As we meander into the summer months following commencement ceremonies, the pace of campus life changes. Many (though not all) students and their professors go on a break from courses, turning their thoughts to planning for the coming academic year. For department chairs and search committees, that means something specific: faculty job ads for the 2026–27 hiring cycle are being drafted right now. By the time those ads go live later this summer, a set of consequential decisions will have been made about how to signal institutional and department values, and what criteria search committees will use to evaluate candidates.

My research team at Heterodox Academy has been tracking faculty job ad content for the last two years with an eye towards understanding how required Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) criteria have changed. Our recently published research report showed that the share of jobs requesting DEI statements — whether standalone, within cover letters, or within research or teaching statements — declined sharply, falling from approximately 25% in 2024 to 11% in 2025. (There are many other detailed analyses within the report that are worth your time to explore!)

With the backdrop of this report in mind, here’s what we’re watching out for in the coming 2026-2027 academic job cycle. Have additional suggestions for our upcoming analysis? Drop us a line at research@heterodoxacademy.org.

1. Will the DEI decline continue, or has it hit a floor?

Between 2024 and 2025, the share of job ads requesting that candidates address DEI dropped from 25% to 11%. As our report explains, some of the decline may be associated with anti-DEI legislation in red states; although blue states also saw a decline and some of the indirect pressure against DEI was coming from the federal government. Some enthusiastic crusaders may argue that 11% is not small enough, and the number should be zero. But our research also found that there was also striking variation across states, with rates in many red states either at or hovering near zero: 0.9% in Kansas, .06% in Alabama, and 0.0% in each of the Dakotas. This is at least partially attributable to schools in those states facing legal or political pressure to change course. However, some of our data challenge this hypothesis, showing that DEI statements also declined in states without anti-DEI legislation, and among private universities, which are not bound by such restrictions.

Still, job ads in blue states request DEI statements at much higher rates, including 34% in California, 36% in Washington, 44% in Maine, and 69% in Vermont (this was the highest percentage of any state, although Vermont also posted the fewest raw number of total job ads). So even if the overall nationwide rate of DEI statements in job ads is already on the decline, that trend could realistically continue in 2026, with the most potential for change coming in the Northeast and West Coast regions. It will be important to document what schools in those regions do differently going forward, if anything.

Last year’s decline, and any further decline could also reflect a broader societal trend. As HxA-affiliated scholar Musa al-Gharbi has argued, we may be entering a new era that is “past peak woke” in terms of academic scholarship (mirroring changes in other areas of society such as journalism and entertainment). But critics of our report have offered a different interpretation, which is that schools are rebranding. Specifically, administrators and department chairs, facing legal exposure or political pressure, are simply swapping explicit language for subtler signals that accomplish the same screening function. I think that explanation is less likely — if the subtle signals increased alongside decreases in explicit requests to address DEI, that would be stronger evidence for the rebranding hypothesis. But if the subtle signaling language decreases in subsequent job cycles, that would be further evidence against the rebranding hypothesis.

2. Do search committees signal and select for DEI in more subtle ways?

One finding from our recent report that we think deserves special attention going into the new cycle is the language describing candidate evaluation criteria. While explicit DEI statement requests fell, a different kind of language held steady. Roughly 40% of ads told applicants that their institutions value DEI and this framework would be used to evaluate candidates. This number was nearly identical to what we observed in the 2024 cycle. For instance, some ads had language indicating that their ideal candidates will have a “demonstrated commitment to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion” in the classroom or in research/clinical environments, even without instructions for applications to write statements.

It may be worth watching for vocabulary drift in the upcoming job cycle. Even in states that outlaw DEI, other related terms like “inclusive pedagogy,” “justice-oriented scholarship,” or “culturally sensitive teaching,” accomplishes the same screening function while being harder to legislate against. Some ads may drift further into activist vocabulary, using terms like “anti-racist pedagogy,” “decolonial scholarship,” and “critical theory approaches.”

3. What does the geographic trend tell us about academic hiring markets?

Right now, the gap between red and blue states in terms of DEI restrictions is substantial, and it may widen to the extent that more red and purple states move to further reduce or eliminate other DEI programs. We don’t yet fully understand how this political variable is affecting potential job candidates’ applications, as well as their vetting and selection by search committees. American academia may be heading toward something like two separate hiring markets, operating under different rules and sending candidates very different signals about who belongs. If early career scholars start self-sorting by perceived political expectations before they even submit an application, the result could be deepening political homogeneity within institutions across states, which is precisely a condition that makes open inquiry harder on local campuses. A bifurcated market could wind up nationalizing the problems associated with litmus tests. This is already happening to some extent given policies that restrict academic freedom, as surveys show that faculty in red states are looking for new jobs in other states or internationally, or looking for non-academic jobs. Students may also be sorting into different schools according to their political views.

One place we’ll be watching closely is a category of academic units that our job ad data has not yet examined in depth: civics centers. HxA’s own research on the new landscape of civics centers found that half of all identified civics centers were founded in 2021 or later, with many of those created between 2022 and 2025 established through state legislation. These new centers, which are concentrated at public institutions in states like Ohio, Florida, Tennessee, and Texas, represent a structurally distinct hiring market, operating under different mandates and often different governance than traditional academic departments. In some cases, state legislators have directly shaped who gets hired: Ohio State’s Chase Center, for instance, has a separate academic council whose members must be approved by the state legislature.

Whether these centers are actually producing viewpoint diversity in hiring is an open question. Another possibility is that they craft ideological substitutions in the opposite political direction, with a stronger emphasis on conservative scholarship. A Chronicle of Higher Education analysis found that faculty at civics centers get “hundreds and hundreds” of applications per year, suggesting there is real demand among job candidates. It would be interesting to examine whether civic center job ads differ meaningfully from traditional department ads in how they signal evaluation criteria, and whether they’re actually avoiding the litmus test problem or simply inverting it.

As we look forward to the upcoming academic year, the full findings from the 2025-26 cycle, including state-by-state breakdowns and our methodology, are in HxA’s recently published report. If you serve on a search committee or work in a provost’s office, it’s worth reading closely before your job ads are finalized. It’s also worth asking not just what your job postings say and what materials are requested, but also how your committees actually evaluate the people who apply.

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Jennifer Schubert Aiken: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back. Thank you for joining us. My name is Jennifer Schubert Aiken. I’m the co-founder and CEO of the Steamboat Institute. We are very grateful to the University of Wyoming and to Heterodox Academy for hosting us here in Laramie tonight for our Campus Liberty Tour debate as part of the Mountain West Regional Conference. We would also like to welcome those who are watching the live stream of our debate, coming up here in just a few minutes. We always have live stream viewers from all over the country, and we’re happy to have them joining us.

Steamboat Institute was founded nearly 20 years ago with the mission of promoting America’s first principles and fostering an appreciation of the freedom we enjoy as Americans. We’ve hosted dozens of debates on college campuses across America over the past eight years, visiting more than 30 campuses, including CU Boulder, where we partner with the Benson Center; CU Colorado Springs; Arizona State; University of Texas at Austin; University of Tennessee; University of Maryland; Harvard; Princeton; Cornell; and many more. With each of our debates, the emphasis is on critical thinking skills — teaching people how to think, not what to think. As our nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the greatest threat to American self-government and liberty is the collapse of civil disagreement. Our republic can’t survive if its citizens no longer know how to disagree without trying to silence one another. Steamboat Institute aims to address this problem with our Campus Liberty Tour.

Our debates feature high-profile experts fearlessly tackling the hottest topics of the day, including, for example, the U.S.–Israel alliance, climate change and energy policy, DEI policies, socialism versus capitalism, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and much more. Our most recent debate, at CU Boulder back in April, featured John Bolton and Susan Rice debating U.S. foreign policy. We’re proud that over all these years, and with all of these contentious debate topics, not a single one of our debates has been shouted down or canceled. With all of our debates, you can watch live from anywhere on Steamboat Institute’s YouTube channel, and we hope you’ll sign up for our email list at steamboatinstitute.org so you can get the viewing links sent directly to your inbox. And, of course, all of our previous debates are available for viewing for free on our YouTube channel.

As a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, Steamboat Institute relies on the support of many generous individuals and foundations to bring programs such as today’s debate to audiences across the country. I would like to extend a special thank you to our major sponsors: the Adolph Coors Foundation, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation, the Anschutz Foundation, the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, the Tina Snyder Foundation, the Woodford Foundation for Limited Government, and Bruce and Marcy Benson, for their support, which has allowed us to expand this program to dozens of campuses across America.

Today’s debate addresses a question that has become increasingly important in higher education: Should colleges and universities adopt a position of institutional neutrality, or should they take public stances on controversial social and political issues? We invite all of our audience members, including our live stream viewers, to respond with your view on this question. There are QR codes on the cards on the table. The question is this: Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes? Agree, disagree, or undecided? Do this now. If you’re watching the live stream, you’ll see a link in the chat. For those of you here in the room, like I said, there are cards on the table — use that QR code. Then, when the debate is over, we’re going to ask your opinion again to see if opinions have shifted.

And now it’s my great pleasure to introduce our speakers and moderator for this evening. So let’s welcome them to the stage, and I will then introduce each of them while they remain seated. Welcome, speakers and moderator. It’s okay if you want to applaud. Yeah.

Okay, so I will introduce each of them, they will remain seated, and then I will turn it over to our moderator, and opening statements will begin.

Arguing the affirmative on our resolution is Jonathan Turley, a nationally recognized legal scholar who has written extensively in areas ranging from constitutional law to legal theory to tort law. Professor Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. Professor Turley is the founder and executive director of the Project for Older Prisoners. He has written more than three dozen academic articles that have appeared in a variety of leading law journals, including those of Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, and Northwestern, among others. Professor Turley has served as counsel in a variety of national security and terrorism cases, and is a frequent witness before the House and Senate on constitutional and statutory issues. He is a nationally recognized legal commentator and is the second most cited law professor in the country. Professor Turley is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, where he frequently publishes opinion pieces on constitutional law and civil liberties. He’s the author of The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, published in 2024, and the just-released Rage in the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. Please give a warm welcome to Professor Jonathan Turley.

Arguing the negative on our resolution is Todd Wolfson, Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He also serves as president of the American Association of University Professors and as national vice-president of the American Federation of Teachers. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, Professor Wolfson’s research focuses on the convergence of new media and social movements. He is the author of Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left, which examines the impact of new media and communication technologies on the spatial, strategic, and organizational fabric of social movements. Professor Wolfson is also a co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project, which uses media and communications as a core strategy for building a movement of poor and working people in Philadelphia and beyond. The Media Mobilizing Project has been recognized as a national leader both in using media as an organizing tool and in advocating around the intersection of poverty and technology. Please give a warm welcome to Professor Todd Wolfson.

Our moderator for the debate is George Bogden, Senior Counsel for Trade at Continental Strategy, a government relations firm with offices in Washington, D.C., Florida, and Latin America. Dr. Bogden previously served as Executive Director of the Office of Trade Relations at U.S. Customs & Border Protection, where he was the agency’s primary liaison to the international trade community. A writer and commentator, his analysis has appeared in outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. Dr. Bogden is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a David Rockefeller Fellow of the Trilateral Commission, and a Senior Fellow with the Steamboat Institute. He was recently named to Washingtonian magazine’s 2026 list of the 500 Most Influential People Shaping Policy. And now I’ll turn it over to Dr. Bogden to begin our debate.

George Bogden: Thank you so much, Jennifer. It’s such a pleasure to be here today. I have to say that this is an exciting debate, not just because of our extraordinary speakers, but also, I think, because you all have been ruminating and deliberating on many of the subjects we’re going to address. So I ask, make this an opportunity to kind of crystallize and bring to the fore those points of agreement and disagreement you may have had earlier on.

I also want to say that — this is kind of the third debate that I’ve gotten to moderate in this fashion, and I have to say what really makes this fun is audience participation. And so I’m going to give a little demonstration. These cards are key to the debate. I think it’s great that Steamboat looks at folks using their devices as a feature, not a glitch, of a big public event. And so take the opportunity now to express your views on the topic, but also to start thinking through topics for the questions, because it’s my preference to ask your questions rather than the ones that I’ve prepared, and I’ll certainly stick to that.

Beyond that, I think it’s important to take one moment to read out what is a bit of an elaborate resolution. So if you’ll bear with me: This house believes that institutional neutrality is necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes. There’s a lot there. So without further ado, I think I’ll hand it over to our opening speaker, Professor Turley.

Jonathan Turley: Thank you very much. And please let me first thank Steamboat Institute, and of course Todd Wolfson, in facilitating what I think is a very timely debate.

The term “institutional neutrality” is often associated with the debate that really began significantly in 1900, continued through the 1950s, and then culminated with a report that you’ll hear a great deal about, called the Kalven Report. But it actually can be traced back centuries, to the basis for universities as institutions, as unique forums for free expression and free thought. Indeed, you can trace it back to the very founding of the concept of an academia. And that term, as I mentioned, I talk about in my book The Indispensable Right, can be traced to a small Athenian grove in ancient Greece where Plato would gather with his students, and famously they would form a circle to create a type of protected space, and they would direct their comments and their thoughts to the center of that circle, and it would symbolize the fact that what they would discuss was protected from pressures and influences outside. Higher education is meant to maintain that protected space. Universities and colleges protect the circle itself, and allow students and faculty to speak freely within it.

It is equally important to emphasize what institutional neutrality is not. It is not a bar on people who want to take public stances or engage in protests. Rather, as stated in the Kalven Report decades ago, the university is the home and sponsor of critics. It is not itself the critic. It also does not mean that the universities cannot speak to defend institutional interests, such as attacks on academic freedom, as many institutions have done in the last couple of years. Institutional neutrality encourages free expression and academic freedom by assuring students and faculty that the school itself takes no position other than supporting their right to speak, debate, write. Faculty can join en masse in protests and petitions, but when they do so, they do so as individuals, not as representatives of the university.

The call by figures against institutional neutrality is not coming from the students. A recent poll found a majority of students oppose institutions taking these public positions. Notably, another poll showed that roughly 60 percent of students said they fear speaking freely in class. An even larger percentage say that they actively self-censor in classes and on campus. That is a particularly distressing and depressing statistic. Many universities have taken the stand to try to reverse that, and they’ve reaffirmed their commitment to institutional neutrality to try to restore diversity of viewpoints. Schools from the University of Chicago to Yale to this institution, the University of Wyoming, have expressly embraced institutional neutrality as a touchstone. But other universities have abandoned that. University and department heads now regularly denounce ICE, condemn conservative speakers, or make other types of public statements on issues of the day. An institutional statement at the University of California, Santa Cruz declared, as an institution, that Gaza is a feminist issue. In the last election, Wesleyan university president Michael Roth called upon universities to reject institutional neutrality, and even called for them to endorse Vice President Harris, to oppose what he analogized as the rise of the Nazis.

The rejection of institutional neutrality is the final goal of many who have turned our higher education into an academic echo chamber. In the last two decades, conservatives and libertarians have been effectively purged from faculty and departments. There are many departments now that don’t have a single conservative or libertarian on the faculty, in a country that has a majority of conservatives and libertarians. With the complete control of faculties, many of these same figures are now pushing to make the academic institutions themselves into advocates. What is striking for some of us is these voices are not new; they’re all too familiar. At one time universities imposed a variety of religious and political viewpoints, including punishing those that undermined Christian values. It’s common for universities to denounce and cancel — but what we are watching is the final breaking of the circle from the Athenian grove. Higher education is now in an existential battle with itself, and we must join to create a new circle to guarantee that this garden, this grove, will allow many ideas to flourish. Thank you.

Todd Wolfson: Hey, everybody. How you doing? Good to see you. Um, I also want to start by thanking Steamboat. And, you know, this is my first time seeing these campus tours. It’s beautiful — a beautiful and important thing — so I really appreciate it.

Um, so we’re going to run into like some crossroads here, because I think there’s a lot we agree on. So I want to start with a concession: universities do issue too many statements. They do. Many are performative, politically convenient, and they’re intellectually hollow. I’ve spent 30 years in higher education, and I’ve watched institutions rush to signal virtue on questions far removed from the core mission. I’m not here to defend that. If the question tonight were “should universities weigh in on every political controversy,” I might be sitting on my opponent’s side of things.

But that’s not the question in front of us. The proposition before us is whether institutional neutrality is necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry. Necessary is a strong word. It does a lot. That means without neutrality, there is no open inquiry. That is the claim that my opponent — that Jonathan — must prove today, and I’m here to argue that he can’t, because history and experience point to the opposite direction. And so my burden is simple: find one case where non-neutral institutional action preserved open inquiry, and then the proposition fails, because a necessary condition admits no exceptions. So I intend to give you a couple of exceptions tonight, and we can think through from there.

But here is the central point I want to make. Academic freedom is the foundation of open inquiry — academic freedom. Neutrality is merely a strategy that helps us hold open inquiry, but a strategy is not the thing that makes a university free. Tenure, shared governance, faculty speech, independent research — these are the conditions under which genuine inquiry happens. Neutrality is a strategy that sometimes serves those conditions, but it’s not the source of those conditions. Confusing the strategy for the foundation is a central error in the proposition before us. Even the Kalven Report — and Jonathan said as well — even the Kalven Report recognizes that universities must defend the conditions that make inquiry possible.

Think of it this way. If universities were perfectly neutral, but the government abolished tenure, dictated curriculum, and controlled research, would inquiry be free? And that doesn’t matter whether you have a left-wing or right-wing government. In either case, if they dictated a curriculum, would that institution be free? You know, obviously not. In that world, universities would be perfectly neutral; they would also be profoundly unfree, which means neutrality was never the variable that matters most.

And we’re watching this play out in real time. Last October, the federal government sent a document called the Compact for Academic Excellence to nine major universities. The offer was straightforward: accept federal criteria over admissions, your curriculum, and your campus governance, and receive preferential access to federal funding; decline it, and you do not receive access to that federal funding. Seven universities publicly said no — MIT, Brown, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Virginia, and Arizona. Each took a public position, a public position: we will not let the government determine what we teach, whom we admit, and how we govern ourselves. Did those non-neutral statements destroy open inquiry at MIT, Brown, and Dartmouth? Did open inquiry suffer, or did they protect open inquiry by making a non-neutral statement?

And this is not a left or right question. One of the most influential defenses of free inquiry in modern higher education is the University of Chicago principles from 2014. Chicago did not remain neutral on free expression. It issued an explicit institutional statement rejecting the suppression of unpopular ideas, and affirming the university must protect the right to express them freely, and also demanding no safe spaces from ideas. More than 100 colleges and universities signed onto those principles. This is not a neutral position. And universities have likewise defended Christian student groups, conservative speakers, and unpopular voices through explicit institutional action.

So even the strongest defenders of institutional neutrality recognize that neutrality has exceptions. Once we admit that universities may speak when the conditions of inquiry are threatened, the debate is no longer about whether universities should ever speak. It becomes a debate about when they should speak — when and how they speak. And that’s a very different proposition.

My opponent will argue that when universities take institutional positions, they chill dissent and compromise their role as forums of open inquiry. Hold that claim against what you just heard. Seven universities publicly refused a government demand to submit their academic programs to political criteria. Some advocates of institutional neutrality would counsel silence, but silence in that moment is not neutrality. Silence is compliance — it’s compliance.

So it’s academic freedom. I’ll just say this one more time, and have us like center this: academic freedom is the central foundation upon which we have open inquiry. Institutional neutrality is a strategy, which sometimes works and sometimes is not necessary to hold and maintain open inquiry in our universities. Thank you.

George Bogden: Thank you so much for those stirring public — or opening — statements. And now we have a really exciting moment in the debate where I get to ask questions, you get to ask questions, and we’ll kind of see where things head. I want to start off by kind of going to the canonical example that Professor Turley opened us with, which really has to do with Athens and its validity as a model for the university. Do you think that that concept of the free and open space creates potential for harms and abuses? I’m thinking of, you know, putting to death of Socrates, or the ascendance of his acolyte Alcibiades. I didn’t mean for much alliteration. But, I mean, what I’m getting at is, is that a formula for people to take advantage and to do negative things and to persuade publics in awful ways?

Jonathan Turley: No, I don’t think it is. In The Indispensable Right, I talk about this growing chorus of academics who are saying that free speech is harmful or dangerous or triggering. And I don’t accept that. I don’t believe that free speech is harmful in the sense that you should be able to regulate it and curtail it to a large extent. But the question is what the baseline is.

This sort of goes to what Todd had said. I do not believe that the standard of whether institutional neutrality should exist is whether there’s a single academic somewhere who is showing academic freedom. That’ll be a hell of a test. The Chinese could say, “Yeah, you don’t need free speech; I can name an academic in Beijing who seems to be doing just fine.” The question is what the baseline is. And some of the universities that Todd referenced as opposing the Trump administration policies — and I oppose some of those policies — are signatories on institutional neutrality. The Kalven Report specifically says that universities are allowed to speak publicly about their institutional interests. Now, does that mean that the exception swallows the rule? No. But to come back to your question in terms of Athens: no one is actually being forced to take hemlock. In reality, they don’t need it. Most of the dissenting voices have been eliminated in many departments. And, quite frankly, I’ve always thought it was amazing that this group really wants to get rid of institutional neutrality — they have control of virtually every department in the country. They can sign petitions with overwhelming numbers because there are very few conservatives, Republicans, contrarians, libertarians. They’re largely gone. I’ve been teaching for over 30 years; I’ve watched it happen. So no one’s afraid of hemlock, because they got rid of Socrates years ago. They actually got rid of Plato years ago.

George Bogden: Right, right. And what do you think? Any response to that, or?

Todd Wolfson: Well, I do agree with Jonathan on this. I don’t think that open inquiry — and free, the circle — is the problem. So we do need a university. We might not agree on issues, but there’s no disagreement that we need a robust university that has diverse thought, where we are fighting over ideas, where we are teaching our students how to think. We are training them in multiple different disciplines that help them think. I mean, if that’s the proposition — that like there’s a side that doesn’t believe that’s true — I don’t think there’s actually that side in this world. I don’t see it. And I’m the one that’s the interlocutor on the left that supposedly is walking amongst the folks that are trying to shut everyone down. That is not what I am seeing. That is not the reality of the university I see today. That doesn’t mean there aren’t excesses — and Jonathan, you brought up some good ones about statements that were humorous, like “Gaza being a feminist issue” being one. But I think that there’s a typecast about what’s going on in the university that is not my experience.

Jonathan Turley: Can I follow up on that? Because Todd and I actually do share a lot of values — not surprisingly, we’ve both been teaching so long. And I don’t doubt Todd’s love for academia, but we obviously have some fundamental differences. What Todd just referred to — originally, much of our academic freedom policies came out of the German school, and this idea of sort of the Wissenschaft type of principle of higher education as teaching a way of learning. And the reason that’s important is because you’re not being taught that there is an orthodox set of answers. The idea is that we would teach a way of learning. That requires a very specific environment, that protected environment, and in my view essential to that is for the institution not to take a stand.

And, you know, there was a famous statement by a physicist who said that all great advances in science follow funerals. And what he was saying was that you have to wait for a lot of the orthodox advocates to pass before you can challenge it. And so what I would say to Todd is that when you go to sort of ways of learning, it’s very dangerous when institutions take positions, and it’s not necessary. In the Kalven Report they refer to universities becoming second-rate political organizations. No one really cares that much outside the university what they say, but people in the university — because if you want to go for tenure, if you want to get rehired, and you have a university saying X is the truth, then, if you were even thinking of writing that it’s not the truth, it presents a real barrier. And what I would put forward as examples of that is that during the pandemic we had many academics who were fired and attacked for taking opposing views of COVID. And that includes the Great Barrington letter that was signed. I spoke at the University of Chicago, and many of the signatories were in the front row. And I asked them — most of them were vindicated. They were vindicated on saying those blue masks did not prevent the transmission of the virus. They were vindicated on saying that the six-foot rule did not have a scientific basis. They were vindicated that you didn’t have to shut down schools — our European allies didn’t, and they flourished, while we are still suffering from that. All those voices were silenced because universities adopted positions that said that they were wrong and even racist. So that’s the problem.

George Bogden: Jump in with another kind of historical example here, because I think that oftentimes when we think about universities, and we talk about things like lawfare, we think the present is all there is. But just to give you one very vivid example: during the height of Watergate, one of the president’s men, Mr. Magruder, described then the special prosecutor Archibald Cox as, quote, “high priest of the Kennedy White House in waiting in Cambridge,” end quote. And it’s my understanding that that characterization was used to try to discredit this sort of constitutional process to investigate this question. And I’m using that example to try to put a fine point on: if institutional neutrality is impossible, what separates it from becoming any other political actor in our system? And I think you have the important first point to make on that.

Todd Wolfson: Yeah, and I think that’s the key point that we’re really at right now, is what constitutes a political statement, right? And so let’s go to the Kalven Report, and let’s just understand the moment it was written in. It was written in the ‘60s, during the civil rights movement, during the anti-war movement. And I think that students — not just students, faculty — were militating to get universities to make statements about the Vietnam War, or to make statements, or to divest from the war machine in one way or the other, right? And so in order to insulate the institutions from that, University of Chicago adopted this commission that then developed the Chicago Kalven Report. And they say in the report that we have to give leave for institutions to defend themselves historically, looking back, maybe at McCarthyism, maybe at Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s. But they don’t go into detail about what that means there. There are some statements about it, but there is not an express discussion about exactly what that means. And I think that’s where we are today, and that’s where maybe the disagreement lies, right?

