Commencement season may be winding down, but commencement speaker controversies show no sign of slowing. Inside Higher Ed reports speaker cancellations at Rutgers, Utah Valley University, and South Carolina State University along with protests at Harvard, Princeton, and Duke. Students at New York University demanded the university disinvite their own professor, Jonathan Haidt, hoping for someone more “representative of their values,” such as past luminary Taylor Swift.

As I ingested this news the past few weeks, I couldn’t help but wonder whether controversies like these show any signs of ending. Starting rather arbitrarily in 2000, I did a quick Google News search for “commencement controversy” to put recent trends into perspective. For nearly the entirety of the aughts, nothing really showed up except for a blip in 2009 when then newly-elected President Obama made the commencement speech rounds, stirring up controversy for his views on abortion.

In the dawn of the 2010s, the opening of what we’ve come to call the “great awokening,” we began to see a small rise in controversies over commencement speakers. The first widely reported speaker cancellations occurred in 2013; by 2014, so many controversies were happening that news roundups at major outlets like Today began. In the latter half of the decade, the coverage made its way into legacy outlets such as The New York Times, and op-eds on the topic became commonplace. There was a temporary plateau during COVID, followed by an extreme takeoff in news coverage in the last couple of years. We’re only mid-way through 2026 with nearly twice as many news stories covering campus speaker controversies as last year.

The controversy over commencement speakers is not entirely novel, but it has taken on a new form in the PR-driven social media era of higher education. The arms race over high-octane speakers really kicked off after Steve Jobs delivered his memorable address at Stanford in 2005. Writing back in 2011, Pablo Eisenberg opined in Inside Higher Ed that celebrity commencement speeches were simply a “cash cow” for speakers, earning tens of thousands of dollars — and some over six figures — to deliver their inspirational talks for 30 or so minutes.

The issue is that prestigious commencement speeches have largely become PR events for universities in the modern era. As Sonel Cutler of the Chronicle of Higher Education reported this week, “Selecting a commencement speaker has become a high-wire balancing act for colleges,” involving a delicate calculation of bringing someone exciting to the stage for the commencement event, making (hopefully positive) news headlines, and of course, making the university look good, prestigious, and important.

None of this really has to do with the graduates themselves or their accomplishments. It’s quite clear that these events, especially at prestigious institutions, are about the university’s bottom line. The person invited to speak at this institutional event in front of a captive audience, for better or for worse, reflects on the institution’s status and prestige. These, in turn, bring in donor dollars. But when money and prestige are on the line, controversy inevitably follows.

Over the past 15 years or so, we went from basic speeches to political posturing on stage. And in a left-leaning academy, the speakers are overwhelmingly left in their political leaning. HxA member Robbie George called the lack of viewpoint diversity among commencement speakers “scandalous.” Earlier this week, John Tomasi and Jeff Flier went live for an HxA webinar to argue for the position that commencement speakers should not use the podium for politics. Jeff Flier pointed out the irony of the political commencement speech he gave in 1972 as a graduating medical student — a speech he emphatically said he wouldn’t give today given that it violates his changed position on the matter.

We now seem to have evolved into a state of pre-commencement controversies. This year’s protest over Haidt is a case in point: Haidt was announced and students protested the idea of him speaking because of his perspectives. In the case of Haidt, who delivered a neutral yet inspirational speech, the media only came running to confirm that students booed him. The PR machine driving commencement isn’t about the actual speech, it’s about the headlines that can be churned out about the controversy.

During the Q&A in HxA’s webinar on the topic earlier this week, an audience member asked a question that has been asked with increasing frequency for over a decade now: “Are commencement speeches really necessary?” Despite the question earning laughs on the call, it’s one worth taking seriously given how much PR risk is now involved in selecting a speaker.

One obvious answer is, “of course not.” While big names at prestigious commencements seem banal today, they are relatively new in the long arc of higher education history, and limited to a subset of universities. I didn’t go to an Ivy but I’m pretty sure the only speaker at my undergraduate graduation was a senior administrator, maybe the president, and a student or two. Graduation ceremonies were — and still are at your average college or university — primarily an internal affair among students and faculty with little fanfare.

But another answer, and the one I tend to favor, is that graduates deserve a send-off that feels commensurate with their effort over the preceding four years; they should be genuinely celebratory for the graduates. Flier and Tomasi put it eloquently in the Boston Globe this week:

Universities should adopt a simple norm: Commencement speakers are guests at an institutional ceremony, not partisan advocates seeking to energize supporters. Whether students, faculty, or invited guests, they are speaking to and for the whole university. Their goal should be to inspire graduates across differences, not drive them into ideological camps. In an increasingly fragmented and distrustful society, to preserve a civic and institutional ritual that transcends political division is to advance a public good.

Graduation is, by design, a moment of transition between what was and what will be. Commencement speakers should honor that glorious passage and the special nature of the university — not hijack them in service of political goals.

Despite existing in a PR era of higher education, universities can and should focus on bringing speakers on stage who want to excite the graduates in this moment of transition in their lives. Maybe those are celebrities, but maybe they are not.

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What I want to talk about a little bit is the issue that really got me involved with Heterodox Academy in the first place. So one of the things that I became known for a little bit in my research is that during the 2016 election, I was kind of disturbed by the fact that pretty much all scholars and analysts and pundits were uniformly convinced basically that Trump would never win the Republican nomination. And then after he won the nomination, there was like two seconds where people were like, huh, I feel like we should learn something from this. But then the second that Hillary Clinton won the nomination, it was right back to, oh, it’s going to be a landslide, the Republicans are going to be destroyed for a generation, it’s a bloodbath, and so on. And then once again, we had one of the largest collective predictive failures in modern political history.

But rather than learning anything from that, what scholars often tried to do, the kind of vast preponderance of academic research that I encountered was basically scholars and journalists trying to pathologize the voters, to try to explain the electoral result by some kind of deficit or pathology that held among people who voted for Donald Trump. So almost nothing was learned from this. Rather than asking, well, what did we get wrong, what are we missing, what did we fail to understand, what’s wrong with some of our institutions, the kind of dominant question that researchers were asking, especially in my field and a lot of other adjacent fields, is basically, what’s wrong with normie Americans?

Okay, so before I get into the meat of the lecture, I want to start with a quick pop quiz. So here on the screen behind me, you see two lines. And you can see at this point in the series, they’re close together. And at this point in the time series, they’re further apart. If you had to explain to me which of these two lines shifted more to the left or the right, like which one is driving the growing gap between A and B, which one would you say?

Okay, great, great, great. So same thing again. So you have two lines that are further apart. They grow further apart over time. Which one’s responsible?

See, so the thing is, when you have the lines like this, in black and white with generic labels like A and B, no one has any problem at all understanding what’s going on in these graphs. But then this funny thing happens. When you start to color the lines red and blue, and you attach labels to them like Democrat and Republican, then all of a sudden, the thing that’s super obvious to anyone who just looks at the lines becomes almost impossible for a lot of people to see.

So that first chart that I showed you was from a political scientist, from an article called “What Happened to America’s Political Center of Gravity?” Now, what the chart visualizes is the Democrat and Republican Party platforms from 2000 to 2016. And so you can see that around the time Barack Obama was elected, the Democrat and Republican Party platforms were not actually very far apart. By 2016, they were very far apart. Well, what you can see when you look at the lines is, in the red line, there was kind of a mild polarization in 2012 before the party moderated under Donald Trump in 2016. And the reason that the lines are further apart was because starting in 2012, the Democratic Party shifted radically to the left, and they continued on that same trajectory through 2016. And so the lines are further apart than ever.

But of course, if you read this article called “What Happened to America’s Political Center of Gravity,” that is not the impression you’ll get. The impression you’ll get is that what happened to America’s political center of gravity is that Republicans went crazy.

One thing that’s critical to note is that this kind of wild shift that you see in the Democratic Party platform, in the words of Kamala Harris, “it didn’t fall out of a coconut tree.” Instead, what you see when you look at public opinion is that the Democratic Party was responding to changes in the Democratic base. So the Democratic base, starting in 2012, started shifting radically in a way that put them not just out of step with Republicans but also with independents. So the Democrats grew further apart from the median voter. So this is not a case where you have kind of regular Republicans and regular Democrats going radically apart from each other in kind of roughly equal ways. This is a case where you see a kind of radical shift on the blue line, a uniquely asymmetrical shift. And in fact, when you interrogate what’s going on with this blue line, it turns out that this isn’t just Democrats in general who shifted, but a very specific subset of Democrats who shifted even more extreme than that looks, to the point where they’re shifting the whole curve. But we’ll talk about that more soon.

So the second chart was from an article by another political scientist, Tom Wood, called “Racism Motivated Trump Voters More Than Authoritarianism.” Now before I get into the substance of the chart, I’ll just note that that’s a really interesting way of designing the study. So there’s this whole genre of studies that are structured this way where it’s like, basically, which negative trait best explains why someone voted for Donald Trump? Is it that they’re more racist or sexist or authoritarian? More on that in a moment.

So what the chart visualizes is it looks at Democrats’ and Republicans’ embrace of symbolically racist attitudes from 1988 to 2016. Symbolic racism, quick nutshell, is the idea, it used to be the case in polls and surveys, social scientists just asked Americans, do you like black people? Do you want black people to live in your neighborhood? Would you feel comfortable with someone in your family marrying a black person? And they would just say no. And then increasingly, people stopped saying no. And so the question was, is this a progress story, Americans becoming less racist? Or is it the case that people have just become less comfortable expressing racist attitudes, but the baseline levels of racism remain roughly the same, they’ve just become better at concealing their racist attitudes?

Most social scientists just largely assume that the latter is true, that in America there has been very little progress in terms of actual racism, that the main thing that’s happening is that people are just less likely to express their racism in a direct way. And so scales like this one are designed to try to measure this kind of latent hidden racism. Now there’s a bunch of problems with these scales, but let’s just set that to the side. Let’s just pretend like this chart measures racism.

Okay, so what you can see in this chart is that in 2016, when Trump was running, the gap between Democrats and Republicans on these racial attitude measures was bigger than any previous year. And on this basis, Wood argues, race must have played a bigger role in the 2016 election than in other cycles. So far, very reasonable inference. The problem is the next assumption he made. He said, so if race played a bigger role in this cycle than in previous elections, it must be that Trump voters are driven primarily by racism.

The problem with that narrative is that his own chart — he created this chart, I did not create this chart, this is his chart — what you can see is that on each and every one of these measures of symbolic racism, the red line is going down from 2012 to 2016. Which is to say his own chart shows that Romney voters were more racist than Trump voters. Trump voters are less racist than previous cohorts of Republicans. His own chart shows that. The reason why the gap is bigger is because starting between 2012 and 2016, there was this massive shift in the blue line. Democrats shifted radically. The Republican trend was towards convergence. So again, moderation — the reason the gap grew was because of these radical shifts in the blue line.

Democrats became less likely to endorse these symbolically racist attitudes in 2016 than in any previous year on record, less than when there was a black candidate from their own party, America’s first black president, Barack Obama. In fact, one thing I’ll just note parenthetically, for the years that Obama was on the ballot, Democrat endorsement of symbolic racism actually went up by a lot of those measures, which is really interesting, completely unanalyzed in the literature though, because we don’t actually analyze the blue line, we’re focused on the red line.

So one of the things that’s really interesting about the structure of this, like “which negative trait,” is that we don’t really analyze why people vote for Democrats at all, actually, much at all. It’s not even an interesting research question for most social scientists. Why would someone vote? It just seems to us obvious why someone would vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, they’re the better candidate. But if someone did design a study asking, well, why would someone vote for Hillary Clinton, and the structure of the design was competing between a bunch of negatively valenced traits, like, why would someone vote for Hillary Clinton? Is it that they’re more communist, that they’re atheist, that they hate America? If you designed a study like that, by the way, you would absolutely 100% find, for instance, that if you reverse coded patriotism, it would be associated with votes for Democrats. You could absolutely design a study like this and find these kinds of things. But if anyone tried to do that, which negative trait explains why someone votes for Democrats, and tried to get that published in a peer-reviewed journal, it would be universally rejected, and for good reason. It’s a prejudicial study design. When you do things like this studying Trump, it’s just taken for granted as normal. There’s literally a whole genre, as I’ve shown in some of my other works.

Now, in fact, one of the exceptions, Julie Wronski and colleagues, looked at how authoritarianism, they studied authoritarian impulses looking at Democratic primary voters. So did supporters of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, were they more likely to be authoritarian? She found really interesting results. But this is an exception. As lots of other research shows, we just don’t really ask about Democrats very much. We don’t design a whole bunch of studies asking why people vote for Democrats. This is not a research question we ask.

More disturbing, even when we have. Like for instance, there are a whole bunch of studies that show a strong empirical association that goes back, that you see in almost all data sets, as far back as the empirical record goes, in every country that you study, that subjective well-being, feeling happy, fulfilled, content in life, is associated with conservative political leanings and religiosity. And there’s this whole genre of studies whose literal point is to pathologize wellness basically because conservatives come up higher on subjective well-being. We design whole studies that basically argue, well sure, conservatives are happier, but that’s just because they suck. Like if they were decent people who actually knew stuff about the world and cared about other people the way we care about other people, then they’d be miserable too. The idea that you would design a study pathologizing wellness is not a thing you would see if the data went the other direction. If it turned out that liberals rated higher on subjective well-being than conservatives, you can 100% bet that there would not be a vast literature trying to attribute this finding to some kind of pathology. Instead, the narrative would be, it’s just further proof that the left is correct. Not only is it correct, it’s good for you. And you see this in measure after measure.

One thing that you see a lot, as Christine Reyna demonstrated in this study, is that if you look at things like social dominance orientation, or almost any political scale that you want to imagine, what often ends up happening is that the gap between Democrats and Republicans is actually pretty narrow. The objective gap between them is actually pretty narrow. So you could create a 10-point scale on social dominance, and you can see that Democrats come in at 3.42, while Republicans come in at 3.75. Since both of them come in well below the midpoint of the scale, probably the most appropriate way of interpreting that finding is to say that both Democrats and Republicans are broadly egalitarian. And you can even argue that Democrats are marginally more egalitarian than Republicans. Is that the way it’s described in the literature? No. The way it’s usually described in the literature is that Republicans are motivated by dominance orientation, that they’re dominance-oriented, and that this explains why they vote for Donald Trump. And that’s wild, because to take the average 3.75 on a 10-point dominance scale and describe them as dominance-oriented because they’re just very marginally different from Democrats is a wild thing to do, but it’s also a very common thing to do, as Christine Reyna and others have shown.

There are other literatures. There’s a vast literature in sociology and political science on racial dog whistles. Racial dog whistles are formally race-neutral statements that are supposed to, in a wink-and-a-nod way, suggest some kind of affiliation with white supremacy or hatred of non-whites or immigrants. So it’s stuff that’s not explicitly about race, but kind of winks and nods towards your racist leanings. Now the problem with this field is twofold. First, the way that a lot of people have come up with examples of racial dog whistles is it’s a bunch of white liberal scholars who sit around thinking, if I was a racist, what kind of message would appeal to me? And then they come up with these and then they test them. And if Republicans say that they like these messages, then they go, aha, it’s proof that these statements must be racist. What they don’t do, implicit in the racial dog whistle narrative, is that these are narratives that appeal uniquely to whites, because again, they’re signaling, winking and nodding towards white supremacy. But they don’t actually usually test non-whites’ receptivity. They just only test white people.

One exception to this rule is one of the pioneers of this framework, Ian Haney López, who, to his credit, decided to actually investigate non-whites’ receptivity to racial dog whistles. So he took canonical examples of racial dog whistles from Donald Trump, but didn’t say they were from Trump, and presented them to black, white, and Hispanic voters on law and order, immigration, things like this. What he found was that these messages actually resonated the most with Hispanics, and then African Americans, and they resonated the least with whites. Now this is a major problem for a framework that’s predicated on the idea that these are messages that resonate uniquely with whites, and they actually resonate the least with whites. That’s a big issue.

But scholars have largely insulated themselves from having to deal with that problem by largely ignoring the views of non-white voters, including and especially in ostensibly anti-racist literature. They just ignore the views of non-whites because they’re inconvenient. I suspect one of the major reasons why they just focus on whites is because of an intuitive understanding, not tested. Because again, if they do test it, you have to deal with this kind of problem. So they just don’t even test non-white public opinion much. And there’s all sorts of research looking at how this is a really vast problem in public attitudes about race and racism, that there’s just all these big claims that are made about unique views of whites and racism and so on, and they just ignore non-white voters because they have inconvenient views. And when you do test them, you get inconvenient views for the narrative that they’re trying to spin.

In fact, one of the things I’ve shown in my own work as it relates to Trump is that a lot of the narrative about why Trump won is that he won because of racism. But actually what you see, as I’ve shown over and over again for like a decade now, whose vote shifted the most between 2012 and 2016?

