every methodology, every theory has both its contributions and its limitations. So they’re going to help us to kind of see certain variables or kind of think about different ways of getting to an answer that other kind of perspectives won’t necessarily have. But they’ll also have their blind spots. So to get to some version of the truth, we’ll be better off if we have this kind of kaleidoscope of perspectives where we can basically see what combination helps us get as close as possible to the actual truth.

To say that a little bit more concretely, you know, if you have scholars who use different methods or subscribe to different theories, that’s going to help us to stress test the claims that we make because they might say, you know, well, from my perspective, I would look at like this variable. So why aren’t you talking about this variable? Or you know, my understanding of methodology is, you know, you need to do if you’re going to do causal inference, you need an experiment. So here are the problems with your non-experimental design. Or conversely, you know, here’s what observational data can tell us that an experiment can’t do.

So kind of putting all of that together is going to help us get to some closer version of the truth and kind of identify the limitations of what we think is the truth.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. I just want to say, in particular, your mention of a kaleidoscope, like that’s a metaphor I’ve not heard before, but it’s such a neat idea to think about, you know, pivoting the kaleidoscope and recombining the same bits of material to yield a different pattern or a different, like, that’s a really nice way of thinking about how diversity, you know, helps us see things that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Jesse, what do you think? What are the mechanisms that make diversity valuable?

Jesse Smith: Yeah, it’s a great question. And my response would overlap quite a lot with Ashley’s. But I think for social science in particular, this could apply to other disciplines to different degrees. But social science, you’re dealing with the social world, you know, politics or culture or religion in or the economy or things that I think virtually everybody has some kind of stake in, some kind of knowledge of, and that virtually everybody cares about and has some kind of interesting perspective on, but very complex phenomena. So we’re trying to make claims about those things. And what these different kinds of diversity give us is a way to stress test our claims.

You know, we bring certain assumptions, we bring a certain angle or perspective to whatever we’re saying about these different things and we don’t necessarily know what our biases or blind spots are we don’t always know what the strongest counter arguments are and so I think that diversity of perspectives really brings that and as far as mechanisms in a way we already have a mechanism because we have things like peer review and workshops and that sort of thing but if you don’t have diversity among the people who are doing that then you’re not getting the a full benefit of it because you don’t have a group of people that’s actually maybe able to adequately stress test each other’s arguments. And so this is where I think the diversity contributes.

Justin McBrayer: That’s a nice framing too, that I’ve not, I’ve not heard before stress test. I mean, that’s what happens when you defend your dissertation in front of your colleagues, right? I mean, my advisor and the other colleagues, you know, that were on that committee, they stress rest tested my ideas. And it was stressful to go before them, right? And pitch your ideas and have them, you know, lean on particular assumptions and arguments and the like. But I think you’re exactly right, Jesse. That’s what we need if we’re going to try to figure out what the world is really like rather than what we, you know, naively assume the world is like.

So let’s pivot our discussion less from, you know, what faculty think to more about the title of this webinar, You know, like, how do we make this the norm on campus? And Shuri, I want to double back to you quickly because I think one of the report’s more striking findings is that it revealed this gap between what faculty personally believe and what they think their colleagues believe. So, you know, faculty support political and religious diversity in the sense that they think it’s valuable, but they also assume that their peers see it as less valuable than they do.

There’s like almost this silent majority kind of thing so tell us about that finding like what does it reveal about how politicized this conversation has become what does it reveal about how difficult it might be to make this kind of conversation the norm on campus

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah so with this finding I think it’s it’s helpful to compare the gap on like political and religious diversity to the gap that we didn’t see on other forms of diversity, like race and gender and sexuality. So when we asked about, you know, how much do you, how much do you value these demographic forms of diversity? And how much do you think your colleagues value them? People basically said, I value them. And I also think my colleagues do as well. But when we asked them about political and religious diversity, they were still likely to say, yep, I value these, but they were less sure that their colleagues share that view.

And so what my guess would be that there are some very loud critics of viewpoint diversity and or they also carry more social cachet than the proponents of viewpoint diversity. And this kind of creates a dynamic where people who do have positive views of these kinds of diversity, they don’t express them. And we get what’s called a spiral of silence, where we have this majority that isn’t being as open or forthcoming with their positive views as they privately feel. And then that distorts the information that’s available to everybody who’s trying to form an impression of like, okay, what views are prevalent among my peers?

And so once we take, you know, these kind of like normie moderate views out of the equation, all we’re left with is the vocal people on the extremes. And so, yeah, I think this is a problem that needs addressing. But I think there kind of have to be two, I don’t know, crucial ingredients to that response. I think one of them has to be, we need to make viewpoint diversity more visible by showing people positive examples of how they can do this. I think HxA makes a big point out of highlighting these positive examples.

You know, things like Sway, I’m thinking of Abigail Saguy’s gender course, positive examples of how you can do this and how it can go well, coupled with support from administration faculty need to trust that if they’re going to go out on a limb and do this thing that’s still a little bit risky, that might draw some backlash, they need to trust that they’re going to have the support of peers and the people in power.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah so I you know at the on the one hand the finding is distressing because our perceptions of others don’t match the reality we think that other faculty don’t value this thing when it turns out actually they do so that’s the distressing part but the silver lining part is in fact there’s wide agreement across faculty that this stuff really does matter so there’s a the good news is that there’s a majority the bad news is that it’s the silent majority so let’s think about how to connect with that silent majority and make some moves that would matter on campus Ashley you’ve thought about this cluster of issues you know more than most and you’ve got all kind of ideas for concrete things that we can be doing on campus and in fact one thing that you’ve written about is this idea that institutions can declare support for like other forms of diversity intellectual diversity or ideological diversity or the like without really doing anything on the ground, without changing anything.

It’s just sort of a virtue signal and then they move on. But if Shiri is right that the faculty support is there, what is it that departments and institutions can be doing? What can they be building? Or what should they quit doing if there are things they should quit doing? What are some concrete things we can do on campus to harness the fact that the experts themselves think that diversity matters?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thanks for the question. So I think part of the problem that we face is that viewpoint diversity means so many different things to different people. And as Shiri was saying, it’s kind of a right-coded concept at this point, which is also leading to these problems. But as part of the kind of ambiguities relating to viewpoint diversity and its different names, intellectual diversity and so on. I think we have to think about viewpoint diversity as a practice and not just as a value. So obviously viewpoint diversity is a really important value and to say like we support viewpoint diversity, I think that’s essential, but we can’t think that that’s the only thing that we’re doing. We also have to actually practice viewpoint diversity.

And the really key point here is that viewpoint diversity as a practice is something we’re just supposed to do as researchers, as scholars. We’re supposed to engage in this. This is just kind of fundamental to how we’re supposed to do scholarship. We’re supposed to engage and explore a range of explanations and, you know, look at the data, you know, seriously from those different perspectives. We’re supposed to say things or we’re supposed to ask questions like, you know, what do I expect to see if my hunch or my pet explanation is right? And what do I expect to see if it’s wrong? What if, you know, these other typical explanations people offer, what would I expect to see? Like, let me steel man them and see if they’re consistent with the data.

And this is something that we’ve kind of institutionalized kind of in the writing process, because we are supposed to discuss alternative explanations, contradictory data, and that’s kind of just supposed to be in our write-ups when we’re doing this, not just in the research practice, but we’re also supposed to show people that we considered these considerations. And if we don’t do this ourselves, editors and reviewers are supposed to point that out. So I would say, you know, we need to encourage people to practice this kind of pluralistic approach in our research, in our teaching, and even in our engagement with others.

And so I would say a statement from a university or organization just kind of supporting viewpoint diversity as a value, I don’t think that’s going to do that. Instead, I think we have to create structures and incentives that are actually designed to check that we’re doing that and kind of putting some sort of backstop in place when we’re not.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. So I like this idea of living. What does it mean to live viewpoint diversity in your teaching, in your research? Yeah, that sounds right. Jesse, speaking of what it would mean to live viewpoint diversity, in your work, you’ve made the case that the magic happens, the real gains come from actual exposure to disagreements and not, you know, like kind of pretend disagreements or statements. Commitments or the like. Can you tell us more about that? Like, what happens to us when we’re exposed to disagreement or viewpoint diversity, you know, in some of the senses that we were thinking about in this report? Thank you. And as much as I wish I could take credit for that insight, I think John Stuart Mill beat me there by a little bit.

Jesse Smith: So he, I know people are fans of him around Heterodox Academy. So he talks about in On Liberty, the importance of having actual disagreement. And one point he makes that I think is really, it’s vital, but it’s not always intuitive, is he says it’s not good enough to have an argument presented by a teacher or an instructor. It needs to be presented by an advocate, someone who really believes it, because they’re going to, I think his phrasing is, they’re going to do their very utmost for the argument, force people to know them in their most plausible and persuasive form, and feel their whole force. And so I think what he’s really getting at, which I think is vital here, is the importance of engagement.

You know, in academia, we’re dealing with ideas all day long because what we do, so we’re reading things and scanning and mapping and kind of pulling what we can use for our projects. But we’re not necessarily engaging ideas all the time.

We mostly, in terms of like, Thinking through their implications, seriously thinking about how they apply to our subject matter and what all would follow from their arguments we really only do that for a select few ideas that we care about the most but I think that’s the most fruitful part of intellectual life is when we’re really engaging things and so I think what real disagreement does whether engaging a debate or whether you’re watching a debate and kind of feeling some of the drama of it promotes a more serious engagement with the different ideas and perspectives, which then leads them to yield the strongest benefits toward inquiry.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. And you’re exactly right. John Stewart Mill has this line about, it’s not just, you know, interacting with ideas, but seeing the ideas in the flesh, right? People who actually hold those ideas. And there’s something powerful about that. I, in fact, just ran across a paper that offers some empirical support to this million hypothesis. I’m It’s a it’s an old it’s 25 year old paper, but it compares people the effects of people who play devil’s advocate with coming face to face with someone who really believes it and how those two, you know, the devil’s advocate is sort of better than nothing. But it doesn’t have some of the real benefits, Jesse, that you were just talking about, you know, interacting with someone who truly believes something.

Thing. You know, I don’t know if that’s because when you meet someone who truly believes that it gives you some social permission to believe it too, or maybe they’re just more serious about their evidence or their arguments. But I think, you know, that there are studies that have borne out what John Stuart Mill, you know, advocated for many years ago. Let me ask one more question, then we’ll pivot to Q&A. Those of you who are watching, if you have questions, I encourage you to go down to the Q&A module at the bottom of your screen, drop in a question, go in and check out the questions that are there and upvote the ones that you want me to pitch to the panelists, and we’ll do that shortly.

So one final question then before we turn to Q&A for all of you. The report found that faculty who regularly engage with people who disagree with them, so people, you know, Shiri, who are not in that 30% of, I never meet scholars who disagree with People who regularly interface with other scholars who disagree with them. Those people are far more likely to value political diversity in particular. Given that, what would it look like to mobilize faculty to do more of that kind of engagement? I would love to hear an idea from each of you, like a real intervention, not just an aspiration. You’re like, I really want to push you here.

Like, what is one concrete thing you can do as a faculty member, as a department chair, as a dean, as a member of a faculty senate? Like, give me one idea that will move this, you know, move from valuing viewpoint diversity to actually embodying it or living it on campus. Shiri, can we just start with you and then we’ll just go kind of go round Robin?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Sure. Well, I think incentives can go a long way. So maybe if you’re a dean or chair, you can offer some funding for faculty to put together maybe a debate or a panel convening scholars who disagree, or maybe fund them to go to a conference.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. Okay. Ashley, why don’t we do you next and then we’ll do Jesse.

Ashley Rubin: Sure, thanks. So I agree funding for colloquia, you know, speaker series that puts different viewpoints in conversation, or at least that features speakers from different perspectives over the course of the term or school year, providing funding for adversarial collaborations. But if you don’t have funding, like one smaller thing you could do is just institutionalize the idea of the 10th man. So this is an idea that comes from World War Z, both the book and the movie, I think. But the idea that, you know, if everybody in the room agrees, somebody has the responsibility to try to give the steel man version of the alternative argument or set of alternative arguments and kind of take that seriously.

And so to kind of normalize that approach, I think would be really helpful. And then finally, I would say just reminding people how to disagree. And I would, this is going to sound, you know, totally suck upy, but, you know, promulgating the XX way principles, because I found them really helpful as just a reminder of like, oh, right, like when I feel myself slipping a little bit too much into an ideological mode, the HX way is kind of helpful for kind of bringing myself back. And so I would advise, you know, chairs, deans, just to kind of circulate that or their own kind of updated version of it that I think would be really helpful.

Justin McBrayer: That’s a good suggestion. I did that in my classes, actually. You know, I’m a philosopher by trade. So we would talk about, you know, what does justice for transgender athletes look like? And what do we say about the abortion? Like really controversial things. And I would use the HX way in my classroom. And it was a beautiful model for how to engage with one another in constructive, but civil ways. Good suggestion. Jesse, concrete things we can do.

Jesse Smith: Yeah, you know, this one, it’s maybe not usually one you hear about in these conversations, but I think it would be both direct and relatively straightforward.

I think in the, just the ecosystem of journal publication, if you made it easier to publish critiques of existing work, and a very good example of that, I think Brain and Behavioral Sciences does this all the time, where they’ll publish an article, and then they’ll have like a whole series of different perspectives, different counter arguments on whatever the target article was actually very appropriately for this there was a very famous article I learned a lot from about political diversity and social science from jose duarte I think jonathan height and a few other people and I found that such an enriching thing to read I felt like I learned so much not just from their article but hearing like 20 different people respond to it and seeing all the different forms of pushback I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t you know scale that up or make it more of a journal norm and I think you would get a lot of traction that way.

Justin McBrayer: I remember my first year in graduate school, my professor made the point that René Descartes was one of the first to publish work with responses to critics, you know, so he’s, he cycles the meditations across all of the main kind of big name thinkers in Europe at the time said, what do you think about this? They wrote objections, and he had replies. I just think reading through that dialectic as a graduate student, here’s what Descartes thought, here’s some pretty serious criticism of his work. Here’s what he thought. Just that back and forth was such a model of good thinking that, you know, we could do a better job of that in our own work and in journals and the like. So that’s a great suggestion, Jesse.

Okay, I’m going to turn to some questions and raise some issues that our viewers are raising. And I just, I have to tell you that Heterodox Academy viewers, they don’t pull their punches. So you’re going to get some, You’re going to get some good questions, and I’m excited to see what you have to say about them. So the first one comes from David. He says, I think that academic disciplines often carry political bias. For example, tongue in cheek, every historian is liberal, every civil engineer is conservative, and so forth. As universities have to replace faculty in specific academic areas, departments are likely going to propagate their bias.

And so repeated over many years, hiring is just going to intensify the viewpoint biases in faculty, not diversify them. What do you do about it?

Jesse Smith: I guess I can start on that one. I mean, that’s a very difficult question. I don’t think there’s any silver bullet to it. I do think it matters just kind of instituting viewpoint diversity or whatever diversity we think is helpful as a value and something that we should actually prioritize and potentially hire for, which is not, it isn’t something that comes naturally, I think, within the current structures. When you’re looking for who you’re going to hire, you look for who you’ll get along with and for who has a really impressive research agenda and CV. And of course, you should look at all those things. You don’t necessarily look for the person who’s going to challenge dominant assumptions. If anything, it’s the opposite.

That person is probably going to make things a little bit more uncomfortable around your department. So maybe subconsciously, you might not go for that person. And I think kind of adopting an ethic of like, no, we actually should be trying to bring in the critical perspective, even if they get on our nerves, because they might actually contribute a lot to our epistemic environment. Even just getting people on board with that idea would hopefully be a first step toward actually now following through on it.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah.

Ashley Rubin: You know politically demographically experientially diverse faculty but if they’re all in their own little silos that’s a problem conversely if you don’t try to do like the political litmus test of aversion but you think like okay well we’re going to hire in particular areas and that’s going to fix the problem because different areas are kind of right or left coded so let’s say we’re in a history department american revolution is kind of now right coded so we think like okay we’re We’re going to hire somebody who studies the American Revolution, and that’s going to kind of fix our political problems without actually looking for are you actually a conservative or a moderate or whatever.

The problem is you can study the American Revolution from a lot of different perspectives, and you might end up, as Jesse said, you might get somebody who is looking at it from the exact same perspectives as everyone else in the department. And so you’re not actually just because you’re looking at this, you know, right coded topic doesn’t mean that you’re not looking at, you know, kind of left leaning theories. So that’s not really going to fix the problem. So for me, I think the solution has to come back to just getting back to what scholarship is supposed to be in the first place, like that, that treating it as a practice, institutionalizing, we have to look at different perspectives.

And so for administrators, I think looking and kind of setting up structures that say, hey, chair of this department, you know, what evidence can you show me that you guys actually are looking at things from different perspectives and not just kind of a theoretical monoculture that you even if you have people from different perspectives in your department, what sort of engagement are they having? What sort of, you know, contestations are they doing? Or is everyone just basically going on their own little path and not looking at the other paths. So I think kind of setting up those structures is going to be really key.

Justin McBrayer: Shiri, would you mind if I pivot to the next question in our queue? Because it touches directly on the point that Ashley just made. Is that okay? And then we can circle back. So Ashley, you were just making this point about what administrators need to do. And when we’re hiring, we’re like, well, here’s the next question in our queue. It comes from Duane.

As an administrator, it’s very hard to push viewpoint diversity when the hiring process does not collect that information and at most places you know inquiring about political viewpoint for example is not allowed so if the key to if what we are trying to do is hire a viewpoint diverse faculty how do we institute that in hiring like what how are we I mean actually you were just giving advice this is what the administration do are you like how do you do that we’re not we don’t have an equal opportunity office it’s like coding people for their viewpoints and we don’t. So just concretely, what does that look like?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah. So again, like I don’t want to code people by their viewpoints. I think that’s, you know, like that seems very close to illegal if it’s not actually. Instead, I would say like, have, you know, like we, when we do hiring, we have to fill out these forms about like different questions and like mandatory, what is it? MQs and DQs, like mandatory qualifications and desirable qualifications. One of those qualifications should be, are you evaluating, are you critically evaluating multiple perspectives or are you just pushing your own perspective? When you give a job talk, are you showing kind of competing explanations?

Are you talking about here are the limitations, not like not in the, sometimes we see like limitation slides that are just really you know paltry and it’s it’s just kind of rote stuff that everyone says like oh this is an observational study therefore it can’t show causality or something Instead, are you seriously engaging other viewpoints? And by viewpoints here, I mean perspectives, methodologies. Are you seriously kicking the tires of your study and thinking about things from these different perspectives? And if you have a lot of campuses now have an advocate who’s part of the hiring process, the advocate can sit in on the job talk and say, like, you know, what sort of questions are we seeing the department asking?

And, you know, are they kind of asking questions from multiple viewpoints? And if they’re not, maybe that department needs a little reminder about, you know, like, here’s going to be a training session on just basic stuff that we’re supposed to do in research.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good. Thanks. Shiri, you have ideas for what we can do, you know, of just concrete things that we could do either in a hiring committee or the like?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I mean, I agree with what Ashley said about just building the incentives into the structure, just because it is so hard to, it’s unintuitive to seek people out and invite them in who disagree with us and push back on our ideas. And so to the extent that in the hiring process, you can select for people who they don’t have to agree with your, you know, your disciplinary premises or methods or assumptions or conclusions, definitely not, but they should at the very least take a kind of pluralistic approach, like Ashley was saying, in their own research and in the way that they are willing to accommodate other approaches to similar questions.

And it just seems very hard to try to seek truth if not everybody’s on the same page about, you know, sharing that as a starting value.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good. Jesse, do you want to weigh in on Duane’s question about what are administrators supposed to do, given that you, in some ways, it’s very hard to measure whether changes you make as an administrator are making the faculty more viewpoint diverse or not? Like, suppose you’re one of the faculty who responded to this survey and you’re like, yes, I value this kind of diversity. Like, what is an administrator supposed to do? And they can’t do what Ashley thinks they shouldn’t do anyway, which is like try to slot people into views and code them. Like, what are you supposed to do then?

Jesse Smith: That’s a very thorny question. And one thing I think is in general challenging about viewpoint diversity conversations is that what valuable viewpoint diversity actually looks like is going to differ by every subfield, by every department. So we’re always trying to have these conversations at the 30,000-foot view, but it’s going to be completely different in cultural anthropology versus the sociology of religion or whatever it is we’re looking at. So I know something both the Yale report on higher ed reform mentioned and then the Vanderbilt report that actually helped write mentioned was about having departments engage in some kind of self-study where you look at, okay, what are the gaps in our inquiry, our research agendas?

What do we think is missing that would be helpful potentially? Which, again, isn’t something you necessarily just do naturally or intuitively. You might need to be prompted to do it. But so that may be something an administrator can do is just prompt departments to undertake that kind of like it’s almost like a meta analysis of like what it is that we’re doing here. Obviously, departments have to be on board with that to do it well. But if it is something they’re open to, then maybe they can give you the feedback and they can tell you what they would need to do to improve kind of the diversity and epistemic quality of what they’re doing.

Justin McBrayer: OK, good. I want to ask a question. And this is not verbatim from one of our viewers, but I’m piecing together several questions that are in this vein. And it’s also something that’s very much in the air right now when it comes to higher ed reform. What do you do when your department tells you everything’s fine, but you suspect that it’s not? So you do, Jesse, you ask them to go through this meta-analysis. They say, we’ve taken a look at our curriculum. We think it’s spot on. Ashley says, well, when you do a search, make sure people, you know, seriously kick the tires on other views. They’re like, oh, we do. This is the proper range of views. It’s only neo-Marxist views.

Outside of that, those aren’t even like, and within that range, they kick the tires on all four of the ways of reading Foucault or like, you know, like what, like, what do you do then? This is the really hard and uncomfortable question. I know, this is why I raised it for you. Yeah, I appreciate it.