So I think that if you fast forward to 2026, what the problems that the university faces — though some of them are from within, many of them are from without. And they’re demanding that universities sign demand letters from the Trump administration, or sign on to the compact, or do any number of things that limit curriculum, that limit who we hire, who we admit. And so I think the thing about the Kalven Report is that it was meant for the university of the 1960s, and we need to augment it by understanding that we’re in a different moment in 2026, and that it demands a different understanding of what institutional neutrality is, and what political or administrative speech is. And I would argue again that speaking against a president who makes a demand of X, Y, and Z is political speech. You cannot tell me that standing up to the Trump administration, as Dartmouth University or MIT, was a non-political act. It was a political act. And so, again, the choice and decision point we have now is not whether institutional neutrality is necessary, because it’s not. The question we have is what kind of speech, and when that speech is necessary, and we need to come to a place where we’re comfortable setting new boundaries about what speech makes sense.

Jonathan Turley: Yeah, I’d like to respond to that. First of all, when we get to like the death of Socrates — whether we’re having more Socrates and Platos, but the death — it was Socrates that took the hemlock. But I don’t know if Plato would do any better. But I want to go to this idea that this all began with the Kalven Report. That’s simply not true. It’s not what Todd is saying — Todd is saying that really the emphasis is on the Kalven Report, and he’s right about that. But actually, I went to University of Chicago, and I was very proud of this connection. President Harper, who was the first president of Chicago, articulated the first institutional neutrality principle. The first paper was in 1899; his famous speech was in 1900. Then you had a further work from Yale that came out before the Kalven Report. And so there was a great deal of American scholarship identifying institutional neutrality as essential to creating that really unique environment, that almost fleeting environment that produces what is extraordinary, which is intellectual life. You know, it’s probably the most vulnerable and delicate life form there is, is intellectual life. It dies with the smallest temperature changes. It has to exist within that type of circle.

And when Todd refers to standing up to the Trump administration — I criticized the Trump administration for its position with universities, even though I agree with the Trump administration on the lack of diversity and some of these other issues. But when Dartmouth and other schools did that, that’s exactly what Kalven anticipated. He said that you can speak as an institution for the things that are threatening you as an institution. So if there’s a threat to academic freedom, of course the university can speak. But that’s a very bright line, and I don’t think you can go from then say, well, you can protect academic freedom, therefore it’s a bonanza — you know, we can just start to hold forth on these issues. There’s a value to bright lines, and that’s what this gives. If you read the University of Wyoming statement on institutional neutrality, like some of these others — these are not statements when you read them you think, “My god, how limiting!” You would say, “Well, this is pretty common sense.” University saying, you know what, we’re going to protect all of you to talk, all of you to speak, all of your research, and we’re not going to weigh in. We’re leaving it to you. Our job is to make sure you can do that job and fulfill that function.

George Bogden: Those are both very helpful answers. Um, I want to give you a kind of extreme example, right, so really, I think, bring to the fore, you know, kind of examples that we may have seen in everyday life at universities. You know, say I’m a student, very upset with, you know, the position taken by faculty on, you know, a conflict that I have a heritage connection to. And I come to the administration, and I say, you know, I demand that the administration discuss and make a statement on the injustice of one side or another in this conflict that’s taking place. Can you explain for us why or why not the university should take a position on that, and how they would respond to the argument of the student that “I don’t feel safe at the university because these statements are being made in public on the university’s campus, and it’s chilling my ability to be a student or to engage in the speech that I would like to engage too, because I feel threatened”? Is that to me first, or to Todd?

Todd Wolfson: Look, you know, I mean, we all face these situations, right? We’re facing them now on our campus, certainly when it comes to the war in the Middle East, where we have students coming to us from both sides, feeling completely distressed about the — not just the academic life, the social, cultural life of the university — because they feel threatened, because a word they hear, a word that’s spoken, they hear differently than it’s meant to be as a spoken word, etcetera. I, again, I am not here to defend that universities should speak on these issues. I do not think universities should take a stand, for instance, on Israel and Palestine. I do not think, as a faculty member at a university that’s probably got — Rutgers University, it’s probably got one of the largest Jewish faculty and largest Muslim faculty communities in the country — it is not healthy to create an environment where the university itself takes a position on that, even if many members have strongly felt beliefs. So I am not arguing — now, I would not argue that.

Again, what I’m arguing is that the argument for institutional neutrality runs up headlong against the moment we live in now, when universities are forced to take political positions in defense of themselves. And that may be spoken about in the Kalven Report, but in and of itself it forces universities into a different position than they’ve been in, and therefore institutional neutrality cannot be fully, fully protected. Because in the moment that you make that decision, that is a judgment decision by the president or the board of governors of that institution to stand up and defend the institution. And I’ll note that two universities, while they didn’t accept the compact from the Trump administration, they did not speak publicly, right? And they did not publicly reject it. So they made a different decision about what was right for their community. So again, that’s the ground I want us to be on. I am not going to make an argument here today to you that we should be speaking out as institutions about all told number of horrors in the world. I think we, as individuals, should; I don’t think our institution should.

George Bogden: Just to push you a little bit on that point, before we get to you.

Todd Wolfson: Please, go ahead.

George Bogden: I mean, let’s say we have a Jewish university, and a university that identifies with the Jewish tradition and so on. And would you say, under the Kalven criteria, they have a basis to make a statement about the conflict which you’ve raised as an example?

Todd Wolfson: No, because there are also many Jewish people who are not comfortable with the war in the Middle East. So no — there are Jewish people who are not comfortable with... I’m a Jewish faculty member who is not comfortable with the war in the Middle East at this moment. So no, that would not be acceptable.

George Bogden: They would have to accept the premise that that conflict has no threat to their core values. I’m just trying to push you on this one.

Todd Wolfson: No, they would have to accept that there are — all right, so you’re saying, do they have to accept that? You would have to make a case for me, which hasn’t been made, that speaking out about the war in the Middle East, or the war in the Middle East itself, in some way undermines a yeshiva or a Jewish institution in a way that stripping a university of its right to control its own curriculum does to Vanderbilt. I do not see those as apples to apples.

Jonathan Turley: I’d like to respond to your original question, and then come back to Todd’s answer. First of all, at University of Chicago, the answer was clearly stated in the Zimmer letter, which I thought was absolutely brilliant. So some of the students that had been accepted at the University of Chicago received a letter of acceptance, and it congratulated them on being selected. It said that the University of Chicago is excited about their coming. It said, some of you might be concerned that you’re going to face these triggering types of ideas — there’s no, that you’re not going to have a safe space at the University of Chicago, and I’m just writing to make sure you know there are no safe spaces at the University of Chicago. And he said, we will not protect you from ideas, and if that’s really important to you, then this is not the place to go. The Chicago letter has been adopted by many universities. So the answer to your question is no.

I’m sympathetic with people that feel like certain speakers are triggering. They can protest. What they can’t do — and what we can regulate, which is not speech — is conduct. So if you shout down a speaker, that’s conduct. If you’re at Stanford and you’re shouting down a federal judge who wants to talk about his philosophy, that’s conduct, okay? That’s not — you’re preventing free speech. You’re protected to be outside and to state all of those reasons.

But I want to push my friend Todd a little further on this, because I feel the same way about academic institutions as I do about the AAUP. And the AAUP has signed a letter taking a position on the Gaza war. And as an academic who believes strongly in the history of the AAUP and how it has fought for academic freedom, I was very critical of that. I was critical of your pledge, as a president, to make it more of an advocacy organization. You know, I’m not too sure why the same doesn’t apply to an AAUP. I believe that academic institutions, which include the AAUP, should be fighting for the right for people to speak freely, and not take a position on what they are doing, their research, or the issues that are being debated.

Todd Wolfson: I’ll respond to that. And it’s true — AAUP and I have taken many controversial political positions, and I feel very comfortable with that. And I think that it’s a very different beast than a university. And so what I would say to that simply is that, first and foremost, AAUP is a member organization. We have 60,000 members, and we’re a democratic member organization. And so we reflect the thoughts and will of our overall membership. And democratically — which means if 60 or 70 percent feel a certain way, that are engaged in a process of democratic deliberation, then we will take a position on that. And I feel strongly that that’s what organizations that are member-led democratic organizations should do. That, again, is different, because we have a different role than a university, which is meant to, you know, do research, teaching, and service, and of course protect open inquiry. That is not the role of AAUP. AAUP, as a member organization, reflects the will of its members. And, you know, like, we might not all agree on this, but my feeling — it’s important to understand the history of AAUP, which is, it was founded well over a hundred years ago by John Dewey. And for the first 50 years of its lifetime, it was a professional association representing the profession. In that moment, I think Jonathan is right. It would be better off being neutral. The last 50 years, it has pivoted to being mostly a union. The people who pay the dues have collective bargaining rights, and it’s become a union, and unions are political organizations. So we have shifted the organization to reflect that reality. I agree, though: if it was more of a professional association, it would be less appropriate for us to take these sort of political positions.

George Bogden: You can push this a little further. Go for it.

Jonathan Turley: First of all, I don’t agree on the AAUP. I actually think unions should — I have a problem with unions taking a lot of political positions when members are paying dues from different political standpoints. But that’s — I can see Todd’s point, and that’s a legitimate point of disagreement. But the AAUP, through its Committee A, produced a position on institutional neutrality very recently, and you have a very able head of that committee, who is a University of California professor. And, you know, it was a very strong argument against institutional neutrality, but it’s notable that his position includes, for example, saying that universities should issue a statement condemning Charlie Kirk if he spoke on campus — this was before he was assassinated. And it gave an insight into at least what that author thinks about institutional statements, that he thinks that one of those things institutions could legitimately say is to attack a conservative. Not someone like Angela Davis, or someone from the West who are more frequently speakers on campuses, but that Charlie Kirk should have been condemned. And I’m just wondering whether you believe that that’s true — that your view of institutional neutrality means that universities should condemn people like Charlie Kirk.

Todd Wolfson: Well, I think you’re referring to Brian, who is not the chair of Committee A, Rana Jaleel is — she’s also from University of California. There’s a bunch of University of California folks on Committee A. I won’t — it’s not my job to defend Brian’s book.

Jonathan Turley: No, I’m just interested in this — in the point, not his book, but this idea that…

Todd Wolfson: I mean, I think I’ve made my point clear, which is, look, I think that what we really want to — what I really think needs to be explored here is how institutions are responding to a — what I believe is an existential threat from a very aggressive federal government. Again, it could be a leftist federal government. In this case, it’s not. And how it is forced to take political positions, and what that means for the concept of institutional neutrality — because I think it undermines it, even if the Kalven Report made an exception for it. I don’t feel it’s necessary for me to respond to an argument that Brian Soucek made about Charlie Kirk, which actually I’m not even, frankly, you know —

Jonathan Turley: Yeah, I agree, it was sort of an unfair thing, quite frankly. I regret I asked it. But I’m more interested in trying to figure out, sort of grope around, where your line is drawn here. Because for those of us who are big advocates of institutional neutrality, we want a bright line rule. And you make us feel really uncomfortable, because we’re not sure where that line is.

Todd Wolfson: Well, let me give you an example, which I do think is important for us to think about, um, that is outside of the argument I’m making about, um, response to the federal government in this moment. So when I was at Rutgers, Rutgers University wanted to expand its cancer center, and they made a decision, using the power and networks that they have and a very large endowment, to close down the best-performing middle school in New Brunswick and move that middle school — their offered site was a brownfield site. And it’s important to note that the majority of the students were people of color. And so, that they could expand the Cancer Institute, right? Now, that is not something that is dealt with appropriately, I think, in our discussion of institutional neutrality. We talk about statements, but that act by Rutgers University to kick out students who had the best-performing middle school and move them somewhere far away — it took years for them to rebuild that school — I believe is also a political act, and an act that we haven’t appropriately dealt with when we think about our universities and institutions and we talk about institutional neutrality. How do we reckon with that? How do we reckon with that? It’s an honest question. I think institutional neutrality does not effectively reckon with that.

George Bogden: I love this organic exchange, but it is my favorite part of the debate where I get to ask your questions. Before we do, though, I just want to tell the audience my favorite quote from Jimmy Hoffa, given all this talk about unions, which is, you know, “I may have my faults, but being wrong ain’t one of them.” Beyond that, though, there’s a lot of, I think, really interesting kind of ideas coming from the audience, basically around the converse of what I asked you earlier on. So we now have had a discussion about what separates a non-neutral university from any other political actor. So now, Professor Turley, I want to ask you, from our audience: does institutional neutrality require what we might call apathy from all external forces? Or where do you draw the line beyond the Kalven discussion?

Jonathan Turley: Well, it’s a very good question. And the fact is, I am a believer in robust institutional neutrality. The times of where academic freedom is challenged are, thankfully, few, although we’ve seen some with this administration where universities took a position, and, whether you agree with them or not, I think that absolutely that was within their right to do so. But it’s a very slippery slope. And you end up — for example, my university took a position on D.C. statehood. And I understand that they viewed that as the sort of disenfranchisement of a city with a majority of African American voters, and they felt very strongly about that. But that’s a very good example of where this slippery slope can take you. I testified on D.C. statehood repeatedly in Congress and raised, I believe, that the bills that were being put forward were facially unconstitutional — that the Congress could not do what they were thinking of doing, for constitutional reasons. So there’s a myriad of reasons why you would support voting for D.C. residents. In fact, I suggested a way of doing that, but be opposed to D.C. statehood. But the university stepped in and said, no, here’s the answer.

And the question is, how does that make, for example, an assistant professor who just started in the political science department — how does she deal with this subject if it’s within her wheelhouse, and she thinks that no, it’s a bad idea, when the university president is saying this is the position of our university? So the problem with abandoning this bright line rule is that it quickly takes you on there, and we’ve seen institutions lose those bearings. And it gets back to that sort of baseline I mentioned with Todd, of where the baseline should be. And a lot of you — dozens of universities — have said the baseline has to be with institutional neutrality. Now, are there going to be outliers off that baseline? Of course, there always are. I mean, you can’t have a principle where there’s not going to be these tough questions. But the baseline itself has a certain gravitational pull for the institution. It tells professors and students, we’re not here to tell you the right answer; we’re here to help you find a way of learning, and to reach the answers on yourself.

When I went to University of Chicago, there was still a very robust free speech community, and I talk about it in Indispensable Right, that it was like walking into the bar scene in the Star Wars movie. And, you know, we had — I lived in a cooperative, a vegetarian cooperative, and downstairs Trotskyites would meet, and upstairs, like, we had militant vegans, and next door we had crazy libertarians. And I loved every single minute of it. I love meeting people who could see what I was saying and see something so different. That twilight environment, that fragile intellectual environment, requires institutional neutrality, in my view.

Todd Wolfson: Can I — can I, because you pushed me? I’m gonna ask you — you know, turnabout’s fair play. So, all right, so let’s go to Texas, and I think it’s Senate Bill 37. So Senate Bill 37 puts real constraints on how we teach around race and gender. It also abolishes shared governance, but then it asks the different Texas systems to put it into practice, and the different universities put it into practice differently. Texas A&M had review of all syllabi, right? And I think the number is between 200 or 300 classes were found to be teaching race or gender incorrectly, and they were either canceled or moved out of the core curriculum. One of the famous examples, I think we all heard of, is the teacher who was teaching on Plato. And so Texas A&M and the Texas Tech system didn’t abolish shared governance, but they turned faculty senates into faculty councils, something like that. The University of Texas at Austin, the flagship, took a different position: they abolished the university, or faculty senate — I’m not sure which it was; I think it was a faculty senate — but then also, and I was just saying this as we were walking in, they are closing four departments: African and African Diasporic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Mexican Latino Studies, and American Studies. They’re consolidating them into one mega cultural studies department, and many of the faculty will not be returning, right? And so I guess the question for you: none of the Texas universities spoke out about this or challenged this state law. And so my question for you is, should they be speaking? Should the universities be speaking out about the Texas universities, about SB 37?

Jonathan Turley: Well, I can’t speak to that actual legislation, but I get the gist of it from your description. It sounds like some of that I’ve criticized. I don’t believe that legislators should be telling academics what they can teach in class, like barring anyone from teaching, for example, critical legal studies. I teach a theory class as part of my torts class, and I teach various schools of thought from feminism to economics to critical legal studies, because I want my students to understand all these different perspectives and to come up with their own view of what the law should do. And so I was critical of some of this legislation that dictated you cannot teach these. Now, having said that, I also want to note that the state legislators are in a position now that I believe is a difficult one, and we’ve created it.

The fact is that universities are overwhelmingly hostile today to certain views. That’s what a lot of conservative Republican students report, they have a much higher rate of self-censorship. And, you know, I had this debate at Harvard with a Harvard professor, and I mentioned the majority of judges in this country are Republican appointees or conservatives. Half this country is Republican, and you’ve got like five on your faculty. And Randall — who was a guy I liked a great deal, Randall Kennedy — said, “We’re an elite institution; we don’t have to look like America.” And I said, “Randy, you don’t even look like Massachusetts. I mean, Massachusetts is 35 percent Republican.”

So what these legislators are facing are these universities that have become these hardened silos, and they don’t want to keep on supporting them with public dollars unless they see real reforms. And they have spent decades telling these university presidents and faculty members, you’ve got to have greater diversity, and the faculties will not do it. They have continued down the same path. So I guess my answer is, I agree with Todd on some of this stuff, and I am very critical of some of these laws. But I’m also very sympathetic as to what some of these legislators are trying to do, because the number of applications are dropping. Universities are closing at an unprecedented rate, and we’re like a ship of fools. We’re not even remotely interested in why many people look at higher education now, which is the highest — sorry, the lowest — level of public trust and respect in modern history. And yet we’re fighting about this as we alienate half of this country.

George Bogden: Well, you know, I think Foucault would agree with you about that ship of fools. I don’t know if it’d be negative for him. Nonetheless, you know, I have to get to, before we go to closing statements, what I think is the overwhelming point of the questions that have been submitted, which is the critique that you’ve heard from many different places — I think from folks like Desmond Tutu: if you’re silent in the face of injustice, you’re essentially siding with the unjust party. And I want to push that a little bit further, very quickly. How do you see the difference between silence and neutrality? Or is there one?

Todd Wolfson: I do want to say one quick thing, which is, there’s many reasons why public trust in universities has dropped. Arguably, maybe it’s because the faculty don’t reflect America. I think that there’s some reality to that argument, but there are other things we have to be honest about and look at. And so I am not happy with the Yale report, for instance, because that’s what they focus on, but they miss the fact that for the last 60 years, the federal and state governments have divested away from our institutions, our public institutions. And in divesting, they’ve put the burden of college onto the backs of our students and their families, and created $2 trillion in student debt. And then secondarily, the people who have had the biggest microphones talking about higher ed for the last five to 10 years are people who are using it for political platforms, right? And so while I am sympathetic that there are not enough conservative voices or libertarian voices in higher ed — I think there’s something to be said about that — I think that that’s only a part of the story, and it’s an overused part of the story, because we are not looking at long-term divestment, and we are not looking at who is talking about our universities and how are they talking about them and for what purpose.

But to return to — just really briefly, and I know we’re running out of time — I am very sympathetic to the concept, the Desmond Tutu’s famous quote, that if you do not — if you are silent in the face of oppression, then you are complicit in that oppression. I am. That does not mean, I think, that universities are the way that we respond, necessarily, to that oppression. And I think I heard Jonathan say this as well: there are all sorts of ways to organize. I organized by building a union. And the union — and maybe we disagree about the role of unions, but the union is then meant to respond to those injustices if the members agree with those injustices. So I agree with the quote, but I don’t think that the university making statements is going to be the solution to those problems.

Jonathan Turley: You know, I think the quote is misplaced. I remember one time I had a colleague that was in a fight over his shirts being lost by a laundromat, and this owner said, “I’m going to call my lawyer.” And Eric spun around and said, “I make lawyers.” Putting the bravado aside, what we do as academics is we create thinking — or we perfect thinking — people, where we shouldn’t be trying to get them to understand what they should think. And that means that sometimes, in terms of an institution being silent, it’s because it’s not our role. What we need to do is, if you really want to fight injustice, create a generation of educated and thinking people. That’s how you end injustice, that’s how you end ignorance, and the institution itself can make that happen by protecting that way of learning.

George Bogden: Very excited for us to begin our closing statements. I do want to remind you, after those closing statements, to vote. I want to reiterate that — that it’s really crucial to the integrity of the debate that it’s after you all have heard those final remarks that you vote. But with that, I’ll hand it over.

Todd Wolfson: Hey, y’all. When we began tonight, I made a concession: universities issue too many statements. Some are performative, and some are foolish. Some undoubtedly create pressure to conform rather than encouraging debate. After this discussion, I’m even more convinced that concern needs to be taken seriously. But again, that’s not the proposition before us. The proposition is not whether institutional neutrality is often wise. It is. The proposition is not whether universities should comment on every controversy. They shouldn’t. The proposition is whether institutional neutrality is necessary to preserve the university as a forum of open inquiry. Before you decide how to vote, I think it’s important to be clear about what must be true for that proposition to prevail.

My opponent can’t just show that institutional neutrality is often wise. He can’t show that some statements are misguided. He can’t show that sometimes those statements chill dissent. All of that’s clearly true. To win, he must answer the core argument we’ve discussed tonight. He must show that institutional neutrality is not merely a strategy, but a necessary condition of open inquiry. He must show that academic freedom is not the true foundation of a free university, and he must explain why universities that spoke to defend their own independence and the conditions of inquiry do not count as legitimate exceptions. I do not believe he has, because if even one legitimate exception exists, the proposition fails. And that’s not the legitimate exception of an individual; that’s a legitimate exception of any institution that speaks politically in order to protect open inquiry. A necessary condition admits no exceptions. And after an hour of debate, I do not believe the burden has been met.

I’ve spent 30 years in higher ed. I’ve watched universities face pressure from governments, from donors — a lot, recently — from political movements of every stripe. And what I’ve seen consistently is that institutions that survived those pressures with their integrity intact were not the ones that stayed silent. They were the ones that knew what they stood for, and they defended it.

Throughout this discussion, I’ve asked us to distinguish between the strategy and foundation. Academic freedom is the foundation of open inquiry. Tenure is a foundation. I think shared governance is a foundation. I think the independence of teaching and research from political control is a foundation of open inquiry. I do not think institutional neutrality is a foundation. I think it’s important at times, but not a foundation.

My opponent argued, following the tradition of Kalven Report, that institutional statements can chill dissent, create pressure to conform, and draw universities into political disputes. They’re right to worry about that, and I worry about that too. But even the strongest defenders of institutional neutrality recognize that universities must defend the conditions that make inquiry possible. And once we admit that principle, we already acknowledge that academic freedom is prior to neutrality, because when the two come into conflict, neutrality must yield to academic freedom.

The most important example tonight, from my vantage, are the major universities that said no to the Trump administration. Seven refused publicly, without equivocation, because they understood what the proposition tonight misses: silence in that moment was not neutrality. Silence was compliance, and compliance would have ended the independence that makes inquiry possible. Were they wrong? Did open inquiry become less secure at Dartmouth, Brown, and MIT because the leaders defended institutional independence? Of course not. Those statements did not undermine open inquiry; they protected it, and they were not neutral. The University of Chicago reached the same conclusion when it publicly committed to protecting unpopular speech, including speech this audience might find uncomfortable, or I might find uncomfortable. Non-neutral, but obviously right.

The moment we can identify even one circumstance of a university speaking to defend the conditions of inquiry, the proposition can’t stand. Why? Because necessary is a strong word, and legitimate exceptions defeat it. Now, again, imagine a university that’s perfectly neutral. It never issues a statement. It never takes a public position. It never enters a political controversy. That circle is kept closed. But politicians decide what can be taught. Researchers are told what they may study. Faculty can be punished for unpopular views. Shared governance disappears. The university would be perfectly neutral. It would also be profoundly unfree. What makes a university a forum for open inquiry is not neutrality. Academic freedom is the foundation; neutrality is a strategy. And when that foundation is threatened, the willingness to defend it is not optional — that is a mark of a free university. Thank you.

Jonathan Turley: Thank you very much, Todd. Again, and I want to emphasize a couple of things, but I first like to read you something. I may even have glasses where I can do that.

“While university leaders will make decisions about matters that further UW’s educational mission” — you’ve guessed it, this is the University of Wyoming statement — “they do not, on principle, commit the university in ways that are outside of its core academic purpose. This adherence to impartiality reaffirms the intellectual freedom of all at UW to seek and receive information without restriction, and enjoy unfettered access to all expression of ideas through which any side of a question, cause, or movement may be explored.”

You know something interesting about that statement of this institution? It did not create the dichotomy of my friend Todd. It did not say, well, you pick institutional neutrality, or you pick academic freedom, or you play them against each other. If you take a look at some of the early writings — from the 1899 study, the 1900 statement by Harper, the Yale statement that occurred two decades later — they all talked about pillars, plural, of higher education. One of the most important is in fact academic freedom, as Todd correctly notes, but another one was institutional neutrality.