White turnout was stagnant between 2012 and 2016. Trump got a smaller share of the white vote than Mitt Romney. The reason he won in 2016 was because he got a larger vote share with black people, Hispanic people, Asian people. And in every single midterm and general election since 2016, Democrats have continued to see attrition with non-white voters.

But again, this has been very tough. And in 2020, the reason Joe Biden won was because of shifts among whites towards the Democratic Party, specifically white men. Joe Biden won in 2020 because of white men. Now, this is the thing that, again, within the dominant frameworks of a lot of these disciplines, it’s just really hard for them to even see, let alone process and talk about these findings, even though they’re kind of blindingly obvious.

Last example I’ll give, you see the same kind of thing in gender. So if you’re doing political analysis for why an election went the way it did, here’s a pro tip. Look at women. Women are a larger share of the baseline adult population. They’re also registered to vote at higher levels than men, and this has been the case for decades now. And among registered voters, they turn out to vote at higher levels than men, which is what this chart visualizes. So the total adult population is already skewed towards women. The electorate is even more skewed towards women. What this means is, if you want to understand any electoral outcome, women’s votes matter more than men’s.

But when you look at what you would think, for instance, in this last election, when you had a female candidate who stood to be America’s first female president on the ballot, you might think especially in this kind of a race, like in 2016 or 2024, it would be important to look at how women exercise their agency. That is not, for the most part, what people who study politics decided to do. Instead, the narratives are all about men and misogyny and so on, even though, again, Trump didn’t perform exceptionally well with men, but Kamala did perform really poorly with women. The only Democrat who got a worse vote share than Kamala Harris with women, you’d have to go back decades to go to John Kerry in 2004. Incidentally, the first person I ever voted for, ugh. A really ill-fated campaign.

But the reason Kamala lost was because she did poorly with women. Her vote share with men was actually comparable to a lot of other Democratic nominees. She didn’t do poorly with men. The reason she lost was because she did do poorly with women. But even a lot of ostensibly feminist scholarship declines to look at how women exercise their agency. And this is especially true if they’re trying to explain something they think of as bad. So most scholars think that Trump’s election was bad. We think that women are good, so we just don’t design studies that look at how good people created bad things, how women could have been responsible for Trump’s election.

We can see all of these trends simultaneously in this chart. So the study is restricted explicitly to whites. So when he’s looking at differences between Democrats and Republicans and this endorsement of symbolic racism, it’s just white voters he’s analyzing. He just conveniently ignores non-white voters. Even though both partisans, both Democrats and Republicans, it’s a five-point scale of symbolic racism, you would be hard pressed to know that because he truncated the Y-axis, which makes the lines look bigger than they are. In reality, for the whole time series, both Democrats and Republicans are both above the midpoint of this five-point scale. Which is to say, a way of understanding this data would be that both Democrats and Republicans are motivated by racism. If you wanted to have this kind of unfavorable, uncharitable analysis of the trend lines here, since both of them are above the midpoint of the racism scale, you could argue, hey, Democrats and Republicans are both motivated by racism, but Democrats in 2016 were moderately less motivated by racism and certainly less than they have been in the past, or something like that.

In any event, so you have this truncated Y-axis which creates the illusion of more difference between the parties than there actually is. And the data is analyzed as if the red line and the blue line people just have radically different motives. The red line people are motivated by racism, the blue line people are presumably, well, we don’t actually get into their motives, but the assumption is they’re motivated by good things, they know about the issues, they care about America or whatever. And this is just kind of a broad pattern you see.

One thing I’ll just note, if you continue this time series through 2024, it gets pretty interesting. So Republicans continue, you continue to see these declines in racist attitudes among Republicans, which is to say the whole time Trump’s been in office, in fact, the whole time Trump’s been part of public life, Republicans have been growing less and less racist. It’s not the news that you would get. But since 2020, the gaps between the Democrats and Republicans have begun to shrink. So the distance between them has grown smaller. This is for two reasons. It’s both because the Republicans continue to grow less racist, but the blue line is also converging again, back to this moderating. So if you were going to analyze this chart in the uncharitable way that the initial chart was analyzed, how you would analyze this is that Democrats have become more racist in recent years. So Democrats grew more racist between 2020 and 2024 with Kamala on the ballot. But that is absolutely not the way that they would interpret that coefficient.

You can see this kind of thing in chart after chart after chart about polarization. So Leonardo Soares and Baekkwan Park had this great study in the Journal of Politics where they looked at issues where Democrats and Republicans have grown further apart over the years. What they find is that in most issues where Democrats and Republicans have grown further apart, Democrats have been the one driving the change. They’ve shifted more. Pew, similarly, looked at all the issues where Democrats and Republicans have grown further apart from 2003 to 2023 and who shifted more. What you can see is that on the vast majority of issues upon which Democrats and Republicans have grown further apart, the reason they’ve grown further apart is because Democrats shifted significantly, with a small number of exceptions. But again, the vast majority of discourse that you’ll see in journalism or academia about growing polarization is focused on Republicans and starts from the premise that Republicans have lost their ever-loving minds.

More to the point of what we’re doing here in higher ed, if you look at public trust in the scientific community. So this is a famous study in one of the top sociology journals by Gordon Gauchat. What he’s trying to answer in this study is, if you look at the beginning of this time series, this line, conservatives, this kind of square line, conservatives are technically the most trusting of the scientific community at the beginning of the time series. It’s actually a statistically insignificant difference between the progressives and conservatives, but whatever. Let’s just say they’re the most supportive, and by the end of the time series, they’re the least supportive. And so he’s trying to understand why that is. Fine thing to study. But one thing that’s interesting is that if you look at the whole time series, at the beginning, conservatives and liberals are kind of pretty close together. Conservatives continue on this same trajectory of consistent declines that they were on over the course of the whole time series. But starting in the mid-90s, Democrats go from trending with conservatives to just abruptly shifting the other way and becoming more and more trusting of the scientific community, to the point where at the end of the time series, they’re just floating off in space.

It’s not the case that conservatives are here and the rest of the independents are somewhere in the middle and progressives are over here. The objectively weird line when you look at this chart is actually the liberal line. It’s just floating off in space. Conservatives and moderates are actually very close together and trending in much the same direction since the mid-90s. But you have this really unusual divergence, both a divergence from their previous trend and a divergence relative to everyone else in America, not just conservatives. But we don’t design studies going, “Why are liberals so credulous about the scientific community?” In fact, when we design studies, we just grant it that Americans should trust the scientific community, that if anything, the levels of trust should be somewhere way above the chart, and that anything below 100% acceptance is some kind of pathology that needs to be explained. And so we don’t even really design studies asking why are liberals so extremely credulous about the scientific community? But if we want to understand polarization around science, who it is that’s diverging the most from the rest of America, again, not just from the out party, but even from moderates or middle people, it’s actually this line. This is the weird line on the chart.

And you see the same thing, liberals, moderates, conservatives, if you switch it to analyzing Democrats, Republicans, independents, you see the exact same trend. In fact, this time series continues it. That one ends in 2010. This continues it to 2020. You can see that Democrats and Republicans are even further apart in their trust in the scientific community. But again, who’s driving the polarization? What you can see is that the blue line started polarizing first and way more, such that the gap between the Democrats and Republicans is certainly bigger than it’s ever been before, but it’s being driven largely by this shift in the blue line. And to the point where the Democrats are very far apart from independents, much further from independents than Republicans are. And you see the same trend, Republicans consistent line, Democrats starting in the mid-90s, this abrupt positive shift that then goes like into the stratosphere.

If you look at what is this chart trying to explain, what is the article that this is from trying to explain: why being anti-science is the new part of many rural Americans, read Republicans’, identity. So you have this kind of extreme hockey stick on the blue line, and it’s just unanalyzed. We just don’t go, well, why are Democrats so extremely trusting of the scientific community? It’s just not a thing that we really analyze that much. And the thing about that that’s so weird to me is that mistrust of experts is actually kind of easy to explain. As my colleague Gil Eyal in his book The Crisis of Expertise, it’s actually not a really tough puzzle about why people might be skeptical of experts. Experts make claims that you can’t verify. They’re wrong about stuff a lot, and when they’re wrong, they rarely pay the cost. Other people pay the cost for their errors. Experts are often very sociologically distant from the people that they’re making demands of. So they’re telling you to close your schools and keep your kids home, but they’re people who are not like you. They don’t live in your communities. They don’t share your demographic characteristics. They don’t share your class background. They don’t share your worldviews and life experiences. So there’s these distant people that are making demands of you. They often behave in ways that other people view as untrustworthy or weird, and they often have a different understanding of what your best interests are than you do. So when you have that kind of a situation, it’s really not a puzzle to figure out, well, why would people be skeptical of experts? It’s actually not that big of a puzzle.

What’s really interesting is that despite all of this, people often do follow expert advice. Most people vaccinate their children, for instance. And this is actually a more interesting sociological puzzle, that’s why despite all of this, people actually do defer largely to expert advice. But again, we don’t actually study that side of the equation as much, because a lot of us start from the premise that people should trust experts, and then try to explain why they don’t, usually by appeal to some kind of deficit or pathology. They’re brainwashed, they’re ignorant, and so on.

One thing that’s critical to note about those charts, by the way, is that what they’re measuring, both of those, we’re looking at trust in the scientific community, which is very different from public perceptions about science per se. In terms of science per se, you actually see almost no change in public attitudes about science per se from decades ago to the present. So this chart visualizes whether or not Americans think that the benefits of science outweigh the risks and costs. You can see a pretty static line from 1979 through 2018, basically no change in the green line. It’s a pretty overwhelming majority that believes that the benefits outweigh the costs. If you look at trust in American institutions, trust in science per se, basically a flat line, even as a lot of other institutions have seen a decline. So where you see a decline in these previous charts isn’t people who don’t trust science, but people who don’t trust the scientific community, which is the people speaking on behalf of what the science says, the experts. And that’s an important distinction to draw. A lot of us don’t attend to that distinction very much. And so we look at charts that show declining trust in scientists and interpret that as declining trust in science, which is a convenient conflation for us to make, because then it makes it easier for us to portray people who are skeptical of things we’re claiming as being rooted in some kind of irrationality, ignorance, and other pathologies. But that’s actually not what you see in public opinion trends. What you don’t see is growing distrust about science per se. It’s trust in scientists.

And part of the reason why trust in scientists might have declined is because scientists were engaging in a lot of behaviors that people found strange. So one of the things I’ve shown in my own research, analyzing tens of millions of academic research papers, starting after 2010, there was a rapid change in how scientists went about their business, like the themes that they wanted to study, how they talked about social issues. Institutions that host scientists, universities are the main place where scientists are hosted today, were riven by all sorts of wild conflicts. So if you look at cancel culture incidents after 2020, you see this kind of rapid spike and then eventually a peak. And as I’ve argued in other places, we seem to have passed kind of a peak woke, the kind of peak period of this contestation. A lot of scientific organizations explicitly oriented themselves towards politics and morality. Quick example: shortly after Trump was elected, there was a March for Science, and the literal structure of it was that a bunch of scientists, often wearing white coats and stuff, basically declaring that we have science over here, Trump over here, and you have to choose which one do you support. And so if you’re a conservative or a Republican, the implicit choice given to you is, you want to basically abandon all of your moral and political commitments in order to embrace science, or you’re going to be more skeptical of scientists and keep your moral and political commitments. If that’s the choice that people are faced with, how that resolves itself should be pretty clear.

In fact, if it’s not clear, a political scientist, Matt Motta, did a great study looking at the effects of the March for Science. Given that people broadly trust science, and before a lot of these kinds of attitudes and behaviors in universities really took off, people also trusted scientists broadly. What he was curious about is, since scientists and science are so popular, and Trump, on the other hand, was a polarizing and unpopular figure, maybe the March for Science would make people like Trump less, like scientists more. What was the effect? What he found is that the main effect of the March for Science is that it caused people to trust scientists less. And this was not without consequence, because scientists engaged in this highly polarizing set of activities right before the onset of a major global pandemic, where trust in science was actually important and highly consequential. Another way of saying this is that there might be people who are dead today who would have been alive if scientists hadn’t engaged in this kind of highly polarizing activity. If we think the work that we do is important, if we think the work that we do matters, then how we conduct ourselves matters.

The press, last thing I’ll say about this, you see a similar kind of trend. So I’m a journalism professor, so I got to talk about the press. But you see the same kind of thing you see for trust in science. If you look at the red line, a very consistent kind of path, nothing really changes in the overall trajectory. Independents, which broadly trend with Republicans for most of the time series. Starting in the mid-90s, Democrats are trending with everyone else, and then starting in the mid-90s, they shift in the other direction in a way that puts them increasingly out of step with everyone else. And then again, after 2016, such that the blue line is just floating off in space, much further from independents than Republicans are. But again, we don’t ask, well, why are Democrats so extremely credulous about mainstream media? Why is it that they’re so unusually, wildly trusting of the press? Because again, we just start from the assumption that actually it should be 100% of the people who trust the press, and any divergence from what we think people should be doing, we explain in terms of deficits and pathologies. And we just focus on the red line and the declines and appeal to things like misinformation, the Koch brothers, Trump and whatever. But if we actually want to understand polarization in the media, it’s actually important to attend to both sides of the line, especially the line that’s shifting more.

And again, if we want to understand why it is that people have started to gain suspicion about the media, this is actually not that hard to explain. So as I’ve shown in my research, analyzing tens of millions of articles in the New York Times and looking at TV coverage of different presidents, for instance, what you can see is that the way that the media covered Trump even before he was president was radically unlike any other political figure in modern history. They talked about him way more than America’s first black president, than any other president who’s ever been considered. Almost all of this coverage was extremely negative. And even after Trump was out of office, into 2022 when Joe Biden was president, they still talked about Trump more than the sitting president. And then TV news, same thing. For most presidents, what you see is when they run for president, they get a spike in coverage, and then when they’re the sitting president, it goes down, but not as much as before they were the candidate. For Trump, not only was his objective level of coverage much higher than any other president on record, but it just stayed high. We basically have four straight years of campaign-level intensity television coverage of Trump to a degree that I think would surprise a lot of people. So in the New York Times, for instance, in that year, 2018, Trump was the number three most used word in the whole New York Times, if you exclude words like “but,” if you just look at substantive terms.

On average, every single — I had a corpus that included everything published by the New York Times: sports, foreign affairs, weather, arts, culture, anything that the New York Times published was in this corpus. And on average, anything published by the New York Times in 2018 directly mentioned Trump about three times, and then indirectly, Commander in Chief, White House, POTUS, another couple of times. Trump became the lens through which the New York Times interpreted reality. Almost any story that they talked about was talked about through the lens of Trump. Now this kind of behavior would again maybe cause a lot of people to go, huh, seems like something is weird with the New York Times.

And it’s not just with respect to Trump. So my colleague and I analyzed 27 million news articles from 47 media outlets over the last 50 years. And what we found is that starting after 2010, there was this rapid spike in discussion about prejudice and discrimination, all forms of prejudice and discrimination: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, just hockey sticks all at once in a way that didn’t seem to correspond with anything that was happening in the world with respect to those issues. It predated Black Lives Matter, it predated Me Too, and so on, and in fact might help explain why those movements were able to take off. All to say, the media was behaving in a genuinely unusual way, and that’s maybe reflected in public interpretations of journalists. And you see this kind of pattern, as I show in my book, this kind of pattern that you see in academia and media of this kind of rapid shift in how they operate. You see this in most other knowledge and culture industries: finance, human resources, and so on. You see similar kinds of trends.

In fact, I looked at identities, voting behavior, protests, outputs by companies, a whole bunch of other metrics. And you see over and over and over again this kind of hockey stick that’s driven by knowledge and culture professionals. That shift that we saw on the blue line, it wasn’t like most, like black Democrats, Democrats without degrees, they haven’t shifted much at all. The reason the hockey stick looks like that is because highly educated, relatively affluent urban and suburban white people, especially people tied to the knowledge and culture industries, just changed really, really, really rapidly. If you want to know why they did this, you should read my book.

But one thing that I’ll just note about the way that we analyze these trends is that a big problem for people figuring out what’s been going on is that the people who were undergoing these radical shifts were the same people who are producing almost all of the mainstream narratives about those shifts. As an example, for an essay I did for Heterodox Academy, I showed that if you look at the professoriate, professors are highly unrepresentative of the public at large along most dimensions, in terms of their class backgrounds, in terms of their religious leanings, in terms of their political leanings, in terms of their ethnic composition, in terms of their sexuality. They’re just wildly unrepresentative of the American public. This is a problem for a couple of reasons, but you have this kind of narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society that’s undergoing this rapid change and that notices a growing gap between them and other people. But how they interpret that gap is colored by who’s doing the narrative.