Ashley Rubin: My personal take, you know, because there are some options on the table that I think make us all very uncomfortable that kind of feel authoritarian, top down and scary. And, you know, it’s not clear that they would work in the way that we would even want them to work. And so I kind of want to put those aside. And so my preferred solution is, you know, I think we need to work on incentives and make voluntary change and give people opportunities to do that. And if you have a department that’s just very reticent on doing essentially their job, my preferred solution is to create a new department that people can voluntarily go into where that new department has to be committed to, you know, the basic foundation of how we’re supposed to do scholarship.

We are supposed to do this, you know, stress testing approach. We are supposed to be open to different viewpoints. And as long as you can do that and you’re willing to stick to certain structures that are going to keep checking that you’re doing that it’s not just going to be like a one and done thing that I think giving people the opportunity to do that and then you put resources into that department so long as it’s doing its job and then you just don’t give new hires to the department that’s not doing that unless they start to change their behavior. And it’s still, you know, kind of an uncomfortable solution, but it’s at least it’s voluntary and it’s not actively penalizing, like they can keep doing their thing.

But it’s just, you know, hopefully at some point going to come to an end one way or another.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah. I appreciate both the clarity of your answer and your courage to make it so clear, but it’s the sort of build and then kind of let lie kind of strategy. So I appreciate that. Shiri or Jesse, would either of you like to weigh in on this? The question again is like, what happens when a department tells you that they’re kicking the tires on serious views, when they tell you that their curriculum’s covering all the valuable stuff, but there’s some kind of good reason to think that they’re not? What do you do, either as a faculty member in that department or as an administrator? Well, I’m also kind of scared of that question, but it also is one that I think can’t entirely be avoided.

And that actually the Vanderbilt report kind of touches on this too, when it talks about the difference between astronomy and astrology and yeah, when the astrology department, they’re telling you that everything is fine, then what do you do?

Jesse Smith: And I think the, at minimum, I don’t want to get into specifically what the interventions would look like, but you do at least want to be able to make the argument and say, okay, we don’t believe you. We have good reason and to think that things are not just as fine as you’re telling us they are. And so you would want some kind of criteria to be able to evaluate or articulate as an administrator what your problems are and ideally maybe get someone from maybe other departments in that discipline or adjacent disciplines. You might need some kind of external assessment, but you want that external assessment to be as close to the core of that discipline as possible in order to make it as authoritative as it can be.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, nice suggestion on a review. And of course, reviews of that sort are part and parcel to your life as a faculty member, right? You’re reviewed by your peers, your published work is reviewed, your department is reviewed on a periodic basis every five years or seven years or whatever. So it does seem like that is a norm within higher ed to rely on outside experts. The question is just, you know, who counts as the experts and how do we identify them, especially if you have worries about the discipline writ large. Shiri, do you want to say anything else on that topic?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I thought Ashley and Jesse gave great answers.

Justin McBrayer: Okay, great. Let me ask one other kind of hiring-related question, then I want to pivot to a teaching student-related question. The hiring-related question is this one. Is there a danger of preferential hiring or changing our hiring practices in ways that favor viewpoint diversity, but then they sort of melt into some of the same questions that we had during the DEI era or affirmative action era. I mean, is there a worry, this comes from Jeff, is there a worry that hiring for viewpoint diversity might fall prey to all the same kind of mistakes that we made when we were hiring for DEI reasons?

Ashley Rubin: I can go ahead and start us off. Yes, absolutely. I think this is the super lazy, sloppy way to go about it. And this is the way that I think a lot of us are worried that viewpoint diversity will be handled by universities. And so I think all of us would say, you can’t just go for this one thing and kind of prioritize it, that is support for viewpoint diversity or ability to practice it. You have to be looking across the board that this is a high caliber scholar who matches the qualifications you would expect in your department. As soon as you start prioritizing the support for viewpoint diversity above other things. I mean, I do think engaging in viewpoint diversity as a scholar is fundamental to scholarship.

But if that’s the only thing you have going for you, that’s that’s not a strong candidate. So I would say you still need to hit all of the other, you know, MQs and DQs, you know, like that still has to be there. This can’t be this can’t be something that overrides, you know, obvious problems with a candidate. It’s a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Exactly. Yeah. Thank you.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah. Jesse or Shiri, like, are there risks that hiring for viewpoint diversity might, you know, land us in the same kind of hot water that hiring for other kind of diversity might land you in? Thoughts?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I think there definitely are risks, especially if we’re engaging in the same kind of demands as DEI statements engage in. For example, if we’re just substituting those kinds of statements with other attestations that we’re asking scholars to make, that seems probably problematic. Problematic, but I think that efforts to recruit, identify understudied topics in a discipline and try to recruit for those, that’s on much firmer ground, in my opinion, just because anybody can, you know, be interested in, for example, military history. You don’t have to be conservative. And in fact, many people might be interested in military history, you know, just because. And so that’s my opinion about a more legitimate weight.

And it’s also grounded in an epistemological argument about what would improve inquiry in our discipline. We’re looking for scholars who can fill in the blind spots that we have and push our assumptions. And yeah, in my view, that’s on way firmer ground than recruiting on a personal characteristic, like who you voted for, which is illegal, I would think.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah. Jesse, you should not feel any pressure to end. Do you want to chime in any way on this?

Jesse Smith: Oh yeah, I can say briefly, and I would actually maybe circle it back to the report because the, so in general, the report suggested that faculty tend to value diversity on these different metrics, but they value methodological and theoretical diversity really highly and other things less. And to me, the obvious distinction there is that, well, you can tell exactly how more theory and method are going to contribute to inquiry. It’s less obvious how those other things are going to do so. I think they can, but it’s not on the surface.

So to me, it’s whatever diversity you’re looking for, political or racial or demographic or whatever, you should be able to translate it into a theoretical and or methodological contribution and explain how it’s going to be valuable on that level, rather than expecting that the characteristic in itself is going to contribute something. And if you can’t really make that case, then it is probably not that valuable. Good thought. I’m going to pull moderator’s privilege and ask an uncomfortable follow-up question before I pivot to the pedagogy.

Justin McBrayer: Jesse, you made the point, well, you allowed that John Stuart Mill made the point that engaging with people who genuinely disagree with you is a good, an important epistemic good. Ashley and Shiri, I think the two of you each agree with that. Like it’s a really good thing to have people who are actually committed to these ideas because maybe they’ll put them in better light or whatever. But none of the suggestions that you just gave are guarantees that we will get people like that. Like, actually, we could invite people in to give job talks. They might all seriously. We could, Shiri, look at syllabi and they might be diverse in terms of ideas and whatever. And Jesse, you know, we might be able to look at some scholars profile and she’s published.

Like it all may look diverse on the surface but every faculty member on campus could be an evangelical christian or every faculty member like and by your own lights we’re missing a good there is there anything we can do about that or are you willing to just say there’s some good things we can’t rightly inculcate do you guys see what I’m pressing

Ashley Rubin: Yeah I can start us off yeah this is one of those things where we just have conflicting values. We have a legal structure and I think a fairly strong normative structure that we’re not supposed to hire people based on certain protected statuses and categories. And I think politics is often included as one of those. Or hiring somebody for their beliefs. There’s just something very icky about that. So even though we can all recognize that that is really important to do, to have that available, our legal system doesn’t allow it. And I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable advocating for doing that. If for no other reason, it’s really hard. I mean, people can also change their minds or you can be of a particular party. You can donate to a particular group.

You can vote for a particular candidate. But that’s, you know, there’s such a diversity within each of those categories that we’re not necessarily going to bring, you know, the person who actually, let’s just use abortion as an example. You’re, you know, just because you hire a conservative doesn’t mean they’re actually against choice or whatever framing you want to use. So there’s kind of also this risk of essentializing. So there’s kind of like a practical matter of just because you hire somebody you think is going to have this view doesn’t mean that they have that view or that they’re always going to have that view. I mean, we are supposed to be scientists and scholars. We are supposed to change our mind when we see different evidence.

So it’s very risky. So I would say at the end of the day, it’s just a tension between different values. Like it would be great if we could have that on offer for our students and for the world. But getting there, I think, is just practically and legally very challenging.

Justin McBrayer: Nice point. As a philosopher, I think about the distinction between those two, Ashley, is differences between your goal. You know what John Hite likes to call your telos, where you’re headed and then your side constraints. And your side constraints are the ethical parameters between which you agree to operate. And the point you’re making is we’ve got these side constraints that we’ve agreed to. And it might turn out that those side constraints block us from certain ways of achieving our goal. Like there are appropriate ways of achieving it, non-appropriate ways of achieving it. Earmarking people by their, you know, their voter registration or whatever is outside the side constraints. Nice. Jesse or Shiri, would you like to weigh in?

Like there’s the good of having genuine disagreement. And yet the interventions that we’re talking about don’t guarantee that you’d get them. Thoughts?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Just really quickly if we’re if we’re willing to expand the scope beyond hiring for a second hiring is not the only mechanism it expands the pipeline you could say but you can also do things like invite you know someone with a different perspective to guest lecture in your course or to you know present at your brown bag speaker series so that doesn’t address the pipeline issue but it does address the people presence

Justin McBrayer: Good Yeah it does get you face to face with like true believers or whatever yeah good Jesse any thoughts yeah I guess I would let’s say I see the distinction you’re drawing and it in a theoretical sense I think it could be relevant and I would agree that you can’t you know hire or try and promote diversity based on like what people hold in their hearts you can’t really look at that But in practice, I’m not sure it would necessarily be

Jesse Smith: So difficult as it sounds like in practice. And just to take Ashley’s point about like your views on abortion. So if you’re a philosopher, if you’re like, say, an ethicist who explains why abortion might be a bad thing, and if you’re an ethicist who makes the pro-choice argument explaining why abortion might be a good thing, you don’t need to look at people’s hearts. You can look at their arguments and try and get the diversity of perspectives from that. And I guess it’s always possible that what people believe deep down is just completely out of alignment with the things that they’re arguing in their scholarship. But in general, I would expect those things to be aligned enough that you don’t need to try and peer into people’s hearts.

You can probably judge pretty well based on their scholarship, whether they’re going to offer something valuable.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good thought. Okay, let’s pivot to pedagogy. This question comes from Pilar. Can you help with this? Yes, my students have expressed that it’s more important to be kind and not hurt people’s feelings rather than risking being uncomfortable with a potentially contentious discussion or raising viewpoints or perspectives that would challenge people’s identities or their, you know, their core beliefs. What do I do about this?

Ashley Rubin: I can jump in. That’s a thorny question. I mean, I think that one of the things that I wrestle with, and I think everyone in heterodox wrestles with is, you know, like, we want to be open to different perspectives. But sometimes those perspectives are antithetical to the core perspectives of what we’re supposed to be doing. And, you know, like, yes, kindness is important. But at the end of the day, we have to tell the truth, we have to be willing to look at different perspectives. And, you know, if you have this idea that certain perspectives are just they can’t be on the table, you can’t address them. That’s a really dangerous, you know, approach to take.

And I realize like my own, you know, like I could be being hypocritical, you know, by saying that because I’m saying like this is a dangerous perspective. So it becomes kind of circular, but we’re not circular. But anyway, so I think this is really challenging. And so I think one way to handle this is maybe to have an open conversation. You know, if you haven’t already, this might have resulted from that very conversation. But have, you know, a discussion and have students offer kind of like, OK, so give me the steel man for the other view. Like, why might it be important to hear arguments that might be uncomfortable and that might make people, you know, uncomfortable, basically?

And, you know, one argument that I like is if we really think a view is problematic, then exploring that view should give us the chance to actually see that it’s problematic. So we shouldn’t be afraid of ideas because if there really is a bad idea, we should be able to figure out through a debate or a discussion or through evidence that it’s a bad idea or that it’s wrong. So this is one reason why, for example, I think we absolutely should test hypotheses that we find personally insulting. Resulting, because if we truly believe that that hypothesis is wrong, factually or morally, we should find some data in the course of doing a systematic analysis of it. And just to be clear, I’m not saying like, go and find proof that it’s wrong.

I’m just saying like, you know, do a real investigation. And if we truly believe, you know, we’re right, then the data should, you know, hopefully come out that way. And if it doesn’t, then that should also cause us to reevaluate our position. So I think there’s a way to get to this kind of point that we should always be investigating even the most offensive ideas because, you know, hopefully truth will prevail.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. I’m tempted to put your point in like slogan form. It depends on whether your goal is truth or preserving what you already think. If it’s preserving what you already think, then it’s going to be scary to test things or whatever. Your goal is the truth. There’s nothing to lose. Yeah.

Ashley Rubin: And, you know, like, why are you in college if you’re not here to be exposed to different ideas and to ultimately try to find the truth, you know, and follow, you know, the data wherever they go.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. Jesse or Shiri, advice on students who, you know, want to prioritize kindness or niceness over contention?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Ashley’s comments reminded me of one of my favorite Atlantic op-eds ever, and I’m going to send it in the chat here. But it’s a piece by, I think, Princeton political scientist Lauren Wright. Right. And she did this kind of qualitative project with Princeton students where she asked undergraduates to describe the opposite political view of the one that you hold on various issues. Conservatives could tell you front and back what a liberal thinks about Stein or abortion or any number of issues.

Issues the liberal students could not tell you what you know in any meaningful sense what a conservative honestly thinks about these things and a lot of them said you know I really don’t like to think about that that just feels too icky or you know things like that they just avoided engaging with it and what she found I mean as these you know these experiences from students would suggest is that conservatives were leaving college much more equipped to advocate for their views than the liberal students and so I sometimes like to say that you can make a completely self-interested almost I almost think of it as like harm reduction kind of argument for viewpoint diversity like some students I don’t know if you can ever get them to buy into the idea that they, you know, they should expose themselves to disagreement because, you know, eating vegetables is good for you.

And so is exposing yourself to difficult ideas. But you can buy them into the idea that do you want to be a good advocate for your beliefs? Do you want them to be based in good reasons and not be flimsy and fall apart with the slightest pressure? This is why you should talk to people you don’t agree with. You know we can kind of we don’t have to put on blast that oh maybe you will also change your mind about some things or maybe you’ll realize you weren’t 100 right about this or that but for me that’s like the entry point just to get them to even consider it

Justin McBrayer: I Love it I’m trying to put together in my mind like the “too long, didn’t read” you know to the answers to pilaf’s question so Ashley gave an epistemic reason you’ll do a better job finding the truth she was giving a like psychological reason. You’ll be more resilient. You’ll be a better, like a thinker, like you yourself will process information and understand things better having been exposed in the right, like a kind of exposure therapy kind of.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: You’ll be rhetorically a better, a better advocate.

Justin McBrayer: Agreed. Nice. Yeah. So there’s also that, a rhetorical advantage to doing that. Nice. Jesse, you want to add?

Jesse Smith: I wouldn’t add a whole lot, I suppose. I guess I’d just say you can’t force students to do or believe anything. But if you’re the instructor, you do set the norms and to some extent the practices for the classroom. So just make the case up front to the students why this is ultimately a good thing. And having, you know, ground rules for how to communicate so you can work through disagreement without excessively stepping on each other’s toes.

And potentially modeling, too, if you think your students just aren’t really going to do it, but you really want them to see the value in it, and maybe be intentional or present something provocative and see if you can go admit a participation or have another faculty member who disagrees with you on something important come and debate you or maybe you can expose them to the value of it that way if they’re not initially on board.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, nice. So we’re moving towards the tail end of our discussion. We’re winding down, but I can’t help but wanting to slip in one more question from our Q&A.

And we’re going to return all the way to where we started back to like research questions and figuring out what the world is like this question comes from elizabeth and I’ve been puzzling over this myself elizabeth so I’m so glad you raised it two studies were released in the last few days that contradicted one another so there’s this one and the studies have to do with like why is it that sociology majors are so liberal and why is it that business majors are so conservative rid of them like what are the causal mechanisms driving that you know is it self-selection or is there some kind of you know change happening to these students once they get in the measure so one study found that disciplinary coursework seemed to change students political leanings that that paper was featured in chronicle higher ed like two days ago there’s a write-up on it but then there’s a working paper from brown university that found that actually student self-selection was a much better prediction rather than coursework or what happened with faculty.

So like, how is a lowly philosopher supposed to figure out what’s going on? Like, I’m not an expert at this. Like, how are we supposed to read, you know, between these kind of two different studies that seem to contradict one another? And how might your study, Shiri, either help us understand what’s happening here with contradictory findings or like, how should we be thinking about this?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah, I became aware of both of those and yeah, I’ll be honest that they seemed to, I think, point in slightly different directions, at least on their surface. I’ll be honest, I tried to read the studies and I was like, this is, I’m not super familiar with the methods they used. I gave them to Claude and asked them, Claude, like where do these papers Where do they disagree? And it gave me this very nuanced like threading the needle. Here’s how. I’m not sure I totally followed it, but what they agreed on was that, OK, there’s a leftward skew among faculty. Self-selection does drive part of the effect here. It’s not clear whether faculty really have like an influence. I think they both reject the indoctrination idea.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah. So how that can be - So are you saying that maybe what they differ on is like percentages? Like one paper saying that selection effect explains more of that skew than influence or because - It could be - Yeah, go ahead.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I think it’s also that they were different methodologically. Like one of them looked within the same, they held the course constant and they looked to see whether like the ideology of the faculty member teaching it affected students maybe voter registration changes and but the other one was much bigger in scope looking at way more schools and it looked the focus was just different I don’t remember off the top of my head but I think maybe these methodological differences the measurement differences there are ways that the findings can be kind of reconciled but I think maybe there’s others that they don’t quite agree on

Justin McBrayer: Fine points here yeah Jesse Ashley other thoughts like what do we do I mean how do you think about this as an expert and how should I be thinking about it as a non-expert you know as a humanist who’s trying to read social science findings and try to figure out what’s driving some particular phenomena.

Jesse Smith: And I would say, so Shiri did more work than I did. I’m aware of both of those studies, but I didn’t actually undertake to try and like tease apart what the differences are. I wouldn’t necessarily read that much into them in the sense of thinking about what your responsibility is as an educator. I think all the principles we’re talking about here would still apply fly, whatever the data says about it. And I don’t see any contradiction. It could be you could self-select into sociology because you feel like it sort of fits with your worldview and then have that worldview continually reinforced as you go through your major. So both things can be happening at the same time.

But I think in either case, if you think that kind of stress testing or presenting different perspectives is valuable, both pedagogically and as an approach to scholarship, then it’s always going to be a, that’s always a positive thing to implement in the classroom in either case.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good. Ashley?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, I would say, you know, I think if you have two contradictory studies, it just means we need more data. This might be a methodological difference, it might be just a basic data difference, like studies don’t always replicate. And that’s why we need so many studies. So, you know, we can see how much of this is just by chance it turns out to be different. You know, like when we use a 0.05 distinction for significance, like one in 20 times that we just might be, you know, wrong by chance. So I would say, you know, this just means we need more data.

Justin McBrayer: Elizabeth, thank you for raising that question. I now want to do a study where I map faculty ideology and which study they shared on social media. Like, were the right-leaning faculty quick to share one and the left-leaning family quick to share the, and not right. Cause I do think that we see evidence through our own prism and we’re anyways, I’d love to do that study. Okay. We’re, we’re wrapping up. Can I give each of you a minute to give us like a final takeaway, or if you want to talk about stuff that you’re doing or offer our viewers suggestions for where to find more of your thoughts on these areas, a couple of things they should be looking at. Let’s just go around. Everybody can give us a wrap up. Shiri, we’ll start with you.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I guess what I’ll say is what we saw from the report is faculty don’t personally distinguish between these different forms of diversity all that much. Each form of diversity was positively correlated with each of the other ones. That’s not something that we reported in the report, but there were just support for one predicted support for each of the others. And so I think that we would probably do well to think about diversity broadly construed because that’s how faculty seem to think about them and yeah as far as what HxA is doing or what I’m doing you know check out my articles on Free the Inquiry I like to digest psychological science, give my take on it.

Justin McBrayer: And thank you all for coming. It’s been great. Shiri, will you drop your Substack subscriber link in the chat while everybody else is talking? That way our viewers can have that. It’ll be easy for them to just click on it and follow you there. Thank you. Jesse, let’s go to you next. Final thoughts, wrap up. What are you working on? How people can connect with you or stay in touch?

Jesse Smith: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve written a fair amount on political diversity in particular and what that actually looks like and how we translate that to something that’s epistemically valuable that actually aids inquiry rather than being some kind of representation thing or a political litmus test thing. So I guess in addition to other sources, I can shamelessly promote my sub stack. The next turtle down has a few pieces on this general topic. And just kind of a general thought. So I’d say I think it’s important to have these high level conversations like we’re having about just what the principles look like, how this plays out in practice.

But to me, the very logical next step is more focused on how these things play out on the ground as well and what this actually looks like in any given subfield in any given department. I think there’s a gap there that can be bridged, but that would really be the next step to turn this into practice to, I think, live the diversity, as Ashley put it.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, that’s a nice thought. If you don’t mind, put your Substack link in the chat, too, to make it easier for folks to follow you. Ashley, you have the final say.

Ashley Rubin: Great. Thank you. Thank you so much for hosting and organizing this. It’s been really great. Right. Yeah, I would say, you know, I think just reiterating what I said earlier, we have to, you know, it’s not enough to celebrate viewpoint diversity, either in lip service or like to truly mean it. We have to actually engage in it. And importantly, we have to encourage each other to hold up the practice and, you know, like help each other to do that. And, you know, right now we talked about a lot of like principles and abstract stuff. And as Jesse said, you know, we’re going to need data to see like, okay, so what happens? Like maybe we have to change our mind when we get more data.

Maybe it turns out that, you know, a lot of the stuff that we said from a kind of principle perspective turns out to be wrong if, you know, three years from now we’ve taken our advice and it turns out not to be good advice. So basically stay tuned. And I’ll go ahead and drop my sub stack in the chat as well. Jesse and I spar on Substack about viewpoint diversity sometimes. And it’s really fun.