There’s a lot of factors that go into this hothouse, this extraordinary place that produces the geniuses that this country has brought forth for the whole world. It’s a really fragile hothouse. It requires all the right soil, the temperature, the moisture — all of those are the dynamics of growth, intellectual growth. And that in turn is the growth plate for a nation. We need higher education, not to tell us the answers, but to prepare us as a people. We are going to be facing some terrible challenges. I talk about that in Rage in the Republic. We’ll be facing some of the biggest challenges we’ve ever faced as a democratic system. We need an educated population. We need people who can think for themselves.

And the reason I don’t accept the framing of my colleague, um, as clever as it is, is that I don’t view these as competing principles. I view them as part of a wonderful recipe that produces what we have today in higher education. But you cannot achieve those other things without institutional neutrality, because it’s institutional neutrality that helps guarantee academic freedom. It gives the buffer for free expression and for discussion. And it’s one of the things — I’ve had debates before where they say, well, point to someone who’s not really saying what they want to say. That’s rather an old saw. You know, we have to look at the environment that you’ve created.

Now, I’m going to be very blunt, and maybe a tad too harsh, but I believe this generation of academics is killing higher education. I believe the evidence of that is all around us. They have turned it into an academic echo chamber. I’ve seen it happen. I never thought, when I went into teaching over 30 years ago, we would ever be where we are now. The level of intolerance of viewpoints, the lack of diversity of faculty — I never thought it would happen. But part of that equation is institutional neutrality. It feeds the rest of it.

And I would simply tell my colleagues this — you know, this is a revolution in education. Some of my colleagues have called it that. You know, Rage in the Republic, I start with a statement by probably what’s properly known as the Thomas Paine of his generation. He was one of the great thinkers of the French Revolution, a Jacobin, and he observed after the French Revolution that revolutions, like Saturn, devour their children. I would warn my colleagues this: we are already seeing a lot of the people that said nothing as universities were effectively getting rid of all conservatives and canceling speakers — all of the people that said nothing, and now they are being turned upon, and they are being attacked as well. Revolution swallows its children. And what we could lose here is something that is just absolutely irreplaceable for a nation like ours. We’ll never need higher education more. So we need institutions to be neutral, so we don’t have another COVID situation where we’ve got academics who are fired and marginalized for things that they were later supported on. They’re not back. When I asked all those people in Chicago how many of you were rehired, put back on your associations — it was zero. Some of these people were vindicated, where federal agencies now support what they said. That’s the price when institutions start to abandon neutrality. Thank you very much.

George Bogden: Well, just one more reminder to take that moment to vote on how you think the debate went and where you come out — affirmative, negative, or undecided on the resolution — and, we’ll look at the results in just a moment.

Looks like we have some interesting results coming in — still filtering in. Oh, okay. So before the debate, we had 63 — or, excuse me, 66 percent in agreement, 14 in disagreement, and 21 undecided. Afterwards, we had about 63 in agreement, 13 in disagreement, and 24 undecided. And it still continues to fluctuate. I’m kind of concerned, but, you know, clearly we had some change. But as they say in France, plus ça change. I’m gonna hand it over to our host, and thank you all for participating.

Jennifer Schubert Aiken: Just very briefly, to wrap up: thank you to Professor Turley, Professor Wolfson, and moderator George Bogden. One more round of applause. What a fantastic debate.

If you’re wondering about the poll, it will be posted on our website, and you’ll be able to see this on our YouTube channel too later, so you’ll be able to get the final-final as it continues to shift as all of you vote.

I would also like to thank the University of Wyoming and Heterodox Academy for allowing Steamboat Institute to bring our Campus Liberty Tour debate to you here at the Mountain West Regional Conference. Thanks also, once again, to the Adolph Coors Foundation, and Bruce and Marcy Benson, and all of our wonderful supporters shown on the screen tonight, for making the Campus Liberty Tour possible.

If you enjoyed tonight’s debate, two things. One, we are a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization; we would love to have your tax-deductible support. Two, many of you are with universities — like, most of you are with universities. If you would like us to bring a Campus Liberty Tour debate to your campus, please contact us. We’d love to visit with you. Go to steamboatinstitute.org, or pick up a flyer outside to see our upcoming debates this fall. And, once again, this debate will be available in its entirety on our YouTube channel within 48 hours, for free, for you to share — use it in many ways to get more people to watch this. Thank you again for coming, thank you for the opportunity, thank you again to our speakers. Have a good evening.

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Drawing on her new book, Radical Duke, Allen traces the origins of modern constitutional democracy to a network of radical thinkers in eighteenth-century Britain who fought for free expression, political transparency, and popular sovereignty. Their struggles, she argues, offer important lessons for the challenges facing democratic institutions today.

The conversation then turns to the modern university, where Allen and Tomasi examine whether universities occupy a unique place in democratic life. They discuss why disagreement is essential to both truth-seeking and self-government, how institutions can create space for productive conflict, and what responsibilities colleges and universities have in preserving the civic capacities on which democracy depends.

Subscribe to Heterodox Out Loud on your preferred podcast platform. A transcript of the episode is below.

John Tomasi: Danielle Allen, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Danielle Allen: Thank you, John. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m glad to have the chance to have this conversation with you.

John Tomasi: As you and I both know, though you’re here in New York for the podcast and for the panel tomorrow morning, that’s not the only thing that brought you here. It’s also the case that this week is the launch of your exciting new book, Radical Duke. Congratulations.

Danielle Allen: Thank you. It’s exciting — it’s always exciting when a new book comes out, but this one was especially fun.

John Tomasi: We’re all pretty excited about it too. And you and I were saying before we came in that you’re giving a talk this evening at the New York Public Library.

Danielle Allen: Exactly. I’m going to have the pleasure of introducing the Radical Duke to people. This was somebody named Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond. He lived from 1735 to 1806. He was a British politician who was a fervent supporter of the Americans. He was the first member of Parliament to recommend acknowledging American independence. He introduced a bill for universal manhood suffrage in the House of Lords in 1780 —

John Tomasi: A hundred years before.

Danielle Allen: More than that. Britain started widening the suffrage in 1830, based on the kind of reform foundation he had laid. It took until the early 20th century before Britain achieved full universal male suffrage, and then a decade after that, universal suffrage. So yes, he was a visionary, really ahead of his time. And pertinent to our themes: he was part of a network of radical writers who had to write secretly, because dissent was so powerfully suppressed in Britain in the 1760s and 1770s. As they fought to get their views into the public sphere, they also fought for important kinds of openings. For example, at the beginning of the 1760s it was illegal to report on the proceedings of Parliament — to report speeches and so forth.

John Tomasi: It wasn’t just Chatham House rules. It was completely illegal.

Danielle Allen: Exactly. You were not supposed to report anything outside the walls of Parliament. But some members of these radical groups had really excellent memories, and they would go sit in Parliament and listen, and then record almost verbatim transcripts of what had occurred and secretly circulate them. They did this enough, and there was such an appetite for it, that eventually the government could not hold out against the cry for transparency in parliamentary proceedings.

John Tomasi: That’s fascinating. And this Duke brought together in his circle people like Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Say a little bit about that.

Danielle Allen: Yeah. People forget that in the 1760s and 1770s there was this universe of radical Whigs — Whigs because they were associated with the great Whig aristocratic political families. Those families had been dominant in politics throughout the 18th century. They didn’t have a particular ideological flavor through the middle part of the century, but then in the 1760s and 1770s the impact of Enlightenment philosophy really hits. They imbibe the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty and begin to have a theory of politics that counters the standard monarchical view. So working men like Burke, who trained as a lawyer, and Thomas Paine, who was originally a corset maker, were part of the same philosophical conversation. Together these radicals forged modern conceptions of constitutional representative government, popular sovereignty, and ultimately constitutional democracy. It’s not until the French Revolution that you get Burke and Paine parting ways — the one going right, the other going left. So the father of conservatism and the father of liberal radicalism were both radical Whigs in the 1760s.

John Tomasi: Fascinating. I’m at the stage with your book that I describe as the pre-read stage, so I’m reading all the reviews that have come out. I read The New Yorker piece, which was great, and a great piece in The Wall Street Journal that I’m sure you saw. One of the ideas the Wall Street Journal picked up — an overarching idea — is that most of us think those radical revolutions happened at the American founding and at the French Revolution, but there’s a suggestion that the germinating ideas came not from the US alone, not from France alone, but in fact from Britain, in those conversations.

Danielle Allen: Very much so. This is not to say that America didn’t matter, or that France didn’t matter — they did. Adam Gopnik’s description of my book the other day somewhat overstated the argument I actually make. But yes, the radical circles were thinking and arguing and writing in the 1750s and 1760s in England, and they were tightly connected to the Americans. Benjamin Franklin was a particular link in the chain, going back and forth across the Atlantic. Many of the things we associate with the movements toward revolution here in the colonies have their precursors in England. For example, there was the stamp tax and the riots against it — but several years earlier, England had had riots over the cider tax. We think of the Boston Massacre as a critical moment, but several years earlier in London there had been the St. George’s Fields Massacre, when soldiers shot into a crowd gathered to protest ministerial actions and killed some people. So those dynamics were really quite homologous on both sides of the Atlantic.

John Tomasi: It’s fascinating. I want to move to some topics in higher education, and the bridge I’m going to invite you to cross with me is a convocation address by a president at Brown University. Her name is Ruth Simmons, the first Black woman president of an Ivy League university — a woman who, as you may know, had a remarkable personal story, growing up in real poverty and rising to become an extremely idealistic leader, first here at Smith and then at Brown. When she arrived at Brown, it was a time when there had been a lot of racial tension on campus the previous year. There was a discord across the campus of an unhealthy kind — a sense that people could not talk to each other, maybe should not talk to each other, that loyalty was more important than community. Ruth Simmons came in to give a convocation address in 2001, and she said something in it that struck me so much I memorized it. I’ve carried it around in my head all the time, and I invite you to as well, so I’ll just say it. She said that while other types of communities devise covenants so as to avoid conflict, at the university our covenant is rooted in quarrel and in opposition. We freely allow ideas to collide in the service of learning; no idea is out of reach or out of bounds. It’s the first part of that I wanted to invite you to talk with us about. She says the covenant of a university is rooted in quarrel and opposition, unlike other forms of constitutional or political covenants. What do you make of that general idea? How does your work — your most recent book, or your earlier work — bear on that set of ideas?

Danielle Allen: Well, it’s a beautiful formulation, so I can see why you listened, heard it, memorized it, and carried it around. I appreciate the power of it, and I agree with its basic argument that the university is defined by being a space of disagreement. I think Alasdair MacIntyre also spoke eloquently about the university as a place for constrained disagreement. So I appreciate that formulation. And the word “covenant” is, of course, an interesting word — it does suggest a contract, an agreement to come into consensus around something. I wouldn’t want to suggest, though, that the covenant that founds a democracy is about a community coming to a robust agreement. It’s rather a community that’s come to a kind of minimal agreement, and the minimal agreement is to prosecute their disagreements peacefully through institutions, rather than with arms or physical conflict. In that regard, James Madison in Federalist 10 famously said that freedom generates diversity of opinion. So if you’re going to protect freedom, you will have disagreement. A political covenant, from my point of view, depends just as much on recognizing that you’re protecting the space for debate as a university covenant does.

John Tomasi: So you’re saying that free institutions — for example, institutions that allow for freedom of association, church groups, other groups where people can form deep understandings of themselves that are unlike other groups in their community — combined with other liberal freedoms, such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press, generate the materials of friction in an ongoing way.

Danielle Allen: Exactly.

John Tomasi: It’s not just something that happens, so we’re going to try to avoid the conflict through institutions. The institutions themselves perhaps create it.

Danielle Allen: They create it, they support it, they produce a container for it. That’s why MacIntyre’s phrase “constrained disagreement” is so important — it is disagreement within the bounds of peacefulness. You’re committing to put down arms. And we have to remember that liberal democracy is really a creature born from the conflicts of religious wars, when people wanted to find a path to religious toleration and religious freedom. So there is a thing people agree on, and it’s that we have methods for how we’re going to engage in our disputes and disagreements. I think that’s the same between a university and a liberal constitutional democracy.

John Tomasi: You say it’s the same. Let me push there a little, because I love that quotation so much — I’ve been carrying it around for 25 years, and I’ll continue to. But you’re helping me see some limitations to it, and I want to push back on one piece. I think what she’s doing is saying there’s something special about the kind of discourse and the kind of disagreement at a university. You might not agree, but I’ll play it anyway: there’s something about the university’s covenant — and I think she’s using sacramental language intentionally, to say you’re doing something important here — something almost sacramental about the disagreements, because they’re so essential to the search for knowledge and understanding and to personal growth. That separates the disagreements we have at universities from the disagreements we have in, let’s say, well-functioning democratic politics. Is that just confusion on my part? Nostalgia for that day?

Danielle Allen: I think there is a difference in the nature of the disagreements, and also in the terms of the agreement we have for how we debate them, between universities and the political sphere. Let me first say one further thing about the concept of covenant, which is sacramental, as you say. In that regard, perhaps the first distinction President Simmons was trying to direct us toward was between a religious community and the university. A covenant in a religious community surely is an agreement on doctrine — there’s the credo, “I believe,” and here’s the list of things I believe. That’s a powerful distinction. So I would put religious communities in one place, and then universities and liberal democracies in another place. But then, in terms of the parameters and institutional norms for how debate is handled, I would invoke Plato for understanding the difference between universities and the political sphere. The political sphere is often a sphere of judgment under conditions of uncertainty, when action must be taken. It’s a sphere where prudence is the reigning virtue, and the best you can do is make fallible, defeasible judgments. In a democracy, you’ve also decided that the majority will win — so you’re not actually insisting that you’re looking for truth, you’re looking for a stable decision that will carry popular support with it, in order to maintain the legitimacy of institutions over time. That would be anathema to the decision-making basis inside a university, and that is probably partly where our problems come in: in universities, we too often want to port that majoritarian orientation of the political sphere into decision-making. Inside the university, decision-making needs to be guided by norms of truth-seeking — quality of argument, quality of reasoning, quality of evidence, and so forth. So that’s a sterner standard than the one the political sphere uses.

John Tomasi: And yet within the university, as you search for truth within a discipline, I gather we hope there would be some convergence of people’s thinking toward at least broad parameters in some area — otherwise we’d be all over the place. Some people talk about this strange feature of academic freedom: that it has a conservative element and a funky, radical element. The conservative element is that we want our graduate students to learn all the arguments there are, so they can go out to the frontier knowing everything they need to know. And at that point, beyond the conservative memorization, we value the idiosyncratic twist, the next move, the great idea that adds something. So there’s a strange tension there.

Danielle Allen: There is. And there’s also a tension in the notion of “scientific consensus,” which matters to us — what is the scientific consensus about something? We use that phrase, I think, because we acknowledge that it’s when people come to agree with an argument that it gets anchored as one of those building blocks we then want to pass on to our graduate students. So there’s a funny blend in that phrase, “scientific consensus,” of the epistemic principles of truth-seeking individuals and a certain community-oriented, majoritarian element. I think that’s exactly what we have so much difficulty navigating in academic contexts. When heterodox views emerge that are counter to the scientific consensus, we struggle to know precisely when to open up the consensus and when to try to maintain it.

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

Danielle Allen: Right, exactly.

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

Danielle Allen: And that’s the requirement — to listen. I think that’s so important and distinctive in the context of the university. Coming back to the ancients, because they thought about this intensely: Plato and Socrates were trying to carve out a different kind of space for discourse from the political sphere. One of the ways they captured the difference is that Socrates said, in the Theaetetus, “Don’t ever make me speak to the water clock.” The water clock was the jug that ran out water to tell the time in the courtroom. His point was that politicians are always obliged to speak to a clock — a decision must be made. The defining feature of true academic discourse is that it is not bound by time. If somebody brings an argument meeting methodological standards, then we have an obligation to listen, and even time itself should not limit our patience with hearing those arguments.

John Tomasi: I want to move to a distinction you make that I think is really fertile and extremely interesting — close to the center of a lot of your work — between political science as something descriptive and democratic design as a kind of craft. You were recently on the Democracy Works podcast, in April of this year, and you made a pointed claim about higher education that struck me. As I heard it, you said something like: the future of the university has to involve reviving the science of democratic design. I wonder if you could begin by saying a bit about the distinction between political science as descriptive and democratic design as a craft, and then about reviving that craft in the university. Take it any way you like.

Danielle Allen: Okay. There are many directions to extend from that. I’ve spent a lot of time working on how we might redesign our political institutions here in the United States to escape some of the pathologies that have accrued. For example, we have reduced access to a meaningful vote. Sixty million Americans no longer have a meaningful vote in federal elections — that’s a quarter of the electorate.

John Tomasi: Meaningful because of the way districts are drawn.

Danielle Allen: Exactly — because of gerrymandering and closed primaries and things like that. In some states, the only way you can have a vote in a decisive election is if you participate in a party primary for a party you don’t actually agree with — so, compelled association, under First Amendment considerations. That’s one kind of limitation. In the process of doing all this work, it’s become very clear to me that we don’t actually have the intellectual resources inside universities to assist with it in any particular way. That’s because political science is a descriptive discipline — it focuses on how things work. There is the law school, where you have constitutional lawyers who think about constitutional design, but constitutional design is really just a small layer of the overall set of design questions pertinent to how democratic institutions operate. When you go back and read the Federalist Papers, you realize they were deeply steeped in design thinking about institutions, and they educated themselves for it by reading history and geography and anthropology. Jefferson’s library had books about every kind of system for organizing human society that existed around the globe — not just European formal political systems, but also the different political operating systems in farther-flung parts of the world. The same was true for the radical Duke; he had an equivalent kind of library. They were really thinking like engineers, or like designers who would go to one of our design schools. They wanted to know: how does this work when you do that? If I change this, then what happens? That’s the kind of expertise we just plain don’t capture any longer in our academic disciplines, and don’t teach. So the argument about the university is twofold. One: a democracy needs to preserve its capacity for civil discourse and debate to be healthy, and there are no institutions to steward that capacity other than universities. And second: a democratic society needs to constantly evolve and redesign its institutions, and again, there is no institution able to steward that expertise other than colleges and universities. So inside a democratic society, colleges and universities have this supreme responsibility to steward those two capacities — the one for civil discourse and dialogue and debate, and the other for democratic design. But we’re not really doing either much these days.

John Tomasi: Can I give an example and get your reaction? It starts with an observation I came to very recently. If you think about the design structure of universities and what people hope for when they want to see a university change — let’s say the way HxA wants them to change, to have more open conversations with a wider range of views, seriously looking for truth together as part of a community of imperfect learners — how do you design an institution that way? What most people look for, I think, is the virtuous president. They’re waiting for the next president to arrive who will be virtuous, and then that virtuous person will bring us there. Our founders knew that if you rely on virtue alone to protect the liberty of the many, it’s probably not going to work out too well, for all kinds of reasons — they were very skilled about incentives and other reasons too. So they set themselves the task of design: how do we make this work so that if virtue flagged or wavered, we’d still have a strong country? Is something similar at play at universities? I think we’re still at the stage of hoping for the virtuous leader all the time.

Danielle Allen: Absolutely. I think that’s really well diagnosed.

John Tomasi: What would it look like? How would it begin to change?

Danielle Allen: Well, I think every university has to consider its own design questions. For example, at Harvard, something I’ve been advocating for is that in tenure decisions we should have a formally assigned devil’s advocate inside every departmental meeting around a tenure case. Why? Because I think the way we process tenure decisions is at the heart of the institution’s intellectual standards, choices, and commitments. Over my career — I’m long in the tooth at this point, I’ve been many places and seen a lot of different things — I’ve seen huge variation in the quality of debate that actually unfolds when you’re debating that all-important, basically marriage decision: do we stay with this person for the rest of their life? I think that process would be vastly improved if we had a formally assigned devil’s advocate.

John Tomasi: So the idea is that we might look through various pieces of the university and ask: how could this existing set of practices be redesigned?

Danielle Allen: Exactly.

John Tomasi: Do you have any thoughts about more general governance design questions at Harvard? There’s always this question about how Harvard is governed. Generally speaking, at most universities we have a structure of trustees and presidents. Any other design that’s striking or interesting?

Danielle Allen: I’m deeply involved in governance questions at Harvard. I say to people, democracy renovation starts at home — you can’t really do it far away if you’re not doing it at home. So I’m doing it at Harvard, and I’m doing it in the state of Massachusetts. But again, universities are idiosyncratic in their structure and modes, so one has to ask these questions in place-specific ways. I don’t think anybody can say, “Here’s the answer for all of higher ed.” At Harvard specifically, I’ve been among the groups of faculty working very hard to build a faculty senate. Harvard does not have a university-wide faculty senate. Faculty senates come in many different shapes and flavors; some succeed and some don’t. So if you’re going to make the case that faculty responsibility for governance should be better supported and better integrated into the governance work of the university, you also have to have a clear, design-thinking view about what makes the difference between successful and unsuccessful senates. We’ve done a bunch of work studying senates around the country, and we have some views. The size of the senate matters — it can’t be too big; it needs to be at that sweet spot where it counts as representing a wide swath of the faculty. You need a selection mechanism structured so that you’re really bringing in different sections of the faculty and not getting dominated by any given subset. You need standards for how you organize deliberative procedures, including, for example, rules on the use of time and speaking time — that’s one of the most basic and most important things for high-quality deliberation. We can look at Chicago, Duke, and Stanford; they all have quite high-functioning faculty senates that are a positive asset to university governance.

John Tomasi: I love that. And I wonder if we could — like the American founders, and perhaps the radical Duke and his friends, whom you would know better than I — look to previous examples of people who tried things, even if they didn’t fully succeed. I’ll give one example you probably don’t know about, and I think my listeners might not either. At Brown University, when they founded the university a long time ago, they were very much working in the wake of Roger Williams, and so they had a rule when they created the university and its governing trustee board: that the board had to be pluralistic by religion.

Danielle Allen: Oh, wow, that’s fascinating. They literally required it.

John Tomasi: Over time that changed, but it was an interesting idea. Is there something in that idea about trying to decide what diversity of views we’re going to have on a governing board, on some dimension of diversity? That’s an old one. Here’s a more recent one, which has been experimented with — or at least toyed with — at the University of Austin (UATX) in Austin. I’m not sure they actually put it through, but there was an idea there for a while that really struck me. They were concerned about the virtuous president being the only thing that would keep the university virtuous through time, so they had the idea of something like a bill of rights of academic freedoms — for students, for professors, for teaching, research, writing, and speaking — and then an external judicial body that could hear complaints from any student or professor, complaints presumably against the administration, to adjudicate whether they had a right or not. What interested me about that model — you can see it immediately — is that it’s saying we’re going to have some external body do this, following the founding generation of the US in separating powers. Any thoughts about either of those?

Danielle Allen: It’s a good question, and certainly an interesting experiment. This is where we get to the real challenge of all these questions. Madison famously said — you were alluding to this — that if men were angels, we’d have no need of government, and hence we designed checks and balances and the like. But he carried on in the same set of arguments to make the point that laws can’t guarantee things either; you do still need character. So you need both. You can’t get out of it just through institutional design and incentives. You have to maintain a culture of commitment to free inquiry. And at the end of the day, one could easily imagine an excessively litigious culture that itself blocked and chilled all modes of expression. So that method for UATX might work, but it might also over-bureaucratize and chill through a structure of litigiousness.

John Tomasi: Right. But these are exactly the kinds of questions we’d be asking if we were doing the art of design.

Danielle Allen: Right.

John Tomasi: We’d be thinking that through, proposing it. And there’s a community process that becomes unleashed when you’re doing that, because you’re being asked to say, “Let’s talk together about what we’re trying to achieve here. How do you see it? I’ll learn from you about what I’m wrong about, or what I’m right about.”

Danielle Allen: And to do the design work, it depends on actually starting with some clarity about the design principles — what are you actually trying to achieve? That’s where you get that shared understanding of the mission, of what kind of container for intellectual work you’re trying to build. I think that’s quite important.

John Tomasi: It’d be fascinating to do a project — maybe HxA should do this with our new research and development team — about historical attempts to govern universities well for these virtues. Get a catalog.

Danielle Allen: That would be a great project. I would endorse your doing that.

John Tomasi: Something we might do another year — once your book is out. I thought you might help us with it. But let me go on. Civic education has been central to your work forever — the Democratic Knowledge Project, Educating for American Democracy. I wonder what you make of the wave of civic centers that have been growing across the country. HxA did a report on them recently. We distinguished two big categories: ones based on civic thought, and ones based on something like civic commitment or civic practices — bridge-building, you might say. What do you make of this explosion of civic centers across universities? They’re often arising in the midst of a culture war and are often thought to be part of that culture war. What do you make of their rise?

Danielle Allen: I’m generally pretty excited about it. I think it’s a pretty positive thing. In my observation, there’s a variegated landscape. There are many that are motivated by genuine intellectual concerns and the desire to include questions and bodies of knowledge that have fallen out of favor in recent times. I endorse the idea that ensuring students have a chance to learn about constitutionalism, American political thought, and so forth are very valuable things, so I welcome that return of those themes to the curriculum. There are some that perhaps tend more in an ideological direction, where the ideological impact is the point, and I would warn against that. But there are many very good examples. The University of Tennessee at Knoxville has a very fine center that is doing a good job thinking about the whole campus and integrating its intellectual work with the broader campus — Arizona as well. Where you see the successful ones, you also see bipartisan support for them in the state legislature. That’s an indicator that what they’re succeeding at is reknitting the positive relationship between the university and the broader community.