So you see the same thing with journalism. Journalists, like academics, are concentrated in very particular geographic regions. In terms of ethnicity, you see a lot more diversification in journalists, which is to say that now 18% of journalists are non-white. In terms of partisan affiliation, journalists went from being broadly representative of America as a whole to being 10 to 1 Democrat. And in fact, even a lot of people who self-identify as independent, if you actually analyze their voting behavior and their political lean, almost all of those people are also Democrat-voting liberals. In terms of class composition, in the 70s, most journalists had college degrees, but they had college degrees from a lot of different institutions and from a lot of different majors, and people entered journalism from a lot of different walks of life. Today, almost all journalists have college degrees, almost exclusively in journalism and communication. And as more and more people have had college degrees, where you get your degree from matters more and more in journalism, such that the New York Times has a higher concentration of Ivy League graduates than the US Senate and the Forbes 500 list. And this has important implications for how we tell stories. If we’re supposed to be holding the powerful to account, and the powerful people we’re supposed to be holding to account are our buddies from Columbia and our parents and our wives, we just cover the story a lot differently.

And so journalists and academics and other knowledge and culture professionals, we correctly perceive that the gap between us and huge swaths of the rest of America is growing. We mistakenly assume that the reason the gap is growing is because those people must be getting more radical, even to the point where we can produce work that clearly illustrates that we’re the ones who shifted, but we can just not see, we can literally not see our own data. So again, these very sophisticated, good social scientists produce charts that clearly, unmistakably show that the blue line shifted more and is driving polarization, and they couldn’t see the trend in their own data, and instead put forward articles arguing that the red line people are going crazy.

But it’s not just these individual scholars who missed it. That to me is not what’s most interesting. Any of us can have a brain fart. What’s interesting to me is that the peer reviewers couldn’t see obvious errors, and the editors couldn’t see this obvious problem. And the often data-sophisticated journalists who looked at these charts and circulated them and wrote articles praising them also couldn’t see the obvious problem. And the other scholars citing these studies couldn’t see the obvious problem. It’s right in front of people’s faces. And once you point it out, you can’t unsee it. I can’t show you that chart again and you not see that the blue line is driving the polarization. But until someone points it out, it’s really hard.

And this is not a problem, for the most part, of mustache-twirling villains who are willfully engaging in activist social science and misinformation. The problem is that institutions like higher ed and journalism are designed on the idea that we all have partial and situated knowledge, that we all have biases, we all have blind spots, we all are prone to error, we all have limits to our comprehension and our empathy and so on. But if you create institutions and processes that pull together people with different interests, different backgrounds, different values, then we can collectively correct each other’s errors and produce something that looks like reliable, objective, comprehensive truth. But these systems only work, systems like peer review, committee decision-making, they only work as intended when you actually do have people with diverse views and values and life experiences taking part in the scientific enterprise. When institutions are dominated by a narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society that largely shares a lot of interests, values, life experiences, risk exposures, and so on, then these same processes that are supposed to help correct our biases can reinforce them instead. It can make it harder for new ideas to break through, harder for dissent to occur, harder for innovation to occur. You can get reinforced groupthink. You can have misinformation cascades.

So this is not a problem of individual scholars who have some kind of deficit or pathology. I’m not just reversing the sign and pathologizing scholars. This is a structural issue and a collective action issue. So my next book, which is slated for publication with Princeton University Press, will explore the causes and the consequences of this growing social distance between us, professionals in the knowledge and culture industries, and huge swaths of the rest of society. What are the causes of this growing distance, what are the consequences of this growing distance? How does this distance interfere with our ability to understand other people and their attitudes and behaviors, and often lead people to misunderstand us and our institutions and communities as well?

Thank you for your time.

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University commencement ceremonies occupy a distinctive place in academic life. At once celebratory, ceremonial, aspirational, and institutional, they mark the culmination of years of study and the transition of students to the next stage of citizenship and professional life. At institutional events — organized, sponsored, and symbolically endorsed by schools and universities — speakers chosen to address graduates at commencements should respect the purpose of these events by not politicizing them.

Honoring this principle is increasingly important at a time when commencement speeches have often become platforms for commentary on divisive issues, partisan advocacy, or ideological signaling. Universities should resist this not because complex or controversial ideas are unwelcome in academic life — far from it.

They should insist on a depoliticized approach because commencement is a unique moment in university life. It is a time to honor the graduates while also celebrating the university as a special type of community, one in which people with diverse perspectives have come together for a period of years, to listen and to learn from their differences in the communal search for knowledge.

At commencement ceremonies, the institution is the host, and invited speakers communicate with the symbolic imprimatur of the institution. When speakers use this platform to advocate their own political preferences — whether on immigration, foreign policy, social justice, or politics — they are not simply expressing their personal views. Intentionally or not, they are attaching their views to the institution and, by extension, to the graduates. Disclaimers that the speaker’s views are solely their own don’t prevent the audience from perceiving the invitation itself as a form of endorsement.

That perception matters…

Continue reading at The Boston Globe

“Yale’s core mission is to create, disseminate, and preserve knowledge through research and teaching.”

That’s the new mission statement President Maurie McInnis recently made official and the first obvious policy change since the faculty-led Yale Report came out last month. Gone are references to “improving the world,” educating “aspiring leaders worldwide who serve all sectors of society,” and carrying out that mission through a “diverse” community.

The change was explicitly recommended by the Yale Committee on Trust, which declared, “At a moment when higher education is being buffeted from all sides, it is imperative to understand what we are here for and what universities do best. That requires clarity, not diffusion, of purpose.”

In light of Yale’s revised mission, some are calling foul, arguing that Yale’s mission has been “narrowed” or “shrunk.” HxA member and Wesleyan President Michael Roth argued in the New York Times that Yale’s new mission is merely a “defense strategy” against the Trump administration, claiming that “the retreat from public purpose will not enhance trust; it will further erode it.”

McInnis says she (and the Yale Committee on Trust) simply “reaffirmed” Yale’s “core” mission, which always has a public purpose: “Our university’s purpose is found in our teaching, scholarship, and research, which contribute knowledge and breakthroughs to society and affirm the tangible connection between our efforts and the everyday lives of people across the nation and the world.”

An underlying question in all of this is what a mission statement even is, and what it should be. Depending on whom you ask, mission statements guide decision-making, define academic function, articulate community values, or amount to little more than corporate window dressing. Adding to the murkiness, it seems that “mission,” “purpose,” “goals,” or “function” are all distinct concepts, except when they’re not.

Responding to Yale’s change in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Brian Soucek argues that it is generic, and should instead be unique to Yale. In focusing on what universities in general should be, the committee “mistake[s] necessary conditions — universities’ defining commitment to teaching and research — for mission statements, which are meant to reflect the unique character and aspirations of a particular university.”

Whether those necessary conditions are in place, at Yale and elsewhere, is the question of the moment. Perhaps this isn’t even a mission, but rather a recognition of the core academic function of the university that needs to be explicitly named as a north star. Everything else, as I’ve written before, is superfluous to what a university actually is. Without the knowledge function, a college or university of any kind is not what it claims to be.

Affirming a “core” mission of a university seems vital for reform because everything seems to stem from the university’s purpose, and university presidents are now being more vocal about this. Dartmouth President Sian Beilock stated in an interview recently, “The only way I know how to make decisions is to be very clear about what our mission is.”

But even if we could agree on the need to name the “core,” how far should a mission extend beyond this core function? This question is the crux of most debates over policies such as institutional neutrality or others that are at least in part conditional on what a university’s mission is. Even Yale’s new mission statement webpage reflects this plurality of mission breadth and purpose. Although the university’s formal statement is focused on the core academic function, new sections for its various colleges and schools now state their respective, specialized missions.

The relative novelty of university mission statements contributes to some of this debate and semantic confusion. Yale did not adopt its first formal mission statement until the 1980s, when many universities were adopting this convention from the corporate business world (and accreditors began to require it). Today, nearly all universities have a mission statement, but until the 1980s, most universities simply relied on their charters to outline their purpose.

Mission statement or not, Yale’s own stated purposes have changed over the centuries, and often with national implications. The 1701 founding charter focused the college on arts and sciences in addition to its religious charge. This approach, including instruction in Greek and Latin, was defended in the highly influential Reports on the Course of Instruction in Yale College of 1828. Over the next century-plus, Yale transformed from a religious college to a secular German-style research university, adding some facets (like PhD programs) while dropping others (like compulsory chapel). Yale’s role as a bellwether for academia was deepened by the critiques of recent graduate William F. Buckley in his 1951 bestseller, God and Man at Yale.

Along with most other universities, Yale established a contemporary mission statement in the 1980s that was then expanded in 2016 by President Peter Salovey at a time in the academy when one particular vision of social justice was creeping into university missions. It referred to “improving the world today” and fostering “an ethical, interdependent, and diverse community.” Supporters saw the wave of mission statements like this as a sign of universities taking social responsibility, but critics saw politicization and mission creep. This sector-wide change is often linked to plummeting public trust in universities. In a provocative interview in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Harvard “gadfly” Harvey C. Mansfield argues that this was a mistake: “In the university, you are not just a part of society. You rise above it, and you consider questions that partisans don’t.”

Could a higher education mission shift, following Yale’s lead, be the start of a move away from overt political posturing, redirecting more attention to the work of scholarship? Maybe. HxA member Martha McCaughey elegantly argued for “scholar-optimism” in inquisitive, saying that “Of course, politics and scholarship can never be completely separated. But striving to keep them separated — even when studying pressing social and political issues — is central to a scholar’s intellectual autonomy.”

Those of us who welcome Yale’s new mission statement cannot write off the previous version as a break from historical tradition. Debating and re-stating the purpose of higher education is the historical tradition. And as a tool from 1980s corporate culture, the mission statement per se is hardly sacred. But at a time when U.S. higher education is publicly grappling with its social role and reputation, affirming the core academic function — whether it’s called a “mission,” “purpose,” “goal,” or otherwise — seems essential to restoring trust.

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The concept of trust is front and center in contemporary discussions about the crisis in higher education. Hardly a week goes by without someone flagging the Gallup poll showing that trust in higher education is at or near an all-time low. In response, universities are taking action. Recent reports like the ones out of Yale and Harvard Universities are pitched as solutions to the growing trust deficit. Yet some critics of this work insist that it’s not a breach of trust for universities to expand their mission and even that “trust is not an academic value.” Higher ed reformers are tilting at windmills.

To see who’s right, we need to disambiguate two different questions about trust in higher education. The first is empirical: Why has trust in higher education cratered over the last decade? No doubt the answer to this question is complicated. The causal factors behind the trust deficit are likely to be many and varied. We should look to the social sciences to help untangle them.

None of this complexity should have any bearing on the second question about trust. This question is not empirical but normative: Is the reduction in trust reasonable? Answering this second question requires us to go beyond social science to ask whether trust is an academic value and about the conditions under which that trust is properly earned.

I will offer an answer to the second question. Trust is an academic value. It’s an essential feature of our division of epistemic labor and something that will be either earned or squandered by institutions of higher education. While I’m less confident about the causal drivers of the recent trust gap, I’m far more confident that it is rational for people to trust universities less than they did 20 years ago.

Two Types of Trust

There are no doubt many different conceptualizations of trust, but two in particular are relevant for higher education: epistemic trust and social trust…

Continue reading at Inside Higher Ed

I was asked to give a keynote to kind of start us off together. And I thought what I wanted to do is really to give you a little bit of a sense for how I see the whole landscape, how all these different things hang together. And then we have a little bit of time for discussion afterwards as well.

So, I’d like to focus on three perspectives on the current state of free speech, viewpoint diversity, and open inquiry on campus. I want to first talk about progress. I want to talk about principle, and then I want to talk about politics.

So, let me start with progress. I know that many of us are here because we have been at this for a long time, and it can sometimes be a lonely and frustrating task. But we should not forget the progress that has been made.

Before I was at Vanderbilt, I was a provost at University of Chicago. And before that, I was dean. So I have been in this business of university leadership now since 2014. And I have to say that, when you look back, there’s a lot of things that have been accomplished. And so I’m going to tell the story in a couple of chapters.

The first chapter that I would say was really the free speech crisis on campuses. So those were the days when speakers were shouted down. Those were the days of — you remember the Halloween costume controversy at Yale? Those were the times of speech codes and so forth, of disinviting speakers. And when you look at that one aspect, I think we’re in better shape. I think it is difficult to argue that there hasn’t been progress in this area. There used to be times — and you remember this, I remember this — when all it took was kind of like a letter by students that objected to a particular speaker, and the speaker was disinvited. That is not the case right now.

And I think the model that proved successful there was a clear statement of principles. And my old employer, the University of Chicago, I think played a very important role in that with the Chicago Principles, the Stone Report. And then also some pressure. And I think the pressure came with you, Heterodox Academy, but also FIRE, I think, played a very important role on that, to just kind of emphasize the importance of these principles and then to call strikes a strike, and balls, balls, and that created, I think, a momentum towards what I think now is a better free speech culture on campus, at least when we’re thinking about this specific aspect. And the fundamental controversy was over bringing controversial speakers on campus, but there was a whole variety of other things like that, but my sense is overall, there was progress. There has been progress, and we should not forget that.

Second progress, institutional neutrality. So this is something that I have been a vocal proponent for over the last four years. Institutional neutrality, of course, is the principle that universities should not take positions on issues that do not directly and materially affect the core purpose of the university. When I started talking about this, this was about four and a half years ago, there were like a handful of universities that had committed to institutional neutrality. University of Chicago was one of them. Vanderbilt had it actually since the 60s. A few more. Now we have over 140 universities that have subscribed to that. Now, not always exactly how I would do it, and not always all the way. But again, I would look at that as progress.

And then I think this is a bigger debate, and I’m just going to kind of talk about it in passing. But there’s a whole, of course, discussion about DEI. We’ve had a variety of things that I think were very problematic. For our friends at Stanford, remember the speech codes? We couldn’t call a master server a master server anymore. There were the whole things on microaggressions, end, end, end. Again, I would say we’re in better shape here. Now, this is a complicated issue because there are legal issues. There’s, of course, the Harvard decision. There’s all sorts of legal actions by the federal government right now, which is worth a whole other conference. But again, I would say that there has been progress.

So on these areas, we look back, things have moved in the right direction. Now, to me, the underlying challenge there, or the underlying principle, is really a principle of politicization of the university. That’s the way I think about it, is that we’ve moved away from the core purpose of the university and that this politicization of the university has manifested itself in these different ways, in attacks on free speech, in the desire for universities to take positions on political and policy issues that had nothing to do with the university, and then also, of course, with respect to the kind of more radical variants of DEI.

Now, we like to say that at Vanderbilt we call this proud but not satisfied. So we should not forget the progress. But now we’re adding and we’re going into a new chapter, which is going to require even more thought. And this is really about — it goes to the very core of what university is all about. And the question now is what happens in the classrooms and what happens in the research enterprise? What type of — how are curricula structured? What do students learn? And then how do we think about certain fields? How do we think about the questions that are asked? How do we talk about publication? How do we talk about funding? How do we talk about tenure and promotion and so forth? I will have a lot to say on that.

But of course, what makes this so tricky and complicated is that this touches, in contrast to some of the other issues before, on core questions of academic freedom. So it was easy to have when the debate was about which speakers could come to campus, or even institutional neutrality. Now we’re talking about what happens in the classroom, how do we think about research, how do we think about research standards. And that is a different level of challenges. But we need to, I think, together and as a community of scholars, tackle those issues as well with the same level of courage and clarity that we’ve tackled the other ones.

So that’s part one, progress.

Number two, principles. All these things, at the end of the day, have to be rooted in a clear understanding of what is the purpose of the university. And in some way or another, every one of these three or four chapters are really intimately connected with that question. And people have different points of view on that.

My point of view is — I’ve said this many times, and I think it’s very important to be clear about that — the purpose of the university for me is pathbreaking research and transformative education. Full stop. So universities are not political parties, and they are not members of political movements. Their goal is the production of knowledge, seeking truth and insights, and then conveying them to publications and teaching. That’s what we do.

Once you believe that, a lot of things follow. And we can have debates exactly what follows and how. But if we don’t agree on that, it’s difficult to have discussions really about what should happen in the classroom, because then we just have a completely different point of view of what university should be. There should be no mistake about it that many faculty and students and some administrators do not agree with that. They agree that they would argue that the university has a particular social purpose or political purpose and that that particular purpose needs to be advanced in a particular way.

So my premise is that’s the purpose. That’s what we’re doing. And everything that we should do needs to be tightly connected to the purpose of pathbreaking research or transformative education.

So now let’s talk about a couple of principles that I think sometimes get kind of muddled up. So number one is the principle of free speech. Of course, that was clearly expressed in the Chicago principles. And it is usually understood either as a direct manifestation of the First Amendment in public universities, like Berkeley, or private universities are basically saying, we’re guided by the First Amendment. We’re going to follow the normative structure of the First Amendment to the extent that we can as private universities. But I think what’s not so clear is why is that? So it’s a little bit like people take these constraints as a given because we kind of have to. But why is it really critical to be consistent and abide by the First Amendment? I’m going to put this aside for a second because it’s really important to come back to that and to be crystal clear about this. Because it is a different concept than academic freedom. And I think these things sometimes get muddled up. But they shouldn’t be muddled up. We need to be clear about this.