Justin McBrayer: I love that. I’m also going to add Ashley, the link to your Vanderbilt–WashU report on scholarly standards in sociology. So everybody has that. Thank you to my esteemed panelists, Jesse, Ashley, Shiri. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. Thanks to all of our viewers. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow at our virtual event and in April at our national conference. Ciao. Thank you.

Share

Featuring conversations with leaders from Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Denver, the University of Virginia, Cornell University, the University of Wyoming, Dartmouth College, UC Berkeley, and more, these excerpts showcase practical ideas for strengthening higher education through free inquiry and intellectual pluralism. A transcript of the episode is below.

Andrew D. Martin — Chancellor, Washington University in St. Louis (Episode 39)

Andrew D. Martin: Dialogue across difference is a program we stood up a little over three years ago. And the purpose of the program is really simple. It actually gets back to what you were talking about a little bit earlier, about what are the conversations at two in the morning in the dormitories. You know, for those of us who attended colleges in the United States in the 80s or 90s, we had a very different experience than what our students are facing today. I mean, you can sometimes walk into our cafeteria and see two students sitting with each other, each on their phones, probably texting each other rather than engaging in conversation and dialogue.

And so we came to the conclusion that, while at the time we were coming up this was sort of a natural thing that happened, that actually being able to sit down and have dialogue with someone — particularly someone who you disagree with about a very fundamental issue, whether it’s politics, whether it’s religion, whether it’s about identity or something else — that was actually something that we could teach. And so what we did with this program is we have built a team of professional facilitators, most of whom are professional staff, some of whom are graduate students, and some are members of our faculty, who learned how to teach and model dialogue.

We’ve built this into our first year experience. If you want to live in our dormitories as a first year student — which we require you to do as a first year student — you’re also required to take this course.

John Tomasi: And it’s a course. This is an eight-week course?

Andrew D. Martin: It’s an eight-week course. It’s not credit-bearing. It’s just part of our student experience.

John Tomasi: And so — I’m sorry — so from a student’s perspective, they’re taking a course that lasts 12 weeks or something like that?

Andrew D. Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: And they do this as a sub-course along the way?

Andrew D. Martin: No, this is just an add-on.

John Tomasi: I see.

Andrew D. Martin: Just like, you know, if your dormitory said you have to do 10 hours of community service, or you need to show up at four social events over the course of the semester. This is just part of our expectation. We then offer lots of other experiences to sign up for. And every year we have well over 1,500 students of our 8,000 undergraduates who are raising their hand and say, “I would like to sit down and talk with someone who has a different religion than I do,” or, “I’m really interested in sitting down with someone who has very different political views than I do.” And we work with those students so they can have those dialogues with one another and flex that muscle that then they can take out and use in the rest of their campus life.

John Tomasi: And to say again, this is the fall of their freshman year they take?

Andrew D. Martin: Correct. We start — in fact, the very beginning starts during orientation — and then it’s the very beginning of their first semester.

John Tomasi: And you said a few moments ago that, for a variety of reasons including to do with having a wider range of socioeconomic backgrounds for the undergraduates coming to WashU, did you have a more diverse student body?

Andrew D. Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: Are there other steps you’ve taken in terms of — maybe it just happened organically — but are there steps you’ve taken in terms of your admissions programs to try to look for implicit biases of ideological conformity? Is that something you’re aware of or care about at this point?

Andrew D. Martin: So I’m aware of it and I care about it. It is something that we continue to look at, particularly in the essay questions and so forth that we ask among our students. One of the things that we’ve been doing that I’m really proud of is that we’ve spent a lot of resources, many of which have come from philanthropic contributions, to go out and find talented students wherever they are. We do that in cities all over the country. We also have a program — two different programs, actually — to go out and try to find talented rural students.

We’d rather have those students. I mean, we’ll take students from wherever they come, but we’re gonna have a much greater chance of getting those students from Missouri and Southern Illinois. And so we have a team of individuals who are visiting high schools all across the state of Missouri who might have one or two students who have the horsepower to come to a place like WashU and, certainly given the curricula in their high schools, are not going to have the same level of training as someone who went to a fancy private school, say, here in New York.

John Tomasi: Andrew, can I just — I’d rather tell you a story that you might enjoy. I’ve had this experience now probably six or seven times, where I had a freshman advisee at Brown, some very talented person often from a non-traditional Brown background, who would tell me that they’d been aggressively recruited by WashU and that they were on the fence about which way to go. And the ones who went to WashU, I never met. But I’ve met probably seven people I can remember who sat in my office saying, “Boy, I had this really interesting experience where this particular university really made it clear they wanted me to go there,” and recruited them to come. So it was probably part of that same initiative.

Andrew D. Martin: It’s part of the same.

John Tomasi: That was really striking. And I’ll just say, it’s the only school that I can remember a student saying to me, “Boy, you know, this school really made an effort to get me to go there.” And WashU, though, kept coming up.

Andrew D. Martin: Well, and we really value diversity at WashU. And what that means is we’ve got to go out there and we’ve got to find people wherever they are and make sure that they can understand what are the opportunities for them there. And we need to make sure that we’re prepared to offer to those students what they need to be successful, right? And a student coming from rural Missouri is going to need something very different than a student that’s coming from a public high school in New York.

Jeremy Haefner — Chancellor, University of Denver (Episode 40)

Jeremy Haefner: These principles of free expression, of open inquiry, of thought pluralism, and constructive dialogue and disagreement — those are fundamental things that we believe in at the University of Denver. And I want everyone to know that if you adhere to those principles and our values, of course, then we’ve got your back.

And the ways that we started doing that are organic ideas that have come from the faculty. So the Denver Dialogues, for example, is a wonderful initiative from our Joseph Korbel School for International Studies that really brings in partners like AEI, Hoover Institute, New America, Aspen Institute, and brings in scholars from these think tanks to discuss, in front of our students, faculty, and staff, issues that have some controversy on them. So whether it’s immigration, or congressional reform, or democracy around the world, or climate change, for example. These are hotly contested topics, and to see scholars have discussions that are very balanced — and students walk away with the fact that you can have these discussions and disagree — is really powerful.

John Tomasi: And how often does a Denver Dialogue occur? Is it once a year or twice a year?

Jeremy Haefner: It’s at least once a quarter. So they’re organized by, again, the Korbel School and the Scrivner Institute for Public Policy, which is part of the Korbel School. And they worked really hard to really bring in this balanced kind of conversation for our students, faculty, and staff. They did it at the Aspen Institute one summer when there was a focus on security in particular. Of course, one of our famous alums is Condoleezza Rice, and she is, of course, the director of the Hoover Institute. So she kicked off our inaugural Denver Dialogue with the other leaders of those think tanks. And it was a marvelous gathering of diverse thought.

John Tomasi: When was that? When did it kick off?

Jeremy Haefner: Jeez, that was almost two years ago. So that would have been ‘23. I’m pretty sure of that.

John Tomasi: And on those events, do you find that— So, I ran a center at Brown that had something we called the Janus Forum, or the Janus Lecture Series, which was two speakers in conversation. What we found early on was that sometimes we’d get two speakers who are really combative with each other. A memorable one for me was — the topic was justice, gender, and the American dream — and we had Harvey Mansfield, the well-known conservative from Harvard who’d just written a book called Manliness, pitted up against Catharine MacKinnon, a very famous feminist philosopher. And it was an incredible event, but it was kind of like a combat on stage. And we were worried that the student experience was really sort of passively watching an exchange of ideas, rather than what we actually cared about, which was the students — what happened in their minds, and did they change?

I’m just wondering, have you had that experience with the Denver Dialogues? Is it passive? Do you have any sense that it’s actually active? Is it having the effect on students that you wanted to have, or does it become a spectator sport?

Jeremy Haefner: A great question. One of the things, of course, that we always insist on doing is having a robust Q&A of the speakers, and Korbel School does a really good job at empowering students to ask questions along the way. So I think from our student perspective it has this potential for really engaging students and not being passive around this.

The other idea that we’ve had modest success with is to build little follow-up seminars around the discussions that are student-focused, and faculty lead those discussions in order to help the students think — well, break down the arguments that all the speakers presented, and which ones did you feel carry your thoughts along the way? And did they argue persuasively? So we need to do more of that. But I think that is a great example of it sinking in.

Mary Kate Cary — Founding Director, Think Again, University of Virginia (Episode 41)

John Tomasi: Think Again at UVA — what is that?

Mary Kate Cary: Think Again is dedicated to four pillars: viewpoint diversity; freedom of expression; intellectual humility, because people of all ages can be wrong; and critical thinking, where you don’t just believe everything everybody tells you, you investigate both sides for yourself and decide what you believe.

So we have year-round programming. We call it Free Speech Fridays. Some of them are things like speed debating — and we make the “b” of debating smaller, so it looks like speed dating, because we really want them— We’re going to do that around Valentine’s Day. We want them to debate things and then fall in love and get married. And then we have another one called Low Stakes Hot Takes, where the students sit around a table and say things — not presidential elections, but, “Is Taylor Swift overrated?” Half the room says, “What? How could you possibly say that?”

John Tomasi: So, Low Stakes Hot Takes. What are you trying to do? What’s your— Because I know you’re always working on numerous levels. What are you doing?

Mary Kate Cary: That one’s trying to get them to see that it’s okay to express an opinion that somebody might disagree with, right? And to start with low stakes and then eventually get braver and go to high stakes.

We have another one that does graduate up, called Food for Thought. And Food for Thought starts with softball questions: what’s the best fried chicken in Charlottesville, and why? Right? Medium ball would be, what’s your favorite and least favorite class at UVA — a little uncomfortable to talk about, in case you hurt somebody’s feelings or something. And then high stakes, a hardball, would be: tell us about a time when you changed your mind about something important in your life.

John Tomasi: Nice.

Mary Kate Cary: And that one, we have the room for two hours. I figured they’d come in, grab a piece of pizza and say, “Oh, Professor Cary, I can’t stay, I’ve got a quiz, thanks so much,” and they’d all take the food and sneak out. At the two-hour mark, every table’s still full. I go over to one of them and I say, “So, guys, we’re gonna run out of time in the room here, I’ve got to kind of send you on your way. But tell me what you’re talking about.” And they said, “Oh, we’re doing the hardball.” And I said, “Which hardball did you pick?” And they said, “The time you changed your mind about something important.” And I said, “What was it that you changed your minds on?” And they said, “Oh, going from atheism to a life of faith.”

John Tomasi: Wow.

Mary Kate Cary: And I said, “Really? I would have thought the other direction in college.” And I said, “Are you guys all old friends?” And they said, “No, we just met.”

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Mary Kate Cary: And I said, “You know what? Forget about leaving the room at the two-hour mark. You can have the room till midnight. You’re awesome. Have a good time.” And then probably the most famous is Disagree with a Professor. I shouldn’t say most famous — most popular.

John Tomasi: I can imagine.

Mary Kate Cary: And so, Disagree with a Professor. We get professors to each write three statements of their own creation that they think will be controversial with students. And some of them pick guns and abortion. Some of them pick some topic in their field of study. Some of them do something silly like, you know, peanut M&Ms versus regular M&Ms or something. So then we put them in a plastic sleeve that stands up on the table, so the students enter the room and look around at all the tables at the statements and then say, “Oh, well, I disagree with that statement, I’ll sit here.” And they sit and they start questioning the professor.

John Tomasi: Can I say something about that? Because I had a professor, Martha Nussbaum, when I first went to Brown. She’s a very famous researcher, and a person who’s also famously— no, she’s known for being very focused on her research. And when she was leaving Brown to take a job at Chicago, she took me out to lunch — I was a first-year assistant professor — and she wanted to give me a secret about Brown. And she said the secret was that at Brown you can advise a freshman if you want to. You can voluntarily be a freshman advisor, which no professor particularly wants to do, because you’re supposed to be doing your research so you can get tenure and so on.

But she said to me, “You know, every year, or every other year, you should be a freshman advisor. You should also offer a freshman seminar with your advisees in your class.” And this is, you know, people don’t want to teach freshman seminars because it’s not focused on your research. You can’t show them the book you’re writing and get help like you could with a graduate seminar. And she said to me — Martha said to me — “You should do it because it’ll keep you humane.”

And I bet the thing you’re doing there, by drawing those professors, like luring them into that room — I bet it affects the way they go about being a professor, about the way they see themselves and their role on campus. Because I think part of the role of HxA is to— And we talk about open inquiry as a particular thing that we care most about, but behind open inquiry I think is something more basic, and that’s just: do you care about the students? Do you care about the profession? Do you care about the search for ideas? Do you care about your university? Right? Are you a citizen, or are you just a professor of some discipline that you got your PhD in — important though that is — or are you also aware of your responsibilities to your university and to the next generation?

Mary Kate Cary: It’s the next generation.

John Tomasi: And it’s also the institution itself, right?

Mary Kate Cary: Right.

John Tomasi: So I’m really struck by that you’re forming — whether you’re doing it subconsciously, you probably are — not just the students’ experience, but you’re forming the experience of the professors, too.

Kavita Bala — Provost, Cornell University (Episode 42)

Kavita Bala: So one of the reasons I took on this role: I was excited to think about how should universities reimagine themselves, given this really rapidly changing landscape? And that’s actually another piece — the pace of change is so relentless, we’re not able to get ahead of it. We’re not able to design the laws, the public policies, the social norms even, of the technologies fast enough to stay ahead. And so I was thinking that we need to reimagine what the university teaches, what kind of research we do, how we engage with the world, because of these kinds of changes.

And then additionally, there were these two other disruptors that sort of made me stand up this committee that you just referred to. And the two other disruptors — you already mentioned one of them — is this loss of public trust in higher education, but actually in all public institutions. And that’s the part that we need to really worry about: in governments, in every aspect of public engagement now that society engages in, there’s a loss of public trust. I think tech plays one role in that because of the online polarization, et cetera, but that’s only one part of the puzzle. So how do we— We’ve lost the public trust. It takes decades to build, and we’ve lost it in a few years. How do we bring that back?

And I’ll say public trust is about different pieces. Viewpoint diversity, you know, those opinions, polarization — that’s one piece. One of the things that has been very surprising to me as a scientist is the loss of trust in science.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Kavita Bala: That is one I would not have predicted. Some of these I would have predicted; that one I didn’t see coming. And so we are seeing this backlash where, in this time of, you know, the anti-vax movement is gaining huge momentum, conspiracy theories about all parts of scientific discovery are rife. And so this loss of public trust is the other major disruptor.

And the third one, which really unfolded this year, was this renegotiation of the relationship between the government and higher ed. And so this has been a longstanding relationship — 80 years, or even longer if you go back from the founding of Cornell, for sure, in 1865. So given those three disruptors—

John Tomasi: Cornell, of course, is founded as a land-grant university, and it’s often thought of as the flagship example of a land-grant university because it does so much outreach in agriculture and other areas as well.

Kavita Bala: That’s a great— yes, exactly. Thank you for mentioning that. Right, so we’re a land-grant university — the only land-grant Ivy. We are in every county of New York State, and also across the country and the world actually, because of our land-grant mission of engagement and bringing the mission of the university out to the public.

John Tomasi: Can I just say a word on that, if you don’t mind, just to share something with you? We often talk about a mission of the university being to search for knowledge and to disseminate knowledge, and then people often talk about that as: universities have professors searching for knowledge, and then they disseminate knowledge to the students. But land-grant universities think of dissemination in a much broader way. They think about disseminating knowledge to the community, to people.

I spent an afternoon this summer with a friend in Idaho who spent his life at the UNLV Extension School. He works in hydraulics, and he was talking about how water systems work, and he would spend his whole life taking the knowledge that was built at universities and bringing it to people, farmers and other people. So at Cornell, that idea of dissemination as a land-grant university — dissemination is not just to the students, it’s disseminating into the fabric of society and the fabric of the economy in a really striking way. I just wanna mention that.

Kavita Bala: Thank you. That’s a great point. And I want to actually say another realization that we’ve been having increasingly is that dissemination is bi-directional. Yes, we disseminate out, but we learn from the communities we’re in. We learn what problems they’re facing. That drives the kind of research that we do. If you’re working with farmers in every county and you hear the problems that they’re struggling with, I think that’s an important part. It’s not a one-way, it’s a bi-directional flow and engagement that enriches us in our understanding of the problems facing—

John Tomasi: Oh, that’s good. That’s great. For me, I love that. And part of what I’m thinking is that, you know, good teaching, really good teaching, often involves a professor learning things from the students because they ask a question in a new way that you hadn’t thought of before. So we’re all familiar with that experience, but you’re saying the same thing about the extension.

Kavita Bala: That’s exactly— And it influences, it really seeps through. While we have the colleges, the contract colleges, and some of them, the land-grant mission is really across the whole university on every side, because — exactly — we engage with our stakeholders, which is the whole citizenry of America and beyond, and then we learn about what kinds of things should be important to a university. I think that does change the nature and the kinds of problems you solve, you know, in your research and scholarship and in your education.

Ed Seidel — President, University of Wyoming (Episode 43)

John Tomasi: You have institutional neutrality, I believe. When did you adopt that? Can you share anything about the pathway? And what’s Wyoming about it? What’s cowboy about it, as you put it a minute ago?

Ed Seidel: Well, okay. We were one of the first — at least in the new wave of this — to actually commit institutionally. We watched—

John Tomasi: We were cheering you.

Ed Seidel: Thank you. And it came out of our working group; that was a top recommendation. But it also does fit Wyoming, because Wyoming has been, over years, proud to call itself the equality state. So there was neutrality— You know, Yale only started admitting women in 1968, thereabouts. I was a grad student there, and so, yeah, women were there by then, but it was kind of a newcomer. Wyoming from its very founding was this way. And it’s called the equality state because women were the first to have the vote here. So that’s a kind of a libertarian view, I would say — not imposing on others. And I think the neutrality does fit that.

At the same time, it has created struggles that I hadn’t fully anticipated. So you can naively say, “Oh, we’re neutral as an institution.” And then something happens and you’re in a position: are you going to make a statement about it or not? And what are the actual facts? And does it violate institutional neutrality? So I have a little wiggle room in this, at least the way we’ve implemented it, if somehow a statement is important because it’s important to the mission of the university — which includes, are we building supportive community?

Are there times when I might say things that you might say could violate, in some very pure way, institutional neutrality? So I did make a statement on the October 7th attacks in Israel, and it was a bit controversial, I think, honestly, even for me. And I felt obviously the attacks were horrendous, but are we taking sides somehow? And I debated this with some of my team, and we decided that it was really impacting the cohesion of our university. We had faculty who were in Israel at that time. We had students from Muslim groups and Jewish groups and so on that were very much unsettled by the whole thing.

So I made a statement, and some people said, “Well, that wasn’t neutral,” but I try to be neutral. And guess what? The statement I made didn’t appease neither the sort of the Jewish students nor the Muslim students. And so I took the opportunity and I invited them both, on different evenings, over to my house to have an in-depth discussion. And I think it helped us then prevent some of the really rambunctious and destructive things that happen on many campuses, because they took it in. We have to have not only viewpoint diversity, but constructive dialogue.

And so sometimes — like there was an event that was about to happen on campus — I had a call from the head of Muslim Student Association saying, “We’re going to actively try to make sure that this doesn’t go awry.” And so that’s an example. Another one: we had an incident last October where some pumpkins were found with some swastikas on them for Halloween, and it was a really tough thing. And by bad kind of communication channels, I didn’t find out about it until a few days later. But I did take two days to make sure I understood the facts and then understood exactly what was happening on campus. And of course I made a statement that seemed to many people to be a no-brainer, but it did take some time to think through. That’s what our community needed. It was about community support. And so I think there are certain areas where you have to interpret what neutrality really means.

John Tomasi: Let me just push you for a minute more on that really difficult set of issues regarding the Hamas attack and then Israel’s movement into Gaza. You made a statement, an official statement, and then you also described inviting students to dinners to talk about these things. And overall, the effects were generally positive, you believe, on the campus culture. But do you think the statement helped, or was it the bring-them-to-dinner that made the most difference?

And I ask because we have a president we talked with, Brian Casey, at Colgate. And Brian emphasizes that during that period, when those campuses were under so much internal pressure and external actors getting involved and all that stuff that was going on, what he and his team did was they doubled down on the dinner approach. And they hosted dinners all over. I can’t remember what number, but Brian went to something like 25 dinners in some crazy period of time.

One of the things Brian says that I’ve repeated before the show, but I’m just going to say it again because I find it really insightful: he says that policies matter, and he cares a lot about the policies for free expression — you have to have those as a backbone of the institutional structure — but what he really cares about at the end of the day is what kind of conversations happen in the dorms on a Tuesday night.

Ed Seidel: Totally.

John Tomasi: What’s the experience really like? Do they talk? Or do they just balkanize? I just wonder — was there a statement? Looking back on that whole episode now, would you retract the statement and keep the dinners, or would you say they’re both necessary and needed? What would you say?

Ed Seidel: I’ve debated that with myself. Should I make that statement? Would I do it again? Well, I’ll tell you, it definitely catalyzed activity that we wouldn’t have had without the statement. So I had immediate reaction from people across campus. But I didn’t just ignore it. I took it up. So when Muslim Student Association wanted to meet with me, I was there the next morning. When Hillel wanted to meet with me, the same thing. And that created the opportunity for more dialogue, which I think was helpful. So overall, I think it did work. You could debate whether I was right to make that statement. I still debate it. But okay, here we are.

John Tomasi: A very open-minded scientific approach.

Sian Leah Beilock — President, Dartmouth College (Episode 44)

John Tomasi: We did a big study recently about faculty. We studied all the studies on faculty diversity. We found that most of the studies are not very well constructed. The ones that were least well constructed tended to produce the widest variations, interestingly. But we have a pretty good sense now — the best data shows something like this: that in 1990, the ratio of left- versus right-leaning faculty was about two to one. Currently nationally, it’s about five to one, which is much less than you sometimes read. But in some disciplines, it’s extremely high — 30 to one, 40 to one, even higher perhaps. And there’s some evidence that if you do cohort breakdowns with younger faculty, you find higher imbalances.