John Tomasi: I’m sure you know the work of Jenna Storey and Ben Storey on this topic. What I like about their work — they’re very involved in the centers themselves, which I find fascinating — is that they’ve also been making the argument that there is this thing, civic thought, which should be a discipline with disciplinary credentials. They make the argument from an academic perspective about the kind of ideas and standards a set of ideas would need to satisfy to launch itself as a discipline. They’ve been approaching civic thought not just as a matter of creating a center here and there, but as filling in a lacuna similar to the one you described — a lacuna of design, of craft, and of history.

Danielle Allen: Yeah.

John Tomasi: It combines all kinds of interesting pieces of social science and thinking about collecting data, but also straight-up reading Plato again. I want to move on, because our time is short. One of the reasons civic centers have been started in some universities is a concern to increase viewpoint diversity. In some instances, the centers have been containers that could house newly hired faculty, or bring in faculty for joint appointments, as stimulators for diversifying the faculty. Of course, there’s more than one way to increase viewpoint diversity on a campus. You can do it by bringing new people in; you can also do it by adjusting existing practices, encouraging current professors to teach in broader, new ways and helping them find ways to do that. I just wonder if you can say something about viewpoint diversity. HxA exists in large part because a group of professors, about 10 years ago now, became worried about the quality of the research coming out — especially in social psychology, but other areas too. They worried that the lack of different views was bending research experiments before they even got started. What do you make of viewpoint diversity? It’s also caught up in the culture wars, of course. What’s your sense of the state of it? You can talk about Harvard if you like, or just across the academy — whichever you prefer.

Danielle Allen: Sure. Why don’t I start by sharing my definition of viewpoint diversity, and I’d be pleased to know what you think about it and how it connects to yours. I didn’t take the time to go back and check how you define it, but from my point of view, one of the responsibilities of any academic institution is to ensure that, for every discipline or area of inquiry, you are hearing the maximum spread of possible views within the parameters of standards of evidence and methodology. In that regard, one should always be seeking to maximize disagreement — again, within those parameters of excellence — and that’s true across every single discipline. Now, when you come to disciplines that are also very closely connected to human subjects and to contemporary policymaking, then that space of disagreement is also likely to track underlying ideological orientations. So the element of ideology is contingent on the discipline and its proximity to human questions. But the principle of maximizing disagreement should apply to every discipline; and then in some disciplines — like my own, political science, or history, economics, and so forth — when you maximize disagreement, what you’re also getting is ideological spread. That’s how I think about viewpoint diversity, and I think of it as something necessary for a healthy functioning university, and also to fulfill our responsibility to students in the human-touching, social disciplines. I don’t see how we can consider ourselves to be preparing young people to function well in this world if they have no exposure to the actual debates of this world. So I too have found the relative viewpoint homogeneity of college campuses distorting of our educational mission as well as of our research mission. In that regard, I take us all to have a kind of obligation to engage in a corrective project to increase the aperture of disagreement.

John Tomasi: So I hear you saying there’s something like a frontier of positions that could be defended within any discipline according to that discipline’s own methods and standards, and that viewpoint diversity would mean maximizing the range of options kept open.

Danielle Allen: Yep.

John Tomasi: That’s a version of what I argue for too. I think they need to be kept open in what I call a lively way — which doesn’t mean anyone needs to hold the view, or that the view gets a free pass simply because it’s different. They have to be met by arguments.

Danielle Allen: I accept the “lively way” amendment.

John Tomasi: I did a conversation recently with Cass Sunstein on what viewpoint diversity is, and one of the things we worried about with that definition — I worried more than he did, perhaps — is that it seems too disconnected from the society we’re in and the time we’re in.

Danielle Allen: Well, I recognize that. It’s a bit abstract, of course. And this is the challenge, because universities are disconnected from society — even when they have clarity about their social responsibilities, they are necessarily disconnected, precisely because we actually live by a different set of standards than, say, the political realm lives by. So I think that disconnection is necessary. Then you have the second problem: given the disconnection, how do we communicate effectively across the town-gown line? I don’t think the fact that there is a town-gown line means we should give up on the need to describe our work to ourselves in terms aligned with the standards of our context. We can’t give up on that. But what we have to do then is figure out how to make those specific standards — and the reason for articulating them that way — accessible to people who are in fact inhabiting a very different kind of space.

John Tomasi: So — just to make sure I understand — accessibility of the academic findings is a requirement?

Danielle Allen: No, that’s not quite what I mean. I’ll put it this way. I often have conversations with people where they say, “Well, why can’t you people at universities protect the First Amendment?” And my response is to do the very annoying and pedantic thing of explaining the difference between academic freedom and the First Amendment. Usually, honestly, it works out pretty well. They’re like, “Oh, okay, I didn’t really understand that before.” So what I mean is taking the time, in plain-language ways, to make visible, accessible, and understandable the principles that actually organize intellectual and academic life — their justifications — and then where they overlap with, and how they relate to, the plain-language understandings of debate and discourse that we take from the political sphere.

John Tomasi: Can you say very briefly how you see this distinction between the First Amendment and academic freedom?

Danielle Allen: Sure. Basically, the First Amendment is a right we hold against governments. It’s very simple, and therefore it’s a right we formally hold only against public universities, which are public-sector actors. There is no actual First Amendment right in private universities. Private universities can protect First Amendment rights as a matter of noblesse oblige, but that is roughly what it is. At the same time, across both public and private universities, there’s a strong norm of academic freedom, which is built into what it takes for those institutions to succeed at their job of truth-seeking. That is to say, you’ve got to protect the expression of all views within these parameters of excellence — but protecting those views doesn’t mean people get to say anything they want anytime they want, because sometimes they say things that are wrong, and you give them an F on their paper and hope they’ll never say that thing again.

John Tomasi: You give them an F at Harvard?

Danielle Allen: Well, these days — these days, maybe a B minus. All right. And you hope they’ll never say that thing again. That’s not what you do with First Amendment rights. You don’t ever get to give anybody an F, or a B minus, on a First Amendment claim.

John Tomasi: Right. So there’s something with the truth-seeking function that’s really going to be central here.

Danielle Allen: Correct. Academic freedom is as much about making judgments — that conservative element you mentioned — as it is about enabling people to speak. It’s the speaking and the judging together. The First Amendment is just the speaking.

John Tomasi: As we come to the end of this — and that was a lovely definition, a great definition — I just want to return to the radical Duke. I want to ask you: if your radical Duke could see American democracy today, and could see the American university here in 2026, what do you think would alarm him, and what might give him hope? You can do it on the political side, the university side, or some of both — whatever you like.

Danielle Allen: Sure, I’ll do a bit of both. I think he would say, “Gosh, this place is starting to look an awful lot like the 1760s,” in two ways in particular. First, that you’ve allowed yourselves to give up legislative supremacy — you’ve accepted an overreaching executive that’s been building for decades; it’s not just a new phenomenon — and in doing that, you’re actually abandoning freedom and self-government. How can you give up everything that it took centuries to build?

John Tomasi: So that parliamentary element that the Duke was eager to reform — he’d be saying he’s very concerned about that.

Danielle Allen: Exactly. He’d be saying, “You guys have the same problems we had.” And with universities, he would say, “Oh my gosh. When I was a young man, I didn’t go to university — I was not one of those university-educated people, and the university people were so condescending to me. And my gosh, it looks like you’re doing the same to the people who are not university educated. But look — can’t you see what kinds of contributions I was able to make from outside the university? So can’t you now also find the people who are doing fresh thinking who happen not to be inside universities, and find ways to open up your discourse to them?”

John Tomasi: Let me make sure I understand that last point. The Duke was a very privileged person with incredible power, highly educated in a certain kind of way. He didn’t go to what we would call public schools — Oxbridge. He did not, right?

Danielle Allen: No, he did not go to Oxford, which was quite a big deal for him — basically, he flunked out of going to Oxbridge.

John Tomasi: When you say we should be more open at the universities, can you say a little more? What kind of openness do you mean?

Danielle Allen: Just the most basic thing. If you go anywhere outside the Northeast, you’ll find people who very quickly express frustration with a certain kind of condescension that emanates from Northeastern universities. Some of that came up in the debate around Covid, for example — the reliance on data-driven decision-making. There’s a whole lot of decision-making that is actually about choices of values, and you can get all the data in the world and it won’t solve the question for you if you don’t let people debate the question of values. So there’s a way in which we inside universities tend to structure an account of what public decision-making should be like that rules certain ways of engaging out of court from the get-go, and that’s a mistake. I think that’s partly why we see so much social division. It’s why, in my field — political theory and so forth — a lot of academics have ended up having jobs in think tanks, not inside universities. We’ve really allowed people who have great capacity to do good intellectual work and generate important ideas that should be given consideration — we’ve not made space for them inside universities, and they’ve had to build alternative channels of communication and engagement.

John Tomasi: Thank you. It’s been wonderful having you on the show. Great talking with you, as always.

Danielle Allen: Likewise. Thank you so much.

John Tomasi: Thank you so much.

Danielle Allen: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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I am an experimental psychologist, and my goal throughout my career has been and still is to find the truth and to teach my students to do the same. How do we do that in science? We disprove our own and others’ faulty claims and methodically arrive at truth. Or at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work.

My own research is in the area of addiction. I want to eradicate it—a big goal, especially as vast amounts of money and manpower have been invested in addressing addiction without actually reducing the problem. So, there is much work to be done.

The scientist in me wants to “build a better mousetrap”—to find the best ways to reduce dependence on substances. I particularly want to investigate the effectiveness of non-pharmacological treatments, methods such as intentionally increasing the patient’s interpersonal connections. However, whenever I question the status quo, which involves using medication as the (almost) universally recommended, “evidence-based” treatment for addiction, I am accused of endangering people, stigmatizing addicts, and bringing up questions that have already been answered.

But those questions have not been answered. In fact, the questions haven’t even really been asked yet because the “evidence” base is comprised of studies comparing one medication to another, rather than comparing medication to non-pharmacological interventions.

Unfortunately, when it comes to treating addiction, there is an ironclad orthodoxy. Research funding for additional treatment almost always requires medication to be provided to patients. Treatment guidelines call a failure to medicate unethical. And trying to publish articles questioning medical intervention for addiction has been nearly impossible for me and my colleagues.

Seeking effective treatment alternatives threatens several multibillion-dollar industries—from Big Pharma to the prison system, from lab testing to treatment centers. Those protecting these industries are far better positioned to lobby and to curry favor with funders, publishers, and guideline gatekeepers. Is that what is happening or is their ideology just so strong that they truly can’t fathom any alternative being viable, let alone superior?

I would like to see head-to-head comparisons of treatments. Let the chips fall where they may. Let the most effective treatments win. But because I dare to question the pharmacological bias, I feel as if I am left (or being sent) outside the camp.

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Is there such a thing as legitimate politicization?

In a recent paper published in Theory and Society, HxA member and sociologist at University of Hawai’i Ashley Rubin attempts to draw the line between appropriate and inappropriate politicization in research, and offers thoughtful commentary on specific research norms that could revitalize the health of scholarship. Rubin posits that sometimes research findings will indeed support a specific political narrative or policy, and that researchers shouldn’t shy away from this. Scholars can also engage in political activism on their own time, outside of their regular research, teaching, and service duties. Rubin’s key demarcator is whether researcher behavior violates scientific protocols. Such violations include starting with a moral or political conclusion and then working backwards from there, hunting for evidence to support a preferred finding, cherry-picking data, making claims that go beyond what the data allow, or suppressing findings because they might be useful to political opponents. Rubin suggests that these varieties of inappropriate politicization are similar to p-hacking and citation nepotism, which researchers already recognize as clear ethical violations.

Rubin ends the paper by inviting more discussion about where the line falls between appropriate and inappropriate politicization. She also suggests some practices that might improve things, for instance, having researchers audit their own work for bias with volunteer peer-reviewers and AI checklists.

Anecdotes point to consequences for breaking ranks within gender and sex research.

Ceci, Williams, and Shulamit Kahn’s previous adversarial collaboration on gender bias in the academy found evidence of bias against women in teaching evaluations and salary, no bias in grant awards, journal reviews, or letters of recommendation, and a pro-woman bias in tenure-track hiring. In this recent piece, Ceci and Williams draw particular attention to that hiring advantage. According to the authors, recent CV-matching experiments have shown preferences for women candidates, and while it’s true that women are less likely to pursue tenure-track positions, when they do, they appear to have the edge.

Next, the authors highlight findings from “an informal non-scientific” survey of gender and sex researchers. The vast majority of the 21 respondents described experiencing a range of consequences for engaging with research that insufficiently supports dominant narratives within the field. From formal complaints, cancelled courses, and even IRB audits, breaking out of the ideological mold has come with repercussions for many. Even when findings on a contentious topic are the result of years-long adversarial collaboration by researchers with competing views, as is the case with Ceci and Williams’ work, it is difficult to break the hardened dogmatism of certain beliefs.

(All the more reason to get the research method right! If you’re interested in learning more about pursuing research with your intellectual frenemies, check out the newly released Adversarial Collaboration Method for Research and Scholarship, hot off the HxA press!)

Disagreement is more constructive in speech than in writing, but people tend to think the opposite.

In a new paper out in advance publication in Nature Communications, Bevis, Schroeder, and Yeomans analyzed nearly 2,000 spoken and written disagreements. In an initial set of studies, pairs of participants who disagreed on a contentious political issue were asked to discuss the topic by either speaking or writing. Those who were speaking to their partners (vs. writing to them) reported more constructive conversations: less conflict, more understanding, and better impressions of their partners. But when the researchers asked a different group of participants what they expected would produce better disagreements, they found the opposite: people tended to predict that written disagreements would go better than spoken ones.

Why do spoken disagreements produce more constructive disagreements? When the researchers analyzed linguistic features of these conversations, they found that pairs who were speaking tended to incorporate more markers of conversational receptiveness, including the use of subjectivity phrases and agreement, and fewer markers of low receptiveness like negative emotion. The writing pairs not only exhibited lower overall receptiveness, but their perceived mutual understanding was more influenced by these cues of receptiveness than it was for the speaking pairs. As the authors put it, people seem to use less receptive language where it matters the most. But by the same token, the findings suggest that written disagreements could be more productive if partners make an extra effort to signal their receptiveness. (Might we recommend the HxA way or Sway?)

In the world of AI-assisted tools comes a new dataset on private grants to universities.

AEI’s Tao Tan has developed an interactive tool called SOURCE, or Searchable Open University Records of Charitable Expenditures, which provides visibility into more than one million grants from over 57,000 U.S. private foundations to nearly 5,300 colleges and universities. Joining a growing body of work following the money into universities, this push for deeper insights into university giving is a worthy undertaking that venturesome researchers will now be able to tap into, ultimately expanding the public’s understanding of “who gets what, when, how” on the modern campus.

Readers may recall Tan’s recent writing that examined several wealthy foundations’ funding for the humanities, arts, and social sciences (chart below). He found that private foundations are well-positioned to shape academic culture in these fields by providing nearly as much in grants as federal sources to these disciplines ($1.2 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively, in FY 2023) in a landscape of relatively scarce funding. And in so doing, this giving works to define fundworthy ideas, influence campus priorities, and establish shared norms aligned with donor interests.

Tan’s motivations for building SOURCE stem from this earlier project. Having successfully leveraged artificial-intelligence techniques to extend the analysis from a single fiscal year to the full corpus of data available, Tan has given researchers a tool to investigate where many private grants are coming from, what they are funding, and what patterns can be found along such axes as institution type and student-life programming. Researchers can also filter by year, university, and grant purpose. “The tool itself makes no normative judgements whatsoever,” said Tan at the launch webinar. “It presents the data and encourages the user to draw your own conclusions.”

That’s a wrap for the Research Roundup for June. Got any interesting research coming down the pike that you’d like us to consider highlighting in the future? Give us a shout at research@heterodoxacademy.org!

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Women’s and gender studies departments have been some of the most embattled on campuses in recent years, with the problems plaguing this field being emblematic of the viewpoint diversity crisis in social-oriented disciplines. While many critics are eager to shut these departments down completely, and scholars in these departments instinctively double down in defense, these aren’t the only viable options anymore: efforts to reform this arguably wayward discipline now have real traction thanks to scholars publicly coming forward and calling for change.

Abigail Saguy, HxA member and professor of sociology and gender studies at UCLA, called for change in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education op-ed, arguing that while it’s an “understandable impulse to close ranks and defend” the current state of these disciplines, doing so “would miss an opportunity to ask hard questions about our teaching and scholarship and, where needed, transform our disciplines from within.”

Saguy continues by explaining how she transformed her own classroom to platform viewpoint diversity and elevate constructive disagreement. For the past decade, she has taught her sociology of gender course jointly with an evolutionary psychologist and human geneticist. Saguy writes:

Since teaching this class, I no longer use biological theories as a foil. Instead, I acknowledge that there are biological differences between women and men and that these are exaggerated and emphasized through social mechanisms. In the past few years, I have incorporated political-viewpoint diversity by adding Richard Reeves’s book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, and short opinion pieces by political conservatives to my syllabus. By assigning authors who disagree with each other, I signal to my students that disagreement — with the readings, with each other, and with the professor — is not just OK, it is expected.

Others are also calling for the discipline to embrace viewpoint diversity. LuElla D’Amico, an English professor and coordinator of women’s and gender studies at the University of the Incarnate Word, recently penned in The Dispatch that “the discipline needs a feminism that can disagree.” Importantly, she broaches the need for genuine viewpoint diversity in gender studies to conservatives in an effort to push back against calls for shuttering and censorship.

The goal of my classes is not to produce agreement or to create Catholic feminists who all think the same thing I do. Rather, it is to cultivate judgment—the kind that can live with disagreement and remain. And if women’s and gender studies is to survive—and to matter—it may need, like Miss Prim, to learn to admire what it does not yet possess.

What makes this situation especially noteworthy is the complexity. On the one hand, Republican controlled states have pushed to exert legislative control over classroom content and anything that falls under the “DEI” umbrella. Across states, including Texas, Florida, and Iowa, women’s and gender studies departments are being shut down, majors cut, research censored, and faculty fired over what they are teaching. Moreover, faculty hiring is down along with student enrollment in many of these departments.

These legislative maneuvers involve clear violations of academic freedom in which the state exerts inappropriate control over classroom content. And while these infringements on academic freedom are rightfully condemned, the attacks are explained — though not justified — by the closed boundaries of inquiry and lack of viewpoint diversity that have characterized many of these women’s and gender studies departments for decades. Both things can be true: the legislative pressure is often overreaching, yet much of the underlying grievance is not.

Ilana Redstone, a sociology professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, wrote about this complex dynamic in a Substack essay this past week, explaining how we must decry state censorship while still understanding that internal dysfunction across disciplines was an impetus for such intense legislative action in recent years.

For years, the academy closed questions it had no authority to close and waved away — as ignorant or bigoted — the people who said so. Many of those people are now in power, and they have seized on the visible effects of that closure as their justification: the universities, they say, abandoned open inquiry long ago, so why should open inquiry shield them now? Whatever the motives behind it, the accusation is not false — and its truth is the academy’s own doing. By using the shield of academic freedom to justify treating contested questions as closed, the academy built the opening the state is now driving through.

Why does this matter, if the state is still in the wrong? It matters because of what follows for the academy that wants the intrusion to stop. The state’s pressure draws its force from a real grievance — that the universities closed questions they had no business closing. As long as that grievance stands, the coercion has a justification to point to, and resistance in the name of academic freedom rings hollow, because the academy is invoking a principle it spent years misusing. The way to take the justification away is not to deny the closure more loudly. It is to end it — and ending it has to begin with admitting it was there.

Academic freedom grants no one the authority to close a question — not the state reaching in from outside, and not the scholar quietly closing it from within. The academy is right to resist the first. It will only have the standing to do so when it stops doing the second. And that begins not with a louder defense, but with an admission: that the closure was real, that it was ours, and that academic freedom never authorized it in the first place.

The only way to remedy women’s and gender studies — and all disciplines that are being crippled by ideological homogeneity — is internal reform. An aggressive legislative approach may appease a voting base, but it also carries the risk of eroding the academic freedom that makes great scholarship and innovation possible, and made the U.S. university system the envy of the world in the 20th century.

We must continue to look critically inward to bring genuine viewpoint diversity to social and humanities disciplines within the academy while protecting and defending academic freedom (a point I’ve made before and a mission that HxA is actively pursuing with universities across the country). The good news is that professors within these disciplines are making public calls for internal reform. We also have witnessed universities’ broader internal reform work make a public splash, such as the recent Yale Trust Report, Harvard Medical School Open Inquiry Report, and the Vanderbilt-Wash U State of Scholarship Report.

The work is urgent. The moment is ours. The faculty and scholars calling for reform shouldn’t have to do it alone. You can be part of this reform movement by becoming a member of Heterodox Academy. You can also join us April 12-14, 2027 in Boston for our next national conference dedicated to shaping what comes next for higher education.

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In this webinar, recorded on June 11th, HxA President John Tomasi joins report co-author Ashley Rubin (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa) and Regina Rini (York University) to critically discuss the report’s conclusions, where it leaves work undone, and what a genuine path toward healthier scholarly norms might look like. A transcript of the discussion, including audience Q&A, is below.

John Tomasi: We’re here to discuss this very exciting report that came out just last week — June 4, as I remember. It was commissioned by Chancellors Diermeier and Martin at Vanderbilt and WashU, and it’s a report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. The commission was chaired by Paul Boghossian, the eminent philosopher at NYU, along with a committee of scholarly all-stars. HxA members who’ve seen the report and looked at the list of people on the commission will recognize that a number of HxA members are on it. That’s not surprising: there are now HxA members on over a thousand campuses in the US alone, and we’re in close conversation on a lot of these topics with university leaders around the country. But I want to state clearly that HxA had no role in this report — no direct role at all. In fact, I didn’t even read it until one of those leaders sent it to me by email the morning it came out. We were not involved in writing it in any way.

Having said that, I want to tell you how excited my colleagues and I were as we began reading it. The most striking thing we thought was: these people are doing things the way we do things — at least in some aspects, as we’ll see. For example, they vividly describe the common view that the humanities are thoroughly and hopelessly politicized, that they’re lost — and then the report rejects that characterization, at least in its bald form. It says, correctly I believe, that fabulous work is being done in many humanities and social science departments across the country. Indeed, I’d say some seminal work is being done there. But the report then goes on to state, unblinkingly, that many things are not wonderful — that there are things that are extremely worrying about the state of the humanities, if we truly care about them. I’ll quote: “Every field we have studied shows some signs of these pathologies, a deterioration of scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria, and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

The humanities matter to us because they invite us to ask questions about deep value — what goals are worthy of pursuit, what life is worth living — and the humanistic social sciences invite us to ask those questions about individuals and about social groups as well. These are among the most difficult and important of all scholarly questions, so it’s desperately important that they not be politicized or trivialized by politicization. The report goes on — and I’ll quote again — that “the academic study of social movements is not in service to any particular social movement.” And I would add that it cannot be. As the report says, the task of the humanistic disciplines is “not to manipulate us into following any party line, but to provide each free person with the tools to make their own informed choices.” This is because, the report tells us, the purpose of the humanities is to “prepare us for a free life.” And again, right from the start, they do things the way we do them at HxA. They take on serious questions that insiders see, and they’re not afraid to confront them. The report promises to address the issue of academic freedom head on — it doesn’t use those words, but that’s what it’s doing.

Thus it notes that administrators operate under “a stringent principle of deference to expertise” — and the report affirms this as a principle administrators must respect. But then it goes on: “our commission exists only because even this foundational principle has its limits.” Whole disciplines can go bad. As the report puts it, when astronomy as a field morphs into astrology, we face an unprecedented situation. Somebody ought to do something.

I’ll confess that, reading the start of this report, I had a Walter Mitty moment. Reading the opening pages, I imagined myself in an old-time Western, out by a fire on the prairie with a philosopher-sheriff assembling a posse to round up a band of disciplinary desperadoes and bring them to scholarly justice. We ride at dawn. It made me want to stand up, throw my black coffee onto the fire, and jump onto my horse — let’s ride! But instead, being a nerdy philosopher myself, I quietly read the report, because I wanted to know: in what direction does it ride, and where does it not ride? What topics, what methods, and which forms of evidence does it use, and which does it not? Where does it bring us in the end? What actionable policies, if any, does it recommend? Those are the questions we’re here to discuss.

So let’s do that. Ashley and Regina, thanks so much for joining us. Ashley, I’ll begin with you. You’re a professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and you were one of the esteemed scholars on that superstar commission. The main finding of the Vanderbilt–WashU report is that in today’s humanistic disciplines, research is too often distorted by politicization. Could you tell us about that finding and why it’s important?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you so much for that introduction and for having me here. Before I forget, I want to say that I’m going to be speaking for myself and not for the members of the commission, so I’ll distinguish between what the report says and what I think. And I want to encourage people to read the report in its entirety and not rely on summaries of it — by me or anyone else — because it’s a very carefully written report.