The concept of academic freedom, of course, for those of you that have looked into this in a little bit more detail, originates with the great German research university, with Wilhelm von Humboldt and the creation of the University of Berlin in 1810. And the German concept of academic freedom that really is rooted in an Enlightenment philosophy, if you will, and by the way, now I’m on this tangent, right? It’s very much worthwhile to read Immanuel Kant’s wonderful essay, What is Enlightenment? The German word is Aufklärung, which is even better. It’s making things clear. Making things clear, like in a wonderful way to think about it. And the last line that he says, it said, “What should be the motto of the Enlightenment? Have the courage to use reason, your reason.” And then he says, therefore, sapere aude, dare to think, should be the motto of the Enlightenment.

So thinking for ourselves was then translated into two principles, or pillars, if you will, what the Germans call Lehrfreiheit, the freedom to teach and to do research, and Lernfreiheit, which was the freedom to learn. So there was one for faculty and one for students. Now, that was the key concept of academic freedom in the German university. And what’s so remarkable and amazing is that this thrived, and the German universities became the model for the American research university, of course, within an authoritarian structure. So this was like the Prussian and then later the German Empire, authoritarian state, but the universities had these privileges. They then moved over to the United States. But the teaching, the student side, the kind of freedom to learn, played no role. And they were translated into a more kind of philosophical context of pragmatism. John Dewey played a really important role in defining the modern American concept of academic freedom. But there were, if you will, there were echoes or influences from the German model, but it’s not the same.

The fundamental or the foundational document of that, of course, is the AAUP 1915 Declaration of Academic Freedom. And philosophically, it grounds academic freedom in the social purpose of the universities, meaning that path-breaking research, discovery, insights, innovations are very useful for society, both for technological progress, but also to have a more enlightened public discourse. Therefore, we need to give faculty the autonomy to do research as they see fit and to teach as they see fit. That’s the fundamental.

So notice the grounding of academic freedom in specialized knowledge, in scholarly expertise. This is critical. It became, of course, foundational for the American research university, but it is not the same thing as free speech. So academic freedom is a privilege that faculty have. It is explicitly defined as something that distinguishes faculty from everybody else. And it comes with the responsibility, and it’s grounded in a specific purpose.

So to give you an example, let’s say you have two graduates from an economics department. They both get a PhD. One of them works for Goldman Sachs. The other one goes to work for Berkeley’s economics department. If that person works for Goldman Sachs, the supervisor will say something like this: “Slide five on your slide deck has to go, and I want you to work on this project and not that one.” That would be a violation of academic freedom in every university. So it’s not a universal right, like free speech protection, but it is something that is a privilege that is given to faculty grounded in the idea of scholarly expertise. So that’s a very important thing to keep in mind as we’re thinking about what the challenges are and how viewpoint diversity kind of connects with them.

Third principle, institutional neutrality. I talked about it. A surprisingly difficult concept for people to grasp. It gets confused all the time. It doesn’t mean the university is value neutral. I just told you what the values and the purpose of the university is. But they are not values that are about political position taking on issues that are not directly connected to the purpose. So put it differently, at Vanderbilt, where we have been committed to the principle of institutional neutrality, we will not take positions on foreign policy issues, but we will take positions on research funding or financial aid for students or any aspect that is critical for the research university to thrive. So it’s a question about domains. Are you in? Are you out? And of course, there will be boundary cases. But for every concept, there are boundary cases. And that’s why we have law schools. It’s not the only reason we have law schools, but that’s what we do in law schools. We try to figure out exactly does this principle apply or not.

So that’s institutional neutrality; let me talk a little bit about viewpoint diversity. So, I am super sympathetic about everything we can do to sharpen and strengthen the purpose of the university. I am not 100% sure, and I need to be convinced, that the concept of viewpoint diversity is exactly the right cure. And the reason why is that — and you know this from critics of viewpoint diversity — is that, well, what is that? What do you mean? You want to have people that support Phlogiston’s theory in chemistry now as part of viewpoint diversity. So viewpoint diversity, I think, if that’s what we’re going to bet on, needs to be sharpened a little bit, needs to be clarified a little bit. It’s not just about a pluralism of opinion, another concept I think that’s overused a little bit.

And of course, we all know where this comes from. It comes from the areas of the university where the university is engaged in the business of society reflecting upon itself. Those are things like the humanities, qualitative social sciences, law schools, where we have different intellectual traditions, and these intellectual traditions are fundamental and foundational to the field. But how exactly does this work when we’re thinking about social work or clinical psychology or places like that? It doesn’t travel so easily.

So my sense is that the deeper problem is really something else. And that problem manifests itself in a lack of viewpoint diversity in certain fields. From my point of view, the fundamental problem is the erosion or subordination of scholarly standards under a political agenda or ideology. That’s not the same.

So what I mean by that is that we are seeing now in a variety of different fields where faculty, scholars, are arguing and acting in a way that the fundamental scholarly standards that we have taken for granted should be subordinated to political or social goals. That, to me, is the fundamental problem. And then that can show up in a suppression of viewpoint diversity, but it shows up in many, in a variety of other ways as well.

So what’s the evidence for that? Where do we see this? I think you have John Shields on a panel tomorrow, so I’m sure he’s going to talk about his paper on undergraduate syllabi. So I’m not going to kind of steal his thunder there. But the one way in which this can show up is that you have a field where there are, within the scholarly literature, completely legitimate different positions. But one of them is taught, the other one is not. In undergraduate, for example, in undergraduate syllabus. Now, that is not doing your job as a teacher, as an educator. Because if these positions are relevant to grasp the material, they need to be in the syllabus. And if they’re not in the syllabus because they’re not in alignment with a preferred political position, that faculty member is not doing his or her job.

There are other aspects of this. There are real worrisome tendencies in multiple fields where there is basically a suppression of questions being asked, that certain questions cannot be asked, that their papers cannot be published, that book contracts are revoked, that papers are rejected not because they are not methodologically sound, but because we don’t like the outcomes or the conclusions. Prizes are given not to the best work, but because it’s in alignment with a particular point of view. That’s what I mean by the erosion of scholarly standards or the subordination of scholarly standards on a particular ideology or social or political set of goals.

We always kind of had a sense that this was happening in fields. Many of us had experienced this personally. Now of course what we have with the advent of large language models, we now have the opportunity to look at this systematically. And the numbers and the data that we see and just the examples that we see are pretty striking. I’m going to just give you like three examples of that. One very specific, the other one more general.

Example number one is the emergence of calls to change our citation or publication practice. So some of you may remain familiar with the calls for advocacy of what’s called citation justice. So citation justice is now part of a variety of journals, and not only in the humanities, but in the sciences as well, that says in order to submit a paper, you need to cite a particular percentage, say 20% of your citations need to be by underrepresented scholars. Now citations, that’s kind of our currency, right? I mean, that’s how we look at which papers have impact or not, at least in a quantitative way. So that, to me, is an erosion of scholarly standards, because we’re now saying the job of citation is not necessarily to represent the relevant work, but to advance a particular group. Now that may be a fine goal, but it is not the way we typically think about, commonly think about scholarly standards.

The same is true about positioning statements. The positioning statement is the idea that the closer you are in your own identity to a particular set of questions, the more legitimacy or the more credibility your point of view should have. So they went, like, how proximate are you when you’re talking, for example, and describing in your work or having a point of view or doing research on a particular group? Again, clear violation of how we typically think about scholarly standards.

And then a particularly striking example was recently identified by Alex Byrne. Alex Byrne is a distinguished analytical philosopher at MIT, and he got interested in concepts related to gender. He wrote a book on that, and he made the following observation in a recent article. It came out last year. The observation was basically the following. He said, look, every year we have a thousand papers in philosophy on abortion, pro or con. It is a vibrant and well-established field of ethics or bioethics or medical ethics or applied ethics, however you want to think about it. There are hardly any papers, philosophical papers, on trans. Now, it’s full of great philosophical questions, moral questions, right? Particularly if you think about care for transgender youth, gender-affirming care and so forth, a big debate on that. There was a big debate in the UK, the CASS report and all of that. What’s the philosophy, what’s the philosophical question of that? How do we think about benefits or costs or risks? Great question. Mind-body problem? Great question. Questions of identity of concepts. And no papers.

And then he points out, kind of painstakingly, it’s like the way particular questions now in philosophy are being suppressed. And the way it works is just by asking a question, you’re being attacked, you’re being called names, students are being discouraged, papers are being — there’s lists of people saying, “Oh my God, you can’t publish this, you can’t publish that.” Those questions are not being asked. And they’re not being asked not because there’s something wrong methodologically or from a scholarly standards point of view, but because they touch a raw nerve with respect to a particular point of view, again, that point of view may be very justified, but it is non-epistemic. So the problem is basically is we’re bringing non-epistemic reasons in there to criticize, suppress, or prevent a particular dialogue from happening, and that’s the problem.

So in certain fields that manifest itself as viewpoint diversity issues, especially in the social sciences or in certain parts of the humanities or law schools, but the problem I think is much deeper, and it is not confined just to the humanities, it’s not confined just to the social sciences. You’ll see it now, particularly in publication practices in fields like medicine, public health, the sciences as well.

So that’s the question of principles. So I think what we are called up to do now is to do the hard work of having debates about that, naming these things, putting them on the agenda, and then asking ourselves, how do we deal with these issues and with these manifestations while staying within the framework of academic freedom? That’s the question. That’s a hard problem, but it’s a very important problem, a very important process that we have to engage in.

And just from a pragmatic point of view, which brings me to my last part of my triad, which is politics, is what you’re seeing right now in some of the policies that are being passed in red state public universities, like Texas or Texas A&M. Particularly Texas A&M probably had the most dramatic examples of that, most controversial ones. You now see state legislatures directly interfering with what happens in the classroom. So we are now in a battle about how do we think about the politicization of disciplines or scholarship inside the classroom or inside the research practice. And we better have a clear, well-reasoned point of view on that and a clear idea about what we’re going to do about it within the context of how we typically think about academic freedom, which is a foundational principle, of course, of the modern research university.

Politics. I think it is a little bit of a temptation of scholars, because that’s what scholarly life is, is to focus exclusively on getting the argument right. That’s what we do every day. We write a great paper and the world is different. But when you look a little bit in how these things changed over time, going back to my four chapters, getting the principles right was number one. That is essential. Without having clarity on free speech or academic freedom or institutional neutrality, you cannot really have progress. As a matter of fact, it’s even problematic because we may then be led to policy solutions that are not working, may even make things worse. So getting that clarifier and doing the hard conceptual work of being really clear about this is really important. And I’ve been a big proponent of institutional neutrality, and it bothers me how that concept is often misunderstood or misused for interfering directly with academic freedom, which really has absolutely nothing to do with it.

So getting the concepts right is number one. It’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Every time we’ve really seen significant change, in addition to getting the concepts right, there was the need to organize and put some pressure. I mentioned FIRE, I mentioned Heterodox Academy. Of course, in the case of institutional neutrality, it was the aftermath of October 7th, the outrage that we’ve seen by many board members, by the public, by alums and so forth, that pressured universities and university presidents to take action accordingly. And they did.

Now, why is that important? When you’re a president or chancellor, you have to remember that most chancellors or most presidents have a particular idea on what they want to do with their presidency. They may be engineers by background, and their goal may be to build a local innovation center or to advance their standing at quantum or AI or whatever it is. Whatever academic goals they have are often driven by the academic needs and academic agenda of the specific university. Most of them have no interest and really no expertise of dealing with the whole politicization of the university. So when they get pressured by faculty members, often their instinct is, how do I kind of get through this? Because I really want to get back to what I’m doing most of the time. So we have to understand a little bit, what’s the political economy of the university to understand how change can happen effectively?

So this is my own very non-scientific assessment of that. It may create some controversy. We’ll see. My sense is that 85% of our faculty are people that want to do their work. And if you’re a biochemist, what you want to do is you want to be in the lab 14 hours a day and be left alone. That is what most faculty want, to do their work, in the area that they’re excited about and where their scholarship is located. They may, when you look at politically where they’re standing, they may be drifting to the left. And there’s plenty of evidence for that. But whether they vote for Clinton or they vote for Trump is not essential to their identity. Their identity is their scholars. They want to be biochemists, they want to be mechanical engineers, they want to be physicists. And when they go out as citizens, they do whatever they do. But their number one commitment is to the science, is to their academic mission.

And then there’s a smaller group, and it varies by university to university. At Vanderbilt, it’s pretty small. At Columbia, it’s bigger. Of scholars, of faculty, for whom their political commitments are essential to who they are as scholars and as educators. And that group tends to be overrepresented. They’re almost all of them on the left. And their point of view is that the university and any other institution in society, democracy, rule of law, markets, firms, whatever it is, are nothing else but manifestations of an underlying power structure characterized by an oppressor or oppressed scheme. And then there are different points of view who occupies that scheme. Is it based on class? Is it based on race? Is it based on gender? And now, of course, decolonization plays an important role in that. Their point of view is that society as we see it is fundamentally structured in an unjust fashion and needs to be transformed. And very importantly, it’s not only the typical ways in which we think about power and oppression, but the subtle ways, imagination, knowledge production. That’s an important thing, of course, that when you look back to places like the Frankfurt School, or Gramsci, and then later Foucault, that play an important role of that. It’s not only the direct ways that power manifests itself, but power is pervasive and hidden.

So as a consequence of that, that group of faculty have looked at their scholarship and their education as a manifestation of a political agenda. And they’re not shy of talking about it. They say it openly. They say it directly. They’re kind of like exhibit number one. It’s like anthropology, or the American Anthropological Association, which has on their website a statement that it is the professional standard for every anthropologist to put their research and teaching in service of dismantling the institution of colonization. That’s a political position. And putting your research and teaching in service of this goal is not the way we typically think about the mission of the university.

That group tends to be organized, motivated, and utterly critical to their identities as scholars is this particular project. And that’s fine unless it undermines scholarly standards, when questions are not asked, when research is suppressed, or when our teaching is not reflecting the real questions in the discipline.

So on the right, or on the kind of conservative right, or people that are more kind of classic liberals like John Stuart Mill types, there are some, but they tend to be isolated. They’re like a couple in the law school and three in the business school and one in economics and then there’s always a lonely historian. And they’re not organized. The group on the left is organized. They have often been able to take control of professional associations. So you hear the voices, the isolated voices on the right, but they’re not organized.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a president. The president wants to advance their agenda. Maybe that’s setting up an innovation center locally or being a leader in quantum, as I said before. And now every week you have to deal with another petition that’s coming from the kind of, I’m going to call it, the radical left. So what do people do? They muddle through. Because it’s painful to engage. It’s painful to push back. It will create controversy. I’ve done this many years, and I’ve had police protection, I’ve had people screaming at me. I’ve had complaints to the audit committee that I had a secret consulting agreement with Exxon. I’ve had complaints to the attorney general, and members of my board, the Jewish members of my board, being identified by name, where their kids go to school, what classes they take, and what their synagogues’ schedules are and where students were encouraged to say hello.

So that’s the reality if you push back as a leader or as a board member. So most people don’t do it. And so as a consequence of that, the universities are drifting. And it’s a little bit like a sailboat without a keel.

So when we see faculty getting together, getting organized, and providing a counterbalance to that, things change. Because now we have, as I said, we need the principles named, and we need to be able to be organized and have a clear point of view that is alternative to people that are already organized on the radical left. Without that, it won’t happen.

So the need for faculty like you to get involved, to get organized, to have clear principles, and to advocate them courageously is essential. Without that, it won’t happen.

So we’ve made great progress. We’ve made great progress on free speech, we’ve made great progress on free speech neutrality. Now we have to tackle the hardest problem of them all, which is the hard question of how do we think about the erosion of scholarly standards in parts of the academy. That’s the battle. That’s the question. That’s how we have to get engaged.

I’ve been personally involved with many of these gatherings. And we have a whole group of like 70 faculty that are really interested in this question. We just had our first meeting of this group in Nashville a few weeks ago. And it’s extremely encouraging to see that we now see faculty being energized and wanting to participate in that. So I am very optimistic. I have not seen that much energy, that much momentum, as we see right now.

But it’s really critical that, number one, we get the principles right, and that then we are organized as faculty in order to push. That’s critical, because without that, presidents and boards will not act. That’s the third dimension, and that’s something we should never forget.

So I thank you, all of you here, for being here today. I know many of you have been at this for a long time, at great personal risk. And the courage that it takes to take on these challenges in a principled way, is what we need to move forward. So I’m really here to support you. I’m here to thank you for all the work that you’re doing. It’s great to be part of this gathering. I hope you’re going to have great discussions over the next day and a half, and now I’m open for questions.

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In a sweeping meta-science undertaking, about half of social and behavioral science findings didn’t replicate.