One of the striking things about the convocation addresses we studied was that as presidents talked about open inquiry and constructive dialogue and all these different things they were doing, practicing trainings and so on, almost none of them talked about viewpoint diversity. They didn’t want to go near it. And I talk to presidents a lot. And that’s one of the things that when you come to that part of the conversation, it’s always like, “Yeah, well, that’ll work itself out.” And maybe that’s what you’ll say too.

But I’m just wondering how you see— So in ‘90 it’s two to one. Was that a problem? Or is that just like a natural distribution of people making choices based on their values and careers, which is part of what being a Democrat or Republican reflects? Was that worrying when it was two to one? Is it worrying that it’s changed so much now, almost tripled in 30 years? What do you make of the viewpoint diversity situation on campus regarding the faculty, for example?

Sian Leah Beilock: Yeah, I mean, look, I think viewpoint diversity is important, and it’s important to call out, because what I want, again, is students to have a broad range of opinions and ideas, and people who have different experiences on campus. So that involves making sure we are recruiting students who have different and diverse experiences and different ideologies. It also means that I want faculty who can teach from different perspectives and are focused on different issues.

I don’t love these studies either, because I look at faculty — I have faculty on campus, one of my faculty, Russ Muirhead, for example, who leads our political economy project. And he is in the Democratic state house, I believe. He’s a representative and he clearly has a political party. And he is one of the best people I know in terms of teaching a range of views across the spectrum. And so I worry when we’re using who gave to a Democratic or Republican election as a proxy for whether we are getting students to reach in their intellectual pursuits across a discipline. I worry that that’s the wrong measurement, that we actually have to look at what people are teaching.

Now, I understand the argument that, well, maybe someone who leans more conservative might be more likely in sociology to study the sociology of religion or marriage than someone who leans more liberal. And if it’s the case that we only have people studying the sociology of gender in our departments and no one looking at other areas, I think that’s where the problem lies. And this is where I think deans and provosts and presidents have a responsibility to make sure that the kind of ideas that students are being exposed to in the classroom, and that are being researched on campus, represent the breadth of fields. And I think if we can figure out how to look at that, that is a much better way to ask the question about whether we have enough of this diversity on campus, rather than just relying on whether someone gave $10 to a particular party.

John Tomasi: Right. But I wonder, on that line of yours — “universities must double down on supporting faculty who provide structured opportunities.” So do you give prizes to professors who teach these ways? Have you thought about doing that? What’s doubling down mean?

Sian Leah Beilock: Yeah, I mean, again, I think a majority of our faculty really are focused on giving broad ranges of views to their students, and we can uplift them. So as an example, our Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies faculty who have done this work — we actually have supported their ability to have more co-taught classes, bringing in more visiting faculty. I think visiting faculty are amazing, and were part of that Jewish and Middle Eastern dialogue. We had an Egyptian diplomat in Middle Eastern Studies and an Israeli writer in Jewish Studies.

And so, doubling down on those opportunities. Every year in Dartmouth Dialogues we have a special topic. We had Middle Eastern Studies our first year; we have immigration. And it’s really providing opportunities for faculty who want to push boundaries of the kinds of things that they’re hearing and studying on campus, to make that even more so.

And it’s also making sure that we’re helping — I help to fundraise for programs that bring in different views on campus. Our Rockefeller Center for Public Policy is a great one. We’re doing a whole focus on the 250th anniversary of the country, and the kinds of speakers that have come through campus and visited with our students, from Vice President Pence last year to — I think Ezra Klein is gonna be here in a week or so. So I want to support those kinds of things.

And what I worry about is how easy it is to push away from them, because it’s a little bit hard. It costs a lot to bring in speakers, with security fees and everything going on. It would be much easier to say, “No, we’re just not going to do it.” And again, it goes back to what I prioritize as most important and where I think the purpose of an institution is. I do believe that Dartmouth can be the model of what amazing, centered, elite higher education looks like in this country. And I’m going to do everything I can to help push that forward.

Smriti Mehta — Researcher, University of California, Berkeley (Episode 45)

John Tomasi: There’s a famous paper in 2015 by Duarte, Crawford, and others that talked about the rise of, let’s say, political ideology conformity within the behavioral sciences, and social psychology in particular. And in that paper, they talked about how that imbalance had skyrocketed from being roughly balanced in the mid 20th century, to something like 14 to 1 left-right by 2012, to being as high as over 300 to 1 in some surveys.

And they argued in that paper — I’m not sure you know that — this homogeneity undermines science through scientific mechanisms, because those mechanisms only work if you have people who are raising new questions that are challenging to existing paradigms, that encourage researchers to consider the basic assumptions behind the scientific models they set up and the experiments that they run. If those assumptions aren’t being excavated or made clear, then we lose sight of them and bias starts to creep its way in.

And I’d love to hear a bit from you about how you see that. So you’ve spoken on your podcast about how it’s possible to have a healthy climate for open inquiry on campus but still face a chilly climate within your discipline. So campuses and departments, they swim within a broader sea of disciplines. Can you say a little bit about that? I mean, how do you see that problem? How does that change in the ratio of left-right leaning professors across the discipline of social psychology affect the prospects for having open conversations on a campus, a campus like Berkeley, for example?

Smriti Mehta: Well, I should mention my co-host is Dutch. He’s at a Dutch university. So the landscape is a little bit different there. And I think they’re just more blunt. They just say whatever they want to each other. So they don’t have the same problem that we do of politeness on campuses in the US.

John Tomasi: Sorry, the problem being too much politeness?

Smriti Mehta: Too much politeness. And I think reluctance to criticize ideas as openly and as directly as I think they can. But he’s also a social psychologist, and I think he’s seen this at least in our discipline a little bit.

But in some ways it affects both the people who are invited to join the discipline, which we see from the numbers from this paper you mentioned. I think there are certainly people in the general population, but even academics, who will openly say, “I would never hire a graduate student who was right-leaning.” So there’s a bias against people who hold certain ideologies. And that in turn affects the kind of questions that you ask, especially related to maybe more sensitive topics.

Political psychology, I think, is affected by it. There are certain issues, like inequality, where you can almost hear in the way the questions are framed in some of those areas that there is a lean towards what is the correct answer, or what is the correct way to think about an issue. Or, for example, gender bias. There will be a question asked something like, you know, should a woman pursue a career in a predominantly male discipline like, you know, real estate — is that a predominantly male discipline? — or engineering, something like that. And if a person says yes, then they’re automatically coded as being biased against women.

John Tomasi: Right.

Smriti Mehta: So, not considering the fact that somebody with a different viewpoint, a different background, may answer that question with a yes, but their reasoning could be something that’s not related to anything to do with thinking that women are less than, or that they cannot do well in this area. And you see multiple examples of this. I don’t want to use “implicit bias,” but the framing of the questions, the kind of questions that are asked, is affected by people’s personal beliefs, political beliefs often.

You also see it in cases of disciplines that are considered inappropriate, or when, if you’re pursuing a certain research question, people impute certain motives to it. So intelligence is a great example. It’s related to work that I did during my graduate studies; I was really interested in how people think about intelligence. And when you go into the literature on intelligence and you talk to people about this work, people will often say, “Yeah, that person is just trying to push a certain agenda. They’re just trying to say that it’s all genetics, or it’s all this.” Like, they must have some ulterior motives for even asking questions about, you know, are there group differences in intelligence.

So, touching that area — I mean, it’s just radioactive, right? So if you were somebody who was trying to do research with an honest curiosity about it, it’s like they take it one step further: that you must be doing this research to find certain results that will eventually harm somebody.

Cass Sunstein — Legal scholar, Harvard University (Episode 46)

Cass Sunstein: So I’m not excited about any version of proportional representation. So if a math department turned out to be, you know, 90 Republican and 10 Democrat, I wouldn’t be worried at all. If there’s a physics department that is, you know, without anyone who voted for a Democrat, that wouldn’t offhand be troubling in the least. I’d wonder more what’s actually happening in the classroom. So if, let’s say, in a Democratic-dominated biology department, they’re talking about how great Biden and Obama are, and how Bush was terrible and Reagan was terrible — that would be very troubling, mostly because they shouldn’t be talking about that in their course, given what their course is.

John Tomasi: Right.

Cass Sunstein: So the proportional representation stuff, I think it’s a first cut at something real. If you had a humanities department where the courses are all celebrating Marx, let’s say, and that we need to understand Shakespeare and Milton as either about class conflict or embedding, you know, capitalist terribleness — that would be, I think, very bad for a number of reasons. Now, as an English major, I hope it’s not overstepping.

John Tomasi: I didn’t know you were an English major.

Cass Sunstein: I wouldn’t say that— That isn’t if you teach Shakespeare or Milton. But political indoctrination isn’t good, and skewing isn’t good. So there are about five things not good about that.

If at a law school people are saying that the Democratic appointees are just great and the Republican appointees are terrible, that’s not good teaching. So that’s a terrible disservice to the students. I guess people are more likely to like the judges who align with their views. So a law school would be one where not proportional representation, but diversity of an ideological sort, I think, is essential. And that wouldn’t be true in a physics department. So it would be true with respect to physics, but a physics department needn’t have some people who voted for Sanders and some people who wish Ted Cruz were president. That wouldn’t be so important in a physics department. So I’m thinking that what’s actually happening in the classroom is what matters, and proportional, you know, political whatever is related to that, but isn’t that.

John Tomasi: Nice. So I hear us putting another marker down. There’s a question about where does viewpoint diversity matter and where might it not matter? Or we might say, where does it matter most directly or most proximately, and where might it not matter? And with respect to what?

Cass Sunstein: So, physics — there are forms of viewpoint diversity that are crucial, but they probably aren’t about whether the War Powers Resolution is constitutional.

Danielle Allen — James Bryant Conant University Professor, Harvard University (Episode 47)

Danielle Allen: I think there is a difference in the nature of the disagreements, and then also in the terms of the agreement we have for how we then debate those disagreements, between universities and the political sphere. And so I’ll explain that.

Let me though first say one further thing about the concept of covenant, which is, yes, sacramental. And I think in that regard, perhaps the first distinction that President Simmons was trying to direct us toward was between a religious community and the university. So a covenant in a religious community surely is an agreement on doctrine, right? You know, there’s the credo that I believe, and here’s the sort of list of things that I believe. So that is, I think, a powerful distinction. And so I would put religious communities in one place, and then universities and liberal democracies in another place, in this regard.

But then in terms of, again, what are the parameters, the institutional norms, for how that debate is handled — here, honestly, I would invoke Plato for understanding the difference between universities and the political sphere. The political sphere is often a sphere of judgment in conditions of uncertainty, when action must be taken. It’s a sphere where prudence is the kind of reigning virtue, and so the best you can do is make fallibilistic judgments. And in a democracy, what you’ve also done is decided that, you know, majority will win. So you’re not actually insisting that you’re looking for truth; you’re looking for a sort of stable decision that will carry popular support with it, in order to maintain legitimacy of institutions over time.

Now, that would be anathema to the decision-making basis inside a university. And that is probably partly where our problems come in: that in universities, we too often wanna kind of port that sort of majoritarian orientation of the political sphere into decision-making inside a university. Decision-making needs to be guided by norms of truth-seeking, right? Quality of argument, quality of reasoning, quality of evidence, and so forth. So that’s a sterner standard than the one the political sphere uses.

John Tomasi: And yet within the university, as you search for truth within some discipline, I gather we hope there would be some convergence of people’s thinking towards, at least, broad parameters in some area. Otherwise we’d be all over the place doing all different kinds of things.

So, I mean, some people have talked about this strange feature of academic freedom, that it has a conservative element and a sort of funky radical element. The conservative element is, we want our graduate students to learn all the arguments that there are, so they can go out to the end of the frontier — they know all we know; we don’t know everything they need to know. So then, at that point of sort of our conservative memorization and so on, we value the idiosyncratic twist, the next move, the great idea that adds. So there’s a strange tension there, isn’t there?

Danielle Allen: There is. And I mean, there’s also a tension in the notion that we talk about scientific consensus and that matters to us, right? Like, what is the scientific consensus about something? And we use that phrase, I think, because we acknowledge that it is when people come to agree with an argument that it gets to be sort of anchored as one of those building blocks that we then want to pass on to our graduate students. And so there is a funny blend in that phrase “scientific consensus,” of the kind of epistemic principles of truth-seeking individuals, and also a certain kind of community-oriented, kind of majoritarian element to it.

So I think that’s exactly what we have so much difficulty navigating in academic contexts, because then of course when heterodox views emerge that are counter to the scientific consensus, we sort of struggle to precisely know: when do we open up the consensus, when do we try to maintain it, and so forth.

John Tomasi: And one answer is that we open it up so long as the person can present the ideas in ways that follow the methodological requirements of that discipline, right?

Danielle Allen: Exactly.

John Tomasi: So if you’re invoking astrology in an astronomy department, right, then we’re saying that’s not the right kind of argument. But if you can bring us some new astronomically acceptable arguments, then we’ll listen to you. That’s right — doesn’t mean we’ll agree, right, but we’ll meet you with arguments.

Danielle Allen: And that’s the— it’s the requirement to listen. I think that’s so important and distinctive in the context of the university. So, you know, again coming back to the ancients, because they thought about this intensely, right? I mean, Plato and Socrates were trying to carve out a different kind of space for discourse from the political sphere. And one of the ways they captured the difference was, Socrates said in the Theaetetus, for example, don’t ever make me speak to the water clock. The water clock was the jug that ran out water to tell the time in the courtroom. So his point was, politicians are always obliged to speak to a clock: a decision must be made.

And the defining feature of true academic discourse is that it is not bound by time. If somebody brings an argument in, you know, meeting methodological standards, then we have an obligation to listen. And even time itself should not limit our patience with hearing those other arguments.

John Tomasi: Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode. Heterodox Out Loud is a nonprofit production of Heterodox Academy. We rely solely on support of listeners like you. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please follow our podcast, leave a rating or a review, and share it with your friends and network. Your support helps us reach more individuals who value diverse perspectives in higher education. If you are in higher education, visit heterodoxacademy.org and join the thousands of professors and students from all around the world who are working to support open inquiry. Until next time, I’m John Tomasi, reminding you that great minds don’t always think alike.

Share

On August 3rd, Education Secretary Linda McMahon issued a letter titled “A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards.” The letter has been called “Compact 2.0,” a reference to last year’s controversial Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which proposed conditioning access to federal student loan programs, research funding, approval of student visas, and preferential tax treatment upon universities agreeing to reforms.

The original compact was overwhelmingly rejected by universities, many of whom questioned the legality of its provisions, and ultimately dropped by the Department of Education. The new letter takes a softer approach. It contains no explicit funding conditions or enforcement mechanism. But universities will not be confused about what’s really going on: the government wants reform, and they’re willing to play nice for now, but if changes aren’t made voluntarily, their tactics are likely to change yet again until things do. Government actions are ultimately backed by its coercive power, and it’s the fear of that power that will motivate universities’ response. Yet even when a government’s methods are questionable, it doesn’t follow that the changes they are seeking are necessarily unreasonable.

In 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned about the relationship between government and universities — a warning since eclipsed by a three-word phrase it coined: “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower’s farewell address also described how the “free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery,” was becoming vulnerable to federal direction. With research increasingly conducted at Washington’s direction, “a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity.” The prospect of scholars being dominated by “Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money,” he said, “is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”

Eisenhower’s warnings have been realized. The dependence of universities on government research funding began during World War II, when universities became wartime partners in scientific research. By 2023, universities performed $108.8 billion in research and development, with almost $60 billion — 55% — supplied by the federal government. This reliance has led to an expectation among university leaders for continued funding, resulting in widespread complaints about the impact of cuts on academic freedom, and some even referring to cuts as an “erosion of democracy.”

In fact, the cuts to future research funding were an example of democracy in action. In 2024, U.S. adults’ confidence in higher education had reached a historic low. The Trump administration was brought into power on a platform that included bringing widely desired change to universities. And although universities may have become accustomed to receiving billions in federal funding, it doesn’t follow from this fact that they are therefore permanently entitled to it. The government has an obligation to spend taxpayer funds in line with the taxpayer’s will. A failure to fund research of any particular nature is not the same as banning such research, and confusing this for an attack on academic freedom is a conceptual error.

However, strictly on the issue of academic freedom, the initial Compact still overstepped, as it included government dictates over what ideas and values universities should teach. It required “transforming or abolishing institutional units” that “belittle” conservative ideas, introducing foreign students to “American and Western values,” providing them “instruction in American civics,” and screening out foreign students “who demonstrate hostility to the United States, its allies, or its values.” Had the initial compact actually been enforced, it almost certainly would have faced a strong First Amendment challenge. Additionally, the Compact dictated numerous terms to control other elements of university operations. Universities may not be entitled to government research funding, but neither is the government legally or ethically entitled to use its purchase of research as a cudgel to entirely control a private entity.

While reduced in its number of demands, this flaw remains in McMahon’s Compact 2.0, arguably masked by the lack of reference to consequences for disobedience, but present through the implicit threat of them. The letter still seeks to coerce universities against allowing “foreign actors” to provide gifts that influence “academic programming” and “researcher assignments.” McMahon’s letter insists that universities serve the “national interest” (whatever the administration takes that to mean), but the purpose of the university is not — and was not historically — subservience to a politically determined conception of the good. The federal government is not the universities’ only research client, and its attempt to monopolize the research and academic programming faculty are allowed to pursue does violate their academic freedom and the broader principle of open inquiry. And despite the federal government’s massive funding of research, at public universities students, who are paying to pursue knowledge, still remain the larger customer. This is, of course, even more true at private universities, where on average government funding in the form of appropriations, grants, and contracts (combining federal, state, and local sources) comprises only 10% of their revenue, and students and families generally pay a larger amount in tuition.

Nonetheless, while these flaws remain, the opposition to the entirety of the initial Compact from the AAUP and other progressives lacked nuance; their continued knee-jerk oppositional stance to McMahon’s toned-down letter deepens that mistake. The vast majority of the letter is focused on asking universities to do a better job following through on their stated purpose of pursuing truth and knowledge, a purpose they are widely perceived to have compromised in favor of a political agenda. Despite the letter coming from a conservative administration, there’s nothing inherently conservative about asking universities to follow through on their advertised mission to excel in truth-seeking and knowledge production.

The AAUP’s response to the letter criticizes its allegedly “racially coded” support for admissions based on “merit.” The accusation is precisely backward. Race-based affirmative action and other race-conscious DEI policies literally coded applicants based on their race. Meanwhile, merit-based, identity-neutral admissions and hiring put the most capable individuals to work in the pursuit of truth, with no regard to their race.

The AAUP’s response also objects to the letter’s purported “mischaracterization of peaceful protesters as ‘unruly and violent.’” But since there weren’t specific examples named in the letter, it’s not possible for any instances to have been mischaracterized. Conversely, we do have many documented instances of protesters “harass[ing] students or disrupt[ing] classes, research, public lectures, and campus operations” to deny that this is a real phenomenon, and one that harms the university’s mission of truth-seeking by making open inquiry impossible. The pursuit of knowledge requires the ability to ask questions and challenge popular assumptions without repercussions. These incidents, even if not representative of the average protest, have contributed to a culture of fear on some campuses that prevents this inquiry.

Most of McMahon’s other requests in the letter are equally vital to fulfilling the university’s purpose. The letter asks how institutions will “incentivize rigor,” “prioritize excellence in teaching and learning,” and “encourage intellectual pluralism.” Indeed, intellectual pluralism is vital to these other important goals. We can only establish what’s true through a process of challenging our perspectives, and students can only learn to reason by engaging with ideas contrary to their assumptions. Viewpoint diversity ensures the strongest objections to an idea are surfaced, and constructive disagreement with them enables us to discover where we might be mistaken.

We shouldn’t need a letter from McMahon for universities to take appropriate action on these issues. Unfortunately, the situation on campuses has so degraded that many Americans feel there is no other choice. But regardless of whether one thinks the ends justify the means in this case, it doesn’t change that the ends sought in McMahon’s letter are largely correct. Internal reform is essential to restoring universities, and letter or no letter, the right actions for university leaders to take remain the same.

Share

Attendees of Heterodox Academy’s Mountain West Regional Conference were treated to a debate on the following question: Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry? Legal scholar Jonathan Turley argued the affirmative, while Rutgers professor and president of the AAUP Todd Wolfson argued the negative.

While both speakers made thought-provoking arguments, neither was a clear winner on their arguments alone, in my view as an audience member. (According to the live audience poll during the event, Turley began and ended with more votes, but Wolfson changed more minds.) But even setting this aside, is an all-or-nothing focus on necessity distracting from the more practical questions that campuses wrestle with every day: namely, who would do best to stay neutral, and why?

First, some thoughts on the debate. Strikingly, the speakers agreed that universities issue too many statements on issues not relevant to their core missions. Wolfson’s public skepticism toward claims that typically motivate the need for institutional neutrality (such as the existence of political bias in academia), and his comfort with the AAUP’s overt partisanship, had instead led me to expect an ardent defense of institutional statements. (I was not alone in this reaction, as it turns out.)

But Turley and Wolfson were asked to settle whether neutrality is necessary, not just prudent.

Turley’s arguments, although familiar and agreeable to most in the heterodox world, did not directly address the necessity of institutional neutrality for open inquiry. Turley emphasized the hostile climate for conservatives and libertarians on many college campuses, and his examples of institutional statement-making, such as a UC Santa Cruz departmental statement about Gaza being a feminist issue, illustrated the one-sidedness and performativity of institutional statements. At most, he noted that institutional neutrality’s most vocal critics tend to be openly hostile toward non-progressive views, as if to imply that neutrality is an important protection against political exclusion. All of these pieces of information are logically compatible, but still the case for why open inquiry is impossible without institutional neutrality — rather than just more challenging — was never made.