Our charge was to evaluate scholarly standards across the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and especially to look at the extent to which internal politicization has compromised them. So we acknowledge external politicization, but we were really looking at the politicization coming from within academia. Based on our analyses, we found a middle-of-the-road finding: things aren’t as bad as critics say, nor are they as good as some defenders say. We see, across disciplines, scholarly standards being replaced to varying degrees with political or ideological considerations — and I want to emphasize that this varies a lot across and within disciplines. There’s a lot of heterogeneity, and, as John said, a lot of really good work being done; in some cases, the majority of the work in a field is still really good.

Specifically, we highlight four ways in which politicization is compromising standards. One is explicit statements — in research, at the level of professional associations, and everything in between — where scholars endorse political goals as the point of the work. Second is a consensus that certain research questions, topics, theories, or findings are off-limits, with varying forms of backlash against those who pursue them. Third is a deep skepticism about the possibility or necessity of objectivity, and really about the knowability of the world, which in turn leads to a rejection of important steps in the research process. And finally — a somewhat funny finding, unfortunately — a lot of bad, dense, jargon-laden prose, which on its face doesn’t seem obviously political but which tends to appear in the more explicitly political works, often in the service of political arguments. That’s actually something I’ve written about. So across these four, we’re seeing the advancement of knowledge and understanding being subordinated to political projects.

As for why this is important — speaking for myself — I think this is an issue of trust. My own frustration with my fields is that I’m getting to the point where I have a hard time trusting the research and believing that scholars are actually advancing knowledge. Research is a collective endeavor; I have to stand on the shoulders of giants. I have to use and cite what other people are producing, and if I don’t trust that work, it becomes really difficult to do my own. My personal goal is doing big theoretical syntheses, stitching together a lot of different work — but if the work you’re stitching together isn’t good, isn’t believable, isn’t robust, it’s really hard to do that kind of synthetic work that gives us the big picture of reality. So I look at this as a big issue of trust — and then, of course, the larger issue of trust not just in research but in universities. How is the public going to trust us — with their kids, with themselves, as producers of knowledge — when we’re increasingly losing that monopoly as experts? For me, this is an issue that traverses multiple layers, from just being able to do the thing I love more than anything else — research — to the future of the university.

John Tomasi: That’s a fabulous summary, and I really appreciate your encouraging our listeners to read the report for themselves, because it’s worth reading more than once. Let me ask you about a couple of things you said. I want to zero in on jargon. There’s a lot of jargon in academia, and a lot of serious — indeed seminal — scholarship that we could describe as jargon-laden. Jargon serves a purpose. I still remember, as an undergraduate, the first time I was assigned John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice — I couldn’t read the thing; I didn’t know what any of it meant. And there’s denser jargon than Rawls. So I wonder what you make of jargon, and why it’s worrying. Let me offer a hypothesis and hear how you respond: my sense is that it’s actually the conjunction of some of these concerns that makes jargon a problem. I’m not sure jargon would be a problem if we didn’t also have, say, politicized goals being announced alongside the work — but I might be wrong. Can you say something about jargon, and about whether our concern about it relies on the other criteria you mentioned?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you for following up on that. To be honest, I love jargon — it makes me feel special and smart, and I think that’s one of the reasons we use it. But it’s also a great shorthand. So it’s not really a dig at jargon per se; it’s more about clunky writing. One of my big pet peeves is when we use these specialty words and then don’t define them. In my field — again, speaking for me and not for the commission — we have the term “the carceral state,” and it means at least four different things, often more, and people don’t define which they mean. It used to refer to the infrastructure and the government actors responsible for determining and meting out punishment. Now it might mean mass incarceration; it might mean the criminal justice system; it sometimes means formal social control — which is itself a jargon term that means policing and punishment together — and sometimes it means informal social control, the interpersonal, private policing of each other’s behavior. So it means all these different things, and the problem is that when we’re trying to have a conversation about, say, what causes the carceral state, and we’re all using it to mean different things, it becomes really hard to theorize — under what conditions does it emerge or grow, and so on. So part of what I’m getting at is using jargon in ways that aren’t useful and that block understanding: not defining terms, or stringing together multisyllabic word after multisyllabic word — these twenty-five-cent words — so that by the end you don’t know what it means. When I used to read this kind of thing, I’d think, “Oh my god, I’m so stupid — why can’t I understand this?” And as I matured, I increasingly realized that in some cases I can’t understand it because it’s just bad writing — it’s not that I’m stupid. So I see that as really problematic for communication. To your hypothesis — that it’s the conjunction of politicization and jargon — I think that’s part of it. In addition to the basic scholarly standard that we need to define our terms and focus on communication, we want to be able to have clear conversations in the scholarship.

That’s one thing. But then there’s the more causal story: why are people doing this, beyond my glib remark that we feel special and smart, and beyond the fact that it’s efficient when we’re talking among experts? The flip side is that increasingly people use certain types of jargon as a kind of shibboleth — a way of showing that you have the appropriate bona fides. We use these words that the public doesn’t understand, but increasingly even those of us in academia don’t quite know what they mean, so they become very clunky — again, bad for communication — but we’re doing it specifically for political purposes. In my work I’ve collected a bunch of statements where people say why they’re using these terms, and they justify it for political reasons. So I think that’s part of the causal story. You can do it the purely scholarly way — this isn’t about communication, you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do — and then there’s the question of why people are doing it, and I think the combination definitely becomes problematic.

John Tomasi: That’s great. Those are super-interesting criteria, and the relationship between them is also worth serious study. Regina, I want to bring you in. You’re a professor at York University — thank you for joining us. I’m going to jump right into the fire with you. You were one of the people who commented almost immediately on the report, and you’ve been a very thoughtful commentator. I’m going to read a fiery thing you wrote on X: “The Boghossian et al. report on the humanities has some good points, but ultimately it is a failure.” On your reading, the report supports there being “some political line beyond which scholarship may be suppressed” — it merely disagrees with the postmodernists about where that line should be drawn. So you’re pointing to a line-drawing problem. Can you tell us more about your concern here?

Regina Rini: Sure, and thanks for having me. I think my role here is to be a friendly critic. Just so the audience understands where I’m coming from: I agree with a lot of the conclusions of the report — maybe we’ll have a chance to talk about those in a bit — but for the moment I’m going to talk about my problem with it, which is the argument: how the report gets to its conclusion. I think the argument doesn’t work, and in fact doesn’t work in a particularly worrisome way. A lot of the report is constructed around taking certain positions in philosophy — in metaphysics and epistemology. It frames itself in opposition to relativism, and it enforces a pretty hard distinction between knowledge and politics as exclusive categories. The problem is that I don’t think that framework is stable.

So let me point to where this happens in the report. This is very close to the end. There’s a very nice sentence near the end that says, once we have conceded there are truths to be known in an area of scholarship, there’s no room for the further thought that scholarship may legitimately suppress or distort those truths, even for the sake of advancing what may be a legitimate moral or social goal. Which sounds very nice. But then there’s a footnote, and in the footnote it says, well, actually this is not absolute — there are times when we can suppress, or even distort, knowledge in the pursuit of social goals. The example it gives has to do with nuclear secrets: a physicist might suppress or even distort nuclear secrets, as in fact was done in the 1930s and ’40s. And this sounds like a harmless concession — wouldn’t we all agree you shouldn’t let out things that might cause a nuclear apocalypse? But once you make that concession, you can’t rely on a very firm, absolute distinction between knowledge and politics, because what you’ve conceded is that there are cases where it’s consistent with knowledge to allow politics or moral concerns to intrude on your information-sharing practices. In other words, there’s no longer such a firm divide. And once you make that concession, it’s open for people to say: where’s the dividing line? Why is it about nuclear secrets and not about racial equality or something else? We can have that argument. I’m not saying there’s a slippery slope and you immediately have to allow everything everybody wants. My point is that the framework of the report is based on there being a very firm, absolute dividing line between knowledge and politics, and as soon as you make those concessions, that’s gone — so it’s owed some further, deeper argument.

My own view is that the conclusions of this report are better supported in a different way — not coming from epistemology and metaphysics, but coming straight from politics. I think there’s a very good argument from the need for pluralism. You mentioned John Rawls a few minutes ago. Rawls famously argued that in public debate we engage in public reason — we set aside our background metaphysical and ethical views and try to find a common, overlapping consensus to argue from. I think scholarship, just as much as politics, has to allow for the fact that we come from different places, and that’s a very good basis for an argument to the conclusions of the report — but you can do all that without getting into fights about relativism and a hard distinction between knowledge and politics. So that’s my criticism.

John Tomasi: That’s great. Can I ask you about the last bit, on the positive side? We could talk about what the report says and the degree to which it relies on rejecting relativism — or on pointing out that there are weak versions of relativism that are relied upon too quickly, which the report sometimes does, I think correctly; but that’s different from rejecting relativism wholesale, which would be a stronger position. I want to ask about what you described as a Rawlsian framework. There are various frameworks within science and social science. For example, Polanyi, in an essay called “The Republic of Science,” talks about academics working on the frontier together, where certain breakthroughs are only available at that frontier. The frontier tells us what’s important, and then there’s a strange combination: on the one hand we value conservative adherence to disciplinary norms and procedures and to the giants of the field, and on the other we value the quirky, interesting new thing coming out at the end — like the green shoot on the end of a branch. That’s one rough, metaphorical view of how scholarship happens in social science and the humanities. Polanyi says this is a model for the sciences but also for the humanities. Is that the kind of thing you have in mind? It seems like you’re trying to get at the need for coherence and agreement on standards, with possibilities for change that are recognizable by those standards. Is that where you are?

Regina Rini: I think what you’re saying is consistent with what I’m getting at; I’m coming at it from a different direction. I’m coming at it partly from politics — the idea that public scholarship, not just the sciences but including the humanities, owes a certain debt to the public that supports it, which means being accessible and being representational, and that includes politics. If you have an entire sector of public political views — which in North America often means conservative views — that are very thinly represented in academia, then there’s a legitimate complaint from the public that they might not trust the way academia works. I can give a more sustained argument for that if you want, but it would take a while.

And then, simultaneously, there’s a separate argument from social epistemology — this one will be familiar to some folks. It goes back to John Stuart Mill in the 1850s, who argues in On Liberty that you can’t actually get truthful reasoning unless you open yourself to all sorts of criticism. You need all different kinds of people in the room, arguing back and forth, and it’s that that does the magic work of sharpening your distinctions and making things better. I think Mill goes a bit too far — he’s a bit too optimistic about how well that process works; it’s not entirely clear he was in enough committee meetings — but the basic idea is right. If you don’t have people from lots of different perspectives in the room, you’re going to be worse off. So those are the arguments for why we need more representation of different views when we’re doing academic work.

John Tomasi: That’s great. I just want to note, for the audience, that on that topic HxA hosted a pop-up a couple of weeks ago with Cass Sunstein, talking about viewpoint diversity. One of the things we discussed a lot was how wide the circle should be — reasonable value pluralism, reasonable epistemic pluralism — and how we define “reasonable.” How does a scholarly community do that? So it’s an extremely interesting line of criticism you’re developing.

I want to keep pushing, because we want to get to audience questions, which is an important part of this event. Ashley, I’m going to come back to you. I’d like to ask you to say a few words about methods. As I mentioned with my Walter Mitty example, I was thinking: what methods do they use, and what methods don’t they use? When I read the report the first time, I was surprised how it went off up into the high hills of philosophy, and when I got to the end I thought, “Wait a minute — where’s the rest of the report?” I felt like I was going to get more social science. I got philosophy — and I love philosophy — but I was like, “Are we going to come down from the hills?” So can you address, any way you like, the general question of methodology? What methods does the report use, what methods does it not use, and what does that mean for the strength of its conclusions?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. I’m going to speak for myself on this one. I actually wrote a Substack a month or two ago on how you evaluate a discipline — the difficulties of doing it, what sorts of data you need, and the limitations. First of all, we all used a combination of systematic and more case-study-based approaches to studying what’s going on in a field. For myself, I was looking at sociology specifically, so I was looking at survey data — of sociologists generally, of sociology chairs, and so on. I was also looking at high-profile events and statements made by American Sociological Association presidents or high-profile members, panels that had been platformed, statements and op-eds that people had written. I should mention that my primary focus was on work that’s already been done studying the state of sociology — of our disciplines, sociology was actually the most studied. My internal report was a hundred pages long; there’s a lot of data on the state of sociology, and a lot of debate. So I was primarily looking at already-published work, and then I was also doing some of my own data collection, some of which is still ongoing — because one of the findings was that there’s difficulty in evaluating some of these issues.

So, going back to your question about types of data: survey data, high-profile events, and I was also interested in forms of censorship that have happened, collecting cases of tenure and promotion denials. That’s a really difficult one, because they tend to be confidential — a lot of times the people going through them don’t get the full story, so we don’t actually know systematically what’s going on with tenure and promotion denials where there’s some sort of bias or discrimination based on the research produced, unless it’s big enough that there’s a lawsuit or it gets written up in, say, the Chronicle of Higher Education. So that’s an area where we desperately need more systematic data. Another is the quality of the research itself. That’s really difficult to do — very time-intensive. You basically have two ways. You can read specific studies and evaluate them against scholarly standards; there’s virtually no incentive to do that, and people look at that work with great skepticism, so there’s a big cost — which makes it understandable that we don’t already have many established studies doing it. The other way is to use LLMs or AI, and we’re increasingly getting studies that do that. There’s a great new study in Theory and Society — of which I should mention I’m now an editorial board member, just to flag a conflict of interest, though this was published before I joined — by James Manzi, who used AI, several AIs, to evaluate different disciplines, looking at their level of political neutrality and then at the politics of the non-neutral studies. There are a number of efforts underway to use AI and LLMs to evaluate research, either individually or at scale, and I think that’s going to be really promising for the next phase of pushing this work further.

Some other work I relied on was really interesting — looking at the blind spots and what I call the “monocropping” of sociology. It’s fairly well known that sociology tends to over-focus on inequality. We used to be a much broader discipline, looking at a lot of different aspects of society, but we tend to focus on inequality and on the negative parts of society, looking away from social progress. There are new published reports focusing on what they call the “negativity bias” in sociology; HxA member Fabio Rojas has a Substack about the lack of sociology looking at progress, which John Iceland and colleagues have also spoken about. So there’s this blind spot — specific topics that sociology doesn’t tend to look at, or, when it does, it does so in a very narrow way: religion, the military and war, certain theories about crime that are more popular in criminology than in sociology — essentially anything that can be seen as conservative. The really big one is biology and evolution; there’s an assumption that if you do that work, you’re conservative and therefore bad. So we have these massive blind spots that hamstring us as a discipline, because we can’t make the broader claims about society — we have this very narrow focus at the field level. There have been some really nice studies looking at dissertation topics and article topics, doing word frequencies, looking at the heterogeneity in the field and where the blind spots are. We also have less systematic data on censorship, so there we have case studies. And then the big empirical question is what the chilling effect of those cases is, because people hear about them — so the question is whether they actually have to be that common to have an effect, and that’s something we don’t know. So, sorry — it’s a mix of data.

John Tomasi: That’s fabulous — absolutely fabulous. That’s a feast, a quick feast, which we really appreciate. I want to call our listeners’ attention to the time: we’ll be moving to Q&A in about ten minutes, so if you have a question, please formulate it and put it in the chat. Regina, I want to go back to you, and pick up directly on Ashley’s line of thought, with a little twist. You used the word “pluralism,” so you’re going to get the viewpoint-diversity question. As you know, at HxA we’re intensely interested in viewpoint diversity. We did a big study of the viewpoint-diversity studies of the professoriate — you’ll find it in the chat in a moment — and it found, broadly, that the studies showing the widest ideological divergence tended to be the weakest methodologically. But if you work through that and dig into the more careful studies, you see a pretty remarkable delta over the last thirty years, from about two-to-one to something like five-to-one. It intensifies geographically if you look more closely, of course, but the big finding is that, especially within the humanities, there’s been this change in the degree of imbalance. The report skates fairly quickly over that terrain. It notes that viewpoint imbalance is not inherently a problem — which is a nice philosophical dodge, perhaps — but I wonder if you want to say anything. Is that change in the composition of the professoriate of interest to you when we think about the importance of pluralism?

Regina Rini: Yeah. You mentioned the report says it’s not inherently a problem. I think it is inherently a problem if you have an increasing skew toward one strand of a partisan split in a democratic society — so I do think there’s a worry there. The tricky bit is disentangling two different historical processes that are correlated, where we don’t really know which way the causation goes. At the same time as the professoriate becomes more left-wing, there’s also an increased amount of attacks on academia coming from the political right — going back to Reagan, back to Nixon, all the way back, really, to William F. Buckley in 1951 with God and Man at Yale, seventy years ago. So you have two political processes playing out at the same time: attacks on academia from the right, and an increasing leftward tilt within the academy — and we don’t know which is causing which. There’s a possibility that the causation actually runs from the attacks on academia to the leftward tilt, in the following way: it might be that for three generations now, young conservative people have been told by intellectual leaders in their community, like Buckley, that academia is not the place for them and they should go somewhere else. I don’t know whether that’s true, but the fact that it’s a possible explanation — alongside more familiar explanations, like left-wing bias within hiring committees — means it’s actually really hard to explain what’s going on. And if you agree with me, as I think probably everybody on this call does, that it’s a problem, then we should care about it — and tackling it is really hard, because we don’t have super-clear data showing which of those things is the cause and which is the effect, or whether it’s some self-reinforcing cycle. So I agree that’s something that needs to be thought about and investigated more deeply.

John Tomasi: Well, let me pause and do a bit more together. There’s probably no natural number or natural ratio for how many Republicans and Democrats should be appropriate across the professoriate as a whole. If we think that one’s political orientation matters for scholarship, it’s probably because we think it goes to deep beliefs about social causation and about the value of the world. So it wouldn’t be surprising if those deep underlying values gave people reasons to join the academy — or not — and so some differentiation wouldn’t be surprising. But the delta seems harder to explain. I remember, years ago at Brown, talking with a group of my dear colleagues about the ideological imbalance, and one of them — a well-known philosopher, one of my best friends — said, “Well, we’re just tracking the truth here, dude. This is a conversation where we’re doing public reason, and it’s coming out one way; that’s how it goes.” We’re always arguing — it’s always a conversation, to some degree, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But it’s interesting to me: how is this happening? What explains the delta? We’re more and more tracking the truth now, whereas before it was more evenly divided? Do you want to say anything about the delta, about the change?

Regina Rini: Yeah. I don’t think I agree with the person you mentioned — I don’t know who it is, and I don’t want to speak for them. But we can try to reconstruct the way people usually make that argument, which is to say: the truth is selective for a certain orientation on the world, and that orientation selects for people who lean politically left. That could be true, for all we know. But I would want to see incredibly strong evidence before accepting it — much stronger than we’d normally demand for an empirical hypothesis — because there’s a lot of confirmation bias: a lot of people who are leftist and academics want it to be true. And if you want something to be true, you need to apply an epistemic deficit to the hypothesis; it has to start off below zero to account for your confirmation bias. So to get to the level of evidential sufficiency, you’d have to have a lot of evidence. Maybe we have some — I don’t know; I don’t think we have a lot. So I think we can leave it as a hypothesis that there’s some sense in which scholarly work selects for people on the left, but unless there’s a ton of evidence to support it, I don’t think we should treat it as affecting our decisions.

John Tomasi: Right — and again, we’d need to explain the change in any case. But that’s well said. I wonder if we could go to some questions from the audience. If you’re in the audience: this is a great report and a great conversation, an extremely important one for us to be having across the academy. I want to say again, if I didn’t say it clearly enough at the beginning, how impressed and delighted we are that the leaders of Vanderbilt and WashU proceeded this way, choosing such an esteemed panel to put this report together. The report is incredibly thoughtful. So if you have questions about it, this is a great time to put them in the chat, and we’ll go through some of them.

Here we go — I’ll read this one out: “In the humanities and social sciences, much of what I’ve seen is deeply skeptical of, and downright antagonistic to, the possibility of objective truth — Nietzschean perspectivalism, relativism, self-interest, false consciousness, Freudian repression. Is there any sense of agreement on basic epistemic standards, and on the possibility of ascertaining, if not objective, then at least intersubjectively applicable truth?” Ashley, do you want to take that one?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. I’m going to put this question under the banner of scholarly standards. To have scholarly standards, you need some understanding of how we know that what we’re saying is correct, how we know it’s convincing in some way. What are the shared standards? One of those is going to be about truth and objectivity. And for me, the biggest problem we’re facing right now is that we just don’t agree on the scholarly standards anymore. I’ll say I was pleasantly surprised, the more I learned about the humanities, that there’s a large group of scholars who really do have standards similar to mine. I’d always thought of the humanities as having very different standards about truth and argument than I had in the social sciences, but a lot of what I’d informally refer to as the scientific method was actually really similar to basic scholarly expectations. To make this concrete: things like looking at counterarguments, looking at counterevidence, thinking through the weaknesses of your arguments or your dataset — that’s just standard good scholarship, and it’s something we’re increasingly not seeing in certain fields, certain subfields, some research that gets published. We’re also seeing resistance to insisting on it, for various reasons that people increasingly put under the banner of political justifications. So I think that’s the big problem.

So, yes — I think there are clear standards. Objectivity is difficult to achieve; there are tricks we’ve developed to get there. I personally believe there’s truth out there, and I think a lot of people do, and that the challenge and the fun of academia is figuring out how to get to it. But there are others — a large group — who don’t believe there’s a single truth out there, or who think we can never actually get there, and that everything we’re doing is basically flawed, irrevocably so. And I think that’s the problem.

John Tomasi: Let me push a little right there — and Regina, you might want to comment too. I’m not sure that an avowal of one’s view about truth is what’s going to drive things here. You said there’s disagreement about scholarly standards, and that seems clearly true; that could be healthy in a variety of ways. But I wonder: is there agreement on the purpose of scholarly standards? One claim about their purpose ties it to the purpose, or telos, of the university. Some people — and HxA members typically are in this group — believe the purpose of scholarly standards is to know more about the world, with humility and intensity. But not everyone agrees about that purpose. Do either of you want to say something about that? Regina, do you want to get in, or, Ashley, do you want to reply?

Ashley Rubin: Sure, thank you. I think that’s the problem — we don’t agree on these things.

John Tomasi: What’s the disagreement, as you see it?

Ashley Rubin: So let me make this concrete. There are certain ways to communicate the scholarly process. When we publish, we publish in particular ways: we’re supposed to motivate our research question, to tie it to what we know and what we don’t know, and to explain why this gap is something that needs to be filled and is worthwhile. Some people disagree that we should even be doing that — that there are some topics so important they don’t need justification, and that if you ask somebody to justify why this research question, why this scholarship, that question is in itself offensive. So that’s the basic disagreement we’re having about scholarly standards: what’s the purpose of research, and what’s the purpose of these norms we’ve developed about publishing our research?

John Tomasi: Thank you. Should we pop up the next question — or, Regina, do you want to get in on this one?

Regina Rini: Yeah, sorry — let me jump in a little. I wanted to think about this question of the connection between politics and truth and knowledge, because the report, as I said, tries to frame those as opposed to each other — but there’s a complication. Imagine the following case. You’re at an academic conference, and people are debating some academic topic; they’re debating propositions — is this true, is this false — and debating the evidence. And then somebody raises their hand and says, “You guys, there’s a problem. I think somebody’s been putting some kind of hallucinogenic chemical in the drinking water. I think we’re all just floating off — we’re all high right now, and we’re not quite getting it.” And imagine the chair says, “No, you can’t talk about that. It might or might not be true, but we’re not doing activism right now; we’re not talking about what’s happening in the world or whether to change the water supply. We’re just doing science right now.” That would be a crazy answer, right? If somebody says there’s a causal process interfering with our ability to do good science, you have to attend to the causal process.

That, I think, is a useful analogue to what a lot of critics of the traditional idea of truth are doing in the academy. They’re saying there’s something — like ideology, or false consciousness, or whatever — that is a causal process interfering with our ability to find the truth. That’s the hallucinogen. They might be wrong about that. But it’s a mistake — a misunderstanding of their view — to say they’re not interested in truth. What they’re saying is, “We’re interested in truth, but we have to do some politics first to remove the hallucinogen from the drinking water, and then we can go back to pursuing the truth in an unconfused way.” And the report just doesn’t track that distinction. There are some people who genuinely don’t believe in truth, but I don’t think there are very many of them. There are a lot more people who have this substantive claim — that ideology is like the hallucinogen in the drinking water, and we have to do some politics — and that’s a more complicated argument that has to be dealt with head on.

John Tomasi: That’s fabulous. I love that example, and you explained its importance so well. Let me give us one minute more on that, if you don’t mind. How does what you said bear on the debate about the telos of the university? Some people — Jon Haidt, for example, argued some years ago, when HxA started — think you face a choice about ultimate ends at universities: something like searching for knowledge versus something like pursuing social justice. Does your distinction throw that into question?

Regina Rini: Well, it shows some complications. If you take the view these people have — and again, I want the audience to be clear that I often disagree with this, but I want to understand their view — their view is that there’s something like the hallucinogen in the water supply, and you can’t pursue the truth without first doing something of what gets called social justice, because you need to correct the hallucinogen before you can have truthful inquiry. So those are not opposed objectives; they sometimes — not always, but sometimes — coincide, according to this view. And that’s what has to be honestly grappled with.