The replication crisis continues to muddy the waters of social science research. Several new papers in Nature have captured headlines as journalists reported the results of a massive effort to reproduce hundreds of behavioral and social science findings.

The outcomes of this meta-science project were… sobering, to say the least. Researchers were unable to replicate or reproduce many of the previously established key findings that were re-examined as a part of the study, raising questions about the original findings. For example, one team of researchers attempted to replicate 274 findings published in 164 papers by repeating the studies and analyzing the new data according to the original methods. But researchers were only able to replicate about half of the claims.

A different team exploring reproducibility used the same datasets and methods as the original studies and found more reassuring results, with over 70% of findings at least “somewhat reproducible,” but there was a great deal of variation in reproducibility across disciplines. The fields of education and sociology fared particularly poorly, while economics and political science came out stronger.

What can we take away from this huge undertaking? As we have emphasized before: scientists are people too. Clearly, different scientists addressing the same research questions (sometimes analyzing the exact same datasets) can come to different conclusions. Part of what drives divergence in findings is that research decisions can be influenced by underlying ideological attitudes. The findings reported in academic papers are the result of many consequential choices, such as which variables are most important, which statistical analyses to run, how to handle missing data, and so on. These researcher degrees of freedom mean that the same data can be bent (unintentionally or otherwise) toward scholars’ preferred conclusions.

Given this flexibility and the risk that even experienced researchers can be driven by their biases, this meta-science project underscores the need for viewpoint diversity and adversarial collaborations, especially in the social and behavioral sciences. Scholars with different worldviews may approach research questions from different angles, and that’s a good thing! This dynamic creates a “check and balance” against each other’s biases. To err is human. Scientists are human. Ergo, scientists err. So let’s err together, in opposite directions, and produce better science as a result!

Over 80% of Britons have “some” trust in science, but the share who have “a lot” has drastically fallen in the wake of COVID-19.

Quipped the British monarch to a joint session of Congress marking the 250th anniversary of America’s independence: “We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.” The five-times great-grandson of King George III, quoting Oscar Wilde’s The Canterville Ghost in a nod to the US-UK special relationship, could have also added a second difference: public trust in science.

Released this month, the More in Common-Wellcome Trust report Britain Talks Trust in Science makes the case for not becoming too much like America in this respect. The report finds that scientists remain a rare bright spot in an otherwise bleak landscape of British institutional confidence — outpolling politicians, journalists, big businesses, and judges by wide margins — but “[a]mber warning lights are now flashing.” Over 80% of Britons say they have at least some trust in science; however, the share saying they trust science “a lot” has severely declined from 63% in 2020 to 34% as of November 2025 polling by More in Common. Moreover, among those whose trust has slipped, 38% attribute it to science becoming “too closely associated with politics.”

The consequences appear to be not merely attitudinal. Of the seven clusters of respondents (defined by core beliefs and values rather than demographics), the two least-trusting segments, “Sceptical Scrollers” and “Dissenting Disruptors,” were also the least likely to receive the COVID-19 vaccine (17% and 20% unvaccinated, respectively, compared to 5% of Traditional Conservatives).

Among the report’s key messages is: “Those who want to preserve science’s privileged position in the UK should heed the example of the United States,” where confidence in scientists to act in the public’s best interests is polarized along party lines, and concerns over ideological bias in the academy have reached a watershed.

Students’ views on free speech depend on who is being talked about.

Free speech advocates will find a lot to chew on with this one. Abramitzky et al. (2026) examined attitudes toward free speech on campus and found that feelings about free speech can shift based on the target of the speech. In two experiments, students judged whether professors and students, respectively, should be disciplined for offensive speech of varying levels of severity that targeted one of these groups, selected at random: black people, Jewish people, Muslim people, transgender people, or white people. A third experiment asked students whether they supported or opposed campus policies that prohibit offensive speech targeting one of the same five groups, again selected at random.

Students’ judgments were strongly influenced by the severity of the speech, with respondents indicating that more offensive statements (such as that the target group was the “root of all evil”) were considerably more deserving of discipline than less offensive statements (such as that the target group “plays the victim to get special treatment”). The target of the speech also mattered: compared to white people, offensive speech directed at minority groups was more likely to be punished or prohibited by participants.

But perhaps the most interesting finding from this study is that students’ judgments sometimes conflicted with their stated principles around free speech. Around a third of the students in the sample identified as free speech universalists (endorsing the same free speech rules for all speech regardless of who it was about), and the remaining two-thirds identified as particularistic (considering identity when weighing free speech boundaries). But even students who stated a universalistic view of free speech were influenced by the target of the speech, deviating from their principles in a direction consistent with their political leanings. Compared to speech targeting white people, left-wing universalists were more punitive toward speech targeting any minority group. Meanwhile, right-wing universalists were less punitive toward speech targeting Muslims and transgender people.

Students only made one judgment per experiment, so it’s not like they were being consciously inconsistent. They were just being human. But the results suggest that feelings toward certain groups and social issues can still influence our judgment about what kind of speech is appropriate, even while we subjectively feel neutral and principled.

Perspective-taking practices halt declines in open-mindedness.

In a quasi-experimental study, Jauernig et al. (2026) found that perspective-taking practices can halt declines in open-mindedness, but aren’t so great at actually increasing open-mindedness. In this study, which was supported in part by an HxA member grant, participating classes at two different universities were assigned to a treatment or control condition. Students in the treatment group participated in perspective-taking practices, such as engaging with the “pro” and “con” sides of three select controversial topics (genetically modified organisms, price gouging, and social media) through curated readings defending both positions, and creating “fuzzy cognitive maps” (example below) to visually depict the arguments and beliefs of each position. Students in the control group experienced no changes to their regular classroom instruction.

All students were surveyed at the beginning and the end of the semester to assess three components of an open-minded mindset: perspective-taking, open-minded cognition, and intellectual humility. But contrary to their pre-registered predictions, Jauernig et al. found that at the end of the intervention, participants in the treatment group exhibited no increase in open-mindedness as measured by perspective-taking, open-minded cognition, and intellectual humility (although they were more likely to perceive ideological opponents as rational rather than irrational). And, at least, participants in the treatment group didn’t experience any broad decreases in open-mindedness. The same can’t be said for the control group, which ended the semester scoring lower in open-mindedness than when they started.

The results suggest that although we can’t easily shift the trend of increasing polarization into reverse, at the very least, trying to understand the perspectives of opposing sides might prevent polarization from accelerating.

DEI statements in faculty hiring sharply decline in 2025-26 hiring cycle

And, finally, we’d be remiss not to mention Team HxA’s latest research report, Changing DEI Requirements in Faculty Hiring: A Comparative Analysis Between 2024 and 2025 Hiring Cycles. Requests for DEI-related materials in faculty job applications have declined considerably, from 25% during the 2024-2025 cycle down to 11% in the most recent hiring cycle. However, nearly 40% of job ads still signal that commitments to DEI will be valued. Read the full report to learn more about how trends in DEI statement requests in faculty hiring have changed since last year.

Think we missed a juicy research finding from this month? Drop us a line at research@heterodoxacademy.org so we can nerd out with you.

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The 80+ scholars who gathered at UC Berkeley for HxA’s West Coast Regional Conference didn’t come to vent or to mourn a lost university. They came to get organized and lead their campuses in reform. Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier set the tone from the first minutes of his keynote about what must be done for change in the academy to occur.

“There used to be times when it took just a letter to get a speaker disinvited,” he said. “This is not the case right now.” Institutional neutrality is gaining ground. Diverse speakers are being welcomed on campuses where they once weren’t. On these things, “we look back and things are moving in the right direction.” But Diermeier was clear that acknowledging progress is not the same as declaring victory. Much work remains.

That harder problem, he argued, is deeper than just politics. “The fundamental problem is the erosion of scholarly standards under a political agenda. We’re seeing now in a variety of fields that faculty are arguing and acting in a way that the fundamental scholarly standards that we have taken for granted have been subordinated to political goals.” This point — the dangers to scholarship — threaded through nearly every conversation over the two days.

Musa al-Gharbi of Stony Brook University presented his Friday keynote address by tracing how political framing can corrupt the full lifecycle of research, from prejudicial study design, politically influenced framing of questions, distortion of analysis. He argued that our knowledge systems will only work as intended when institutions have broad swaths of people with diverse experiences, viewpoints, methods, and theories are able to take part in the academic enterprise. “This is a collective action issue,” he argued.

Claremont McKenna political scientist Jon Shields brought the problem into the classroom by sharing details of his recent publication using Open Syllabus data to show a structural asymmetry in what gets taught on contentious issues: left-leaning perspectives are rarely paired with counterarguments, while other viewpoints are almost always provided a progressive counter. The consequence, Shields argues, is not “indoctrination” so much as the “quiet alienation” of perspectives, students, and ultimately of the public trust universities depend on.

In a panel discussion about whether the Left or Right is a bigger threat to academic freedom, UC Berkeley historian Daniel Sargent lamented a 20-year trend in the presence of politics at all; in a department that once “functioned as an epistemic community,” today “ostentatious political posturing has become ubiquitous.”

But the political threat from outside the university is real and immediate. Political scientist Sean Gailmard, also of UC Berkeley, sounded an alarm about external interventions: when governments dictate curricula or close departments, “the foundation of the university as a space for free inquiry is compromised.” However, he was equally clear that the two threats are not independent: “They exist in a feedback loop that threatens the university’s position in the public.” Steven Brint, a distinguished professor of sociology and public policy at UC Riverside, put it plainly: the Right has read the internal corrosion and responded to it. Orienting toward principles rather than politics is the only way to break that cycle, the panelists agreed.

What does orienting toward principles look like in practice? In the classroom, panelist Brian Soucek of UC Davis Law pushed past the “teach both sides” frame: “More than just giving materials on both sides — we need to model that mature independence of mind, what it would mean to be open-minded, and model the virtues at the core of academic freedom.” He asked every professor in the room: ‘What have you done to instill mature independence of mind in your students?’”

Stanford French Professor Dan Edelstein described one institution’s response: a return to shared core texts, and a skills-based common intellectual experience for all students. Director of the Center for American Civics at ASU Paul Carrese framed civics and liberal arts reform as “enlightened self-interest” for the university, with bipartisan appeal.

Miriam Thomspon, counseling professor at UC Santa Barbara, explored the idea of a course mission statements that embed open inquiry in the classroom from day one; Erika Weissinger, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley’s School of Social Welfare, advocated starting with dyadic discussion in the classroom first before scaling up to larger class discussion to help students get lower-stakes practice in constructive disagreement.

Faculty hiring was a prominent topic all across the conference — how to reduce bias, reward rigor, and establish principles that will stand against shifting partisan winds from any direction. Another theme was relationships with administrators. Half of the conference attendees chose to participate in an “unconference” session to discuss challenges of administrative overreach, and opportunities for principled partnership to improve scholarship, expand viewpoint diversity, all while defending academic freedom.

To Diermeier, the credibility and expertise of faculty make them essential allies in university-wide reform: "The need for faculty like you to get involved, to get organized, to have clear principles, and advocate courageously is essential. Without that it won't happen."

Among Heterodox Academy members on campus, it is happening.

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As Heterodox Academy (HxA) documented in a first-of-its-kind report last year, what was once a relatively obscure governance norm has become a guiding policy adopted by over 160 institutions as of early 2026. But it continues to evoke a range of reactions from faculty, university administrators, and legislators, ranging from fervent opposition to curious ambivalence and ardent support. In many ways, debates about institutional neutrality may be proxies for broader disagreements about the purpose of the university and how best to engage with internal and external demands for reform.

As expressed in HxA’s Model of Statement Neutrality, the practice of institutional neutrality “helps the institution avoid enshrining ‘orthodox’ opinions; chilling debate and discussion; or contradicting academic norms about how to approach complex topics.” Other proponents of neutrality have similarly argued that neutrality promotes free inquiry, is part of the groundwork for freedom, protects free expression, and encourages debate on campus.

More ambivalent observers have described neutrality as an imperfect compromise, an impossibility that is still worth striving for, or per the AAUP’s equivocal stance, “neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.”

Meanwhile, critics have suggested that neutrality is censorship, a cop-out, and a convenient excuse to avoid upending the status quo. Efforts by the Trump administration and state legislatures to incentivize adoption of neutrality policies have probably done little to convince skeptics that neutrality is a boon, not a threat, to open inquiry.

HxA recognizes that institutional neutrality is a powerful lever for unleashing the free exchange of ideas on campus. Thoughtfully crafted institutional neutrality policies ensure that curiosity and scholarship thrive, unencumbered by institutional stances on contested matters. We strongly encourage institutions to adopt our Model of Statement Neutrality in order to preserve the conditions of open inquiry on campus.

But just as much as policy adoption, we also care about policy implementation and how policies are actually being experienced by campus members. Given the range of perspectives on institutional neutrality policies and the breadth of adoptions across the academy, it’s time to reflect on how neutrality has been unfolding in practice.

Our observations over the past year reveal two key trends. First, there is a great deal of variation in how institutions choose to apply and implement their policies across campus, particularly when it comes to academic sub-units and departments. Second, some public institutions are misapplying their neutrality policies to avoid legislative backlash, squelching legitimate (if controversial) expression in the process.

Who Must Be Neutral?

How an institution applies the principle of neutrality across campus departments, sub-units or centers, and leadership personnel reflects the extent of the university’s overall commitment to neutrality. But there’s considerable variation in how explicitly different institutions have chosen to implement their policies throughout campus, particularly with regard to departmental and sub-unit speech.

Departmental speech is one of the most persistent sticking points in neutrality debates. As articulated by thoughtful critic Brian Soucek, departmental speech raises thorny questions about academic freedom, collective voice, and expertise. Institutions have dealt with this thorniness with a range of approaches. Many current institutional neutrality policies gesture toward some degree of applicability to departments and other sub-units, but with varying degrees of scope and specificity. Some policies take a clear stance against departmental statements — a position that HxA supports, given that the close professional proximity of departmental peers may create a particularly strong chilling effect. Other policies offer only gentle discouragement of departmental statements. Still others remain silent on the issue altogether, sending mixed signals about the institution’s stance on neutrality and potentially sowing confusion among faculty.

Some institutional neutrality policies clearly state that departments should uphold their institution’s commitment to neutrality. The University of Tennessee System and Barnard College have taken this approach, for example. This means that departments, just like the broader university, should refrain from issuing sociopolitical statements.

But even policies that initially seem straightforward may be ambiguous when it comes to sub-unit speech by academic leaders versus the collective speech of faculty. For example, Harvard’s policy explicitly commits departmental leaders to institutional neutrality, but only suggests that the policy should apply “in principle” to faculty within departments acting collectively, leaving significant wiggle room for a department to make sociopolitical statements.

Another kind of policy is found at Johns Hopkins University, where university leaders expanded upon their “posture of institutional restraint” and clarified that academic departments are also committed to institutional neutrality, but centers and institutes are afforded more flexibility to speak on matters relevant to their expertise. Thus, not all sub-units are treated equally under the university’s neutrality policy.

At Dartmouth, departments are encouraged to uphold neutrality but are allowed to weigh in on areas within their expertise, pending requirements like an anonymous departmental faculty vote and Provost approval. Similarly, Brown University’s policy on public statements grants some latitude to departments and suggests that departments could potentially issue statements under certain conditions and pending administrative approval.

Faculty are sometimes at odds with their institution’s stance on departmental statements. At the University of Minnesota (UMN), the Senate Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure praised the adoption of Kalven principles at the institutional level, but ultimately concluded that departmental statements are protected by academic freedom and may even be considered under the umbrella of “service.”

But the UMN Board of Regents was unconvinced, and later barred academic departments, centers, and institutes from issuing statements (although official guidance from UMN appears to offer more latitude for centers and institutes). After the policy was implemented, a series of departmental statements were removed from university websites, and the campus AAUP chapter alleged censorship. At least one faculty member has publicly decried the policy, describing it as “destructive and wrongheaded.”

What is HxA’s position on all of this? We urge neutrality for all non-voluntary sub-units at universities, including departments. Departments can engage with contested issues within their area of expertise in a number of ways, such as by hosting debates, panels, or speakers, and defending faculty speaking as individuals on contested matters. But as with institutional statements, departmental statements risk chilling speech (especially from dissenting faculty and students in the department) and flattening the dynamic perspectives of faculty into singular points of view. As expressed in our Model of Statement Neutrality:

Indeed, position statements by institutional sub-units can be especially pernicious, since they affect closer communities. At the limit, partisan positiontaking by departments, centers, or programs may alienate students and other members of the community who see the issue differently and wish to explore the topic free from bias. A commitment to neutrality requires that institutional sub-units at the college or university refrain from taking positions on social controversies.

As evidenced above, there is not currently a consensus model in practice at universities for departments, programs, and other sub-units. Moving forward, departmental speech is likely to remain one of the more contested aspects of neutrality, as institutions continue to balance their commitment to neutrality with faculty governance.