Wolfson opened by describing a hypothetical university that was perfectly neutral but whose curriculum and research were dictated entirely by external political actors. Obviously, open inquiry could not take place in such an academically unfree environment. From this Wolfson appropriately concluded that institutional neutrality cannot be the decisive factor for open inquiry — because as his example clearly showed, it can’t counteract restrictions imposed on the university from outside. But this wasn’t the question on the table. Wolfson’s example showed that institutional neutrality may not be a sufficient condition for open inquiry, but plenty of conditions are not sufficient and yet remain necessary. Someone who gets plentiful sleep but is the victim of abuse from a partner would not be flourishing, yet nobody would conclude from this that sleep is unnecessary.

The rest of Wolfson’s argument turned on the claim that political statements need not hinder open inquiry, and thus that institutional neutrality cannot be necessary for open inquiry to take place. When seven universities publicly rejected Trump’s Compact for Academic Excellence, Wolfson argues these statements were political, not neutral, and yet they protected open inquiry rather than undermined it. This is true on its face, in the sense that a statement addressing the actions of a political administration can’t help but be political. But “neutrality” isn’t meant to be a property of institutional statements; it describes an institution’s decision to refrain from issuing them. The Kalven concept (and HxA’s own model) of institutional neutrality makes clear that universities can break this neutrality to protect their operations and mission, as Turley pointed out in the Q&A. The idea, in Turley’s words, is to provide a “bright line” to help institutions make consistent decisions about when they should express a position. But in a way this was Wolfson’s point: even proponents of neutrality don’t advocate for perfect neutrality, so shouldn’t we be talking about where to draw the line?

Although neither speaker convinced me on the all-or-nothing question of the necessity of institutional neutrality for open inquiry, I’m also not convinced that that’s the question we should be asking. The resolution packed a lot into a single statement: “Institutional neutrality is necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry.” I wonder whether we would be better off breaking the question into two parts and riffing off of each.

The first part is “Institutional neutrality is necessary.” To me, that question is incomplete without specifying whose neutrality we are talking about. Neutrality for top-level leadership seems wise. What about departments? As we recently reported, institutional neutrality policies vary in their guidance regarding departmental statement making: some strongly caution departments against weighing in, while others offer no guidance. I would argue that the more consequential a unit is to an individual’s professional trajectory, the more important it is not to introduce pressure on them in one way or another. Being a member of a department where your colleagues, who will soon review your tenure case, urge you to sign a statement denouncing the results of the latest political election, may be very different from seeing the same statement in a press release from the university president’s office. This seems to be a point of agreement even with critics of neutrality like legal scholar Brian Soucek, who notes in his recent book The Opinionated University that individually signed departmental statements may be the most coercive of all.

The second part, “to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry,” addresses why neutrality is valuable. While open inquiry is perhaps the most popular justification for neutrality, we can also ask whether neutrality might protect other goods as well. In addition to its internal cultural and epistemic challenges, higher education faces a crisis of trust among the public — and one that is increasingly being weaponized by political actors. Even if one questions the necessity of institutional neutrality for safeguarding open inquiry, it could be critical for recovering public trust in higher education, as Jeffrey Sachs has argued in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Given that politicization has been shown to undermine trust in institutions, there also seems to be solid empirical grounds for thinking that institutional neutrality would be a step in the right direction. Here, again, although institutional neutrality may be necessary to win back the public’s trust, it would likely be just a first step down a long road.

Although I’ve offered some critique of this debate and the arguments put forward, it bears emphasizing that even the occurrence of this debate is a success. That both speakers accepted the invitation to engage in good faith over this question (which has generated no shortage of heated discussion) was a powerful demonstration of constructive disagreement within the academy in action. In fact, unearthing so much common ground is possibly the debate’s most useful outcome. Both speakers rejected free-wheeling institutional speech, and both accepted that a university may speak to defend its own operations and independence, as several institutions did in refusing the Trump administration’s Compact. If both sides can agree on that, maybe the next debate can reveal even more common ground about who should be neutral and why.

Share

In open inquiry news this week, the Education Department swaps their big stick for a letter; AAUP president Todd Wolfson defends the union’s turn into political endorsements; a bipartisan group of senators make another attempt at banning legacy admissions; and Texas A&M gets sued over its restrictions on teaching race and gender in the classroom.

Check out the top news stories we’re watching this week at HxA.

The Education Department tries a more collegial approach in a new letter.

On August 3, Education Secretary Linda E. McMahon published a letter asking all colleges and universities “to describe to the American public your commitments to rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service” and post these plans “prominently” on institutional websites. The letter outlines seven topics she wants institutions to address, including increased transparency regarding how merit-based admissions decisions are made (which only impacts about half of US institutions, given that most institutions accept most applicants); plans to protect free expression, and specifically how to tamp down on “unruly and violent” disruptors on campus; plans to encourage intellectual pluralism; improving accessibility, cost, and loan repayment likelihood for enrolled students; how to address AI and ensure academic rigor; how to protect against foreign influence; and how institutions will serve the national interest.

On its face, these are all reasonable requests that every leader of a college or university should have an interest in addressing in some way. The reactions to this latest attempt at reform by the administration are varied. Late last year when the Compact attempted to beat institutions into change, many took more issue with the stick approach by the administration, and less with the substance of the requests. And in light of the hostile approach to reform since Trump returned to office in 2025, many are right to be skeptical. As Inside Higher Ed Editor-in-Chief Sara Custer puts it, there are more or less two ways to read this letter:

A charitable interpretation of the letter will see it as a genuine effort to close the divide between the American public and higher ed. A less generous view would say it’s more federal overreach that tramples on institutional independence. We’ll know by the end of the year if any institutions choose to participate, and what happens if they don’t.

The AAUP’s decision to back political candidates propped up by a 40 person Zoom poll.

In a stunning abandonment of their past principled defense of academic freedom, the AAUP started backing political candidates, in part of their transformation to “an organized, fighting union.” That decision was enough to draw criticism from principled reform groups like HxA, with HxA Board Chair Jeff Flier calling the move a “profound institutional mistake that will cost AAUP whatever credibility it retains as a principled defender of academic freedom.” But the key piece of data AAUP president Todd Wolfson used to support his decision makes the decision even more egregious.

As I shared last week after the news broke, Wolfson cited a big statistic to defend AAUP’s political turn: 80% of Michigan AAUP members supported the national arm endorsing a political candidate. It turns out that 80% was of only about 40 members (of approximately 4,000 state-wide) that were in attendance at a Zoom meeting. The criticism is coming from inside the house, with AAUP members surprised by Wolfson’s use of the poll as justification. Reporting from Inside Higher Ed describes the reactions of several members, including one noting that his “jaw dropped” when he read Wolfson’s statement about the poll. AAUP is obviously defending its position, with Wolfson calling critics “clowns” in a now-deleted X post:

You clowns are right. Being quiet and neutral has worked so well during 55 years of state and federal divestment and the recent attacks from [Florida governor Ron] DeSantis & Trump which led to debt and contingency. Go ahead and lay down & claim neutrality, we are gonna fight. See ya later Chamberlin.

Another attempt to ban legacy admissions reaches the Senate.

The Merit-Based Educational Reforms and Institutional Transparency Act, backed by Republicans Todd Young, Tim Scott and John Kennedy, as well as Democrats Tim Kaine, Raphael Warnock and Andy Kim, was reintroduced to the Senate, in the latest attempt to formally ban the practice of legacy admissions at selective universities. The legislation would tie accreditation to colleges having admissions policies that don’t give preferential treatment to applicants based on their relationships with alumni or donors. Roughly a quarter of four-year universities consider legacy status in their admissions practices. Some states, like California, already ban the practice and tie adherence to public funding, which some universities like Stanford have waived to continue the practice.

Legacy admissions are proving harder to purge than other preferences like race precisely because the practice is inherently tied to the university’s prestige, network, and donations in a way that other admissions criteria are not. As Raphael Montes explains in the Chronicle of Higher Education:

The core reason existing legacy bans are so hard to enforce is that they take aim at something central to the university. Legacy is the mechanism by which universities incorporate themselves into affluent families and create a self-perpetuating alumni network. That network gives elite institutions their pricing power over admission seats and a competitive advantage against younger or less august competitors. We have an antitrust problem without an antitrust solution. It’s one thing to break up a company, but it’s much harder to unwind a genealogy of accumulated prestige.

Texas A&M gets sued over its course bans.

Texas has been in the crosshairs of defenders of academic freedom for its unrelenting push to scrub leftist race and gender topics from classrooms (we’ve covered these issues with frequency over the last couple of years). Now, the AAUP is suing the Texas A&M university system for its banning of courses that “advocate race or gender ideology, or topics related to sexual orientation and gender identity.” The lawsuit alleges “insufficient guidance as to what may or may not be taught, assigned, or said in a classroom, and allows virtually unfettered enforcement discretion such that disfavored viewpoints can be censored.” Texas A&M spokespeople counter that the policies are simply a way to balance academic freedom with responsibility.

Share

Have campus news related to open inquiry that we should be aware of? Share it with us by sending a quick email to communications@heterodoxacademy.org

By Jeffrey S. Flier

On July 30, 2026, the American Association of University Professors did something it had never done in its 110-year history: endorse a candidate for federal elected office. AAUP President Todd Wolfson announced his organization would back Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate in Michigan’s U.S. Senate primary. And Wolfson made it clear that further endorsements will be coming, describing a shift from a defensive posture to an “offense” built on organizing and political advocacy.

The impulse behind this is understandable. Higher education is now under enormous threat — from political interference in curricula and hiring, lawsuits and executive actions targeting universities, and illegal threats to funding. The AAUP has filed litigation to defend faculty and institutions from some of these assaults, which is entirely appropriate. But their decision to engage in partisan electoral endorsements is a profound institutional mistake that will cost AAUP whatever credibility it retains as a principled defender of academic freedom.

Since its founding in 1915, AAUP’s core mission has been to protect the ability of faculty to teach, research, and speak without fear of institutional or political retaliation. That mission requires AAUP to defend academic freedom independent of a professor’s political leanings. A Marxist historian facing an antagonistic state legislature and an evolutionary biologist being attacked for taking a controversial stand on sex and gender both need AAUP’s protection. The organization’s legitimacy to intervene in these and other cases rests on it not being seen as one political faction committed to defending its own.

Endorsing a Democratic Senate primary candidate — whatever the merits of the candidate’s positions on higher education — severely undermines that claim. A professor who doesn’t share AAUP’s partisan choice will conclude that the organization does not represent them. This isn’t hypothetical reputational damage. It is a direct blow to AAUP’s ability to effectively pursue academic freedom advocacy in all of its forms. Many in the community will have a valid reason to view AAUP as an ideologically biased professional association and a partisan political advocacy group.

How and when did this transition occur? For most of its history, AAUP was a professional association defined by standards it articulated and defended. Its1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure is cited in faculty handbooks nationwide. It censured institutions that violated academic freedom and acted as a voice for the profession as a whole.

In the early 1970’s AAUP endorsed a strategy of becoming a union/bargaining unit for subsets of faculty at selected universities. In 2022, AAUP formally affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, bringing AAUP into the AFT’s 1.7-million-member structure and, through it, into the AFL-CIO. As a consequence, AAUP would function as an autonomous AFT affiliate. AAUP leadership sold this major development as a practical move — AAUP had domain expertise in higher education, AFT had resources and state-federation clout. After a century defining itself as the profession’s standard-setter, AAUP formally joined the labor movement. The AFL-CIO is not a neutral body; it is one of the most consistent institutional backers of Democratic candidates. With AAUP an AFL-CIO affiliate, endorsing a Democratic Senate primary candidate was less a deviation from precedent than its arrival at a destination to which its organizational logic was already pointing.

Another sign of evolving values and approach occurred in 2024, when the AAUP changed its longstanding policy against academic boycotts as a practice inimical to the free exchange of ideas, to one where boycotts “can be considered legitimate tactical responses”. Despite occurring at a time when boycotts of Israeli institutions were in the air, they made no reference to that as a reason for the changed policy, a disingenuous decision likely reflecting their engagement with activism not yet being ready for prime time. (In response, HxA released a statement criticizing the AAUP’s reversal, and affirming HxA’s stand against academic boycotts of all kinds.) Taken together, these decisions by the AAUP undermined their ability to claim faculty loyalty and public trust.

As AAUP now moves into partisan political advocacy, it’s important to ask how many faculty members it can claim to “represent”. Of the roughly 1.5 million faculty members at degree-granting postsecondary institutions in the United States, AAUP’s membership, counting both its advocacy chapters and its collective-bargaining locals, runs somewhere between 44,000 and 50,000. This includes tenure track, contingent faculty, and graduate student members. All told, that is around three percent of the American professoriate.

Voluntary associations don’t need majority support to be legitimate. But AAUP’s leadership sold its new endorsement policy by claiming that it’s simply democracy in action, since any member unhappy with the direction can run for office and change it. That framing treats AAUP’s internal governance as the relevant democratic criteria. But when AAUP speaks publicly — issuing a “first-ever national political endorsement” and positioning itself as the defender of higher education against political attack — it implies that it represents the profession, not three percent of it, assuming all of its members agree. To see it as representing university professors steals credibility from representation AAUP doesn’t have. In the future, reporters, legislators, and the public generally will perceive “the AAUP” as “a labor-affiliated advocacy group representing a small slice of unionized and voluntary-member faculty”, and will be correct in doing so.

Some defend the move by arguing that “neutrality” between defenders and attackers of academic freedom is a flawed and even harmful posture. When one political party is actively hostile to the sector, as is now the case, silence is abdication, not neutrality. Of course, an organization like AAUP should take positions on policies bearing directly on academic freedom — funding cuts, gag orders, loyalty oaths, curricular mandates. But endorsing particular candidates is a step too far.

AAUP observed this distinction for most of its history, including decades after engaging in collective bargaining at some schools. Taking clear positions for or against specific policies is different in kind from endorsing political candidates. A policy position can be defended on academic-freedom merits alone. In contrast, candidate endorsements ask members to accept candidates holding a slate of positions most of which have nothing to do with the university. Even candidates genuinely strong on higher-education issues will have unrelated commitments that many AAUP members will disagree about, since the membership is not uniformly of one political persuasion.

None of this means AAUP should go silent. Filing lawsuits against unconstitutional actions, issuing statements on actions threatening free inquiry, organizing faculty to resist incursions on academic freedom — these are all squarely within AAUP’s traditional mandate and are more urgent than ever given the assaults on the sector.

But there is a fundamental difference between a politically active labor union and a professional association whose authority reflects support for broadly accepted principles. By endorsing political candidates, AAUP has surrendered its identification as the professors’ organization; neither its explicit political identification nor its three-percent membership entitles it to that claim.

The AAUP is trading its hard-won credibility as a supporter of academic freedom for a louder but far shallower kind of political relevance — as one more union-backed political advocacy group in a crowded, polarized field. That transformation is a genuine loss, not just for AAUP’s tarnished brand, but for the community of educators, scholars and researchers whose core values it previously existed to protect.

A great university system needs organizations that professors across the political spectrum can turn to and trust as uncompromising advocates for academic freedom and the most fundamental values of the academy. With AAUP now having abandoned that role, we are fortunate to have membership groups including Heterodox Academy to carry the torch for open inquiry and academic freedom.

Share

Editor’s note: Jeff Flier is speaking in his individual capacity as HxA Board Chair and Harvard Professor; this is not an official statement of the HxA Board.

The high-brow world of academia can learn a great deal from professional wrestling. Although the two worlds are rarely equated, the parallels are more substantive than they first appear.

Professional wrestling is one of the great populist art forms: campy, visceral, and yet surprisingly sophisticated in how it navigates tensions between performance and authenticity. But, much like academia, it also is a world where unique individuals build careers through creativity, navigate rigid status hierarchies, and learn early that the performance is the point. Given these similarities, two key concepts from wrestling’s campy lexicon are also worth considering in the world of higher education: kayfabe and the shoot interview.

Understanding both of these concepts will help academics do their work more impactfully and with greater candor. Academics can benefit from acknowledging tensions between performance (which is central to kayfabe) and authenticity (which is the purpose of the shoot interview) in professional settings, as well as having safe outlets to communicate openly and honestly as part of their search for truth.

Carnival Culture

Kayfabe, now enshrined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary, refers to the convention of presenting staged performances as genuine. The term, pronounced kay-fayb, likely originated in carnival culture, where wrestlers and promoters guarded the scripted nature of their craft as a trade secret. For decades, wrestlers maintained kayfabe with near-religious devotion: Heroes and villains stayed in character in public, and exposing the business as something staged could end a career. Eventually, the secret trickled out.

Since 2000, use of the word kayfabe has skyrocketed in print, as wrestling in general, and wrestling vernacular in particular, has seeped into the broader cultural consciousness. Today, kayfabe is routinely invoked to describe the performances of politicians, executives, and other public figures whose public personas may not reflect their private beliefs.

Sociologists will recognize this territory. In his landmark 1959 book, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman argued that social life is fundamentally dramaturgical: We all perform on a “front stage,” carefully managing impressions, while reserving our unvarnished selves for the “backstage.” Goffman could have been describing professional wrestling. The squared circle is the ultimate front stage, a place of exaggerated heroes, dastardly villains, and melodramatic betrayals. The locker room is the backstage, where bitter public rivals share road stories and talk shop.

But Goffman’s binary of front and back is too clean. Professional wrestling is instructive precisely because it has developed an elaborate vocabulary for the gray areas between performance and reality, areas where the front stage and backstage bleed into each other in ways that Goffman’s framework did not anticipate.

In wrestling parlance, a “work” is anything done in service of kayfabe: scripted, strategic, performed. A “shoot” breaks kayfabe entirely; it is unscripted, candid, real. And then there is the paradoxical “worked shoot,” a performance designed to invoke the feel of authenticity, a controlled breaking of the fourth wall—the barrier separating performer and audience—that serves a greater narrative purpose.

When famed wrestler CM Punk sat cross-legged on the entrance ramp in 2011 and delivered his famous “pipe bomb” promo, airing real grievances about backstage politics while technically following a script, fans could not tell exactly where the performance ended and the truth began. That was the whole point. Modern wrestling lives in these gray areas. Today’s fans know that matches are predetermined and that rivalries are largely fictional, yet they remain captivated precisely because the boundaries between real and performed are perpetually blurred. Even kayfabe can betray glimmers of truth.

Anyone who has spent time in academia will find these dynamics painfully familiar. Consider the academic conference, that great arena of scholarly kayfabe. Attendees deliver polished performances, reenact status hierarchies, and strategically position themselves for advancement. Job candidates feign enthusiasm for positions they would never accept. Senior scholars fake magnanimity toward junior colleagues whose work they privately dismiss. Panel Q&As devolve into thinly disguised self-promotion performed as intellectual curiosity.

At a recent conference, an especially ambitious colleague of mine proudly posted selfies with high-status scholars whom I have repeatedly heard her disparage in private. In academia, the distance between kayfabe and authenticity can be vast.

To be fair, kayfabe is not entirely pernicious. For instance, scientific communication is, and often should be, a carefully constructed performance. We present findings with measured language, we situate our work within existing literature, we perform the rituals of peer review. These conventions exist for good reasons. However, we lose a great deal of understanding when we refuse to acknowledge, let alone interrogate, the unbridled truths lying beneath the performance.

Get Real

The cost of unchecked academic kayfabe can be severe. Consider the case of Zoé Ziani. While completing her Ph.D., Ziani was among the first researchers to detect statistical anomalies in the work of Francesca Gino, a celebrated Harvard Business School professor who was later found to have fabricated data across multiple studies. When Ziani included a detailed critique of Gino’s research in her dissertation, Ziani’s committee members balked. One compared academic discourse to “a conversation at a cocktail party,” advising Ziani to adopt a more deferential tone. Another called her analysis “inflammatory” and accused her of striking a “self-righteous posture.”

Under pressure, Ziani removed the critique. She later collaborated with the investigators at Data Colada, who ultimately exposed Gino’s fabrications, vindicating the very concerns Ziani’s mentors had suppressed. This is academic kayfabe at its worst: a culture where deference to status hierarchies and performative collegiality is enforced even when the data is screaming that something is wrong. Even worse, the privilege to communicate honestly in academia can be constrained for less powerful scholars, often at the behest of the interests of their more powerful counterparts.

This is why I believe academia needs its own version of the shoot interview. In wrestling, the shoot interview is a genre unto itself: a long-form, candid conversation in which a wrestler drops the character and speaks honestly about their career: the politics, the injuries, the grudges, the regrets, the creative battles, the moments of genuine joy. These interviews run the full emotional continuum from bitter to hilarious to deeply reflective. They are compelling precisely because they offer something the performance cannot: the truth, or at least something much closer to it.

Unlike in wrestling, academic shoot interviews need not be dramatic or inflammatory. They could take the form of intellectual biographies that go beyond the sanitized origin stories we tell at job interviews and conferences. Or they could focus on how scholars actually arrived at their ideas, what failures shaped their thinking, which professional norms they find stifling, and what they really believe about the state of their fields.

Imagine a senior scholar candidly discussing a published paper that he no longer believes, a department chair acknowledging the political dynamics that actually drive hiring decisions, or a journal editor admitting which review practices she considers performative theater. These would be extraordinary learning opportunities, both intellectually and professionally.

In academia, we get plenty of performances, whether in print or in person. We need to complement those performances with truths, both the ugly and the beautiful kind. Viewpoint diversity, after all, is only possible when people feel empowered to speak honestly.

Even in a world of predetermined outcomes, professional wrestlers put their bodies and careers on the line every single night. The risks are real, even when the storylines are contrived. Mick Foley, the wrestler, bestselling author, and unlikely philosopher, titled his second memoir Foley Is Good: And the Real World Is Faker Than Wrestling. He was onto something. The paradox of kayfabe is that the performance can be simultaneously fake and profoundly honest.

I am not arguing that scholars should be bashing each other constantly, nor that we must bare our souls at every opportunity. Sometimes there are good reasons to be taciturn, to play along, to maintain a polite fiction. And I will freely acknowledge the worked-shoot quality of this very essay, using the language of entertainment to make serious points about intellectual honesty.

But right now, the continuum in academia is badly skewed. We get far too much kayfabe and far too few shoots. We need more candor, more willingness to break character, and, crucially, the institutional courage to let people do so without reprisal. The squared circle and the ivory tower have more in common than either would care to admit. It is time for more academics to put their public personas aside, step through the ropes, and cut a shoot.