John Tomasi: That’s fabulous. Let’s have another question. Someone says: “I agree with you” — I’ll take that as a collective “we” — “about the crisis of loss of rigor and politicization in some parts of the academy. But don’t you have to acknowledge that it’s possible to do philosophically rigorous work that emphasizes perspectivism, postmodernism, and pluralism without sinking into politicization?” Regina, this sounds right up your alley, but I’m going to give it to Ashley instead. I think it might be a softball for you, Ashley — what do you make of this question?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. This ties into what Regina was talking about a moment ago. I think there are really valuable criticisms that critical scholars, postmodernists, and others have offered that help us think about our research methods and our ability to do what we’re trying to do. The problem I have — and that I think the report is getting at — is with people who just completely reject it. It’s not even a question of how we fix the problem. There’s a problem; it’s pretty well documented; we know we have biases — but we’ve also developed tools to get around them. If those tools are flawed, we need to keep fixing them. There’s a difference between saying, “Let’s keep trying to fix the tools, let’s get as accurate as we can possibly be,” versus, “I’m going to throw up my hands; this isn’t possible at all, so we should basically create a fiction and call it science.” That’s the problem I have. So I don’t think we’re rejecting postmodernism out of hand. And I think the focus on relativism in the report is interesting, because it was very carefully defined, but people are reading a lot into what exactly we mean by it. I don’t think it’s supposed to be a blanket critique of everything; it’s the going-too-far that really starts to interfere with our ability to do our job. So for me that’s the big issue. There are valuable critiques you can raise about our ability to do scholarship, science, and so on — but if you can’t even engage in figuring out how to fix it, and you don’t even want to fix it, you just want to reject it, that’s the problem.

John Tomasi: Regina, do you want to add to this? I said it would be a softball for you — do you want to put a curve on it, or something? Mix my baseball metaphors.

Regina Rini: Sure. I definitely agree with Ashley that it would be a huge mistake to throw up our hands and give up on the pursuit of truth. I also don’t know how many people are really doing that. I think sometimes people exaggerate the extent of the shocking view they hold, because it gets attention — on Twitter, from the media, sometimes from grant review panels — so they’ll exaggerate the extent to which they’re saying, “Oh, I’m just refusing to do things the way academics have always done them; I’m opposed to truth now,” and so on. Sometimes I think that’s what’s happening. There are some sincere people who really have given up on truth, but — and maybe this is one place where quantitative research would actually be helpful, though I don’t know how you’d study it — I don’t know how you cleanly divide the people who are sincere from the ones who are putting on airs to get attention. I would really want to know what percentage of people who talk that way really, truly, deep down mean it — that they don’t believe there’s any such thing as truth, even about how to get to the grocery store — and what percentage are exaggerating their suspicion of existing scholarly machinery for effect.

John Tomasi: That’s great. I’ll point out that Heterodox Academy has a research and development team that’s very interested in these questions. There are so many questions now; the national attention is turning to all these issues about the academy, so there are so many opportunities to do really serious scholarly work to help us understand the state of play better. That’s why we think this report is so important — it points us toward the importance of doing those studies.

Let’s get at least one more question in. We’re being invited to talk about teaching a little. So: As important as the politicization of research is — and research is the main focus of this report — this question is about the politicization of teaching, which is arguably a more egregious deviation from what’s appropriate, and of greater public consequence and concern. I was rereading the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration last night — being a nerd — and, as many of you know, it has these stirring passages about the importance of teaching for freedom, about citizenship and the free individual thinking for themselves, and it hammers down on the responsibility to teach in a way that’s liberatory. The specific question is: will there be a report on the politicization of higher-ed teaching? That might be a question for the Vanderbilt–WashU group — I’m not sure whether they’ll do that — but does anyone want to talk about this issue? Regina, do you want to start?

Regina Rini: Sure. I think this is a really important question, because it’s dangerous on both ends. I agree with the questioner that it’s especially egregious for people to abuse the institutional power of being a professor. I remember being a student in classrooms where professors would just get on their soapbox and talk about their views — sometimes about politics; one time it was about basketball — that had nothing to do with the actual lecture. They were abusing the fact that they had a captive audience with no choice but to listen. That’s an abuse of the job, and you should not be doing it. So in that respect it’s very bad. But we also have to be careful on the other side. Teaching, especially at the collegiate level, is not just about presenting an absolutely neutral point of view about what other people have said. Part of the reason you study with an expert is that they have their own opinions — and their opinions might involve things like the hallucinogen-in-the-drinking-water view I described a few minutes ago. We can’t have some sort of filter that says you can’t express those opinions in a classroom. The worst of all is something happening in the US right now, which is governments trying to prevent people from stating those views — that’s not compatible with a model of expert teachers. So what’s really going on here is a certain sort of discipline that individual educators need to impose on themselves: not to abuse the soapbox they have. But if they do abuse it, we have to be really careful that the remedy isn’t worse than the problem itself.

John Tomasi: Since you mentioned remedies, I’ll take my moderator’s privilege and jump in. I mentioned at the beginning that the report says administrators operate under a “stringent principle of deference to expertise,” but also that even that principle has its limits. We’re curious — and HxA is working with a lot of college leaders on this very question — what’s the role of administrators in encouraging a healthier scholarly environment? One way to think about it is that academic freedom stands as an obstacle to administrators doing that. At HxA, we have the idea that perhaps administrators have a role in helping enrich and enhance the exercise of academic freedom — by providing studies like this one that could help people think more seriously, within their own departments, about what excellence might be. Ashley, you might want to say something about this element of the report. What are the practical implications? What might be done after we ride out into the desert with this posse?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. We were really careful in the report to focus on diagnosing the problem; we weren’t asked to make recommendations. But of course people are going to want to know the next step. One thing we say at the beginning is that nothing in the report suggests you should go out and start closing universities or departments or anything like that. If anything, the very next step, if you have concerns in your own university, is to do a faculty-led self-study — because we’re looking at field-level trends, essentially national and in some cases international trends, and that doesn’t mean your local department has these problems. So if you’re going to figure out whether your local department needs some sort of reform, you need to do a self-study, and it has to involve faculty. That was really important.

More personally, I think incentives are really important — getting to your earlier point about how we saw this massive delta, how the change in faculty politicization went off the rails. A big part of it, I think, is that even at the level of admissions and hiring, we started having increasing cases where the university was funding explicitly political faculty positions, and faculty sitting on admissions committees were bringing in students who say, “I want to be an activist,” instead of, “I just want to learn,” or, “I just want to do research.” Increasingly that’s what people think grad school is about, and I think that’s a big reason for the huge shift. So administrators have a big role to play in incentivizing what I’d consider good behavior — thinking about what they’re funding. I’m not an economist, but I do think economists get a lot right about incentivizing human behavior, and that’s something we see a lot in universities.

John Tomasi: I’ll add that we talk to university presidents a lot, and one of the things we often discuss is how they rationally allocate resources for academic excellence. There was an assumption a few years ago that they could do that by relying on the expert judgment of their own faculty — and they can, and they always will need to, for all the reasons described in the report. But we’re increasingly seeing that’s not the whole story: that there’s academic excellence over here, and some other set of things — the free exchange of ideas, viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement — over there. They’re different things; we think they go together; and if you want to test for academic excellence, you have to find more sophisticated ways to test for things like viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement, and the free exchange of ideas — those elements of the HxA agenda.

We’re coming toward the end. Regina, I want to give you the last word, because you’re such a wonderfully thoughtful critic — a good report deserves great critics, and not all the critics I’ve read have been great; you’ve been remarkable. I’ll give you the last word to say anything you’d like about the report. You can take up that question about application, or any point at all.

Regina Rini: Sure — very nice of you to say. Part of the reason I criticize the report is that I’m sympathetic with the basic intuition, the intuition that there’s a problem. I’ll say this personally: I’m not on the political right, but I find it really unhelpful that when I’m talking to colleagues, I don’t get pushback from the right most of the time. When I go to conferences, I actively seek out the few conservative philosophers I know, because it’s really helpful for me to talk ideas through with them. I’ll mention one — Spencer Case, a philosopher who’s working right now on a book about patriotism, and who’s really fun to talk to about this stuff. It’s really helpful to me; it sharpens my research. So part of my motivation is that I want there to be more people I can talk to who have very different views, whom I can argue with. I’m kind of hopeful — I don’t know how we do this; I’m not an administrator, it’s above my pay grade — but I’m really hopeful that if we start finding ways to encourage more diversity, that’s helpful for all of us and we all get more out of it. So that’s a hopeful note to end on, maybe.

John Tomasi: Thanks, Regina. And I want to thank all of you again for joining this conversation. If you work in a university and you’re not a member of HxA — we’re growing, and we are who we are because of who our members are. So join us; make us who you want us to be. Ashley, Regina — thank you so much for this conversation, and we look forward to more discussions about this great report. Thanks, everyone.

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Editor’s Note: Following a longstanding request from the author’s university department leadership, certain names in the essay, including the author’s, have been removed.

In March 2021, students starting the spring semester at my South Korean university were greeted by a banner suspended across a central walkway calling for my removal from the faculty. Inside the social science building where I worked was a poster listing virtually every campus student organization also petitioning for my dismissal. Fifteen hundred students—including most in my department—had signed the petition. Meanwhile, national media writers, such as The Korea Herald, labeled me one of the “different shades of denialism” regarding Japan’s colonial and war crimes in Korea.

How did I become Korea’s—or least my university’s—most famous denialist? The immediate trigger was an essay I had co-authored in the foreign policy journal The Diplomat calling for more open, self-reflective debate about the “comfort women” issue—which involves allegations that during World War II tens of thousands of women from Korea and elsewhere in East Asia were forced into sexual slavery to serve the needs of Japanese military personnel.

Specifically, the piece was a response to the controversy over Harvard law professor J. Mark Ramseyer’s article on the status of these comfort women that deviated from the accepted narrative that these women were simply sex slaves. My co-author and I argued that “debating not censuring” was the more principled and productive path to finding out the truth about this episode in history.

But the deeper story is the long path—personal and intellectual—that brought me back to Korea and eventually into collision with one of its most powerful taboos.

A Second Chance in My Birth Country

When a tenure-track position at a teaching-focused American university did not work out, returning to work in Korea offered a chance to reset. I taught two years at one Seoul-based university before formally joining “H University” in 2013. The position was non-tenure track, but provided long-term employment (renewable two-year contracts), time to focus on research, and access to family housing in the bustling capital of Seoul.

I was born in South Korea, in Gwangju, the epicenter of the progressive opposition to the nation’s authoritarian regimes (1945-87), and was eager to teach and contribute to the country’s development. By 2015, I had settled into my new role and was teaching and publishing regularly. The next year, I was named one of H University’s 23 “Excellent Scholars,” prompting the social science administration team leader to predict that the division would promote me to a tenured position. But this promise quickly turned to controversy over perhaps the most sensitive topic in Korea: Japanese colonialism, and specifically the use of comfort women for the Japanese military during their occupation of Korea both before and during World War II.

The Biggest Taboo

Like most Koreans, I had grown up with a simple and morally satisfying binary: Japanese Imperialists were oppressors; Koreans were victims. It wasn’t a narrative one usually questioned. But several incidents pushed me to look more closely—especially one involving Junko, a Japanese exchange student in my class, who was verbally abused on the Seoul subway simply for speaking Japanese on her cellphone. I quoted her reflections in an article for The Korea Herald:

[The man] said, “Hey damn the child of disseizor [sly invader]. Go out from Korea as soon as possible!” I shall never forget this word. The word “disseizor” was too cruel. It was like a stab in the chest to me. Intellectuals should stop using [these kinds] of harsh words because they have a big effect on people.

Her experience made me ask why Korea’s anti-Japanese narrative had taken on such intense moral absolutism. And the more I questioned, the more I realized that the narrative—like all grand narratives—contained truths, half-truths, and politically convenient simplifications. The most devoutly held, but empirically contested, narrative was that the Japanese military had kidnapped, enslaved, and mostly killed 200,000 Korean girls; that the current Japanese government was hiding or denying these crimes; and that any deviation from this view reflected “far-right denialism.”

The Korean media explicitly compared comfort women to Jewish Holocaust victims. For instance, an editorial in The Korea Times argued that “by no means would the suffering of the comfort women be less painful than that of those killed en masse in the Nazi gas chambers” and the world needs to “see Korea’s misery as compelling[ly] as they see the Jewish Holocaust.”

But rigorous, “revisionist” research, such as Korean-American anthropologist C. Sarah Soh’s 2008 book, The Comfort Women, critiques each of these claims. Instead of comparing Japan’s Korean comfort women to the Jewish Holocaust, a more realistic comparison is to other military brothel systems, such as those operated by France during World War I and the U.S. military in post‑1945 Korea.

Soh revealed how some former comfort women changed their personal testimonies over time, coinciding with the nationalist abduction narrative, and how academics and journalists declined to question the shifting testimonies and instead labeled any critique as right-wing denialism. Reading her book profoundly challenged my worldview, as much as Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind (1987) had years ago before I started graduate school.

Heterodoxy in the Classroom

Virtually none of my students had heard of Soh’s book, as no publisher would translate it into Korean. But her book was not an exercise in denialism. Instead, it was scholarship—rigorous, meticulously sourced, and praised by even progressive historians such as the University of Chicago’s Bruce Cumings. Starting in 2013, I introduced Soh to my students, including those in my Civil Society & Social Movements class, along with more mainstream views of the issue. For the latter, I assigned the U.N.’s 1996 Coomaraswamy Report on sexual slavery during World War II and organized field trips to the House of Sharing (a home to surviving comfort women).

Most of the young people in my classes—a mix of international and Korean students—appreciated the balance. Some pushed back. A few expressed discomfort. But the disagreements were civil—until 2016. That fall semester, a large group of Korean students enrolled. They didn’t talk much or challenge me in class. But after the semester ended—and after I had already flown to the U.S. for winter break—I received a terse email from the Student Council president:

The Student Union of the College of Social Science and Department of Politics & Diplomacy heard of your statement in class. We and many students seriously worried about your statement because it can be advocating war crimes and totalitarianism…. So we need your official position and apology for this issue. Please refer to the attached document. P.S. I sincerely hope that this will not happen again.

Student activists then contacted sympathetic reporters, sparking a national controversy. The department chair—who believed only a trivial number of comfort women had voluntarily joined—declined to communicate with me throughout the entire winter break. My family and I were paralyzed for two and a half months, wondering whether I’d lose my job.

When I returned to Korea, I endured hours-long meetings with a faculty committee and student representatives. Finally, the committee issued a formal “warning” and prohibited me from assigning Soh’s book for one year, a compromise from its initial demand to never assign the book again. That was my first strike.

A Deliberately Edited Misquote

After 2016, I redesigned my curriculum, assigning Soh’s The Comfort Women to my Comparative Politics course, along with Katharine Moon’s book about U.S. military comfort women, Sex Among Allies, to the aforementioned Civil Society course. Students were required to submit weekly reading reactions to assess comprehension. Sensitive topics were introduced only after discussions of less politicized cases, such as human rights abuses in North Korea. I encouraged students to compare the rhetorical patterns of comfort women testimonies with those of North Korean defectors, to examine how narratives of suffering function within advocacy movements.

The classroom atmosphere remained volatile, even though activist students were mostly silent throughout the semester. They then submitted highly negative course evaluations. But after 2016, the number of such students was minimal, as most simply boycotted my elective courses.

Starting in the 2018 fall semester, I was asked to teach the Political Science Methodology course, required for all undergraduate students. I received excellent student evaluations for my teaching: I invited guest speakers and organized various field trips, including to the nation’s largest mosque.

I expected the same in 2019, but that year coincided with the publication of former Seoul National University economics professor Lee Young-hoon and colleagues’ revisionist bestseller, Anti-Japan Tribalism, criticizing Koreans’ anti-Japanese views and arguing that many were based on historical falsehoods. The book sold over 130,000 copies and triggered a flood of media coverage. To connect my course to current events, I discussed Lee’s book as an attempt to overturn historical consensus and usher in a paradigm shift.

One or more students secretly recorded my lecture, edited out my attribution, and circulated the clip as if the statement were my own to like-minded reporters. Without contacting me for verification, the national public news agency, Yonhap, published the headline: “H University professor: ‘Korean scholars researching comfort women are liars’… Student Council pushes back.” The incident solidified my reputation as a member of Korea’s far-right or “new-right” who deny Japan’s war crimes and personally insult our nation’s historians. Meanwhile, the Student Council president requested that I acknowledge that Anti-Japan Tribalism is bad social science. I declined since I do not publicly endorse or reject any book that we may discuss in class.

That was strike two, for allegedly stirring political controversy that hurt H University’s reputation and consuming the time of tenured faculty. My department subsequently banned me from teaching Political Science Methodology, or any other mandatory undergraduate course. (I was, however, still assigned to teach the methods class for graduate students.)

As my number of undergrad courses shrank, I was assigned to teach general English writing classes for graduate students university-wide, mostly in the sciences and engineering. Some would consider this a humiliating demotion, but I feel that all teaching is honorable, whatever the subject. I adapted by assigning various writing and communication exercises—short stories, essays, research papers, small team meetings, and games—and earned nearly 100% positive student evaluations.

Defending a ‘Privileged Denialist’

I had already suffered two strikes in 2016 and 2019, with ever-diminishing chances of tenure promotion at H University or at any other university in Korea, when another potentially difficult situation arose. In 2020, Harvard law professor Ramseyer published an article theorizing that most Korean women signed contracts to become comfort women, and that such contracts offered more pay and shorter terms during wartime than during peacetime because of the difficulty of recruiting wartime workers.

I felt immense pressure not to defend the academic freedom of such a supposedly incendiary and privileged scholar. But to not speak about academic and civil freedoms, when no one else would, would violate my core beliefs.

In the end, I chose the “hard” that I could best live with. The response was immediate, intense, and inevitable. Posters across campus demanded my removal. Student Councils issued similar statements. Media outlets repeated earlier allegations against me. A confidential university panel reviewed my case and voted 11–2 against termination, but I was neither invited to speak in my defense nor even informed that the review had occurred.

My department requested that I permanently refrain from writing about comfort women. We ultimately agreed that I would pause writing for one year and that any future publications would not mention my university affiliation.

Choosing My ‘Hard’

Academics often respond to controversies with the flight-or-fight response. A silent majority probably choose flight, promising to avoid sensitive topics or never to touch them again, at least until they receive tenure. A vocal minority choose to fight, to lean into oppositional activism. I choose neither flight nor fight, but the Heterodox Way—an ethos of rigor, curiosity, humility, and openness. I want to engage, not retaliate. To understand, not demonize. To criticize systems and practices, not individuals.

By God’s grace, I found a community where this ethos was not only accepted but encouraged. When colleagues at H University and at the Korean Studies Association disavowed me, Heterodox Academy accepted me. Through HxA, I found colleagues who believed, as I did, that intellectual diversity and open inquiry are essential to a healthy academic culture and to what should be every university’s core mission: the unfettered pursuit of truth.

Together with Kyushu University’s Shaun O’Dwyer, and later joined by scholars like Frances An from the University of Western Australia, Wondong Lee from South Korea’s Inha University, Meredith Shaw from the University of Tokyo, and Alexandre Erler from Taiwan’s National Yang Ming University, we created the Heterodox East Asia Community, hosting four to six forums a semester on sensitive topics across East Asia. Our community shares the premise that curiosity flourishes where fear recedes.

Why I Still Believe

Some may assume that my ordeal radicalized me—turned me against the left, activists, or even Koreans. It did not. In fact, it deepened my understanding and appreciation of the liberal principles of procedural fairness, viewpoint diversity, self-criticism, and institutional openness. Open vetting of claims—even painful ones—remains the foundation of legitimacy in liberal, pluralistic societies. When institutions suppress heterodox ideas rather than examine them, they erode their own moral authority.

I believe Korea can embody a more open, self-reflective and intellectually pluralistic culture and that classrooms should be safe spaces for criticism, and not only for conformity. I believe in its many citizens—students, journalists, scholars—who quietly told me they wanted open debate, even if they could not say so publicly. The core principles of academic freedom helped persuade the 11 faculty members who ultimately voted not to terminate me—and for that, my family and I remain grateful.

In the end, heterodoxy is not rebellion, it is responsibility. And that is how I became Korea’s most famous “denialist;” not because I denied anyone’s suffering, but because I refused to deny the values of open inquiry and the pursuit of truth.

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It’s now widely (though not universally) conceded that improving viewpoint diversity on campus would improve university teaching and research. Faculty on American campuses are overwhelmingly cut from the same ideological cloth, and this homogeneity has harmful effects on all aspects of the professoriate, including teaching, research, and service. The research mission, in particular, is under threat as faculty political and religious homogeneity distort our knowledge of everything from gender and immigration to secularism and terrorism.

But suppose you had the opportunity to fix this. You could wave a magic wand and improve viewpoint diversity in any part of campus. Where should you work your magic? Where does viewpoint diversity matter the most?

The topical answer says that you should focus your efforts on the humanities and the social sciences. This is a common answer. Back in 2016, Gerard Alexander noted that it was no “coincidence that intolerance is radiating across universities from those subfields of the humanities and social sciences in which viewpoint diversity is most absent and rigorous scrutiny is most anemic.” More recently, Michael W. Clune argued that professors in the humanities and social sciences are unable to articulate and respond to objections to controversial positions in their field, and so most likely to benefit from viewpoint diversity. And just last year, Jonathan Haidt and John Tomasi, both of Heterodox Academy, wrote that viewpoint diversity is especially important “in the social sciences, humanities and some of the professional schools.”

This topical answer is plausible. The humanities and social sciences exhibit the least amount of political diversity and yet feature the most enduring controversial questions in politics, religion, and philosophy. Yet it’s also incomplete. The topical answer doesn’t offer a deeper explanation for why some disciplines are problematic in a way that others are not. It also misses some pretty important exceptions in the natural and life sciences like climate change, vaccines, or transgender health. The research in all of those fields would be improved with viewpoint diversity.

Tyler VanderWeele of Harvard offers a different kind of answer. Instead of a topical boundary, he offers a principle: “Universities should…hire faculty who hold disfavored or controversial views when those views are held by a large portion of the population, have not been clearly refuted, and influence culture and policy.” Anytime a viewpoint is popular, influential at the level of culture or policy, and unsettled by the discipline, we should ensure that we have viewpoint diversity in the faculty teaching and researching those topics.

Like the topical answer, this answer is plausible. It links cultural/social influence with discipline-specific standards. It also correctly identifies the wide concatenation of topics often cited as in need of viewpoint diversity, such as medical treatment for transgender youth, climate change policy, government-subsidized healthcare, etc.

But the principle-based answer also fails to offer a deeper explanation for why viewpoint diversity is more important under these particular conditions. What is it about the combination of popularity, social influence, and absence of academic refutation that mandates viewpoint diversity on some topics but not others?

While granting that both answers are appropriate, I want to offer a different answer to the question. This account explains what’s correct about these other answers while providing the deeper explanation they lack. Where does viewpoint diversity matter the most? Anywhere our identities are at stake.

At a very general level, each of us faces all sorts of non-epistemic pressures to believe in certain ways. That’s precisely why peer-reviewed journals often require authors to disclose funding for research and other potential conflicts of interest. And it’s why judges are required to recuse themselves from cases where they have personal interests at stake. In cases like these, the non-epistemic pressure to draw a conclusion a certain way impedes our ability to evaluate the evidence impartially.

It’s not that in these cases we see the evidence and choose to ignore it. Rather, the problem is that in these cases, it’s difficult for us to see the evidence in the first place. As Upton Sinclair put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” In a case like this, the non-epistemic, financial pressure drowns out the contrary evidence.

Contemporary philosophers have been identifying these sorts of pressures and drawing out their epistemic implications for knowledge and understanding. Katia Vavova explains when irrelevant influences undermine our justification for a belief. In a Millian vein, Hrishikesh Joshi argues that anytime there’s social pressure to believe something, there’s a good chance that your evidence base is not representative. And Nathan Ballantyne defends a regulative epistemology that takes seriously our internal and external pressures to believe in ways that don’t fit the evidence.

Some of the most powerful non-epistemic pressures we face have to do with our identity. We see ourselves a certain way, and our beliefs feature prominently in our internally constructed view of ourselves. We are theists, progressives, anti-vaxxers, religious skeptics, patriots, and the like. What we believe is important to who we are. Giving up the belief that God exists or changing your mind about the effects of structural racism could be devastating for your identity.

Because of this cost, we are prone to engage in ideologically motivated reasoning that will spare us the problematic conclusion. Better to gloss over the evidence than to deal with the pain of cognitive dissonance. Given the discomfort of cognitive dissonance, it’s no surprise that a wealthy man thinks that his wealth is largely the result of personal choices and that the poor man thinks that poverty is largely the result of circumstances outside of his control. Each needs to sleep well at night.

One central facet of our identity is our membership in a group. Humans are deeply social creatures, and our identities are intertwined with belonging. In principle, this need not cause any epistemic trouble; humans might have sorted themselves into in-groups and out-groups by cultural, religious, or political symbols like dress, tattoos, etc. instead of beliefs.