Unleashing vs. Constraining Free Expression

Institutional neutrality empowers faculty and students to vocally engage in matters of moral and political significance. Many institutions have embraced this driving principle of neutrality, and incorporated precise language into their policies that protects individual speech.

Many current neutrality policies affirmatively acknowledge the freedom of faculty to publicly engage in contested matters. For example, neutrality policies at the University of Alabama, Michigan State University, the Purdue System, and the Indiana University System state clearly that faculty are free to speak as individuals, not as representatives of the university.

At Harvard University, the harmony between neutrality and free expression was demonstrated by the co-chair of Harvard University’s Institutional Voice Working Group, who recently strongly criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement and encouraged his readers to “participate in sustained, sustainable resistance.” Critics who frame his stance as contradictory to his support for institutional neutrality are mistaken: support for neutrality is perfectly consistent with extramural speech.

For public institutions, especially those with legislatively mandated neutrality policies, perceived violations of neutrality may carry heavy-handed consequences for faculty and university administrators. To avoid controversy, these campuses may be inclined to over-comply with neutrality. But in doing so, they stifle expression and open inquiry.

For example, the University of Texas at Austin invoked neutrality to prevent Graduate Student Assembly (GSA) members from voting on resolutions, one of which condemned a Texas state law banning DEI initiatives at public universities and another which condemned faculty governance changes. As FIRE and the ACLU of Texas wrote in their letter to UT Austin, the “use of its institutional neutrality policy to restrict GSA and its members from engaging in political speech undermines the very purpose of adopting such a policy.”

Institutional neutrality was also cited at the University of Utah, where a student was ordered to nix language referring to “environmental justice” and related concepts from flyers advertising a student government-sponsored event. This was apparently prompted by the university’s legal team, who argued that the student government body is an arm of the university itself and therefore subject to the institution’s neutrality policy. But as with the incident at UT Austin, this invocation of institutional neutrality is a fundamental weakening of free expression.

Another puzzling incident occurred at North Carolina State University, where officials cancelled a book reading from an American-Palestinian author and cited institutional neutrality. But HxA noted with alarm, invoking neutrality to cancel a campus speaker is a misapplication of a policy that is meant to elevate discussion, not squelch it.

There may be countless other less-publicized instances in which neutrality was quietly invoked to avoid even the appearance of partiality. Public institutions are especially vulnerable to political interference, and accusations of wrongdoing at these institutions can come with big consequences. This potential risk-aversion, combined with broader confusion from both faculty and administrators regarding the specifics of their institution’s policies, raises concerns about the misapplication of a neutrality policy actually undermining open inquiry rather than protecting it.

HxA strongly opposes misapplications of institutional neutrality. While we acknowledge the legislative pressures faced by public institutions, silencing campus voices under the guise of institutional neutrality violates free expression and undermines open inquiry. Such actions are not consistent with our policy model, and we view them as antithetical to a healthy intellectual climate on campuses.

The Next Era of Statement Neutrality

The last couple of years of institutional neutrality policy adoptions have created conditions for reflecting on the success and challenges of policy implementation. Clarity and precision in policy language are key to successful implementation, particularly when it comes to departmental and other sub-unit speech. Departmental statements, like institutional statements, undermine the intellectual freedom required of a lively and robust academic culture.

But perhaps the greatest implementation challenge is being faced by public universities whose neutrality adoptions came at the behest of state legislatures. These institutions, and their leaders, may face political pressure to implement institutional neutrality as a tool of censorship rather than a tool for expression. When faced with a choice between risking controversy or sacrificing academic freedom, at least a handful of institutions have opted to put academic freedom on the chopping block.

Institutional statement neutrality has transitioned from a relatively unknown governance principle to a widely debated policy. Its rise is a welcome development for open inquiry. But the work of stewarding and implementing neutrality is far from over, and will be an ongoing process of refinement and, we hope, vigorous debate.

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Is viewpoint diversity the “mantra of the moment?” It sure seems that way. While Heterodox Academy (HxA) and its members have been grappling with viewpoint diversity in teaching and scholarship for over a decade, university leadership is now taking the problem seriously enough to attempt real, internal changes.

As Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier emphasized in his keynote address at HxA’s West Coast Conference on Thursday, viewpoint homogeneity can manifest as eroded academic standards and politicized campuses, with an intellectual culture that narrows questions, prescribes answers, and causes mission drift.

In what we are seeing as the start of a tidal shift within the academy, two of the most prestigious universities in the U.S. recently released internal independent reports on the challenges facing open inquiry and viewpoint diversity in higher ed. Last week it was Yale, this week Harvard Medical School. Both detail specific internal recommendations for reform to restore trust and address the corrosive damage of the last 15 years or so.

The Yale report calls for actions such as self-study on “the diversity of perspectives in its curriculum,” while Harvard recommends pedagogical approaches to demonstrate viewpoint diversity in the classroom, recognizing that “activism should not compromise… the diversity of opinions within medicine.”

On the main Harvard campus, The Harvard Crimson reported that top administrators are “quietly” asking donors for funds to hire a new cohort of professors aimed at broadening the ideological composition of faculty. This quickly prompted a range of op-eds on the bigger policy issue of how to improve viewpoint diversity in the academy.

David Randall argues in Minding the Campus that appointments won’t fix the deeper problem: “If Harvard doesn’t change its regular hiring processes, it isn’t serious about ‘viewpoint diversity.’ And all these endowed professorships will be a new Harvard marketing scheme for gullible donors.”

James Freeman is wary of an ideological focus and hopes to move straight to rigor, arguing in The Wall Street Journal that Harvard should instead “hire new faculty who are so curious and whose scholarship is so serious and unpredictable that no one can ascertain their political beliefs.”

Kirsten A. Weld, who leads Harvard’s AAUP faculty chapter, dismissed concerns about a “purported liberal bias” and argues that the push is “part of a broader effort to diminish the authority and autonomy of the faculty.”

The Crimson editorial board recommends, as a more effective solution, building a “new institute for pluralism,” similar to the prestigious Hoover Institution at Stanford, that “could serve as a home for rigorous conservative thought, exposing students and faculty across disciplines to heterodoxical perspectives.” But this, too, risks siloing non-left scholarship and normalizing the clear ideological skew of the campus.

As I wrote last week, it’s good news that there are robust internal reforms happening, giving foundational principles of open inquiry and viewpoint diversity legs on campus. This is in no small part due to the leadership of many vocal university presidents, who, according to HxA member Gregory Conti and his co-author Aaron Sibarium, “have essentially acknowledged what polling shows: that politicization and ideological bias harmed higher education’s standing with the American public, and that a new direction is needed.”

All is not rose-tinted, however. There remain broader cultural and normative issues that go beyond faculty viewpoint diversity. At UCLA Law School, student protesters both demonstrated at and disrupted a conservative student group event featuring the General Counsel of the Department of Homeland Security. This comes on the heels of Tennessee passing the “Charlie Kirk Act” that forbids disinvitations of speakers based on their viewpoints and makes it illegal to shout down campus speakers.

Michael Hurley took to FIRE’s blog to offer its legal perspective on this legislation, arguing that “the Charlie Kirk Act will allow members of the campus community to speak with renewed confidence. Professors can contest university positions with more protection against retaliation. Students and faculty can invite speakers without worrying that the school will shut them down because others protest. … Bottom line: that’s a significant win for free expression at Tennessee’s public universities.”

The Tennessee bill brings up a variety of questions about free speech, expression, and the general intrusion of governments into campus speech. Writing for The Chronicle of Higher Education before the bill passed, HxA member Randall Kennedy argued that disinvitation — and the debates it sparks — can serve a useful purpose:

Parties urging disinvitation are simply responding to speech (the invitation) with more speech (the demand for withdrawal). That demand alone ought not be seen as violating the rules or spirit of academic toleration. Members of a college community should have a say in shaping the character of their institution. Those demanding disinvitation are simply having their say.

Over in Utah, the University of Utah is causing controversy for an overapplication of institutional neutrality. As the Salt Lake Tribune reports, a student-organized Earth Day event was required to change their advertising language on flyers posted around campus because the student group was officially sanctioned by the university and thus was required to adhere to institutional neutrality. University officials say the event participants can still “speak freely,” but the language on the flyer has to be “politically neutral.” To quote a colleague at HxA: “That’s not how this works.”

But, in a world of federal and state sticks, we’re seeing cases like this more. The principles need to be right — absolutely — but we also need good policy implementation so we don’t end up with censorship and a different kind of homogenization on campus.

But countering the monoculture that has developed on campus over decades also requires a long view of change, as Bret Stephens argues in The New York Times:

Part of the problem is that a university that spent decades turning itself into what it is now cannot easily turn itself into something else — not least because the self-governing (and often self-dealing) structures of academic life make it difficult to foster the deep cultural changes that universities require. University leaders who try to address the problem of ideological homogenization, for instance, are rarely able to do more than establish an on-campus institute or a faculty position for a tokenized conservative view. But those efforts mainly replicate one of modern academia’s worst mistakes, which was to embrace the cause of diversity (of race, ethnicity and now viewpoint) as a substitute for truth-seeking.

What universities need aren’t more young Republicans or islands of conservative thought. What they need, in every department, are more skeptics and iconoclasts and people with a capacity to change their minds intelligently. Selecting for those virtues, particularly in faculty hiring, is a long-term task.

There is no silver bullet solution; we’re playing the long game here. But the long game requires us to get started — now. Join HxA and shape what happens next.

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Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier didn’t fly all the way to Berkeley, California, to deliver another talk about what’s gone wrong in the academy: he came with an urgent prescription that set the tone for a two-day Heterodox Academy regional conference where over 80 scholars from across the West Coast have gathered to discuss practical action on how to improve viewpoint diversity.

Diermeier has been one of the most outspoken voices in the national conversation about university reform. But to reform effectively, we must understand what has gone wrong. “The fundamental problem is the erosion of scholarly standards under a political agenda. That’s not the same as viewpoint diversity. We’re seeing now in a variety of fields that faculty are arguing and acting in a way that the fundamental scholarly standards that we have taken for granted have been subordinated to political goals.”

The consequences of this politicization are all too familiar for members of HxA: “There is a suppression of ideas, questions that cannot be asked, research not published, books not reviewed, papers rejected; prizes are given because work is aligned with a particular point of view.” For Diermeier, these are failures of the scholarly enterprise itself.

How did this happen? Diermeier pointed to three distinct factions of faculty on campus. The first and most consequential has been a vocal, organized minority who “look at their scholarship and education as a manifestation of a political agenda. They are organized, motivated, and politics are critical to their identity.” The second, the majority of faculty, “just want to be left alone and do their work.” The third — faculty who could push back — have until now been “unorganized and dispersed throughout campus.”

The consequence is that institutions have been drifting toward politicization and away from the core mission. “The purpose of the university is path-breaking research and transformative education. Full stop. That’s what we do. Once you believe that, lots of things follow. If we don’t agree on that, it’s difficult to have discussions about what should happen in the classroom.”

“Universities are drifting like a sailboat without a keel,” he said. University presidents and other campus leaders, faced with relentless political pressure, “muddle through because it’s painful to engage and push back.”

Diermeier urged the faculty in the room to get organized with others across campus to keep the pressure on for change, because without faculty support, campus leaders have little basis for making such principled changes happen. “The need for faculty like you to get involved, to get organized, to have clear principles, and advocate courageously is essential. Without that it won’t happen.”

Despite the dire diagnosis, Diermeier is hopeful the progress of the last couple of years means that “things are moving in the right direction.” He cited cultural changes like more diverse speakers being encouraged on campuses and increasing institutional neutrality adoptions, a policy he has advocated for many years.

“This is a generational opportunity,” he said. “We’re going into a new chapter that will require even more thought. But I’m optimistic.”

The conference continues today, with the work Diermeier called for already underway in the room.

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Heterodox Academy (HxA) congratulates Harvard Medical School on the release of the Report of the HMS Open Inquiry Working Group, a substantive document that reflects the kind of institutional self-examination higher education urgently needs. The group was charged by George Q. Daley, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at Harvard University, to examine the state of open inquiry at HMS and recommend ways to foster respectful dialogue, scholarly debate, and engagement across differences.

The committee met seventeen times, conducted listening sessions with students, faculty, and department chairs, and produced eleven concrete recommendations. While rooted in the specific challenges of biomedical education, clinical training, and the research laboratory, the report’s animating commitments track closely with the four-point agenda HxA set out in Open Inquiry U.

Open inquiry as foundational. The report grounds every recommendation in HMS’s core mission, treating open inquiry and constructive dialogue as foundational to the school’s work. It calls on HMS leadership to “coordinate, manage, and assess future HMS efforts and monitor progress,” with recurring surveys and focus groups to track the climate over time.

“An optimal state of open inquiry and constructive dialogue requires cultural change, eventually producing a culture of greater trust and respect required for open inquiry to optimally thrive.”

Self-censorship and content-neutral policy. The report names the chilling effect of self-censorship and calls for content-neutral application of all institutional policies. It recommends classroom practices such as anonymous in-class polling “as a tool to inform class members of the diversity of class opinions under circumstances where students might be reticent to express these [opinions] publicly.” It also affirms:

“HMS community members who engage in respectful, good-faith academic discussion and expression consistent with existing institutional policies, including expression of minority or unpopular viewpoints, should not face academic, evaluative, or professional penalty for doing so.”

Viewpoint diversity in the classroom. The report calls on faculty to avoid pedagogy that presents contested topics as settled, and recommends a highly visible event series to model scholarly engagement on controversial issues.

“Preparatory material for classes, particularly for topics that are socially and/or politically controversial, should seek to present an appropriately diverse array of viewpoints, analyses of problems, and proposed solutions.”

Constructive disagreement and social compacts. The report recommends training in intellectual curiosity and humility, and proposes value-driven social compacts among community members. The sample compact offered in the report adapts language directly from The HxA Way, which the report cites as “the Heterodox Way.”

“Value-driven social compacts can build trust and foster productive interpersonal interactions across the breadth of daily interactions among HMS colleagues, educators, and learners.”

Medicine-specific application. The report includes a distinctive focus on tensions unique to training doctors: where personal conviction meets professional duty, and where activism runs up against patient care. As Dean Daley noted in remarks cited in the report, “As doctors, we leave our politics at the door when we approach the bedside of a patient.”

Cultural change is not easily achieved, as the report itself acknowledges. Implementation will require sustained commitment from HMS leadership. We will be watching, cheering, and ready to support their efforts.

Six members of the HMS working group are HxA members. This includes the committee chair, Jeff Flier, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and former Dean of Harvard Medical School. Dr. Flier serves as Chair of HxA's Board of Directors, a role he took on in September 2025, while the committee’s work was underway. In chairing the committee, Dr. Flier was acting in his capacity as an HMS faculty member.

Congratulations to Dean George Daley, to the full committee, and to the HMS community for a report that takes the culture of inquiry seriously.

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James Manzi, a DPhil (PhD) student in sociology at the University of Oxford, unleashed a wide-ranging discussion across social media with the publication of his paper, as researchers around the world discussed the methodology, findings, and implications of the research.

In the conversation below, Manzi walks us through the paper’s central findings, responds to questions about methodology, and sketches next steps. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Justin McBrayer: For the benefit of our readers, I want to start with a high-level overview of your findings. Your paper draws five conclusions:

1. Roughly 90% of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period under review.

2. All disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024.

3. Policy-proximal disciplines generally showed limited rightward moderation between roughly 1970 and 1990, though policy-distal disciplines did not.

4. Disciplines with greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity.

5. Sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, and that gap widened over time.

In your view, which of these findings is most important and why?

James Manzi: The most important finding is the consistency of the left-of-center orientation across all disciplines and across the full 1960–2024 period. That pattern is not driven by a small number of extreme cases, but by the relative scarcity of right-of-center work in most fields. This makes it a structural feature of the published output rather than a transient fluctuation. It also provides a baseline for thinking about how ideology might shape research agendas over time.

McBrayer: You did this analysis using ChatGPT-4. It’s amazing that we can do things like this — it would take a human reader years just to read all of the abstracts, much less code them! However, LLMs have well-established biases of their own. To cite just one example, David Rozado has shown that when LLMs answer questions on standard political orientation tests, they are routinely categorized as left-of-center. Given this, why should we trust the output of a LLM analysis of political ideology?

Manzi: The key point is that the results do not rely on taking the model’s outputs at face value without validation. The paper tests the method against multiple external benchmarks, including blinded think tank texts, where the model places content very accurately on the scale. It also shows extremely high stability across repeated runs and robustness to alternative prompts and model choices. If model bias were driving the results, we would expect those checks to fail or produce unstable estimates, which they do not.