Share

Faculty largely on board with diverse viewpoints for research and teaching

First, if we may be so bold: HxA’s latest research report, Faculty Attitudes Toward Diversity in Their Discipline: A National Survey, is out! We surveyed over 3,500 faculty at 80 institutions to understand the extent to which they think eight specific dimensions of diversity (including racial, religious, political, methodological, and more) either improve or undermine the quality of teaching and research in their discipline.

We found that overall, each of the eight sources of diversity on the survey won majority support from faculty. Even the least popular form of diversity, religious diversity, was believed by 53% of faculty to improve teaching and research within their discipline. Political diversity was viewed positively by 57% of faculty — and interestingly, liberal faculty were more likely than conservative faculty to report warm views toward political diversity.

Faculty also tend to underestimate their peers’ support for diversity of viewpoints in teaching and research, pointing to an important perception gap between how faculty actually feel about viewpoint diversity and how they think their peers feel. Read the full report to learn more about how faculty perceive the value of diversity in their disciplines.

Two cheers for regional public universities

Higher ed news often seems to be dominated by the goings-on of elite institutions, from library takeovers at Columbia to government settlements at Cornell to painful congressional testimonies at Harvard, MIT, and UPenn. While elite institutions wield strong influence over the culture and norms of higher education, they aren’t actually responsible for educating the majority of U.S. undergraduates — that job is proudly performed by regional public universities (RPUs). Since about 70% of U.S. undergraduates attend RPUs, the experiences and perspectives of RPU students have important implications for viewpoint diversity among the broader U.S. college student population. A recent survey from the think-tank Third Way of 500 RPU students paints a portrait of a student body that is less concerned with occupying libraries and more concerned with juggling their studies with other important life commitments, such as work and child-rearing.

The RPU students surveyed come from a range of backgrounds, with almost four out of 10 RPU students being first-generation college students, and over half of RPU students described as “non-white.” RPU students keep busy, by choice or otherwise: a little over 70% work at least part-time, 17% take care of children, and 16% take care of parents or other loved ones. And about 77% of students surveyed worry that a financial emergency will interrupt their education.

Forty-five percent of respondents identified as Democrat, 30% as Independent, and 19% as Republican — which is politically dissimilar from the general American population, with fewer Republicans than the broader population (but considerably more politically diverse than the faculty of many universities). About two-thirds reported having at least one friend with a political opinion different from their own, suggesting that cross-partisan friendships are not uncommon. Three-fourths said they had never attended a political protest on their campus.

In short, most undergraduate students are not cavorting around in the most exclusive of ivory towers. Most undergraduates are attending a regional public university, probably near where they grew up, probably while working, and maybe even while taking care of family. The attention given to highly selective institutions probably makes the state of viewpoint diversity among undergraduates seem worse than it is — the reality, thanks to RPU students, is likely more encouraging.

Majority of law faculty feel that they can’t express their opinions on campus

A new survey of U.S. law faculty by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) indicates an alarming climate for inquiry. First, 56% of law faculty report feeling at least occasionally that they can’t express their opinion for fear of repercussions from students, colleagues, or administrators, including 50% of liberal faculty and 72% of conservative faculty. Faculty detect threats from both inside and outside the university, with several reporting that they fear for their jobs should student complaints reach politicians.

Faculty also sense a hostile atmosphere toward conservatives that they themselves don’t endorse with any consensus: for instance, while 56% of faculty thought their colleagues would discriminate against a conservative job applicant, only 22% reported that they were personally willing to discriminate against a conservative (compared with 15% willing to discriminate against a liberal). This mirrors a pattern we found in our own survey on faculty attitudes toward different kinds of diversity: faculty feel more positively about diversity than they believe others in their field do, including dimensions of diversity typically stereotyped as conservative-coded, such as political and religious diversity.

Finally, FIRE’s respondents held nuanced views about DEI: 61% simultaneously value equality/inclusion and free expression, and don’t see them as being in conflict. Over 50% of respondents thought that DEI statements are never or rarely justifiable in hiring or promotion and tenure, and 54% preferred the Supreme Court’s narrower definition of discriminatory harassment to the broader Obama-era standard set by the 2011 “Dear Colleague” letter.

All in all, the data show that law faculty are on the alert for threats to inquiry from all directions (even within their own ranks), while they themselves largely reject censorship and political bias.

New framework proposed to understand political bias in AI chatbots

A new paper by HxA researcher David Rozado and Penn professor Phil Tetlock examines political bias in large language models (LLM). But what does it really mean to say that AI applications are politically “biased”? Rozado and Tetlock offer the Viewpoint Preferences-Epistemic Integrity framework, which conceptualizes political bias along two dimensions. First, the authors suggest that AI systems can systematically lean left or right in terms of their preferences (what they refer to as “viewpoint preferences”). In other words, LLMs can communicate ideas that are more in line with liberal or conservative ideologies, like being pro-choice or pro-free trade. In response to this, some vocal users might cry foul and argue for AI to be politically neutral.

But the authors caution that we shouldn’t assume that neutrality of political viewpoints is ideal with regard to truth, arguing that a “model that is neutral between flat-Earth and round-Earth claims is not more objective; it is epistemically deficient.” They argue instead that LLMs should be designed to maximize accuracy, not neutrality. It may be the case that a liberal viewpoint has more supporting evidence than a conservative one, or vice versa. Being able to weigh evidence and come to the correct conclusion without being inappropriately motivated by political ideology is another, arguably more important way to think about bias. The authors refer to this as “epistemic integrity,” in contrast to viewpoint preferences.

As the authors state, “An AI system may arrive at a left-leaning, centrist, or right-leaning conclusion through an epistemically rigorous process if the conclusion is supported by empirical evidence or rational priors” (our emphasis added). Epistemic integrity relates to how well an AI system upholds the standards of open inquiry when dealing with politically divisive content. This includes whether it weighs evidence evenhandedly, whether it accurately represents competing perspectives, and whether it reasons toward accurate rather than predetermined conclusions. In the authors’ framework, political bias is mainly a problem when epistemic reasoning is compromised, which would happen if LLMs weigh evidence differently depending on whether it supports a liberal or conservative value, or if it fails to accurately summarize information because that information conflicts with such values.

While reading this article, we were struck by how the authors’ framework for evaluating political bias in LLMs could just as easily apply to understanding human biases. HxA, like Rozado and Tetlock, does not argue for political symmetry. Instead, what we argue for is good epistemic processes (i.e., not letting our biases overwhelm our ability to reason carefully about evidence). Sometimes the evidence does support a liberal or a conservative conclusion, and that’s okay for both humans and our robot counterparts!

Federal science funding’s three-body problem

Last month we featured HxA member Ashley Rubin’s paper on where “legitimate” politicization of research ends and where “illegitimate” politicization begins. A new preprint by USC chemist and HxA member Anna Krylov and colleagues (including additional HxA members) asks the same question of federal research funding, and of the university-government compact that has sustained American economic and scientific leadership since World War II. That compact, the authors warn, may be incurring lasting damage from cycles of politicization and counter-politicization.

This tug-of-war over purse strings produces what they call a “whiplash” effect. One administration embeds DEI requirements or other ideological criteria in grant mechanisms; the next reverses them through abrupt cancellations and keyword-based screens. Each phase is justified as a correction of the last and so on, destabilizing vast swathes of the research community. How dizzying!

The toll shows up in how researchers adapt to the uncertainty of delays, freezes, and stop-work orders. Avoiding flagged or contentious topics rather than pursuing ideas wherever they lead. Pursuing technically safe but scientifically marginal questions, what the authors call “inner exile.” Indeed, one of the paper’s coauthors changed 86 instances of the word “gender” in an application on biological sex differences in smoking addiction “in the hope of foiling the language police.” The paper also describes a nearly completed brain science and addiction study that stalled when a routine “no-cost extension” sat unapproved for months. By consequence, results that don’t reach the wider scholarly community (this study and many others like it) break faith with the human volunteers who accepted real risk to make the work possible.

That’s not to suggest new administrations should not have the prerogative to pursue some corrective action, the authors point out. But how that’s done matters. What risks being lost in today’s politicization-counterpoliticization moment is the postwar settlement that made the American scientific enterprise the world’s most productive: government sets budgets and broad priorities, while merit-based review, in a culture of transparency and open inquiry, decides which ideas get funded. Rather than just lament, the authors offer tests for spotting illegitimate politicization, whichever direction it comes from. Are funds closed to qualified investigators for ideological reasons? Is research language limited and monitored? Do political appointees, rather than scientists, pick winning proposals? As sweeping revisions from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget — requiring grant priorities to align with administration policies and directing senior political appointees to conduct further pre-issuance reviews — are scheduled to take effect on October 1, 2026, these questions are all the more timely.

Share

That’s all for this month, folks! Got any hot tips about juicy research cresting the horizon? Drop us a line at research@heterodoxacademy.org with the details!

The chancellors of Vanderbilt and WashU recently charged a national committee of disciplinary experts to assess the state of scholarship in the humanities. The committee’s Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and Humanistic Social Sciences found that humanistic disciplines have become increasingly politicized, with some whole fields substituting political criteria for scholarly ones.

The Report, and the follow-up disciplinary reports now being issued, raise uncomfortable questions for professors and for university leaders alike. Are there limits to professors’ freedom to conduct research and teach courses however they think best? Do university leaders dare intervene if scholarship becomes excessively politicized?

Some professors see the Report as a new line of attack on academic freedom. At Vanderbilt and WashU, the leaders of the faculty chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) write that the Report: “proposes a shocking intrusion of university administration into faculty governance and portends greater threats to academic freedom that should concern all faculty.”

However, academic freedom does not prevent university leaders from reforming wayward scholarship. Indeed, if professors abandon scholarly norms to pursue purely political projects, university leaders may have a duty to intervene.

Perhaps surprisingly, this duty of intervention is set out in the 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure — the classic defense of academic freedom, written by the founders of the AAUP.

The post-Civil War era saw an explosion of new colleges across America — many founded by patrons with narrow purposes or idiosyncratic goals. Governance questions loomed. Should a donor with theological commitments determine how biology is taught at his university? Should Jane Stanford dictate teaching at Stanford?

The AAUP’s founders said no — at least not at truth-seeking universities. Such universities, they argued, are a public trust. Not “public” in a democratic, head-count sense. But public in a sense that transcends the sectarian interests of any founder or donor. The primary purpose of the university is to advance human understanding, to teach, and to prepare citizens to live freely.

If a university’s function is truth-seeking, the experts doing the seeking — sociologists, cell biologists, Egyptologists — must be free to follow their studies wherever they lead. Professors have academic freedom. So university leaders operate under a strong principle of deference to the expert judgement of professors.

This part every professor knows. What gets overlooked is that the AAUP also set limits to academic freedom.

According to the 1915 Declaration, academic freedom is not a freestanding entitlement. It is a privilege grounded in specific professional responsibilities.

Thus, freedom of research only protects conclusions “gained by a scholar’s method and held in a scholar’s spirit.” In the classroom, the professors should “set forth justly, without suppression or innuendo, the divergent opinions of other investigators.” Students should encounter “the best published expressions of the great historical types of doctrine.” The professor’s business, in short, is to present students with a variety of views, so that they might think for themselves.

Scholars who retreat into an ideological monoculture — conducting research merely to serve political interests, assigning students one-sided readings, hiring only like-minded colleagues — abandon the duties that give academic freedom its life.

This is where university leaders come back in.

The 1915 Declaration does not simply raise the flag of academic freedom and tell university leaders to stand down. Instead, it pours the foundation for a system of shared governance. The university is a public trust. A share of responsibility for that trust is given to professors, in the form of academic freedom. But ultimate responsibility runs through the trustees to the people who oversee and govern academic life on a day-to-day basis: presidents, provosts, and deans.

Thus, the 1915 Report aims “to protect college executives and governing boards against unjust charges of infringement on academic freedom.” Ultimately, this involves university leaders in judging whether professors are fulfilling their academic duties. If not, university leaders may intervene without violating academic freedom.

This is not a license for university leaders to dictate research agendas or rewrite syllabi by fiat. Judgement requires discernment, dialogue, and, likely, push-back against external pressures. Judgement of this kind would also likely require expert advice from multiple sources — including sources such as the Vanderbilt-WashU Report.

From there, the range of action available to university leaders runs from gentle incentives — new prizes for open-minded teaching, special funding for neglected topics — to the creation of new centers and new hiring initiatives, to stronger interventions when existing units systematically violate their academic duties.

The professors who drafted the 1915 Declaration understood something that gets lost today: academic freedom is a privilege that only exists within a wider system of roles and responsibilities. Those responsibilities spring from the university’s public purpose: to seek knowledge.

So the real question facing professors in the wake of the Report is not whether they can go on teaching and conducting research however they like. The question is whether they are willing to remember their scholarly responsibilities and take steps to fulfill them.

So too, the question raised by the Report for university leaders is not whether they dare infringe on academic freedom. The question is whether university leaders will remember the public purpose of academic freedom, and do their part to preserve it.

Share

In open inquiry news this week, the AAUP makes its shift to a political organization explicit by endorsing a political candidate for the first time in its history; Vanderbilt releases a declaration on the purpose of the university and its “first principles”; Johns Hopkins is starting a new effort to bring viewpoint diversity to its faculty; and factions form among Florida’s conservative higher education reform movement.

Check out the top news stories we’re watching this week at HxA.

The AAUP is now endorsing political candidates.

For the first time in its century-long history, the American Association of University Professors endorsed a political candidate, Democratic Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed. In defending his decision, AAUP president Todd Wolfson cited AAUP Michigan member polls that found about 80% of respondents favored making an endorsement and about 97% specifically favored El-Sayed.

Ryan Quinn wrote for Inside Higher Ed that “The move continues the AAUP’s evolution from its beginnings as a professional association that wrote seminal definitions of academic freedom and tenure to also becoming a left-leaning faculty union.” The AAUP national decision to endorse political candidates comes after the AAUP started making political statements when Todd Wolfson assumed the presidency.

Jonathan Turley, who debated Wolfson at an HxA event at the University of Wyoming in June, told Inside Higher Ed that the AAUP “has become the loudest part of an academic echo chamber. It only contributes to an environment of orthodoxy and intolerance. As trust in higher education continues to plunge, the AAUP is only accelerating that decline.”

Any semblance of political neutrality at the AAUP is officially gone.

Vanderbilt releases a new declaration on the purpose of the university.

In its continuing efforts to steer the sector in principled leadership, Vanderbilt University released The University and Its Purpose: A Declaration of First Principles, which was adopted by the Vanderbilt University Board of Trust in June 2026. It reads:

The declaration, part of an effort to improve scholarly standards and restore public trust, outlines three purposes for the university

• Pathbreaking research. Universities exist to create, preserve and disseminate knowledge.

• Transformative education. A university education is meant to teach students how to think rather than what to think.

• The covenant between universities and society. Universities depend on public, private and philanthropic support offered in exchange for education and research that serve the public good.

The report focuses heavily on the need to cultivate a university in which inquiry remains free and open, echoing HxA’s own “Open Inquiry U” reform agenda. The Vanderbilt declaration closes with a visionary role of the university in society:

By affirming these commitments, America’s universities can renew public trust and reassert the essential role that higher education institutions play in cultivating a free and self-governing society. These commitments must be lived in practice: Each university has a responsibility to demonstrate how it is upholding and modeling the principles it professes. Such commitments demand courage and clarity of purpose: the willingness to uphold rigorous academic standards and defend free inquiry, especially when it is difficult. In doing so, American universities not only safeguard their own integrity — they use their wisdom, innovation, and principled steadiness to help secure the future of the nation.

Johns Hopkins to open a new school aimed at hiring faculty with diverse ideological views.

In its commitment to broadening viewpoint diversity at Johns Hopkins, a new School of Government and Policy plans to open in 2027 or 2028 in Washington, D.C. Reporting in RealClearInvestigations describes the plans for such a school as an “experiment.”

It’s an experiment based on an untested theory: The hiring of conservative and heterodox thinkers will change the university culture, forcing scholars out of ideological ruts, spurring uncensored intellectual debates on campus and toppling orthodoxies along the way. But a big obstacle to the spread of pluralism is faculty opposition, highlighting the challenge of returning the university to its tradition of open-ended inquiry.

In efforts to broaden viewpoint diversity on campus, many universities are choosing to “build” rather than ban, intentionally creating spaces on campus for more ideological viewpoints to have a home. Many of these efforts have taken the form of “civics centers,” which HxA has been closely tracking, but other forms are also taking shape. Such centers are not without critics, however. Siloing viewpoint diversity into certain centers on campus can create monocultures within the institution, for example. But their impacts need to be evaluated through data over time.

DeSantis administration clashes with Chris Rufo over the University of Florida president pick.

Florida has been a testing ground for Republican-led higher ed reform since Governor Ron DeSantis introduced the controversial Stop WOKE act back in 2022. But the challenge of appointing a new president of the University of Florida is revealing tensions among political reform advocates, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Chris Rufo, a previous trustee of New College appointed by DeSantis, has been vocally opposed to the two most recent candidates to lead UF due to a history of DEI policies at their prior institutions. Santa Ono, previously of the University of Michigan, ultimately wasn’t approved for the position. Now, Stuart Bell, the University of Alabama’s former president, seems slated to assume leadership of UF with “full support” from DeSantis. The Chronicle refers to the fissure as “a startling rupture in one of the Republican Party’s most fruitful and symbiotic political partnerships,” continuing:

Even as that conservative higher-ed coalition has scored striking victories in Florida and Washington, DeSantis’s behind-the-scenes advocacy for Bell — and the bad blood it unleashed — shows that the reform crowd still has a lot to fight about as the movement heads into its next chapter.

Share

Have campus news related to open inquiry that we should be aware of? Share it with us by sending a quick email to communications@heterodoxacademy.org

The bottom line: Overall, every one of the aforementioned dimensions of diversity was viewed by a majority of faculty in our survey as improving teaching and research. Even the least popular form of diversity, that of religious views, was viewed positively by just over half of respondents.

And the most popular form of diversity is not one that shows up on a census form or on a voter registration application. Methodological diversity was, by far, the most popular form of diversity, with over 8 in 10 faculty in our survey agreeing that methodological diversity improves the quality of teaching and research.

Not all of the eight dimensions of diversity were equally popular with everyone, but the findings didn’t break down the way many might expect. For example, contrary to the suggestion that political diversity among faculty is a conservative cause, we found that liberal faculty were actually more likely to report that political diversity improves the quality of teaching and research. This was the case within all disciplines except STEM.

Another striking finding is that faculty collectively underestimate how much their colleagues also value diversity, especially religious and political diversity in the social sciences and arts/humanities. Though faculty members in these disciplines on average saw these forms of diversity as beneficial for their fields, they wrongly estimated their colleagues’ views as lukewarm at best. This indicates an important perception gap: if faculty generally underestimate how much their peers value viewpoint diversity, they may be less likely to advocate for it on their own campuses, which feeds into the cycle of academic self-silencing and groupthink.

Here’s what HxA really wants university leaders and faculty to take away from this survey: Most likely, faculty on your campus already think that teaching and research are made better by exposure to a broad range of viewpoints. Broadly speaking, your faculty don’t need to be convinced; they need to be mobilized.

Each institution may encounter different challenges in cultivating viewpoint diversity, with some faculty perhaps feeling more reticent than others. Here, drawing the clear connection between viewpoint diversity and the purpose of the university is key. Universities exist to pursue truth and knowledge. The conditions for this mission are made fertile by a robust array of viewpoints that don’t just complement each other, but compete to drive truth forward.

There is a growing pool of experience to draw from, as many universities have already undertaken measures to broaden the range of perspectives on campus. Tufts University’s Center for Expanding Viewpoints promises to help the Tufts community “break out of ideological bubbles to drive research and teaching forward.” Harvard University is undertaking efforts to promote viewpoint diversity on campus through hiring for professorships dedicated to “viewpoint diversity.” At Duke University, the Provost’s Initiative on Pluralism, Free Inquiry, and Belonging brings together scholars and students of all viewpoints for constructive disagreement and civic engagement, while the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Wisconsin Exchange: Pluralism in Practice initiative pledges to foster “the robust exchange of ideas” throughout campus life.

These different initiatives illustrate that there’s not a single, one-size-fits-all approach to viewpoint diversity. Institutions need to do what works for them — but whatever “it” is, it needs to be backed up by a genuine commitment from university leaders and support from faculty.

University leaders and faculty can draw from these initiatives to build cultures of open inquiry on their campuses through a number of means, such as: investing in under-explored areas of scholarship; incentivizing syllabus diversification so that students are engaging with good-faith versions of contested positions; supporting faculty in adversarial research collaborations; building infrastructure to enable co-teaching across ideological differences to give both their students and themselves a deeper academic experience; protecting the expression of students and faculty; transforming classrooms into spaces for intellectual risk-taking; and more. There is a wellspring of possibility here to cultivate broad viewpoint diversity within our institutions — and the majority of faculty are likely ready to get to work.

As HxA President John Tomasi often says, academics are a “community of imperfect learners.” No one has all of the answers. At HxA, we’ve been having a lot of internal discussions about how best to embrace the “messiness” of teaching and scholarship. After all, knowledge production is not a particularly tidy endeavor. It requires intellectual elbow grease, epistemic tussles, a few bruises to the ego every now and then — and it’s so worth it.

If this “messiness” resonates with you, join HxA if you haven’t already. And free up space on your calendar to get your hands dirty with faculty and university leaders at the 2027 Annual HxA Conference in Boston, April 12–14, 2027, to discuss how to Renew. Reform. Rebuild. See you there!

Share

By John Mac Ghlionn

Lee C. Bollinger has spent his career inside the American university, not as a casual observer, but as one of its stewards and defenders. He led the University of Michigan through one of the most consequential affirmative action battles in modern legal history, then took the helm at Columbia University for nearly two decades—long enough to test whether his beliefs were genuine or merely convenient. Bollinger’s, it turns out, are the real deal.