But in practice, beliefs are important for defining group membership. They become even more important as our habits of dress, design, and lifestyle converge–how are you supposed to tell liberals from conservatives anymore? Beliefs help us to recognize and police those boundaries.

Not just any belief will do. Beliefs that provide reliable signals of group membership should not be obviously false or refuted (like “the sky is red”) or straightforwardly self-destructive (like “humans can fly”). Instead, good examples of group signaling beliefs are things like “It’s wrong to eat meat” and “God is real.” These beliefs are sometimes referred to as “symbolic beliefs” since they function as social markers and can perform their social function even when they are false.

As evidence for the prominent role of symbolic beliefs as group markers, there is a strong market for bumper stickers and signs literally offering a list of things that you believe (for example, “We believe that: science is real, black lives matter, etc.”). Why would you put such a thing in your yard? The answer is purely about identity. Posting the sign is a form of group participation. You get to wave the flag of your team, signal your group loyalties to others, and perhaps to offer your own non-epistemic pressures on neighbors to agree with you.

The problem is that once a group-marking belief is under threat, we don’t think well about the evidence for or against it. Dan Kahan and others have shown that we process information about these topics in highly motivated ways in order to maintain beliefs that signify loyalty to our affinity groups. Even worse, he concludes that those of us who score the highest in cognitive reflection are the most likely to engage in ideologically motivated cognition.

Putting the pieces together: we face pressures to maintain a coherent identity, belonging to a group is a central part of that identity, groups are often defined in terms of belief, yet when a belief is a group marker, we are more likely to evaluate it in biased ways. That means anytime a topic touches on a belief, conclusion, or commitment used to demarcate socially important groups, members of those groups will face strong non-epistemic pressures to believe in certain ways regardless of the evidence.

If people are put into a position where they must choose between their identities and an idea, most will happily choose their identities. (Although “choose” is too strong–they won’t consciously choose it so much as subconsciously process the evidence in biased ways.) It would be incredibly difficult for an atheist to come to believe that there was a God. It would be incredibly difficult for a progressive to come to believe that a racial disparity is due to anything other than systemic racism. It would be incredibly difficult for a conservative to come to believe that climate change poses an existential risk. Their identities are built around believing along with their tribes.

Universities should know this and not pit faculty against their own identities. Doing so stacks the epistemic deck in a pretty obvious way. Instead, we should have ideologically diverse groups of faculty contesting these issues so that they can better sort the evidential signal from the identitarian noise.

This identity-based explanation shows why both the topical answer and principle answer we started with are correct. The topical answer that we need viewpoint diversity in the humanities and social sciences is correct because identities are more at stake in those fields than others. Hobbes, that astute observer of human nature, anticipates this distinction between the humanities and other disciplines like math:

I doubt not but if it had been a thing contrary to any man’s right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, that the three angles of a triangle should be equal to two angles of a square, that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able. (Leviathan, Part 1, Chapter XI section 21)

Hobbes’ point is that our social incentives impact whether we dispute or suppress a doctrine, and we rarely have such social incentives when it comes to mathematics.

That’s because mathematical beliefs are not relevant to our identities. If they were, you can bet that we’d see the same level of controversy in math departments as we do in the humanities and social sciences. Instead, as the authors of the recent Vanderbilt-Washington University report note, even though academic mathematicians are more liberal than the general electorate, it’s no reason to think that the scholarly standards in mathematics are somehow bogus because of their politics.

Identity pressures also explain why VanderWeele’s principle-based answer is correct. Recall that his suggestion is that we need viewpoint diversity for faculty evaluating views that “are held by a large portion of the population, have not been clearly refuted, and influence culture and policy.” This is almost a perfect recipe for a symbolic belief. In the long run, views that have been refuted are too difficult for in-group members to hold in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence. Views that are powerful enough to shape culture and policy are obvious candidates for group markers as groups often form in competition over cultural issues.

In sum, anytime faculty are wrestling with questions concerning symbolic beliefs used as markers for group identity, we should ensure that we have robust viewpoint diversity in place. This includes the obvious cases of ethics, religion, history and the like but also controversial issues in the social and natural sciences. These days, we use empirical beliefs on everything from EVs and voting security to climate change and vaccination to enforce tribal boundaries–the humanities don’t have a corner on the market for identity beliefs.

One final point. The primary value of viewpoint diversity in these areas is squarely epistemic: it improves the group’s ability to sort the signal from the noise. Viewpoint-diverse groups are more likely to cancel out the non-epistemic pressures associated with identity and more likely to get to the truth. If we want our universities to research and teach on these issues well, we absolutely need to cultivate a viewpoint diverse set of scholars and teachers.

But an important knock-on effect of viewpoint diversity in these domains is an expansion of epistemic trust with those outside the university. When viewpoint diverse experts arrive at a conclusion, that signals to the non-experts that the conclusion was driven by evidence rather than identity.

Research on partisan cue-taking consistently shows that messengers matter: people are more likely to trust members of their in-group first, mixed groups second, and out-groups least. Further, normal humans exhibit biased assimilation: we are more likely to trust experts and expert knowledge when they align with our moral commitments.

In an era when trust in higher education is in freefall, universities should welcome the opportunity to restore trust with the broader public by improving viewpoint diversity in the right areas on campus.

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Columbia University announced this month that it will once again require standardized test scores for undergraduate applicants beginning in August 2027, making it the final Ivy League school to reinstate test score requirements after most universities made them optional beginning in 2020.

Over in California, UC Berkeley faculty members published an open letter urging the UC system to reinstate SAT math score requirements for STEM applicants, arguing that campuses need a clearer way to assess whether students are prepared for college-level quantitative work. The effort has drawn more than 1,500 faculty signatures since June 5, including from 60 STEM department chairs across the system. The letter even spurred a second open letter earlier this week from UC Social Sciences and Humanities faculty urging the use of SAT reading and writing scores in admissions, which has drawn over 400 signatures in a matter of a few days. The UC Academic Senate has now committed to a “comprehensive review of key admissions policies.”

Many universities adopted “test-optional” policies during COVID (with some keeping the policy permanently) allowing students to decide whether to submit their test scores with their applications. Now with enough data to evaluate impact, the dominoes have fallen. Dartmouth was the first of the Ivies to reverse course following an internal review that argued that test scores were an “essential method by which Admissions can identify applicants who will succeed at Dartmouth.” Most of the Ivy League followed suit within months; Princeton and Columbia were the final holdouts.

Universities also framed test-optional policies as an equity win. Because SAT scores correlate with income, requiring them arguably screened out economically disadvantaged (and disproportionately non-white) students who could gain economic mobility from a university education. A policy born of pandemic logistics was quickly recast as a social justice measure. But admissions offices had a more pragmatic reason to keep it. As Colin Diver explains in Breaking Ranks, if only high scorers opt to submit their scores, a university’s reported average goes up — and since SAT scores carry significant weight in the U.S. News “Best Colleges” rankings, test-optional turned out to be a quiet gift to the rankings game.

Columbia’s own data bear this out. According to reporting in the Columbia Spectator based on the school’s admissions data, Columbia’s test-optional policy resulted in a 35 point bump in freshman average SAT scores. But this single stat masks the reality that more students are being admitted to these highly selective universities who lack the foundational knowledge to succeed in high-level coursework.

This is exactly the problem that Svetlana Jitomirskaya and Zvezdelina Stankova, both mathematics professors at UC Berkeley who initiated the open letter, have discussed widely in the media, sharing their experiences with the policy in recent op-eds. They explained that freshman students would come in lacking a conceptual understanding of basic algebra, forcing lectures to pivot from their intended topics to basics like fractions. “With one hand, I am teaching a complex integral, and with the other hand, I am telling them how to solve a simple linear equation like 7x – 2 = 5,” Stankova told The Atlantic in an interview.

The classroom has become bifurcated between prepared and unprepared students, and that split doesn’t just limit learning — it also limits the conditions for intellectual exchange. Classrooms are meant to be places of deep discussion, constructive disagreement, and boundary-pushing inquiry. But that kind of friction requires a common floor: everyone in the room has to be able to engage the material at a common critical level before anyone can push past it. If high-level courses are instead reduced to teaching middle-school content, open inquiry cannot thrive; students cannot thoughtfully discuss the implications and applications of mathematics if students are still working out the basic algebra underpinning it. Students who are prepared fail to get the education they were promised, unprepared students inevitably fall behind, and professors get understandably frustrated. The classroom no longer become places worth attending.

The COVID era test-optional policies were a forced, yet illuminating, admissions experiment showcasing how useful it can be to revisit standard policies and their underlying assumptions, kick the tires, and use data to make informed policy decisions. The argument to bring back test scores to selective admissions rests on a variety of studies, internal reports, and analyses showing decreased preparedness of students, while simultaneously showing little if any improvements in equity goals.

While the data tell a clear story on the role of test scores in selective admissions, there’s another reason for requiring them that didn’t exist in 2020: AI. Personal admissions essays can be produced in seconds. Grade inflation and student cheating are rampant. A sit-down, proctored standardized test to assess a student’s knowledge base in reading, writing, and math might be the only viable option we have right now for selective universities until we can sort out how to teach (and learn) in an era where everything else that goes into an admissions packet has become gameable.

The test-optional era might have made universities look better in the rankings and feel better about their policies, but the data suggests it made students worse off. Universities are supposed to be in the business of honest assessment — of ideas, of evidence, of their own assumptions. The SAT debate is, in the end, a test of whether they can apply that standard to themselves.

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Steven Brint: Our panel is going to focus on a very interesting paper that Jon Shields and two colleagues wrote. Some of you may have read it already, about the closed classroom, how controversial issues are taught in American classrooms. Jon is going to present for about 15 minutes or so. Then we have commentary from two distinguished folks. I should say Jon is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. Our commentators are Will Fithian, an associate professor of statistics here at Berkeley, and Brian Soucek, who’s a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. They will talk for about seven minutes, and then Jon will have an opportunity to respond for five minutes or so, and then we’ll open to Q&A. So, Jon, please.

Jon Shields: Well, thanks to Heterodox Academy for organizing this and having me out. It’s a pleasure to be here. I honestly didn’t know if I’d make it. I got really sick this week, but I’ve been popping pills all week, and I think I’ve turned a corner, so I’m real happy to be here. So today I’m going to just briefly summarize some research that I did with Yuval Avnur and Stephanie Muravchik, both at the Claremont Colleges. And this work really grows out of the belief that education in free democratic societies has some responsibility for forming citizens. And citizens need some fluency with ideas and intellectual traditions that are contending for dominance in a democracy. And they need to acquire some ability to critically assess them. And that raises a sort of question for us in the university, you know, which is how well are we introducing students to the moral and political controversies that shape our democratic life?

And surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of research on this question. We know a lot about the politics of professors, thanks to a lot of good empirical work on this subject. We have surveys, in fact, on professors’ politics going back to the 1950s. But we really don’t know very much about how the politics of professors shapes how they teach. The education historian Jon Zimmerman has pointed out that kind of paradox about college teaching. He notes, “college teaching is a highly public act that has remained mostly private.” And Jon, when he makes this point, always illustrates this with a good anecdote. He’s an excellent teacher, and so some years ago he received NYU’s teaching award and he was invited to a big ceremony that honored him, and the provost introduced Jon Zimmerman, and as he introduced him he read a long list of all of Professor Zimmerman’s publications, right? Because that’s what was most visible, right, about him, and not his teaching.

So we found a way to get a glimpse, at least, into college classrooms, thanks to a large, publicly available database called Open Syllabus. It’s amassed millions of syllabi, primarily by scraping them from websites. The data go as far back as the 1990s, though most of it has been collected in the last 10 years or so. The database doesn’t provide scholars with the raw data, but it provides a sort of searchable database with some useful analytical tools that can help us assess the data. And so for example, it allows us to see how frequently texts are assigned. And importantly, it allows us to see what they’re assigned with.

So we use this database to look at three controversies. And we’re really interested in, you know, actually we began by just sort of asking, like what are some of the most polarizing controversies? Right. And so we looked at three. We looked at racism in the criminal justice system. We looked at the ethics of abortion, and we looked at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All three issues, I think, have been uniquely polarizing sources of division in our democracy. Two have been uniquely polarizing on American college campuses over the last decade or so. And in each case, we were interested to explore the extent to which the scholarly debate around these issues is taught to students. So we were not interested in whether demagogues like Tucker Carlson are assigned to students. Rather, we were interested in whether students are exposed to a spectrum of the most reputable and informed thinkers. And we were guided primarily by our own familiarity with the academic literatures in each of the issues we looked at, as well as citation counts. We used that knowledge to first identify some of the most influential texts on each issue. And then we assess the extent to which those texts are taught in conversation with either critical texts or texts that broadly align with their point of view.

So I’ll give you an example, a few examples of what this looks like. So we look, for example, at Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which inspired a political and moral reckoning over our criminal justice system. You can see its extraordinary influence, right? It’s been cited over 19,000 times since 2010. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for five years. Kendi rightly said, I think, it was one of the sparks that lit the fire of the Black Lives Matter movement. And it became a very popular text in university courses, as it should have. In the database, it appears in over 5,000 syllabi, which places it among the most assigned texts in the database. It appears more often than Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Paradise Lost. And if for some reason you’re not familiar with the book, the core of the book claims that mass incarceration is essentially Jim Crow 2.0, right? It’s a system that was intentionally designed to subjugate and control black Americans, except in some ways it’s more sinister because it seems neutral and colorblind on the surface, right? So it’s more perverse in some ways. So it was a bold and provocative thesis, the kind that tends to stir academic controversy, which it did almost immediately. Enter James Forman Jr. Professor Forman is a Yale law professor. He’s notably also the son of the famous civil rights leader, James Forman Sr. And so not surprisingly, he had a deep interest in the claim that Jim Crow, a system his father helped defeat, had suddenly been resurrected. This is a topic that he found, of course, significant both personally and politically. And so he began developing a powerful rebuttal, first as a working paper in 2011 that then became a law review article a year later. And it was pretty critical, right? I mean, in fact, he essentially argued that nearly all of Alexander’s empirical claims were wrong. And not just wrong, but really demonstratively wrong, right? Deeply wrong. And his work culminated a few years later with the publication of Locking Up Our Own, which argued that there was no racist conspiracy at the heart of mass incarceration. Instead, he said the origins of mass incarceration were simply just much more tragic. He argued that black mayors and police chiefs first rose to power at a moment when violent crime was surging, and they responded to that pressing challenge with tough-on-crime policies. The book was a great success. It won the Pulitzer. It was listed by the New York Times as among the 10 best books of the year. And other books soon followed, I’ve highlighted a few here that in various ways also pressed against Alexander’s thesis. Again, all by prominent scholars.

Now to our central question, right, which is to what extent are any of these critical texts assigned with Alexander’s? And if you haven’t seen this data, you might just take a moment and just, you know, guess in your mind how often these texts are assigned with Alexander. And so I’ll show you the data here. You can see that almost never is the answer, right? Really, really very rarely. Forman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book is assigned about 3.5% of the time. A lot of the other texts, much less. Honestly, these numbers really shocked me, truly did. I thought they would be considerably higher than they were. Still, we wondered, maybe we’re missing something, right? Maybe there’s some other universe of courses that doesn’t teach Alexander, but teaches a kind of anti-Alexander orthodoxy, right? Some smaller universe of courses. So we essentially just flipped the analysis. And instead of starting with Alexander’s classic text, we started with the critics and then asked, okay, what are the critics assigned with? So I’ll show you that data here. And you can see the numbers look really, really different. So at the top there, this is Forman’s working paper or law review article, right? You can see that when that is assigned, Alexander is included about 82% of the time, right? And even Sharkey at the bottom — Sharkey’s, you know, when Sharkey’s taught, Alexander’s included 26% of the time, which is much lower, but actually a lot of other, he’s often paired with other voices in sort of Alexander’s ideological space, right? I think what this suggests, though, is that there’s a minority of professors who really do teach this controversy, right? There’s some division, right? And if there’s a silver lining in this work, that’s it.

Okay, so then the question is who is assigned with Alexander if not her most important critics? Who do professors assign with her? These are the top three titles. By the way, I think all great books to teach, I’ve taught a couple of them, but clearly books that are not going to generate a lot of tension with Alexander. And in fact, you can look at the next hundred most commonly assigned texts, and you’ll find a lot of books more or less in this same ideological space. They’re not works that are deeply in tension with her argument. And it’s not just this controversy. We also looked at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There we find the same broad pattern. Voices that are sharply critical of Israel are frequently assigned. Those that are more pro-Zionist in their orientation are rarely taught.

But I want to, in the interest of time, I want to look at our third case on the ethics of abortion, partly because it’s different than the other two. And I think the variation is interesting here. The three cases we looked at, the ethics of abortion was sort of the least unbalanced. It was the topic that was most liberally taught. And we really didn’t expect that going in. And so I’ll offer some reflections as to why that might be the case. So in the case of the ethics of abortion, it’s clear that there’s no work that’s been more influential than an essay by Judith Jarvis Thomson called “A Defense of Abortion.” It was published in the early ‘70s prior to Roe. It’s also a great essay to teach, one I’ve taught many times. And she made this classic case for the pro-choice position. She says, you know, regardless of what the moral status of the embryo is, women don’t have a moral obligation to carry these embryos, right? And she came to this conclusion by way of a now-famous thought experiment that’s familiar to generations of college students. She says, imagine you’ve been kidnapped and attached to a violinist who’s quite sick, and not just any violinist, but a really famous one. And you’re told you just need to stay connected to this violinist for nine months, after which the violinist will be cured, he can go on his way, and you can as well. And she asked, would it be unjust to disconnect yourself from the violinist? She said, no, of course it wouldn’t be. You don’t have an obligation to support bodily the life of this other person. It was a really creative, inventive argument. It invited a lot of criticism, particularly by pro-life philosophers.

And so I want to quickly get to the data here. So these are the top titles assigned with “A Defense of Abortion.” You can see what’s interesting here is that the most assigned work, by Don Marquis, is a pro-life essay, right? So historically different, I would say, from the way race in the criminal justice system is taught. And so here you’ve got a substantial minority of professors who are really teaching the controversy. If we flip the analysis again and start with, say, Don Marquis rather than Thomson, we see again the same kind of pattern. So these are the most commonly assigned titles with Marquis’s pro-life essay. Judith Jarvis Thomson is number one, 75% of the time. Mary Anne Warren — that’s also a pro-choice argument. So here again, when the critic is taught, the pro-life critic is taught, in nearly every case there’s a pro-choice perspective that’s assigned with it.

And so I think these findings raise a sort of interesting question, which is why is the ethics of abortion taught in a broader way than, say, racism in the criminal justice system or Israel-Palestine? It’s not as if professors are especially sympathetic to pro-life points of view, right? And it is sort of surprising that professors are more willing to make room for a conservative position on abortion than a center-left one on race in the criminal justice system, right? And so part of the explanation we theorize here might be just disciplinary. These are the fields that are most likely to assign Thomson’s essay. You can see that it’s almost taught by philosophers, presumably by analytical philosophers. And of course, you know, philosophers are a sort of famously disagreeable lot. They have a, you know, they’re sort of open to contending positions, arguments, et cetera. And so there might be a greater commitment to liberal education in that field. By way of contrast, these are the disciplines that teach The New Jim Crow. And you can see there’s, first of all, there’s quite a range. And so some of these fields might not have a lot of expertise, first of all, in the criminal justice system. And additionally, some of them are perhaps more politicized than the field of philosophy is. I was struck, for example, that it’s sort of striking that English literature professors seem to teach it more often than political scientists do.

I want to close here by asking a kind of more normative question, which is to think about why this matters, right, or why it might matter. One reason sectarian education might be a problem is that it might be alienating more conservative and moderate students. And I think there’s lots of good evidence that’s true. I’m happy to talk about it. But I think the populist right tends to emphasize indoctrination, which may be the wrong emphasis. Instead, maybe there should just be more emphasis on alienation. It sort of pushes lots of students away who don’t find this kind of education on the serious, or alienating. So just as Americans are sorting into red and blue communities, college students may be doing the same thing on campus, right? Where more conservative, moderate students are picking less politicized majors, classes, etc. It also might be alienating the public. Lots of Americans are worried that higher ed has become too sectarian. And it’s not just Republicans, interestingly. It’s lots of independents. And it’s a minority of Democrats, too — a sizable minority of Democrats worry about this. It also might matter because of some of the civic reasons that have been discussed already, right? Students need some civic knowledge. There’s often so much emphasis on, like, civic discourse and civility, but they also just need knowledge, right? And I think, I fear that if we present controversies as if they’re orthodoxies, we’re really not preparing them to think seriously about these issues, right? Instead, we’re signaling that the nation’s most polarizing issues shouldn’t be polarizing at all. The lesson is they’re not very complicated, or they shouldn’t be complicated, and they shouldn’t be divisive. And then finally, I think civic skills. Students just need to develop the habits of mind to become good citizens. Things like curiosity, skepticism, intellectual humility. And also perhaps maybe something that doesn’t get emphasized enough is we need to elevate just the authority of reason in young people’s minds, right? Such that they’re willing to change their mind in the face of powerful evidence and arguments. Thank you.

Will Fithian: Thanks very much, Jon, for your presentation and for the work that you’re doing. I’ll start by saying I’m very sympathetic to the core thesis of the paper, that we’re failing to encourage students to think critically about dominant progressive narratives or to remain open-minded to competing narratives. There’s no question that there’s widespread fear in academia that seeming to challenge those narratives can draw professional sanctions or angry and disruptive crowds. There are plenty of examples from the University of California one can point to over the last several years to justify these fears for the issues you studied.

At UC Berkeley, we have a recurring problem of angry crowds besieging events on Israel, as Daniel Sargent alluded to. And at UCLA, a prospective hire in the psychology department was canceled when it came to light that that candidate had questioned on a podcast whether it was wise for universities to require diversity statements. Faculty fears unquestionably reach into the classroom. I’ve been told by more than one Berkeley law professor that they’d be afraid to teach a criminal law class because they’d be afraid to teach established criminal law doctrines around consent and self-defense, fearing that some of the students might be so enraged just to learn what the law is. So it would be surprising to me to learn if faculty weren’t flinching from presenting works on the criminal justice system that challenge the progressive frame. Fortunately, the kind of headline-grabbing events faculty fear are still comparatively rare, and what I think is worse than the attacks and what enables them is a kind of tacit community norm that certain narratives just aren’t supposed to be challenged. Most faculty do know how to hold calm, reasoned discussions about contentious issues, and making a conscious effort to lead by example and expose students to divergent perspectives on controversial issues is one of the most effective things faculty can do to establish better norms.

To move toward better practices, it helps to measure them, and your analysis paints a nuanced picture of the three case studies you consider. Having said that, I don’t think I’d be earning my keep as the statistician on the panel if I didn’t find something to attack about your methodology. One thing I’d like to have seen is a control group. So your three examples had two variables in common. First, that there were broadly two different perspectives or clusters of perspectives. One that currently occupies a more dominant position in the academy and another that pushes back and offers a competing narrative in response. And second, that the dominant narrative has a more progressive political valence in contemporary American politics, while the competing narrative, if not explicitly conservative, is at least less far to the left than the dominant one. In all three cases, you show that works presenting the progressive narrative are assigned more often than the works presenting the competing, less progressive narrative, and you attribute this difference to the political valence. But I’m not sure I have a good intuition for what the numbers would have looked like if the political valence were absent. So I think the numbers would make a more compelling case if you compared them to analogous data for other academic controversies where the debate between the dominant frame and the main alternatives either has little left-right political valence, or where the polarity is reversed. As an example of the first, it might be interesting to compare the literature of more dominant cognitive behavioral approaches in psychology with more sort of dissenting psychoanalytical approaches. And as an example where the usual valence is reversed, we might consider a comparison of neoclassical economics to less market-positive strains like Marxist or Keynesian approaches. If you see similar patterns in those cases, you might be identifying something broader about university pedagogy rather than something that’s specifically driven by left-leaning bias.

The second point about your methodology: one great strength of your work is your focus on the kinds of works that we would expect to see on college syllabi, influential works by well-respected scholars. But in a way, I think it is also a limitation that you use academic metrics of influence to identify works that are neglected in academic instruction. Using that inclusion criterion, we can’t detect well-evidenced perspectives that have been more comprehensively excluded from academic syllabi because they couldn’t get a fair hearing in academic discourse in the first place. Of course, the danger of broadening the lens to include such perspectives is that we might fall into what we might call the flat-earther trap. I think we all agree that the fact that a third of Americans believe in ESP doesn’t mean it should be taught in psychology classes, but it could be very interesting to look for perspectives that have been influential among expert authorities outside of academia, such as federal judges or regulatory bodies. As an example of the second, we might think about the Cass report that’s been very influential among medical regulators in the area of youth gender medicine. If this report and other works like it are still being excluded from syllabi for relevant courses in gender studies or medical schools, even after winning the argument among many regulatory experts, that could raise questions without falling into the flat-earther trap.