McBrayer: You conclude that 90% of the politically relevant abstracts lean left in the period under review and that the leftward lean becomes more apparent over time. But, of course, ‘left’ is a relative measure, not an absolute one. In general, what counts as conservative or liberal is always measured against a contrast class. For example, there are likely positions that would have been described as liberal in the 1960s (where this analysis picks up) that were mainstream in 2024 (when this analysis ends). So, why think that academic papers have moved left rather than thinking that mainstream culture moved right?

Manzi: The analysis uses a fixed 2025 reference frame precisely to address that issue. By holding the scale constant, it measures how texts from different periods map onto the same contemporary ideological benchmark. That means the results are about how the content of published work would be interpreted today, not how authors understood themselves at the time. Within that frame, the observed shift reflects changes in the composition and positioning of research output rather than changes in the scale itself.

McBrayer: Stephen Colbert famously quipped that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” The aphorism makes me think that something like that could be going on here. In other words, it’s not clear that the leftward tilt of social science is a distortion. Perhaps it’s not that the research is biased but that good research happens to confirm liberal assumptions over conservative ones. In the article, you mention this possibility by suggesting that it’s possible that “sustained, disinterested inquiry into social phenomena has arrived at conclusions that happen to align more closely with liberal than conservative viewpoints.” Can you explain this interpretive limit on the study? Why doesn’t the paper show that social science is biased, and what would show such a bias?

Manzi: The paper measures ideological orientation, not the truth or falsity of the claims being made. A body of work can lean in one direction and still be correct if the underlying evidence supports those conclusions. Demonstrating bias would require showing systematic distortion — such as selective use of evidence or consistent error in one direction — which this study does not attempt to do. The results therefore describe a pattern in output, not a judgment about its validity.

McBrayer: OK, so pivoting from methodology to significance, what is this research really telling us? I was struck by the explanation that you offer for the leftward shift: “…positional change in stance scores is driven primarily by the kinds of abstracts entering the publication stream — new contributors and subfields whose work is classified farther to the left under the fixed 2025 rubric — while within-author shifts exist but play a materially smaller role under the same evaluative frame,” (p. 25). As I read this passage, it means that social science research is moving left not because the same body of scholars is producing different results over time but because the body of scholars itself is changing. People are driving the leftward shift. Is that right?

Manzi: That is broadly correct. The evidence suggests that most of the movement comes from changes in the mix of contributors and subfields entering the publication stream, rather than large shifts in the positions of the same individuals over time. In other words, newer areas of research and newer cohorts of scholars tend to be positioned further to the left under the fixed scale. Within-author changes do exist, but they appear to play a smaller role in the aggregate trend.

McBrayer: What’s the epistemic upshot? Should your findings undermine our trust in social science research?

Manzi: It should not be read as a reason to dismiss social science research. The findings show a pattern in how research is positioned, but they do not evaluate the quality of individual studies or the validity of their conclusions. At the same time, any persistent asymmetry is worth understanding because it can shape which questions are asked and how results are interpreted. The appropriate response is closer scrutiny and replication, not blanket skepticism.

McBrayer: Given all of this, what should we do? If universities were to commit to truth-seeking and knowledge transmission as their highest goals, how would this change the stream of social science research?

Manzi: Universities already articulate truth-seeking and knowledge transmission as core goals, so this question is best understood as asking how those goals are operationalized in practice. This study does not evaluate institutional performance or prescribe specific reforms, but it does highlight a measurable pattern in research output that may be relevant to ongoing discussions about how inquiry is conducted and evaluated. The appropriate response is to continue applying standard scientific norms — transparency, replication, and open debate — to ensure that findings are as robust as possible.

To learn more about HxA’s work on viewpoint diversity in higher education, see our website.

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In light of this, we ran a poll asking folks about their perceptions of academic job market vibes, using an informal member email survey. We collected responses from 244 people working in higher education (77% of whom are HxA members). Here’s what we found.

First we asked respondents about the job market in general compared to recent years. Exactly half (50%) rated the market as worse than prior cycles, while 22% rated it as about the same, and only 2.5% rated it as better. So overall, the “vibes” aren’t great as far as hiring in general. This makes sense when considering that universities are tightening their belts given some drastic federal cuts.

Then we asked respondents to consider whether the academic job market was friendlier towards non-progressive academics (center-left, moderate, conservative). Thinking about the climate for those folks, the largest share (37%) reported thinking it’s about the same as it has been in recent years. Others were roughly split between those who think it’s easier for non-progressives (13%) and those who think it’s harder (16%).

We next asked respondents for their impressions of search committees’ interest in viewpoint diversity. The largest share (42%) thought that interest in viewpoint diversity is about the same as it has been. The next largest group was respondents who thought committees are less interested in viewpoint diversity (16%), followed by 7.8% who thought committees are more interested. (It’s worth noting that 26-34% of respondents reported having no basis to judge each of these things about the market; when excluding them, the share of respondents answering “worse” for each of the preceding questions increases to over half.)

Finally, poaching scholars in an effort to increase viewpoint diversity doesn’t seem to be widespread. Only 4% of respondents reported it happening to them or someone in their professional network. Still, this would be considered anecdotal evidence, even if it’s occurring rarely. Perhaps it will catch on and become more of a thing in future years, assuming a healthier budgetary environment.

So what can we take away from these numbers? Overall, the job market vibes aren’t that great, so it wouldn’t make sense to call the period we’re currently in a hiring “boom” for anyone, conservatives least of which. For the most part, respondents indicated that it’s business as usual in terms of prioritizing viewpoint diversity and in terms of the ease for non-progressives to land faculty positions. Of those who detect any kind of change, they appear divided between those who perceive negative change (harder for non-progressives and less interest in viewpoint diversity) versus those who perceive positive change (easier for non-progressives and more interest in viewpoint diversity).

Since this is an informal member email survey, we can’t extrapolate to the whole population of academics. But at the very least, the survey responses suggest we don’t have good evidence that academic hiring priorities have changed in a systemic way. That said, there may be a different set of priorities (pro-viewpoint diversity and pro-conservative) happening within civic centers, which sometimes operate in a different way than traditional academic departments. It remains to be seen how civic center hiring priorities will evolve alongside potential changes in hiring within traditional academic departments.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t anecdotal evidence of some departments here and there getting creative and trying new things, but overall, they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Our data pour some cold water on the idea of a “conservative hiring boom.”

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The biggest news of the week is the release of a landmark report from the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Tasked by Yale president Maurie McInnis to “examine the problem of declining trust in higher education,” the report finds three major factors behind the plummeting public trust, one of which is an “array of issues about what is said and taught on university campuses, including matters of free speech, political bias, and self-censorship.”

Coverage was swift, and the message clear: the blame lay with the academy. The New York Times called it a “brutal assessment” of the academy’s role. The Wall Street Journal said the report explains “why everyone hates the Ivy League.” Fortune remarked that the report “savages” the Ivy League for “destroying American trust.”

The report authors note a foundational issue underlying the decline of trust: a lack of clarity about the purpose of the university.

The range of topics revealed another challenge related to declining trust: widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education. Trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do — and, ideally, doing it well. In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable. Rather than build public support, this diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust. Without a clear mission and purpose, it becomes difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.

The Yale Report represents what many Heterodox Academy members have been saying for a decade now: the highest mission of the university, its telos, is truth-seeking and knowledge generation. Teaching and research are fundamental to this mission. Everything else is superfluous to what a university is.

The Yale Report follows a recent shift in the reform discourse that has been playing out all academic year, albeit sometimes quietly: academics, who largely lean left, are increasingly self-critical about the academy and the internal work that must be done. This is probably motivated in part by the onslaught from politicians since Trump’s return to office and the need to get our own house in order before someone else tears it down. But it’s also in part due to an increasingly vocal community of academics who have long called for viewpoint diversity in the academy for the good of scholarship and teaching.

Consider the Yale Report in this context: co-chaired by an HxA member with dozens of HxA members’ scholarship on these issues cited. HxA had a seat at the table alongside organizations like the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Universities. Even a couple of years ago, this would have been highly unlikely.

This change goes beyond the Yale Report, though. Harvard is “recommitting to free inquiry and civil discourse.” Presidents are increasingly speaking out on the national stage about the need for reform. Folks like Sian Leah Beilock of Dartmouth and Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt (who will be speaking at the West Coast HxA conference at UC Berkeley on Thursday) are the most notable examples.

Earlier this month, academics were discussing the impact of the latest large-scale research replication effort in the social sciences, led by the Center for Open Science, which showed that only about half of the thousands of claims evaluated replicated in the same direction. HxA member Ashley T. Rubin told the Chronicle of Higher Education it was “a huge problem.” Ian Adams, also a member, explained to the Chronicle that the lack of transparent sharing of data in his field of criminology is eroding trust in the field and makes replication extremely difficult. Today, academics on the whole are candid about the problems in social science research, and research on political bias continues to make headlines; 10 years ago, many were dismissive.

The humanities are also turning the mirror on themselves. In the Chronicle this week, Justin Smith-Ruiu, a professor of history and philosophy of science at Université Paris Cité, offers his own brutal assessment of why the humanities are collapsing and closing down across the academy.

Have the humanities departments responded to their falling enrollment numbers by renewing their commitment to the great tradition, to helping their students wake up to the wonder of the human mind as manifest in its most enduring monuments? They have not. Instead [...] the humanities are undergoing a rapid process of what Tyler Austin Harper has called “business-schoolification.”

The solution in the case of the humanities is less clear, but many like Smith-Ruiu are advocating for a return to the core of what the discipline historically was, and doing things like returning to the “Great Books” style curriculums and shedding its modernization and vocationalization that have taken hold of many non-STEM areas of the academy in recent decades.

All this to say that there seems to be a genuine turn in the tide this year. Despite the obvious external stress on the academy, it really does seem to be a proverbial “moment.” Large-scale meta-research on ideological bias is coming out consistently across fields; academics are taking to the media and Substack to analyze and discuss fundamental issues like the mission of the university; presidents are taking viewpoint diversity and open inquiry seriously; HxA members are creating institutional policy and driving internal reform. It’s all happening now.

There still remain substantial risks at this moment, though. State legislatures are continuing to gut tenure, programs, and content from public universities; reformers must be careful to not repeat old mistakes from the last decade; and universities risk the presidency becoming a tool of the state. Even internal reform, like what is proposed at Yale, must still be worked out and implemented. There are many outstanding questions, such as the efficacy of department “self study,” and how an “analytically thin” diagnosis of the problem could lead to imprecise solutions, as some academics have shared this week.

Despite all this, “there are indeed some positive signs that university leaders are correcting course.” Yet, “there is much work still to do,” as HxA member Roger Pielke Jr. opined this week.

I agree.

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The Report of the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education, released this week, is a bracing self-assessment and a call for comprehensive reform. It is the product of a year-long inquiry commissioned by Yale President Maurie McInnis and was submitted unanimously by a ten-member faculty committee.

The report does not mince words about the state of higher education. Trust in colleges and universities fell to a historic low of 36% in 2024. The committee identifies the core reason being a “diffusion of purpose” that has left universities trying to be “all things to all people.” The report continues, “Without a clear mission and purpose, it becomes difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.”

The committee’s prescription maps almost point-for-point onto HxA’s Open Inquiry U four-point agenda.

Yale Trust Report Alignment with Open Inquiry U

Commit to open inquiry: The committee calls on Yale to anchor everything to a single, focused mission — the creation and sharing of knowledge. It argues that universities which try to be all things to all people erode the public trust they depend on.

“Without a clear mission and purpose, it becomes difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.”

Unleash the free exchange of ideas: The report reaffirms free speech as the non-negotiable precondition for honest inquiry, extends academic freedom protections to faculty research and public speech, and endorses institutional neutrality — one of HxA’s signature policy asks.

“Free speech is a barrier to the tyranny of authoritarian or even majority opinion as to the rightness or wrongness of particular doctrines or thoughts.”

Insist on viewpoint diversity: Confronting a 36-to-1 Democrat-to-Republican faculty ratio at Yale, the committee recommends that every department formally examine the range of perspectives in its hiring, curriculum, and research — and invest resources in broadening them.

“Echo chambers do not produce the best teaching, research, or scholarship.”

Invest in constructive disagreement: Faculty are called on to model intellectual humility and genuine engagement with opposing views, and to ensure no classroom functions as a political litmus test. A new civic education initiative would make structured debate a shared foundation for every first-year student.

“The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom — the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.”

HxA’s University Partnerships team worked directly with the Yale committee providing feedback and advice to committee members and the president. Heterodox Academy is named in the report as one of a small number of national organizations — alongside the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Universities — formally consulted by the committee. One of the two committee chairs was a member of Heterodox Academy. Several committee members also attended HxA’s national convening in 2025.

Beyond institutional consultation, the report’s dozens of cited HxA members — including Jonathan Haidt, Musa Al-Gharbi, Keith Whittington, Glenn Loury, Samuel Abrams, Mitchell Langbert, Sean Stevens, Molly Worthen, Gail Heriot, Robert George, and Tyler VanderWeele, among others — reflecting the degree to which HxA’s intellectual community has long been doing the foundational work this moment demands.

On self-censorship, one of HxA’s cornerstone concerns, the report is unsparing. It cites Yale’s own 2025 survey finding that nearly a third of undergraduates do not feel free to express their political beliefs on campus, up from 17%in 2015. “Self-censorship driven by fear of personal attack, academic retaliation, or other political pressure,” the committee writes, “undermines the principles of free speech and academic freedom.”

The committee’s approach to reform is also distinctly HxA’s: change from within. It calls for faculty-led self-studies, joint student-faculty committees on classroom principles, and collaborative governance. This is precisely the model HxA has championed for over a decade: equipping academics inside the institution to drive deep, lasting change.

“This report is exactly what we’ve been working toward: an elite university looking honestly in the mirror and committing to the kind of structural reform that rebuilds trust from the inside out,” said Justin McBrayer, HxA’s Director of University Partnerships. “We couldn’t be more proud of the recommendations. This is a model we hope other institutions will study and follow.”

The report’s recommendations now go to Yale’s faculty, administration, and trustees for implementation. HxA commends the Committee, President McInnis, and Yale University for their leadership in this moment, and will be offering our support to Yale as the faculty and academic leaders implement these recommendations across campus. HxA’s University Partnerships division will continue to work alongside other institutions in the U.S. to advocate for the broader adoption of the principles.

Editor’s note: This article has been revised to clarify the role of Heterodox Academy and its individual members at Yale.

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After vague signage policies led to backlash at Boston University last month for the removal of a pride flag hanging visibly on a faculty office window, the president announced on Monday that the university will be “pausing” their “long standing, routine university policy” of removing outward-facing signs. As well-intentioned as this might be, such vague policies, inconsistent implementation, and pausing that appears viewpoint-contingent only contribute to chilled expression.

But expression policies aren’t the only thing chilling speech on campuses right now. Across the U.S. there are a variety of state-mandated and other institutional policies that are threatening academic freedom protections for faculty and their comfort in speaking freely.

In Salon this week, an op-ed by Tracy Kuo Lin, an associate professor of health economics and chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom at the University of California, San Francisco, explains that in the era of intense academic freedom policy changes, the felt experiences of are not always positive:

There’s a profound chilling effect when faculty are no longer protected for speech the university deems troublesome, and academic freedom is merely a consideration they can raise while going through a burdensome and stressful disciplinary process.

Tenure, a fundamental job protection for academics that affords freedom in research and teaching, is also being increasingly threatened in states across the country, including most recently in Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Tennessee state legislatures, none of which has “garnered any public faculty support.” Weaker or eliminated tenure not only chills speech, but also disincentivizes faculty’s pursuit of open inquiry.

HxA member Deepa Das Acevedo, a legal anthropologist, associate professor of law at Emory University, and an expert in tenure law, explains in Inside Higher Ed that even the job protections that do remain aren’t protecting faculty expression because many universities seem to be adopting a “fire first” practice that she argues will deeply harm university’s core knowledge mission.

Firing faculty in violation of their legal rights is expensive because, after all, litigation is not cheap — and neither are settlements. But it is also bad crisis management because it is shortsighted. Universities that are known to adopt a “fire first” policy are likely to lose some employees who decamp for safer, if not greener, pastures, and they are guaranteed to lose the goodwill of employees who stay. That goodwill is what keeps faculty in place, recruiting the best students and colleagues, and fulfilling the academic mission.

Across the northern border in Canada, William J. McNally, a professor of Finance at Wilfrid Laurier University and HxA chapter co-chair at the university, argues that mundane university practices like faculty orientation can also chill expression among dissenting faculty. At his university, faculty are required to take an “anti-racism 101” course as part of their on-boarding experience. McNally says this practice not only “chills dissent by presenting a single interpretive lens as authoritative and morally compulsory,” but also is inconsistent with a university’s mission.

A university is a collegium of scholars, with academic authority resting in the faculty, whose role is to safeguard academic judgment from external pressures — ideological, political, or economic. Collegial governance works only if faculty remain autonomous thinkers — free to dissent without pressure to conform to prescribed doctrines. A faculty onboarding course incorporating only one ideological lens is inconsistent with the collegial model, as it threatens intellectual independence.