He taught constitutional law. He thought seriously, and for a very long time, about how a free society protects the free exchange of ideas. And he came through it, not bitter, but battle-tested.

His new book, University: A Reckoning, arrives at a difficult moment. American universities are both praised as engines of discovery and condemned as temples of self-satisfied detachment. They are celebrated for producing Nobel laureates and blamed for producing graduates who can’t hold a civil conversation with someone who sees the world differently. They carry enormous prestige and, increasingly, enormous suspicion.

Public trust has eroded on both sides of the political divide, though for very different reasons. On the right, universities are seen as ideological monasteries—places where adherence to one set of views is enforced through social pressure dressed up as intellectual consensus. On the left, they are blamed for serving wealth and privilege rather than challenging it. Both critiques contain enough truth to sting. Into this atmosphere of palpable frustration, Bollinger steps forward, not to apologize or deflect, but to defend.

The question worth asking from the very first page is how honestly he manages it in this book. The answer, reached gradually, is this: honestly enough to make the book worth reading, but not honestly enough to fully satisfy the reader.

His central argument is sturdy and stated without hesitation: The American research university remains one of the country’s most important institutions. It preserves knowledge, expands it, and passes it forward. It trains the people a society quietly depends on and usually takes for granted—the doctors, lawyers, engineers, and scientists, without whom everything falls apart. In Bollinger’s telling, the university isn’t a sanctuary for those who’d rather not engage with the wider public. It is, at its best, one of the few institutions standing between a functioning society and its worst instincts.

He makes this case with skill, and he makes it in plain English. There is no jargon, none of the deliberate obscurity that so often passes for depth in academic writing. Bollinger writes the way a good lawyer argues: clearly, purposefully, and with an eye on what actually matters.

One of the book’s real strengths is its portrait of what academic work actually looks like. The popular image of the tenured professor—insulated, unhurried, writing impenetrable papers for an audience of 12—gets a serious and welcome correction. Bollinger describes what the work genuinely demands: It means mastering a field that never stops changing, producing research that actually advances rather than rehashes what is already known, teaching students at every level of preparation, surviving a review process that can be rigorous and petty, and doing all of it while the world asks with growing impatience what any of it is worth. It is demanding, often unglamorous work. Bollinger gives it the respect it deserves.

More than the workload, though, he’s interested in describing what he calls the scholarly temperament—the particular cast of mind that separates genuine inquiry from performance. Real scholars must sit with opposing views, not as a courtesy but as a genuine commitment to the truth. They must hold conclusions loosely. They must begin with a question rather than an answer and follow the evidence wherever it leads, including straight back to that question.

“You must entertain—really entertain—the possibility that you are wrong,” Bollinger writes. “And, finally, you must be willing to change your mind if the evidence calls for it.” It is an old-fashioned idea, which is another way of saying it is an idea that used to be obvious. It is also exactly right. This is what the university, at its best, is supposed to produce—not true believers with diplomas, but people who have learned to think honestly under pressure.

His discussion of tenure is one of the book’s most compelling sections. To outsiders, tenure looks like a golden shield against accountability, a permanent exemption from consequence. But Bollinger reframes it as something more demanding than a job guarantee. Tenure is a kind of contract: Security in exchange for independence, intellectual rigor, and a life devoted to the work itself. “You, the university, will give me tenure for life,” he writes, “and I will give you my life for tenure.”

This line lands with the weight of a vow. Part contract, part calling—a pledge to trade private comfort and higher earnings for a life of teaching, research, and service to something larger than yourself. There’s something faintly ecclesiastical about it, and Bollinger knows it. The sincerity, though, is unmistakable. And the logic holds. A scholar who fears losing his job cannot follow an argument where it leads. Tenure, he insists, is not a sinecure but a safeguard, and the difference matters enormously.

From there, Bollinger turns to the university as a community, and here the book finds its warmest voice. The university is not a place of rules and hierarchy, but a culture built on conversation. Knowledge advances through argument, challenge, and revision. Journals, departments, conferences, and the informal networks that link researchers across institutions keep a steady, self-correcting exchange alive. Ideas are proposed, tested, refined, and eventually either proven or discarded. The process is slow. It can be maddening. It is also, Bollinger argues, irreplaceable. Much of this will feel familiar to anyone who has spent time in academia. But the reminder is well-placed. Obvious truths still need defending, especially when the institutions that carry them are under pressure to justify themselves in faster and simpler terms.

The book’s most ambitious claim connects the modern university to the history of American free speech. Bollinger, a First Amendment scholar of genuine standing, traces how both developed in tandem across the past century, each strengthening the other. A society committed to open debate needs institutions that model what open debate looks like—that build, through daily practice, the habits of mind that democracy ultimately depends on.

The university, in this account, isn’t merely a place where people study things; it is a civic institution. It sustains the culture of disagreement, the tolerance for unsettling ideas, and the willingness to be persuaded—without which self-government is just a ceremonial exercise. It is a large claim, and Bollinger, to his credit, makes it land.

His point about the difference between a university and a political party is equally sharp and equally necessary. Universities investigate contested questions—race, law, inequality, power—but their purpose is to examine, not to campaign. They study. They do not recruit. At a moment when a remarkable number of universities appear to have lost sight of that distinction, this reminder also lands.

And yet—and here the book’s limits come into view—Bollinger is more accurate about what universities should be than about what many of them have become. His tone, for long stretches, edges toward reverence. Parts of the book feel written for 1996 rather than 2026, when universities still had the luxury of assuming everyone basically wished them well. He acknowledges problems—conformity, internal friction, scholarship that falls short of the ideals he describes—but treats them as isolated failures rather than signs of something deeper. The cracks are mentioned, but the shaky foundations beneath them are left largely unexamined.

This is most obvious in how he handles political pressure. Bollinger focuses heavily on external threats, including government interference, legislative overreach, and the use of federal funding as a weapon against academic independence. His concern is real, and his argument on this ground is strong. He has been openly critical of the Trump administration and makes no effort to hide it. Governments that punish universities for reaching inconvenient conclusions are governments at war with honest inquiry, and Bollinger says so directly. Fair enough.

But when it comes to examining the university’s own role in its troubles, the book discovers a previously unannounced commitment to brevity. The high cost of holding an unfashionable view, the social dynamics that shape what gets studied and what gets left alone, the informal rules about which conclusions are welcome and which are not—these forces are at least as powerful as any government threat, and they receive far less scrutiny here.

A book genuinely committed to the values it describes would press on both sides with equal force. It would ask not only who threatens the university from outside, but what the university has done to earn some of the distrust directed at it. Bollinger is bracing on one front and oddly diplomatic on the other. The scholarly disposition, it turns out, has its limits.

Another issue I have with the book is that the economic picture is acknowledged the way one acknowledges an uncomfortable relative at a family gathering: briefly, warmly, and without further inquiry. Public confidence in higher education has dropped sharply, and not without reason. A generation has been loaded with debt that reshapes their lives for decades. The labor market increasingly rewards practical skill alongside—and sometimes instead of—the traditional degree. A diploma no longer carries the job guarantees it once did. And a growing number of people are asking, with understandable concern, whether a university degree is still worth the price. The answer, it seems, is no.

Bollinger is too intelligent and too experienced to be unaware of any of this. Yet he addresses the financial crisis facing universities with considerably less urgency than he brings to their intellectual defense. The book reads, in places, like a man delivering an eloquent lecture on the architectural significance of a building while the curtains catch fire behind him.

Technology gets a similar pass. Bollinger notes that digital tools have disrupted universities the way the internet disrupted newspapers, and that artificial intelligence is already changing how students learn and how researchers work. The observations are accurate. But they feel cautionary rather than curious.

Online learning has already weakened the university’s hold on how education happens. Writing tools, research tools, and tutoring tools are changing what happens inside the classroom and what a degree is actually measuring. Bollinger opens the door on these questions and stops at the threshold. Which is, it must be said, a peculiar stance for a book about the importance of the pursuit of knowledge.

None of this makes the book a failure. Instead it makes it the best possible version of a book that was never going to tell the whole story. Bollinger writes with skill, with seriousness, and with an affection for universities that never tips into nostalgia. His defense is not the defense of a flawless institution, but of an essential one whose failures are real and whose value is greater still. He is right that a culture of genuine inquiry, protected by institutions willing to defend it even when it is uncomfortable, is something a free society can ill afford to lose.

But what the book needed, and only partially delivers, is the same candor it so eloquently champions. The disposition Bollinger argues for demands engaging the strongest argument against you—sitting seriously with the possibility that the institution you have devoted your life to has failed, in important and not entirely external ways, to live up to its own ideals. That reckoning is still, in large measure, ahead of us. And it will require exactly the kind of courage Bollinger describes so well but applies so selectively.

America is still home to some of the finest universities in the world. They have shaped the nation’s science, law, medicine, and public life in ways many take for granted, precisely because the achievement has been so thorough and consistent. They deserve a defense—clear-eyed, honest, and unsparing about their failures as well as their successes. Bollinger offers most of that. The rest he leaves, perhaps deliberately, for the reader to supply.

University: A Reckoning is an imperfect book. Read it anyway. The gaps it leaves are, in their own way, as instructive as the arguments it makes.

Share

The more interesting finding, though, is who drove this year’s decline. Confidence among Democrats fell from 61% to 50%, an 11-point drop that is both the largest single-year decline Gallup has recorded for Democrats since tracking began in 2015 and a new record low for the group. Republicans and independents barely moved by comparison, down 3 points (26% to 23%) and 2 points (41% to 39%), respectively. Democrats, however, remain the most confident group of the three overall.

Gallup did not look into respondents’ reasons as thoroughly this year as it did last, this year, as in prior years, Americans pointed to political agendas on campus (31%) as the top reason they lack confidence in higher education, even more than cost (30%) and inadequate preparation for the workforce (25%).

Given the lack of Democrat-specific data, the cause of their record-breaking decline is open to interpretation. Mine is that last year’s confidence rebound arrived just after Trump returned to office and began funding cuts, lawsuits, and executive actions that have defined his second-term approach to higher education; a good deal of that uptick in Democratic confidence looks, in retrospect, like a rally behind institutions under fire more than a sustained reassessment of the sector. A year later, with the standoff between Washington and university leadership still unresolved, that solidarity appears to be waning: any concession, any negotiated settlement, and any acknowledgment by a university that something needed fixing, may appear to some Democrats as capitulation.

Part of that waning is downstream of a deeper disconnect between what the public sees and what the (left-wing) faculty at large thinks, caused in part because faculty are unrepresentative of the American public. Especially when it comes to politics, left-leaning faculty vastly outnumber right-leaning faculty. When you have this kind of ideological homogeneity among the country’s knowledge producers, the knowledge they produce is distorted, even if from the inside they view that knowledge as obviously correct.

Free the Inquiry

How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production

What happens when an entire profession can’t see what’s hiding in plain sight in its own data? That puzzle animated Stony Brook University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s keynote at the Heterodox Academy 2026 West Coast Regional Conference, held recently at UC Berkeley. Al-Gharbi walks through study after peer-reviewed study on polarization, symbolic racis…

Listen now

3 months ago · 15 likes · 1 comment

A startling example of this — and it’s just one — is the recent viral interview with the American Anthropological Association’s president, Carolyn Rouse, wherein she is pressed on the claim in the Vanderbilt-Wash U State of Scholarship Report that anthropology is “the most extreme case” of scholarly deterioration from politicization. Washington Post reporter Megan McArdle puts in plain language how this ideological defense looks to the public:

When the interviewer pushes back on that last point, she tries to dodge and weave, but has no idea what an effective dodge would be. So we end up watching an unintentional comedian take repeated pratfalls, such as suggesting that people who believe sex is binary maybe “want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY,” and that teaching that sex is binary is as inappropriate in a classroom as debating the pros and cons of interning Japanese people. Perhaps this sounds more coherent if you are fluent in Anthropologese, but to those outside the tribe? Woof.

Woof, indeed.

The good news is that some university leaders and a growing mass of faculty are seeing truth in external critiques: it’s what produced Yale’s Trust Report, the Harvard Medical School Open Inquiry Report, and the Vanderbilt-Wash U State of Scholarship Report this year. There remains, however, a non-trivial segment of the Left that treats any admission of ideological homogeneity or DEI overreach as tantamount to handing the academy over to political actors who want to dismantle it. I don’t think that premise holds, and I suspect it explains at least part of this year’s drop in Democratic confidence. Both things can be true: the federal assault on universities can be real, aggressive, and worth resisting, and the underlying problems with politicization on campus can also be real and worth addressing. Admitting the second does not require surrendering on the first.

As I’ve argued before, federal overreach does not negate the fact that things have gone ideologically awry on campus and need reform. And that reform has to come from inside the house. Rebuilding public trust requires admitting what needs fixing and doing the work of fixing it, regardless of which political party happens to claim parts of whatever issue as its own in any given moment. When principles supersede politics, this isn’t a difficult position to hold.

Share

In open inquiry news this week, Texas continues to make headlines with an ambiguous tenure denial at UT Austin, and the potential cutting of over 100 courses at University of Houston. Alan Garber, the president of Harvard University, took the stage at the Economic Club of Washington this week to condemn threats to open inquiry from the Trump administration; and civics centers in Ohio and West Virginia are trying to solve low student enrollment.

Check out the top news stories we’re watching this week at HxA.

Confidence in higher education drops after last year’s uptick.

Gallup’s annual poll assessing the American public’s confidence in higher education shows that last year’s hopeful uptick was just a blip. While 42% ofU.S. adults last year said they had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the institution, this year only 38% said so. The biggest story in this year’s numbers, however, is the record-breaking drop among Democrats, whose confidence fell 11 percentage points to just 50% — the largest single-year drop since polling began in 2015 and a record low. The lack of confidence stems from perceived political agendas, cost, and workforce preparation.

More on this coming from me on Monday. Subscribe to Free the Inquiry so you don’t miss it.

Subscribe now

Harvard president lauds his decision to not settle with the Trump administration.

Alan Garber, president of Harvard University, expressed his pride in not settling with the Trump administration to a crowd gathered at the Economic Club of Washington this week. His remarks hit on many issues related to open inquiry, including concerns with the new OMB proposal from the Trump administration that aims to give grant decision-making authority to political appointees I discussed last week the importance of protecting tenure to ensure faculty free expression.

Even as Garber continues to push back on political influence in Harvard’s operations, Garber has made an effort to broaden viewpoint diversity on campus. As the Harvard Crimson reports:

…the University has shown it is responsive to political pushback. Under pressure over the overwhelmingly liberal makeup of its faculty, Harvard has made several efforts to broaden the intellectual scope of its ranks. Over the past year, top administrators have socialized an effort to hire dozens of new faculty members in the name of “viewpoint diversity.” Some schools and departments have also separately pursued faculty searches intended to widen the range of scholarly perspectives represented on campus.

Course cuts to appease lawmakers continue at Texas universities.

Reporting from the Chronicle of Higher Education says that the University of Houston could soon cut up to 40% of its core curriculum, over 100 courses, to comply with a state law passed last year.

Houston’s provost convened a working group to review the university’s core courses over the summer, according to documents obtained by The Chronicle. That group’s recommendations, which were shared with the faculty this month, are to be considered by the system’s Board of Regents in August. The recommendations cap a curriculum-review process at Houston that has been underway since the fall. But the latest installment of that work has been done in secret, faculty critics say, raising “serious concerns” about violating shared-governance principles and whether the university’s interpretation of state law is overly expansive.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) is asking the administrators to halt the review process, citing over-application of the law and violation of shared governance. The decision by the Board of Regents will be made next month.

University of Texas at Austin professor denied tenure without explanation.

UT Austin American Studies professor Iván Chaar López was denied tenure by the president’s promotion and tenure committee despite having unanimous support at lower review levels and recieving no indication at mid-year review that his tenure was at risk.

A UT spokesperson said that “The tenure review process is handled thoughtfully, fairly, and professionally with a thorough system of checks and balances to ensure the highest standards of teaching and research.”

Chaar López, whose research centers on the history of information infrastructures used for border enforcement since the mid-20th century, told Inside Higher Ed that he thinks politics are at play.

…the dean … never explained why I was being denied tenure. I asked point-blank what happened, and he literally said, “I don’t know. I can only speculate.” And then he went on to speculate that, probably, the president’s promotion and tenure committee had a negative view of my research, and that the committee had a negative view of my field.

Just before being notified of his denial, his university announced plans to consolidate several departments, including his own American Studies department, which can often be legitimate grounds for relieving tenured faculty. But Chaar López said that “it’s very hard not to see a relationship” between the politics of the state and its ongoing censorship and his tenure denial from the highest level of the university.

University “civics centers” make news for low student enrollment.

Since 2021, colleges and universities across the United States have created dozens of “civic centers” through a mix of external state legislation and internal organic initiatives. Although these centers are in their operational infancy, they are not all thriving from an enrollment perspective. This week, Ohio State University’s Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture and Society, and West Virginia University’s Washington Center made news for their low student enrollment. Lawmakers in Ohio want to mandate that students take the Center’s courses by making it the sole provider of certain required courses. The change aims to boost enrollment after just 131 students enrolled last semester. In West Virginia, the university said just two students are enrolled in four of the Center’s courses as of last week. The center lists 19 course offerings.

Supporters see civics centers as a constructive way to promote viewpoint diversity, while critics have raised concerns about faculty governance, academic freedom, and potential political influence. HxA has the only comprehensive database to track civics centers (available exclusively to members) in our effort to evaluate how these centers are impacting viewpoint diversity on campuses.

Share

Have campus news related to open inquiry that we should be aware of? Share it with us by sending a quick email to communications@heterodoxacademy.org

The debate over free speech on campus is usually framed as a persuasion problem: if only more students believed in free expression, the culture would protect it. A new study in Science Advances, by researchers at Stanford, Penn, Columbia, and the University of Colorado, suggests the problem runs deeper. The study found that many students already believe in the principle of free speech, but they abandon it when their group loyalties are engaged. For those of us who see free expression as the precondition for the truth-seeking work universities exist to do, this insight is key: persuasion is necessary, but not sufficient.

The researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of 3,065 US college students in the summer of 2024, at the height of the campus Gaza protests, and found that nearly 75% reported believing that protecting campus free speech is “very important.” Yet when the researchers asked whether speech aimed at a marginalized group should be policed more strictly than the same words aimed at anyone else, 64% said yes. They claimed to value free speech but did not apply it consistently across views. The authors labeled this group “particularists.” In contrast, 36% of respondents said the rules should be applied neutrally and consistently no matter the target of speech. This group was labeled “universalists.”

The particularist position deserves scrutiny: a right that is applied inconsistently is not a right, but a revocable permission. Even if the “particularists” self-identify as free speech proponents, they cannot accurately be viewed as such. The authors conducted a similar survey among US adults and found that the split between particularists and universalists is nearly even, 52% particularist to 48% universalist. It appears that universalism does better off campus than on it.

However, what the study shows about the universalists is even more concerning.

The researchers had students read a scenario in which a professor made a derogatory statement about white, Black, Jewish, Muslim, or transgender people, and asked whether the university should suspend or fire the professor. Particularists behaved in line with their stated position: support for punishment jumped when the target was a minority rather than white. Universalists mostly held the line, albeit inconsistently, barely moving when the target was Muslim or transgender, and their support for punishment rising far less than that of particularists when the target was Black or Jewish.

However, splitting the universalists up by their politics — left versus right, and sympathy toward Israel or the Palestinians — revealed that much of this consistency was an illusion created by averaging them out. Students who were ambivalent in these divides better maintained consistency. But right-leaning and pro-Israel “universalists” were less supportive of suspending or firing a professor when their target was a Muslim or a transgender student than they were if the target was of a different group; conversely, pro-Palestine “universalists” tilted the opposite way and were more likely to support suspending or firing professors who expressed hate toward Black or Muslim students.

Economists distinguish stated preferences from revealed preferences: what people say they value versus what their choices show they actually value. By their stated preferences, these students viewed themselves as universalists who believed in universal application of free speech rights, regardless of the target of the potentially offensive language. Yet their revealed preferences when faced with a concrete issue showed they were in fact particularists who struggled to apply free speech principles consistently when the target group in question held political salience to them. Their abstract principles didn’t survive contact with genuine stakes.

Why do people struggle to uphold their stated principles? Dan M. Kahan’s work on identity-protective cognition explains the incentive structure: for the individual, bias is rational. Your lone opinion rarely changes an outcome, but visibly breaking with your tribe on a charged issue much more often costs you standing, trust, and friends, so the mind protects group membership over accuracy. Tellingly, a survey conducted by Kahan and colleagues on climate change risk-perception found that the best reasoners (those who score highest on tests of numeracy, science-literacy, and cognitive-reflection) show more of this bias, not less, being better at building the justifications their identity needs. The impulse is bipartisan: a meta-analysis of 51 experiments found liberals and conservatives show partisan bias at statistically indistinguishable rates.

In the decade before October 7, 2023, the loudest complaints about campus censorship came from the right. FIRE’s data show students were mostly targeted from the left between 2020 and 2022. After October 7, the pattern reversed: students were mostly targeted from the right, and many incidents involved pro-Palestinian speech. Some prominent critics of cancel culture cheered efforts to ban Students for Justice in Palestine chapters engaging in protected speech or pressure universities to investigate, discipline, or deport pro-Palestinian students and faculty. On the other side, pro-Palestinian students and faculty who invoked free speech and academic freedom to protect their own expression have themselves shouted down speakers and disrupted events. As FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff put it, “Again and again, political actors preach the importance of free speech, only to reach for the censor’s muzzle when it helps their side.”

Where does this leave advocacy for free speech and open inquiry? Although a third of students endorse a universalist perspective on free speech, and more still need to be persuaded to do so, endorsement alone isn’t enough. Fighting natural human tendencies of protecting group loyalties is an uphill battle. Campus free expression, then, cannot rest on the in-the-moment consistency of individuals; it has to rest on institutions.

Students ambivalent to either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict applied their principles consistently across nearly every scenario the researchers proposed. Distance from the fight preserved judgment. This insight into procedural justice is ancient. Roman law codified it in 376 AD; later named nemo iudex in causa sua, the principle states that no one may be a judge in a case in which he has an interest. James Madison wrote Federalist No. 10 around this: “No man is allowed to be a judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and, not improbably, corrupt his integrity.” Courts ameliorated the issue of bias structurally; judges are to recuse themselves when their impartiality could reasonably be questioned, and jurors with a stake are struck.

Free expression needs the same strategy. A university whose disciplinary outcomes depend on biased individuals will produce biased enforcement, even if they claim to be principled free speech universalists. Instead, content and identity-neutral rules must be in place before any controversy strikes, and ideally the administrators judging complaints should be as free as possible from any overt biases.

The time to build such rules and policies into academic institutions is now. Every new controversy converts more professed universalists into practicing particularists. The next Gaza — and there will be a next controversy just as divisive — will not be the moment to start drafting neutral speech policies. It will be the moment when well-formulated policies withstand pressure and protect speech equally, and weak and ineffective policies fail under pressure from individual biases.

Share

For some years now, despite my being a former Roman Catholic and a sort of Burkean conservative, I have maintained a strong interest in Zen Buddhism and Taoist philosophy—much stronger than would perhaps be expected of a middle-aged guy from the Midwest.

It’s one of the things that people tend to find most surprising about me, in a head-cocking and eyebrow-furrowing and really?-ing kind of way. (They have the same reaction when they learn of my deep and wholly unironic passion for reggae.) In the U.S. we tend to have very little knowledge of what Zen truly is; for most of us, it simply conjures images of a peaceful monk, some bamboo, flowing water, or maybe an athlete or performer in a flow state. This is of a piece with our cultural ignorance of what used to be called “Oriental” studies, an impolitic term that is lamentable as a kind of pejorative, indicating an exotic “Other” we lack the depth to comprehend.

There is one element of Zen philosophy that aligns quite nicely with this issue’s theme of “camp,” and it has to do—unsurprisingly—with the principle of nonattachment. Much of Zen thinking relates to nonattachment: the transience of physical things and the embrace of simplicity, yes, but also the even more important principle of nonattachment to ideas or positions.

There is one Zen phrase I internalized during my own Ph.D. work, as I found myself being routinely convinced by the most recent social theory I came across in my years of seminars. It’s a phrase that, like so much in Zen, is possibly apocryphal and that has been variously attributed to many different figures, but for aesthetic reasons I prefer to attribute it to the classical Chinese thinker Linji Yixuan, who wrote: The man of the Way fundamentally dwells nowhere.

We should acknowledge up front that this phrase could very well be interpreted literally: The sages and poets of classical China were not exactly known for putting down roots, and a philosophy that emphasizes nonattachment doesn’t quite draw the 30-year fixed mortgage crowd. But as with most things in Zen, there is depth to the simplicity and the sentiment of the phrase that can and should be deeply relevant to the work of scholars and academics.

First, let me suggest that we perhaps overemphasize the importance of fixed positions. Both Western tradition and evolutionary psychology suggest that the Archimedean stance—“give me a place to stand and I shall move the world”—holds an innate appeal for us. We have a strong and not totally unjustified preference for the martyr, the sunk cost fallacy, the Patrick Henry, the one who digs in the heels and says this is what I believe and ne’er shall I abandon belief.

That’s all well and good when it comes to moral stances (excepting cases such as Robespierre’s, of course, when moral stance becomes mortal threat). I certainly hope that I shall remain firmly committed to, for example, “Thou shalt not kill.” But to see fixed beliefs as an innate virtue, as a sign of moral worth rather than what may be a certain intractability, is rather a hindrance to good scholarship and research. To stay resolutely fixed in one’s beliefs is not just to flirt with the boundaries of orthodoxy, which can all too easily color both one’s questions and one’s interpretations, but it also reveals a stance that belief can, and perhaps even should, trump discovery.

How can this be avoided, particularly in the age of the so-called scholar activist, when competition for social media “likes” can be just as fierce—and, alas, just as personally meaningful—as competition for top-notch journal publications? We are both blessed and cursed to live in an era of instant information and instant pontification, an era when the hunkered-down pose on social media is praised as principled rather than dismissed as stubborn.

Zen can offer some lessons here. The 11th-century teacher Yuanwu instructs: “You should work to melt away the obstructions caused by conditional knowledge and views and interpretive understanding.” The scholar might bristle at this: “After all this learning, all this acquisition of knowledge, all this specialization and training and ever-narrowing research profile, should I treat my achievements as obstructions to be melted away?”

Well, yes, in the sense that all of your learning should serve as scaffolding, a means of climbing to an intellectual height at which point you can transcend your learning and scholarship and focus on what is found there. You kick away the ladder, to use Wittgenstein’s metaphor, and you find yourself in a realm of openness to new ideas and discoveries that are explicitly not colored by the information you brought there.

Above all else this means an openness to changing one’s mind if new information comes to light. We should always be seeking the way that works best, not the way that things have been done before. This gives Zen some overlap with the very American philosophy of pragmatism as devised by Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey, William James, and others—ideas and knowledge are useful inasmuch as they lay the groundwork for action in the world. If an idea no longer works, or is contravened by something new that has come to light, then rather than laying the groundwork for meaningful action, it chains us to an approach that renders action largely moot.

In this sense we should regularly set up “camps” of intellectual work. Rather than perpetually siloing ourselves in a narrow specialty, we should take on a specific project with some muddy questions surrounding it. We investigate, we research, we ask good questions and we get solid answers. We make those answers public in a forum of our interested peers, and then we walk away. We have dwelt in that knowledge for a time, and it prepared us to act in the world. Now let it melt, lest it become an obstruction.

Most scholars do not take this approach. The usual method is rather more like digging the same tunnel ever deeper, trying to chip away and expose anything you missed in material you’ve already covered. Thus, we get a Shakespeare scholar writing five books about different dimensions of Richard III or an anthropologist spending each summer with Amish communities in order to keep the papers coming and become the dominant scholar in that sub-sub-field.

But what if that Shakespearean turned her attention to, say, John Donne or Andrew Marvell? Or to contemporary spy thrillers? Surely the methodologies that served her well for Richard III could have some bearing on other texts. What if the anthropologist spent a research semester studying teenage behavior in high school cafeterias? The default approach of coming back to the same material, coming back to the same approaches, makes it harder and harder for us to see beyond those things—and this creates the conditions for orthodoxy.

“Shifting and changing and successfully adapting,” wrote Yuanwu, “you attain Great Freedom.” The opposite of this approach is the hidebound scholar, doomed to a Sisyphean scholarship of sameness, perpetually returning to the views that first shaped them. If we are to restore universities to their rightful place as centers of open inquiry, then we need more Great Freedom.

Share

This article was originally published at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal on July 20th, 2026.

The growing (though not unanimous) acknowledgement that academia has lost public trust may be increasingly uncontroversial. But identifying remedies to repair that broken trust is proving to be much more contested.

With the ban on the promotion of “divisive concepts” in North Carolina’s public institutions, the Tar Heel State joins the likes of the Lone Star State and the Sunshine State in aggressive reform efforts that risk squelching intellectual inquiry. Ultimately, bans like these do nothing to strengthen free expression, and in fact do the exact opposite: they stifle speech and create climates of fear.

As an NCSU PhD student focused on higher education policy, I am on board with many criticisms of the academy. Poor scholarship has been propped up by activist sentiment, with some disciplines more guilty than others (the humanities and my beloved social sciences among them). Critical theories have become gospel rather than perspectives to be considered from all angles. And there’s any number of quiet avenues in which certain orthodoxies have spread throughout the academy, such as “citation justice” and now-defunct DEI requirements in accreditation, both of which I have criticized publicly.

But content bans are nothing but trouble, even when ostensibly targeting the “promotion” of ideas rather than mere engagement with ideas. These bans fail to articulate positive visions of healthy intellectual exchange, jeopardize the climate of free expression, and discourage faculty from facilitating class discussions on worthwhile topics. Moreover, bans on “divisive concepts” do a disservice to students, who need more intellectual exchange, not less.

Engaging with divisive concepts should be part and parcel of the higher education experience. Supporters of the divisive concepts ban may correctly point out that it bans the “promotion” of certain concepts, rather than ban discussion outright. But the line between “promoting” versus “engaging” with an idea is a matter of perspective, and absolutely ripe for misunderstandings and implementation missteps.

What does it really mean to “promote” a divisive concept? Suppose a faculty member enthusiastically facilitates a discussion on Judith Butler’s ideas about gender as performance—does lively engagement risk coming off as “promotion”? What if a biology professor’s remark about intersex conditions is interpreted as “promoting” the idea that biological sex is not binary? Is insufficient throat clearing on controversial issues tantamount to endorsement?

The recent enumeration of divisive concepts clarifies little. Take one example: the bill bans the promotion of the idea that “particular character traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs should be ascribed to a race or sex or to an individual because of the individual’s race or sex.” Sure, let’s not unfairly ascribe things to individuals just because of their race or sex. But can we in broad strokes recognize group-level differences in society, such as differences in risk-taking behavior between men and women, and racial differences in religiosity?

Most people would say yes, of course faculty can allow their students to explore those topics in class when relevant. They just cannot require their students to hold certain views. But most people are not UNC System faculty, who are navigating an unclear set of restrictions in an era of great upheaval for higher education (and likely looking at their peers in Texas and Florida, and wondering if North Carolina is headed in the same direction). Given the circumstances, risk-averse overcompliance is almost a guarantee—and is likely a feature, not a bug.

Some of these divisive concepts are so deeply embedded within certain disciplines that avoiding them entirely is impossible. Critical theories about race, sex, and power dynamics are load-bearing pillars of entire fields. This points toward much larger epistemic quandaries within academia—ones which need to be addressed, but cannot be remedied through top-down legislation that puts faculty on edge and dampens classroom speech.

Personally, I am both compelled and fatigued by many so-called “divisive” concepts. They add depth to how I understand the world, but their seemingly wholesale embrace by vocal segments of the academy has come at an intellectual cost for all of us. I don’t want divisive concepts eliminated from teaching and research, but I do want them subject to a fair intellectual fight—no rigged scoring from social justice referees, and no sucker punches from policymakers. Contested issues are best grappled with in a climate of trust and free expression, rather than a climate of fear and suspicion.

Recent incidents in the UNC System should give us all pause over how the divisive concepts ban will be implemented. For example, last year NC State Libraries cancelled a book reading from a Palestinian-American children’s book author, citing the Equality Policy which requires departments to remain neutral (despite the obvious fact that hosting a speaker is categorically different from endorsing their perspective).

More recently, UNC-Chapel Hill administrators initially claimed to investigate two student media platforms for protected, satirical speech before walking back their claim. These incidents may have been learning experiences for administrators. But it’s likely that the ban on divisive concepts will face similar implementation challenges, and be used in ways that weaken rather than broaden intellectual exchange on campus.

Strong academic freedom protections are crucial to defending teaching and research from the kinds of overreach made possible by divisive concepts legislation. The UNC System’s new academic freedom policy, approved by the Board of Governors earlier this year (and criticized by NC members of the AAUP), may be put to the test in the coming months.

To strengthen the new academic freedom policy in light of divisive concept legislation, the Board of Governors would do well to emphasize that engagement with a topic is not promotion, and that faculty and students are free to engage with any and all of the concepts on the naughty list. Additionally, UNC System institutions should also commit themselves to faculty-driven review processes for accusations of violating the divisive concepts ban, involving a high burden of proof.

The fast-approaching fall semester will see the rubber meeting the road for the divisive concepts ban. Many optimists out there may be expecting that it works out in favor of free expression — but if I were a gambling gal, you know where I’d be placing my bet.

Share

In open inquiry news this week, the University of California sets a plan to reevaluate the use of SAT scores in admissions, as requested by thousands of faculty; a newly proposed rule from Washington gives political appointees final say in federal grant decisions; content bans in university classrooms are still a violation of the first amendment and academic freedom; and more.

Check out the top news stories we’re watching this week at HxA.

Subscribe now

The University of California system responds to a faculty letter asking that the SAT be reinstated in admissions.

Last month, thousands of STEM faculty across the University of California (UC) penned an open letter asking the administration to bring back the SAT for undergraduate admissions, citing underpreparedness among undergraduates since the test became optional during the COVID pandemic. Responses to the faculty letter have been overwhelmingly affirmative for reinstatement, with The New York Times Editorial Board running an op-ed urging the UC trustees to “have the courage to admit they made a mistake six years ago and reverse it” after the UC president said they are “revising” their timeline to make an “informed” and “evidence-based” decision, despite countless reports providing that evidence.

A decision is unlikely until next summer, meaning that SAT-free admissions will be in place at least through 2029 (given that many students take the test as juniors in high school). The Chronicle of Higher Education spoke to former president of UC, Janet Napolitano, who was in charge when the system went test-blind in 2020. Even she appears to have changed her mind, stating that the SAT is a “useful data point” in admissions, though she remains skeptical that adding back the SAT will fix the problems UC faculty noted in their letter.

Florida’s Stop WOKE Act still violates the First Amendment.

State legislatures in recent years have pushed laws that would ban certain DEI-related topics from classrooms. Florida’s Stop WOKE act, introduced in 2022, is perhaps the most prominent example. Last week, the Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit upheld a lower court’s decision to block the law. As applied to higher education, the law would limit professors’ academic freedom in the classroom to speech aligned with the views approved by the State. Classroom content bans are a violation of the First Amendment and academic freedom (as I’ve previously written about here, here, here, and here); the court’s decision is another win for open inquiry and viewpoint diversity in the classroom.

The American Association of Anthropology doesn’t seem to be helping the discipline

In what has become a viral interview between Chronicle of Higher Education reporter Stephanie Lee and American Association of Anthropology (AAA) president Carolyn Rouse, the discipline of anthropology suffered another blow as Rouse failed to quell concerns of politicization of the discipline. Last month’s Vanderbilt-Wash U State of the Scholarship report called out anthropology as “the most extreme case” of scholarly deterioration.

An example of this cited in the report was the AAA’s 2023 decision to cancel an accepted symposium at its annual conference on the utility of biological sex in anthropology research (HxA later hosted that panel online to thousands of viewers). When asked directly by Lee if she regretted that decision, she dug in, arguing:

the idea that there are two sexes is just factually incorrect, and to force biological anthropologists to teach that is the equivalent of turning an astronomy department into an astrology department. So I don’t know why we’re debating that. You may not like it. I don’t know, maybe you want to kill babies that aren’t just XX presenting XX or XY presenting XY, but that’s what we have in this world.

The response has been swift and signals that AAA leadership isn’t helping the discipline bolster its reputation as a serious academic field willing to take criticism seriously.

New proposal supplants peer review with political appointees in federal grant reviews.

A new proposal from the Trump administration is aiming to give grant decision-making authority to political appointees. Section 200.205 of the proposal reads:

…senior appointees must conduct these reviews and apply specific principles when evaluating proposals. These principles include ensuring that discretionary awards advance the President’s policy priorities, prohibit the use of funds for discriminatory or otherwise impermissible purposes, and emphasize ensuring compliance with applicable law.

The revised procedure also clarifies that “peer review remains advisory and does not replace agency discretion” in review of federal grants. Further, “peer review recommendations remain advisory and are not ministerially ratified, routinely deferred to, or otherwise treated as de facto binding by senior appointees or their designees.”

The proposal argues that federal awards have often been used “to promote a ‘woke’ policy agenda” and that supplanting peer review with political appointee “merit review” will bring research in better alignment with the “Gold Standard of Science.”

According to reporting from the Chronicle of Higher Education, 341,699 comments were received during the public comment period. The University of Chicago, The American Association for the Advancement of Science, and The American Association for Cancer Research are among those who have put out public statements expressing deep concern with the new proposal.

Texas A&M cancelled two courses for the Fall semester under a new policy.

Last year, the Texas A&M University system’s board voted to institute a ban on DEI-related topics in college courses. Since then, several course cancellations have caused controversy as open inquiry and academic freedom are stifled. This week, reporting from the Chronicle of Higher Education obtained records showing how the policy altered courses for the upcoming year.

Two courses for the fall of 2026 were canceled outright […] Of 45 courses forwarded to the president’s office for consideration for the fall of 2026, 31 were given a green light, while eight more were allowed to proceed under certain conditions — such as removing or clarifying assigned readings — documents show. Those numbers were similar in the spring, when six courses were canceled and 48 of 54 were granted exceptions. Among the fall courses whose exceptions were approved were “Gender, Race, and Media,” “Racial and Ethnic Relations,” and “Human Sexuality.”

Have campus news related to open inquiry we should be aware of? Share it with us by sending a quick email to communications@heterodoxacademy.org

Share

Is institutional neutrality a one-size-fits-all policy? Some institutions say no, opting instead for policies and principles that bolster open inquiry, but sans “neutrality” in the name. Tufts University is one such institution, having embraced “institutional pluralism” and rejecting “institutional neutrality.” To learn more about this, I spoke with HxA member and Professor of Psychology and Computer Science J.P. de Ruiter, who was tapped to serve on Tufts’ Institutional Neutrality Working Group and had a bird’s eye view of Tufts’s path toward pluralism. (De Ruiter offered his perspective to HxA on behalf of himself, not on behalf of the working group or Tufts University.)

In 2024, Provost Caroline Genco charged a faculty working group with exploring recommendations for implementing institutional neutrality at Tufts. The working group swiftly got to business, engaging with community members through listening sessions, meetings, and an online portal to better understand different perspectives on whether and how Tufts should embrace neutrality. “Some faculty, staff and students were concerned about leadership speaking out on some political issues but not others,” de Ruiter shared. “Others expressed the opposite concern, that not speaking out on important current issues by adopting a policy of ‘neutrality’ suggests that we as a university are trying to duck our responsibility.”

Over 800 members of the Tufts community ultimately weighed in, expressing a range of views. But it quickly became apparent that while the importance of defending free expression and academic pluralism were widely acknowledged, the term “neutrality” itself felt like a poor fit for the community. Some felt that “it is impossible to have a neutral stance. Even silence is a political stance, and therefore taking a position is unavoidable,” de Ruiter said. “It was clear that [neutrality] was not what members of the Tufts community wanted.”

Instead, “institutional pluralism” emerged as a guiding principle that best suited the needs of the Tufts community. “What we really wanted to focus on was that everyone at Tufts would feel free to speak in their own name and would not feel constrained in their individual expression by general leadership statements,” said de Ruiter. In gravitating towards a distinctly positive vision, rather than abstaining from an action, the group “chose the word ‘pluralism,’ which focuses more on diversity of opinions than on staying neutral.”

In its final report, the working group recommended that “... university leadership adopt a policy of refraining from issuing statements on political and social matters that are not directly related to the educational, research and service mission of the university.” This stance is precisely what the Kalven Report and HxA’s own policy model on statement neutrality call for. Also in alignment with HxA’s model, the report provides an important lane for university leaders to use their voice by encouraging “leadership to speak forthrightly when [the university’s] mission is threatened.”

The working group’s recommendation was adopted by the Academic Council, Tufts’s highest policy-making organization. Later, the Board of Trustees affirmed three core principles that align with the working group’s recommendations:

1. In the interest of protecting and encouraging pluralism of viewpoint among its faculty, students, and staff, leaders at the university will refrain from making statements attributable to Tufts as an institution about political or social matters that do not bear directly upon the university’s core teaching, research, and service mission or its corporate responsibilities.

2. This continues Tufts’ long-standing commitment to free speech, open inquiry, and academic freedom.

3. It implies neither neutrality nor indifference on the part of Tufts leadership, faculty, staff, or students. Rather, it intends to encourage Tufts community members to speak in their own voices.

De Ruiter believes that it is too early to gauge the impact of Tufts’s institutional pluralism principle on the university’s culture, but he did share that there are several other units on campus exploring pluralism, including the Chaplaincy and the Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education (led by HxA member and 2026 HxA Open Inquiry Award recipient Eitan Hersh).

Notably, Tufts’ commitment to institutional pluralism is a principle, not a strict policy with explicit implementation expectations and guidelines. The working group recommended “a guiding standard instead of a rule, because we didn’t want to paradoxically control speech while advocating for pluralism,” de Ruiter said. As for how the principle will endure through future changes in leadership and administration, de Ruiter is confident that “if our leadership changes, the recommendation will either be followed or appropriately re-evaluated if that turns out to be necessary.”

De Ruiter offers some advice to other institutions that are reconsidering their own statement-making habits and policies. “I would strongly advise them to be very careful with their choice of words. Words do not necessarily mean what we intend them to mean, but rather what the recipients think they mean,” he wrote. Additionally, he suggests “having a wide, open, but structured community dialogue to ensure that whatever policy or recommendation is decided upon, it has the support of the community. This is how we chose the word ‘pluralism’.”

There’s good reason to think that institutional neutrality and similar policies are best shaped by faculty. It is faculty who are at the vanguard of defending open inquiry at their institutions. It is faculty who stand to gain the most from well-crafted policies that strengthen intellectual vitality in teaching and research. And it is faculty who stand to lose the most from weak, ineffective, or overly broad policies. Without campus community input, policies and principles that aim to elevate free expression and recalibrate institutional statement-making habits may be built on shaky foundations.

While the exact amount of daylight between “neutrality” and “pluralism” may be a matter of perspective, either label for the principle is a welcome advancement in the service of open inquiry and free expression on campus. The expanding landscape of similarly-spirited policies (including “institutional restraint” and “institutional voice stewardship”) signals a growing commitment to enriching the climate of intellectual expression on campus and honoring the core telos of the university.

Team HxA applauds Tufts University for its dialogue-driven approach to developing its principle of institutional pluralism, and for demonstrating what is readily apparent to open inquiry advocates: faculty are stalwart defenders of their institutions’ truth- and knowledge-seeking missions, and are eager to work with leadership to do what’s right.

Share

To learn more about how to implement institutional neutrality at your institution, see our website for our policy model, research report, databases, reading guides, and more.