All of this matters because dissent and viewpoint diversity are essential for universities to be what they are supposed to be: institutions where truth-seeking and knowledge generation occur for the greater good of our society. Without actual and experienced academic freedom, we run into ideological homogeneity in the academy. HxA member Jesse Smith, a sociologist and assistant professor at Ohio State University, explained this issue in earlier this week, worth quoting at length.

Academics and politics ought to be fundamentally separate activities, the former oriented toward open pursuit of truth and the latter toward the enactment of substantive social policies. Political affiliation should thus be irrelevant to academic activity, with any explicit consideration of (current or prospective) faculty’s politics operating as a kind of contaminant. Existing political skew strongly indicates an academic environment already contaminated. Yet intentionally seeking more political balance would, by definition, represent still further contamination. This is something of a catch-22.

The liberal-to-conservative skew is not the actual problem. It is a measurable proxy for the problem, or rather a set of problems. First, it suggests censoriousness of various kinds in higher education at odds with ideals of open inquiry. Second, it creates a fertile environment for explicit progressive activism among faculty. Third, it suggests a narrowing of academic activity, both in teaching and scholarship, in which important lines of inquiry are neglected while those pursued are insufficiently scrutinised, thereby creating orthodoxies and blind spots. As a result, the intellectual environment is degraded. This becomes clear enough in critiques of higher education, which may start by highlighting political skew but quickly move on to its larger implications.

You can’t have genuine inquiry if dissenting voices are systematically absent and face risk of retribution from peers or political actors when they do speak, teach, or conduct their research. What we face now is an ideological narrowing of the university that has accelerated over the past 15 years, along with weakened protections that are the bedrock for faculty free inquiry.

Of course, these limits of these protections are still actively debated, especially when it comes to classroom teaching. But we see an increasing trend of universities codifying academic freedom protections to make these boundaries explicit. Following on the heels of UNC, the Yale College Council Senate and Graduate & Professional Student Senate have each passed a joint resolution in support of faculty groups’ demands for more explicit academic freedom protections, aligned with the AAUP definition.

Perhaps the biggest contestation over academic freedom right now, however, is with the proposed overhaul of accreditation coming out of the White House this week. Accreditation reform has been underway for years now, with HxA writing back in 2024 how changes to the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC), which accredits universities in California and Hawai’i, weakened academic freedom protections, for example, by stripping language about due-process for faculty (see for example what Das Acevedo said above).

But there is another dimension to the accreditation debates: the extent to which ideological conformity has played a role in accreditation. As of HxA has previously pointed out, accreditation has carried broad DEI requirements, which can inadvertently create ideological conformity on campus. The proposed new regulations require institutions to adopt “viewpoint and ideological neutrality in policy implementation,” and that institutions provide “support for and appropriate prioritization of intellectual diversity amongst faculty.” While we support these in principle, details of implementation requirements and enforcement of regulations of course make all the difference between ideas and the reality on the ground.

It’s imperative that we continue to push back against the politicization of viewpoint diversity as a concept given how essential it is for open inquiry to flourish on campus. You can help stand up for the principles of open inquiry on campus if you work in higher ed by taking just a few minutes to become a member. How reform plays out over the coming years depends on who shows up and how. Join us.

We’re starting off the series strong with highlights from March 2026, including a new study on the “diploma divide”, an analysis of ideological trends in social science research since the 1960s, a new “Words Can Harm” survey scale, and a working paper from HxA Segal Center Postdoctoral Fellow Eric Torres on political messaging in K-12 schools (spoiler: some people want neutrality… until they don’t).

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College grads have shifted more liberal, non-grads hold steady in political identity.

Prinzing & Vazquez (2026) find that the relationship between education and political self-identification has shifted over the last 15 years. Using large-scale survey data, the authors found that although college grads have held more liberal positions than non-grads for the last 50 years, the gap between how grads and non-grads actually identify themselves politically (e.g., liberal or conservative) only emerged during the 2000s. That gap has been widening since 2012, reflecting what commentators are now calling a “diploma divide.” Interestingly, the gap is driven by college grads increasingly identifying as liberal; meanwhile, the average non-grad’s political identity has remained steadily “moderate.”

In a second study, Prinzing & Vazquez explored changes in students’ political orientation during college. Using survey data tracking over 360,000 undergraduates from freshman to senior year between 1994 and 2019, their analysis revealed that the average college grad has left college more liberal than when they entered. This trend began around 1997, and the size of the within-person shift toward more liberal views increased substantially between 2012 and 2017 and remained high through 2019. Women, Black and Hispanic students, social science and humanities majors, and those with high SAT scores tended to move more to the left, while business and engineering majors tended to shift right.

Of course, these studies are subject to the usual caveats about causation: without a randomized experiment, we can’t conclude definitively that experiences in college (as opposed to other experiences correlated with college attendance) are driving these shifts. Still, the results suggest that educational attainment is becoming increasingly entangled with people’s political identities, widening the cultural rift between those with diplomas and those without.

Social science research skews left.

An abundance of research points to a largely left-leaning professoriate, which raises concerns about ideological homogeneity, especially given the possibility that ideological positions influence research approaches. But until recently, there was limited information about the political and ideological leanings of research itself. Manzi (2026) used an LLM to evaluate the political leanings of nearly 600,000 scholarly works from 11 social science disciplines published between 1960-2024. About 180,000 of the abstracts were determined to be “politically relevant” abstracts, 90% of which lean left. Manzi also found that all disciplines moved leftward between 1990 and 2024, though not always steadily. Gender studies, ethnic studies, and anthropology had the most left-leaning research. Economics, while still mostly left-leaning, had the greatest share of right-leaning research.

Manzi takes care to emphasize that the assigned political scores of the abstracts are anchored to the modern-day political landscape, not the political landscape at the time of publishing. The scores may not reflect how authors situated their research within the political context of the day. But even with that important limitation in mind, Manzi’s work points to worrying trends in the political valence of research.

New survey to measure the belief that words can harm.

Great news for the survey nerds out there: a new survey scale just dropped. Pratt et al. (2026) developed the ten-item “Words Can Harm Scale” (WCHS), which measures the belief that speech can cause lasting psychological damage. A sample of 956 American adults recruited online reported the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with statements like “Exposing someone to a triggering idea can seriously damage their mental health,” and “Even a simple phrase can be emotionally traumatizing for someone vulnerable.” Pratt et al. found that those more likely to believe that words cause harm tend to be younger, female, non-White, and politically liberal.

Unsurprisingly, higher scores were associated with a preference for safeguards against potentially harmful speech (e.g., trigger warnings and safe spaces). Higher scores were also linked with greater self-perceived empathy, a tendency towards interpersonal victimhood (i.e., as perceiving oneself as a victim in social situations) and moral grandstanding (i.e., proclaiming one’s moral attitudes as a way to gain status and popularity).

Clinically, higher scores mapped onto worse outcomes across every well-being variable examined: more depression, anxiety, emotion dysregulation, and lower resilience. But the largest correlations were found with censorship, particularly top-down censorship, one of three components of left-wing authoritarianism (e.g., “University authorities are right to ban hateful speech from campus”). The WCHS gives researchers a precision tool for understanding who supports speech restriction, and why.

Neutrality for thee, if you don’t agree with me.

Should 10th grade government teachers be revealing their political candidate preferences to their students? According to one survey experiment, the answer is no — unless those preferences align with the respondent’s own political views.

This standout working paper by Eric Torres, HxA member and postdoctoral fellow at the Segal Center for Academic Pluralism, offers new empirical research on Americans’ attitudes toward political neutrality in public schools. Torres (2026) analyzed responses from the March 2025 Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll, a nationally representative survey of American adults, which included a vignette experiment. He focused in particular on a random subsample of 537 respondents (out of 1,080) who were given, among other items, one of three classroom scenarios featuring a 10th grade teacher who revealed his political preferences to his government class, either for Trump, Harris, or an unnamed candidate.

The findings are striking. First, Americans across party lines generally endorsed ideological impartiality in their local public schools, at least in principle: 57% opposed schools promoting either liberal or conservative viewpoints, with support for impartiality outpacing the promotion of ingroup views by at least 2-to-1 among both Democrats and Republicans.

But (... and it’s a big but) stated principles appear to bend significantly when ingroup interests are at stake. Among a small number of people who identified with a party and perceived that their local schools were promoting their own side’s views (n=66), 71% rated this favorably. And in the vignette experiment, partisans in general were 1.5 times more likely to object to a teacher’s political disclosure when it favored the opposing party.

What do these findings mean? For those of us interested in affective polarization in the United States, Torres’ study highlights that further work is needed on the “permission structure[s]” and “mechanism[s] by which teaching in politically conservative and politically liberal districts might systematically drift apart.” For those interested in viewpoint diversity in the academy, Torres points the way for a research agenda that takes seriously the uniquely influential role of educational institutions as sites where political identities are shaped and contested.

Have a recommendation?

Have you heard of interesting new research that we should include next month? Drop us a line at research@heterodoxacademy.org. We welcome suggestions for recent articles on HxA-relevant issues, ranging from hot-button topics to evergreen methodological research across all disciplines.

Admiral Andrew Cunningham once said of the British Royal Navy, “It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take 300 years to build a new tradition.” Gaining trust is harder than breaking it, and public trust, in particular, should not be trifled with. Over the last decade, trust in science, and academia more generally, has eroded substantially, partly if not largely due to internal problems.

Take, for example, recent revelations about Oliver Sacks, the famous neurologist who, over his career, wrote many bestselling books for both expert and general audiences alike. Hospitals and medical schools used Sacks’ highly cited works for treating patients with various mental health issues. Unfortunately, many of the cases he outlined in his books included material fabrications—putting words in people’s mouths, giving them skills they didn’t have, and assigning them feelings and intentions they didn’t share. I say “unfortunately” here as a euphemism for “in gross violation of scientific and personal ethics.”

Sacks justified his actions as being “for a higher purpose,” rather than for shallow reasons like fame or attention. No, his exaggerations came from an impulse that was, in his words, “purer” and “deeper.” While Sacks clearly struggled with internal demons throughout his life, he should have, from the beginning, been held to account for his practices.

Today, as a growing body of cases indicates, there are many examples of academics overselling their findings, misstating or hiding facts, exaggerating consequences, using their professional positions to push partisanship, and falsely attributing beliefs and motives to their allies and their enemies—all for the “greater good.”

American academics may not suffer many serious consequences from our periodic foolish vainglory—at least not yet. But we can certainly erode the public trust by advocating for, or providing cover for, such practices to the point that our institutional, financial, and political support collapses. The current loss of trust didn’t come from nowhere, and much responsibility to rebuild it lies with us.

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Mike Coughlin, a tavern owner in Carol Stream, Illinois, defied Gov. JB Pritzker’s order to close his restaurant in November of 2020. If he closed again, he said, the restaurant would go out of business. Pritzker had closed down Illinois restaurants at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020, had re-opened them in the summer, and was now closing them again. In the face of widespread protests like Coughlin’s, the governor defended his actions by going on TV with a University of Chicago infectious disease specialist, who claimed that “there was no way around” the shutdown order. According to this expert, a restaurant could be safe one moment and a “superspreader event” the next, if someone infected with COVID were to walk in.

The closing order would remain in force through early February 2021—a triumph of science over politics, one might suppose. Only it wasn’t—as Jacob Russell and Dennis Patterson argue in The Weaponization of Expertise: How Elites Fuel Populism. In fact, it was one more example of politicians and experts behaving badly, dismissing very reasonable lay skepticism of expert opinion—expert opinion that extended well beyond what the state of knowledge about the effects of quarantine on COVID could possibly warrant and wielded by politicians to selectively shut down some forms of association while leaving others alone.

Russell and Patterson, who are both professors at Rutgers University Law School, taught a course entitled “Populism and the Law” for three years, out of which the ideas in this book emerged. As they and their students learned about populist opposition to political and cultural establishments, it became clear to them that populists often get a bad rap. Popular skepticism of establishment orthodoxy and expert opinion, far from being a sign of ignorance or anti-intellectualism, is often warranted and sometimes closer to reality than what is being put forth by the experts. And the experts, rather than carefully and impartially bringing their expertise to policymaking, often disguise nakedly political judgments as expertise.

The book draws most of its examples from American policy responses to the COVID epidemic, but its analysis extends back 40 years to British nuclear scientists overplaying their hand in predicting levels of radioactive contamination after the Chernobyl disaster. In case after case, we see elites and experts overreaching, populists resisting, and elites doubling down on their error. It should be no surprise, the authors suggest, that there has been a breakdown in trust between establishment elites and the broader population in Europe and North America in the past 10-15 years. And the fault lies squarely with the elites.

This is, of course, a contrarian position, and the authors take considerable trouble to rebut many of the most vocal critics of populism and science “denialism.” Skepticism of establishment consensus on climate change, vaccines, Brexit, the origin of COVID, and other hot button issues, these critics suggest, amounts to a rejection of “facts” and truth in favor of conspiracy. Public intellectuals such as Jonathan Rauch, Naomi Oreskes, and Cass Sunstein each come in for sustained criticism for their overconfidence in expert impartiality and for presuming the possibility of technocratic solutions to political disputes. The elite error, the authors contend, is in supposing that facts are obvious and readily ascertainable by experts; that they, the elites, have succeeded in ascertaining them; and that the resulting policy prescriptions should therefore simply be accepted by the rest of us.

On the contrary, say Russell and Patterson: Far from being immune from values, facts are born in value frameworks, as we seek and find the facts we need to support our values. And our “facts,” whether factual or not, are far more resistant to empirical disconfirmation than our theories. To drive home this point, the authors quote Stanford University legal scholar Mark Kelman:

“People lose faith in their theories because they’re incredibly intellectually incoherent. They fall back on beliefs about the empirical world that are fairly badly grounded, but they can’t be shaken out of them regardless of the level of proof. I think this is a fairly general tendency of people with strong political beliefs.”

Russell and Patterson seek to complicate a common view of how knowledge informs policy: Knowledge, it is presumed, is built up from facts grounded in experience out of which issue valid prescriptions when combined with values. If we start by getting our facts right, values held in common will lead to the right policies—hence the vogue of elite fact-checking and of labeling opponents as purveyors of “misinformation.” They argue that our actual modes of proceeding are far removed from this common view.

Far from simply emerging from experience, facts are constructed from experience as shaped by values and ideology. We see the world not as “some kind of prepolitical neutral playing ground consisting of bare-bones facts, nothing more,” but instead through the lens of our prior understanding of how the world works and what in that world is important. What are or are not “facts,” that is, assertions that are true by virtue of the way the world is, is context-dependent and often reflective of the reaction of authoritative members of a community to a data point, as philosopher Richard Rorty would argue. Furthermore, it is important to remember that in science, facts are always provisional—open to revision as our scientific knowledge evolves.

Rather than seeking to shut down debates purportedly over facts but actually over facts “embedded in cultural values about which there are genuine, good faith disagreements,” the authors argue that elites would do better to exhibit a little humility. Unpacking disagreements about the benefits or harms of school closures during COVID or the genuineness of Hunter Biden’s laptop might actually generate light rather than heat, as the contending politics and values implicit in opposing judgments of fact are laid bare. What’s more, lay “common sense” may sometimes have something to offer to experts. The authors are not optimistic that elites will take their advice, prone to “intellectual tyranny” as they are—the presumption that doubt and dissent reveal error at best and, likely, bad faith in those with the temerity to question expertise.

Russell and Patterson are sharp observers and their targets are vulnerable. Unsurprisingly, however, they are not themselves infallible. In explaining the rise of populism, they give too much credence to doomsayers about increasing inequality in the American economy. While the problem is real, urban affairs writer Joel Kotkin’s argument that a “new class of serfs” is being created in the American economy, cited approvingly by the authors, is hyperbole. Economic growth of the last 40 years has been shared much more widely than is now commonly supposed, as economist Russ Roberts recently pointed out in an essay in Medium. Still, their broader indictment of elites for supposing that expertise can settle what are actually political disputes is persuasive—even though there are many who will not be persuaded.

This book is a salvo in an ongoing battle. It joins other notable exposés of recent expert folly, such as David Zweig’s An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions and Stephen Macedo and Frances Lee’s In COVID’s Wake: How our Politics Failed Us, both from 2025. The experts, however, are not backing down. To many in the public health community and to stalwart defenders of expertise, such as Atlantic Monthly staff writer Tom Nichols, it may be that some mistakes were made by experts in authority during COVID, but overall the expert record was good and the “facts” were the facts.

As the COVID Crisis Group noted in 2023, a key predictor of deaths in each state was “the share of people that voted for President Trump in the 2020 election.” All we need to do better next time is to give deference to “reality-based understandings” rather than to Trumpian “comorbidity,” as Nichols recently wrote. With attitudes like these still the norm rather than the exception among elites, Russell, Patterson, and their allies have quite an uphill fight ahead of them.

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