Finally, I want to make a broader point that I think sometimes gets lost in discussions about viewpoint diversity. One of my favorite things this paper does is that it advocates for making better use of the viewpoint diversity that already exists in academia. When we talk about how to import more diverse voices into our community, I think we sometimes forget how much we can accomplish by finding ways to give voice to the many students and faculty who are already members of our community, who have been drawn to institutions of higher education because they’re curious and they enjoy critical thinking, but who have been intimidated into silence by feeling like they’re alone or feeling like they would be violating institutional norms by vocalizing their criticisms of certain viewpoints. Exposing our students to the diversity that already exists in the academy is one of the highest-leverage actions we can take to show our students that there’s more dissent among academics than they might realize, even on hot-button issues.

Brian Soucek: Jon’s paper is so wonderfully provocative, and I’m going to put off until the end of my comments what exactly I am hopeful that it will provoke. But I worry about Jon’s claim that there is a reluctance — he says this on page 48 — a reluctance to teach academic controversies in full. Because I don’t think Jon knows, or I know, or any of us knows what “in full” means in that sentence, outside of our own discipline. So let’s take a look, for example, at the philosophy example, at Thomson’s canonical article on abortion. My PhD is in philosophy. I don’t think that philosophers have better marks here because we’re somehow innately more open-minded or anything like that. I think philosophers at their worst can be as doctrinaire as anyone. It’s certainly the most sex-imbalanced and probably sexist department in the university. At philosophers’ best, there’s an emphasis on virtues like the principle of charity, where we are trying to give the best version of our opponent’s arguments. And in fact, that might be a reason why sometimes we need more time on a particular article as opposed to teaching it alongside its opponent, because in a survey class like the sort that Thomson’s article is generally taught in, you need that time in order to have the students draw out the very best of what she’s saying.

I asked a philosophy colleague on the way here this morning why he thought his colleagues in his department might not teach other articles alongside Thomson’s. And there’s a variety of answers. One is, her article is so perfectly written, it’s so funny, that almost anything you would assign next to it is just going to pale in comparison and seem like an unfair fight. As I said, you might need the time, especially in a busy survey course, to do charitable readings of a number of canonical articles. But most of all, I think the most important fact is something about Thomson’s article itself, which gets under-emphasized, I would say, in Jon’s article, which is to say the structure of the argument, of Judith’s argument, is to, at the outset, grant her opponents — grant the pro-life faction its principal claim — which is to say the personhood of the fetus. So this is not a case where the normal political debate, as we encounter it in American political life, where we need to pair Thomson against someone else, someone who thinks that a fetus is a collection of cells or something versus someone who thinks a fetus is a person with a soul. That is not the debate here, because Thomson grants as her opening move, this fetus is a person. And yet the bearer of that person doesn’t have the responsibilities, for the reason she goes on to say using the violinist example. So Thomson’s article is a particularly interesting one in how it crosses the polarization of the usual debate as it exists in American political life.

And I think that’s actually quite common when we don’t operate at a 35,000-foot view of controversies, but delve down into actually how they play out within particular disciplines. I would parenthetically be very interested to learn more about why 13.5 percent of the people assigning Alexander’s New Jim Crow are in English departments. I tried calling a few English professor friends last night to get — they had no insight for me, but I have to imagine that the reason it’s being assigned so often in an English lit curriculum is, if we looked and figured out why she’s being assigned there, I wonder whether the precise kinds of controversies that, say, Forman has with Alexander might just prove irrelevant to the purpose that that book is serving within that particular discipline.

I can say in my real discipline now, law, these kinds of things play out in different ways, mostly because of the overwhelming predominance of the case method within law. So one unusual factor there, which might be interesting for study, is so many of our at least most controversial cases, the ones we spend the most time on, are cases in which there’s both a majority opinion and a dissent. So we have two sides of the issue built in to the very thing we’re teaching. And then of course there would be an open question of how often are law professors assigning both the majority opinion and the dissent. I get asked every single year near the start of class why it is that I assign so many dissents. After all, the students are there to learn — think that they’re there to learn the law, and learning the law doesn’t come from the dissent. Doctrine is based on the holding, which of course requires five votes at the Supreme Court, which means the majority. So they say, why are we even reading this? And of course, we all know the answer. Everybody here knows why you want to hear the other side of an argument.

I think it would be completely irresponsible to teach the Harvard, North Carolina affirmative action majority opinions, in order to tell my students what current doctrine actually is in my equal protection class, without also teaching the dissents by Justice Sotomayor and Justice Jackson. Similarly, on the flip side, I think it would be completely irresponsible, professional malpractice, to teach Justice Kennedy’s opinions in the gay marriage cases, Windsor and Obergefell, without teaching at least Justice Scalia’s dissents in those cases. But even that wouldn’t be good enough, because to really get anything close to teaching the controversy in full, I would need to also be teaching the critical race perspective on the affirmative action cases, which is neither conservative nor liberal. In fact, the closest person on the court to the critical race perspective is actually Justice Thomas, in saying, you know what, we wouldn’t need affirmative action in the first place if universities weren’t so focused on their rankings, being driven by their elite status, and so concerned about legacy admissions and athletic admissions and admission preferences for donors. It’s blowing up the whole system. Same with Obergefell. We wouldn’t just teach the conservative and liberal approach, but also a critical queer approach, which wants to blow up the institution of marriage as a whole, seen as a patriarchal sexist institution.

So you need to delve down into each particular discipline in order to have any idea what amount of the controversy is being taught and whether that amount is appropriate or not. And that talk of disciplinarity then necessarily gets me to what I think is the key point in all of this, which is academic freedom. Certainly it’s the key point in any thought of what do we do about the insights of Jon’s article. But I don’t mean this just in the sense of, academic freedom, there’s nothing to do because academic freedom means I get to teach whatever I want and design my own syllabus. That is not my point. I want to emphasize instead the responsibilities that are inherent in academic freedom. So at the University of California, for example, we of course support our academic freedom in teaching in the same way we do relatedly to the way we do in terms of research. It is left to the individual scholar to decide how best to pursue their research and bring that research into the classroom. But there is a more profound basis for our protection of academic freedom in teaching here at UC, and it’s explicit in our policies. It’s to say that the goal of education at the university level — when you’re not a seminary, you’re not a high school or grade school, you are a true university — is to instill in our students a mature independence of mind. And that requires not just this kind of giving them the materials to have a mature independence of mind, showing them the dissent as well as the majority, as well as those positions that aren’t even represented on the current court at all. Those things are needed, but so too we have to model for the students that kind of mature independence of mind, what it would mean to be open-minded. We need to model the kinds of virtues that I think are at the core of academic freedom, a kind of modesty, which I think we need more of in terms of judging the English department, for example. Let’s actually ask what English is doing with these kinds of texts. Modesty, open-mindedness, an openness to revisiting your conclusions, a resistance to indoctrination. Those are the kinds of virtues that I think academic freedom depends on if it’s to achieve its aims in the classroom.

And so the last thing I would say, just because academic freedom is at heart a virtue doesn’t mean we can’t do things institutionally to try to instill or reaffirm those virtues. I myself, in part because of the provocation of Jon’s article, would be very open to asking professors when they write their teaching reports, for hiring, for tenure, for promotion, ask them to say, what have you done to instill a mature independence of mind in your students? One thing I think that would do, which is one of the great virtues of Jon’s article, where I think the provocation really lies, is to make all of us think, what have I done to instill that kind of mature independence of mind? What have I done in my syllabus? Whether or not statistically Jon’s article holds up, one thing it does do is force me to ask, well, does it hold up in my own practice? Am I giving the kinds of diversity of readings that are necessary to achieve the ends that we’re trying to instill?

Now, of course, what I’ve just described is exactly the same thing that I’ve long described — many of you have heard me describe — in terms of diversity statements. I think diversity statements done the right way would be asking the exact same question. What have you done to fill any gaps within your discipline, within your classes, in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion? And the value there, too, I hope saying that doesn’t make you just disregard my former proposal, because what I would rather you see is that in both cases, if it’s done well, what it does is to, one, prompt a discussion among disciplinary communities about what they could be doing better, including in their assignments. But also, and more importantly, it’s less in how you get judged based on those statements and more on what those statements, much like Jon’s article, force you to think about — your own practice and your own virtues in these areas. Thanks.

Jon Shields: Thanks, gentlemen. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate particularly some of the critical engagement with it, some of which I agree with. So, I mean, Will makes the point that it would be interesting to look at other issues that aren’t quite so hot-button, right, and I basically agree with that. I think that would be interesting. You know, he also suggests, I think, that there’s a lot of professors — you know, if you just read the paper, you might get a misimpression of the professoriate as a whole. There’s lots of more moderate professors out there who are less activist in their orientation, who might be afraid to teach some of these topics, perhaps. And I think really one of the keys to reforming the university is persuading some of the professors that Steve Teles calls liberal institutionalists. These are folks who tend to be left of center, but really believe in liberal science and liberal education, to actually teach some of these topics. I think one of the reasons the findings are so stark is because those professors with the strongest incentive to teach some of these courses tend to be the most activist in their orientation. And so again, I think one of the keys to broadening the curriculum is just getting lots of kind of more normie professors to teach some of these topics. And once they do that, it really creates a political mark, a kind of different kind of marketplace for students too, right? They don’t have to choose, like, either a very one-sided course on Israel-Palestine, for example. They can choose something more interesting.

Teaching controversies in full. I mean, I agree with it in part, right? Like, I guess, and maybe I wouldn’t have used quite that — I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, because I don’t know that, I think I kind of agree that, it’s not as if I think professors need to teach every relevant sort of perspective on a given issue. I think really what we’re trying to capture, though, is that courses can be relatively closed or they can be much broader, and capture some of the deep disagreement that really does surround these issues.

Is Thomson perfect? You know, I mean, what’s sort of interesting about this is, actually, a lot of the Thomsonites that followed her would say no. You know, they spent their careers trying to fix the problems they saw in Thomson’s classic essay. I mean, thinking of people like David Boonin. But I also would just call for some humility here, too. I think when there’s a scholarly controversy, we’re, of course, going to have different perspectives on the merits of various scholarly positions. I mean, just speaking for myself, I mean, I’ve taught The New Jim Crow a number of times. I think it’s a bad book, you know, if I’m just being frank, mostly, right? Like, I think it’s kind of conspiracy theory with footnotes. But lots of people who are smarter than me think it’s a great book, right? And it’s at the center of the scholarly controversy, and so I teach it. And so I think, you know, we all have some responsibility to doubt our own judgment in these matters.

I also don’t think — actually I think Thomson’s essay does fit very neatly with the broader political polarization. I think pro-choice organizations basically took a version of her argument. You know, they said, you know, we can’t really know about the status of the fetus. That’s a question that’s hard to answer. But what we can know for certain is that women should have a right to control their own bodies.

I guess I would just ask, too, a kind of general question, like, if these findings, you know, aren’t concerning, my question is, what would we have found that would have been concerning, right? Like, what would have been the finding that — at least maybe for Brian, right — that would have raised some real concern about, you know, like, would lead you to believe that, oh, actually, yeah, higher education is becoming too sectarian, at least in some of these questions.

Steven Brint: We have a little time for questions, so please raise your hands for questions.

Audience member: I love that point about the normie professors, and how — because, like, a conversation that we’ve had, that I’ll just make public then, is that, like, one of the things that’s interesting when you look at the data is if you look at the share of classes, of all the syllabi, like, where Michelle Alexander, for instance, or Foucault or Marx or anyone is assigned. So, like, Foucault is the most cited person, but he’s only cited in, like, 2% of all syllabi or something like that. And so this point that you made about how, like, one of the big problems — I thought it was just a really insightful point — but how one of the big problems actually is that it’s not the case that in most college classes, students are, like, being pushed Michelle, you know, New Jim Crow on them, and then nothing in between. I think a bigger problem is that there’s actually a space in a lot more classes to have kind of more normie people who are not activists in orientation talk about these topics. I thought that was just a really beautiful point. So I just wanted to double-click that.

Jon Shields: Yeah, I mean, I will, on the point of exposure, right? I mean, I do think it depends a little too on the kind of university we’re talking about, right? I think it’s, some of the selective institutions, for example, exposure to, say, Michelle Alexander is much higher, right? I mean, I was just at Amherst College, for example, and just asked the students in the room to raise their hand if they had read the book, and nearly all raised their hand, right? So I think with some of the ideas, right, it’d be good to have better data on this, of course, but my sense is the exposure to some of these political intellectuals is pretty broad. But actually, I think one of the arguments that maybe we don’t make well enough and we need to do more with is just — I mean, actually, I think some of these contentious issues need to be taught a lot more than they are, right? And as students are underexposed to some of these controversies, take Israel-Palestine. I mean, the vast majority of students just don’t know anything about it, like, even just the rudimentary, like the real basics. And so I’d like to see some of these topics taught a lot more than they are, for sure.

Audience member: Hi. I have a little bit more of a broader methodological question. Will, your point of there not being a control group, per se — I think that is an important one. And I’m curious, I’m not as familiar with the Open Syllabus database in terms of how it can be used, but is there a way to use it as more of an exploratory measure to kind of see what potential areas that we’re not prescribing of, like, kind of these hot-button controversial issues? Is there a way to use it in a more exploratory way to see where there is potentially asymmetry in various topics? And to Brian’s point of how these things vary across fields — I know you presented some data of how those vary across fields, but as Brian mentioned, the use case may be different depending on the discipline and type of course. I’m curious of just how this can be used to see how there may be asymmetry in teaching of topics that aren’t necessarily these hot-button issues, and what we could learn from that.

Jon Shields: Yeah, I mean, sure. I mean, you can — I mean, it’s very good at, as I said, I mean, you know, it’s, like, very good at, you know, getting a sense of what texts are taught and then what are they taught with. And I think, so I think the method can be applied to, like, a whole range of disciplines, topics, et cetera. And I certainly hope that other professors do some adjacent sorts of studies. I mean, we picked some of these controversies, again, probably ‘cause we thought they were important, also because we were just familiar with them. And so, some of the — I think, to Will’s good suggestions, it’d be interesting to get scholars who have other concentrations and expertise to really sort of explore it. The one thing I’d say is, it would be — look, it would be troubling if — maybe this is a more normative point, right — it’d be troubling if we saw the same pattern across a whole range of scholarly controversies, not just the ones that are most polarizing. However, I think there’s something particularly upsetting, like, or concerning, if we’re not teaching the most politically polarizing controversies, right? And to me, that’s partly because it goes to the heart of the public trust problem that we’re dealing with. And so I think it’s especially important those controversies are taught well.

Audience member: Hi. I was curious if you had — my senses of those three issues you pointed out, Israel and race and the abortion. If, because most of us, at least speaking for myself, I know someone or probably have experience with abortion, in my senses. But professors probably have more experience with that issue, and even students do, compared to those other two issues you brought up. And so does that, you know, closeness to the issue perhaps lead professors, or perhaps force them, to consider a broader perspective? I’m just trying to understand the question.

Jon Shields: You mean because people, because young people get abortions, and—

Audience member: Yeah, young people do. Professors do. All of us know probably someone who’s had one. Anyway, so does that level of experience lead to a greater, you know, broadening of perspectives in the classroom compared to the other two issues where there’s less experience, perhaps less direct experience.

Jon Shields: You mean, do you get a wider variety of student voices and perspectives because it’s familiar?

Audience member: Yeah, well, and the professors themselves teach perhaps both topics, both sides of it.

Jon Shields: I guess going into this, we actually expected — I mean, without knowing anything about what we’d find, I thought abortion might be the most one-sided in some ways, just because, I mean, the one thing that surveys consistently show is that the social liberalism of professors is really high, right? And so there aren’t — there doesn’t — right, there aren’t many professors with pro-life sympathies, whereas, you know, views on things like Israel and Palestine, the professoriate is much more divided. And so, or you take a radical perspective like Alexander’s on the criminal justice system — and again, on those issues, I would have expected just a greater range of voices because professors themselves are more divided on them.

Audience member: Hi. I’m sort of kind of a sociologist and sort of kind of not, but since there are two sociologists on the panel, I just thought I’d throw out a theory here. And that is, it seems to me that what makes abortion different from Israel-Palestine or questions about race and criminality is, in my opinion, we misconceive gender as a driving variable as opposed to a subordinate variable. And I think about the work of somebody like Maurice Bloch, which shows that in a crisis, people very often — women — tend to subordinate gender over to things like clan identity or group identity. So what it seems to me is that race and questions of Israel and Palestine automatically activate a different type of identity commitment. And in spite of all the magical thinking that people want to see with gender solidarity, I honestly don’t think of the idea of womanhood being actually a sufficiently stable identity to create the types of campus opposition that we see with these other issues.

Jon Shields: Maybe. I would just observe, if you look at, like, a text like Judith Butler — you know, she’s not, I mean, she tends to be taught with other kind of like-minded critical theorists. So there might be something — so I’m not sure the issue of gender in general is taught in a—

Audience member: I’m not talking about the talk. I’m talking about facts on the ground, in that gender doesn’t create actual coalitions that are affected in the same way as Palestine or Black Lives Matter or something. We want to see gender as an activating variable that at the end of the day is nowhere near as powerful as other types of social identity.

Will Fithian: Well, that may be true in a sense, and I’m not a sociologist, but I don’t have as much disciplinary humility as what’s being called for sometimes. But I guess I would say it hasn’t stopped people from being extremely fearful of openly discussing gender issues in the classroom, I think, for sure.

Audience member: Hi there. Thanks for your presentation. Two questions, one for Brian, one for Jon. Brian, I’m curious, as I’m hearing the arguments and critiques that you’re leveraging, they seem to be rooted a lot in what’s ideal or what’s theoretical about teaching. But I’m wondering if, when you consider the results from Jon and his colleagues, if you still would consider that to be a signal that something has gone awry or something’s amiss. We can’t know what’s being taught in every class — and if we did, then we’d have strong evidence. But if you still think it stands as a signal. And then, Jon, maybe there’s detail in the paper, but I’m curious, have you looked at your results over time to see if the pairings, or the mismatch between how frequently things are or aren’t taught on both sides of the argument, have changed over time? So is it that back in the 2020s there’s a big mismatch, but then now, here in more recent years, that mismatch has disappeared a bit?

Brian Soucek: So I hope I didn’t communicate in any way that I wasn’t troubled by Jon’s paper. That’s the whole provocative point. I’m deeply troubled. I think every single one of us should individually be deeply troubled. And I think that the next step to that should be thinking very hard about our own syllabus and those of our colleagues, because those are the only ones that I have any position from which to judge. So that even this last comment, talking about Judith Butler and a bunch of similar things — Jon, I don’t think you’re in a position to say within gender studies what counts as a similar position. Gender studies is one of the most — I stay far away from it because it’s so fraught. It’s a terrifying place to venture, not because as an outsider coming to it, but within it. I mean, I’ve organized amicus briefs with, you know, leading, you know, with Catharine MacKinnon and people like this. And it is just terrifying. And I will not beg the question that there is less diversity there, less contestation, than there is in the typical economics department. And I can’t answer whether that’s true because I’m not in either of those departments. And so that’s my concern, that this needs to be a matter of disciplinary discussion. So I would love to see — to answer what would make me happy — to see this being done on the level of a discipline, you know, where we could really be thinking through, with co-authors that know that discipline, you know, that are in it and that kind of thing. And maybe the law idea is one, although there is the problematic part of that that I mentioned, which is there’s a reason why people aren’t always teaching dissents the same, you know, because it’s not law. But seeing whether there’s a political difference would be very interesting there.

And so, that I’m not overly ideal — I’ll just add one other thing into this, which is what is driving, what is doubtless driving some of this, is not just closed-mindedness of professors. Because what we see, and what Will said about so many law professors in Crim not teaching rape law — that’s because of their student evaluations. They know they are going to be raked over the coals in their student teaching evaluations, which are — because they are outsourcing to definitionally non-experts in the field — a per se violation of academic freedom. And that’s something that we should be thinking about as well. We have studies that say that we all get punished for deviating too far from the political views of our students in either direction. And so that’s a real constraining force, then, on what people are teaching, and one that has to be acknowledged.

Jon Shields: Yeah, so the question about, do we look at this over time — the answer is no, for a couple reasons. One, it’s just sort of hard to do the kind of analysis we did given the constraints of the website. But the other — additionally, most of the syllabi are fairly recent, from the last 10 years or so. One thing we really wanted to do but couldn’t do is look at the age of the professors. I mean, our working hypothesis is, it may be that there’s — that that’s relevant, that older professors tend to be, you know, somewhat less in the activist-scholar mold. And so you might have found, for example, that they’re better at teaching, you know, the broader controversy than younger professors. But again, we weren’t able to do that.

Steven Brint: So we’re gonna have to end it there. Let’s thank Jon, Will, and Brian.

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By Will Bunch

It’s hard to imagine two cultural figures who cut more different profiles during the 1990s than Todd Gitlin and Rush Limbaugh. Gitlin, at the time a professor at the University of California-Berkeley, had been a pioneering campus activist and anti-Vietnam War protester in the mid-1960s, while Limbaugh was then the most popular conservative radio talker in America.

A college dropout, Limbaugh had exploded from one small station in Sacramento to an estimated 20 million listeners thanks to his attacks on what he saw as liberal elites—especially elites in the world of higher education, which he blasted as a bastion of what was then a new term: “political correctness.”

And yet Gitlin, who’d written the definitive history of 1960s protest culture, and who still viewed politics through a left-leaning prism, also believed the cultural values of the academy had veered far off course. In a sense, Gitlin was offended by the same thing that animated Limbaugh—the dominance of a new “identity politics” around race, gender, and sexuality—but for radically different reasons.

While Limbaugh believed that programs like gender studies or campus critiques of Western colonialism were dangerous assaults on traditional American society, Gitlin felt the insular squabbles around identity politics (such as a protest he witnessed at Berkeley over the hiring of a French white man to teach race and ethnic studies) were a distraction from the issues that really mattered, such as social injustice and income inequality.

In a 1995 book titled The Twilight of Common Dreams: Why America Is Wracked by Culture Wars, Gitlin complained that in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s election to the presidency in 1980, campus activists had retreated from big and important political issues in favor of small, internecine battles over questions that mattered only to faculty and students. Activists “were marching on the English Department while the Right took the White House,” he wrote.

Three decades later, understanding the increasingly negative zeitgeist around American higher education in the 1980s and 1990s, and what was behind those “culture wars” that inspired Gitlin’s book and Limbaugh’s on-air diatribes, is critical to explaining the long decline of public trust in U.S. universities.

Consider this: In the 1960s—a decade in which the nation’s college enrollment more than doubled amid not only population growth but the availability of low or even free tuition—a diploma was largely viewed as the fastest ticket to the American Dream. Indeed, we don’t have good polling data from that era around public faith in higher education—probably because the aspirations attached to college amid America’s booming post-war self-confidence were so close to universal.

Today, the situation has dramatically reversed. The public’s trust in higher education has declined significantly, especially over the last decade, with polls showing confidence plummeting from 57% in a 2015 Gallup Poll to just 28% in a 2025 Pew survey. Meanwhile, the growing attitude that a bachelor’s degree isn’t worth the time or, especially, the exorbitant cost is now a key reason behind declining enrollment.

So what the heck happened?

Like any perfect storm, a number of ill winds pushed in the same direction at the same time, including rising tuition that has propelled the national student debt to more than $1.8 trillion, or more than Americans owe on all of their credit cards. But the seeds of doubt about higher education in the United States were unquestionably sown during those culture wars that metastasized during the 1980s and ‘90s. And nothing drove that conflict more than the push to center some college curriculum, and increasingly the bulk of campus politics, around so-called identity issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. Those trends would generate a backlash in the wider body politic.

The roots were planted at the end of the decade that triggered so much of the next half-century of cultural conflict: the 1960s. Although the best-remembered protests of that tumultuous time focused on the big events of the day such as civil rights and the Vietnam War, by 1969 much of the focus had shifted to reforming education—specifically to get the academy to better emphasize Black empowerment, women’s liberation and related causes.

In 1969, for example, there was a series of contentious and sometimes violent campus strikes at California’s tuition-free public universities—most famously at San Francisco State—demanding the creation of ethnic studies departments and the recruitment of more nonwhite faculty and students. The protests inspired similar efforts on campuses from coast to coast, even as a conservative backlash in California ultimately propelled San Francisco State’s anti-strike president, S.I. Hayakawa, to the U.S. Senate as a Republican.

Due in part to these and similar protests throughout the next decades, campus agitation over identity politics continued to rise while protests over more traditional national and global issues largely petered out. This coincided with my own years as a college student, from 1977-81 at Brown University, where I saw firsthand how the new consciousness around race and gender permeated campus life. This ranged from the annual Third World Transition Week for incoming Black and brown freshmen to the Third World Coalition offering justifications for the 1979 Iranian revolution.

There was, not surprisingly, an equal and opposite reaction on the right, boosted by the oxygen of the Reagan revolution and a president who’d launched his political career during his time as California’s governor with fiery rhetoric against mid-1960s student protests. The right’s grievances with campus identity politics centered on the diminution of the great artists and thinkers of Western culture (the so-called “dead white males”) in favor of previously obscure Black, brown or female thought leaders.

The reaction on the right was perhaps best embodied by University of Chicago philosophy professor Allan Bloom, who decried the devaluation of the Great Books of the Western canon in his 1987 surprise No. 1 bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. Few readers paid attention to the fact that much of Bloom’s research at Chicago was backed by the ultra-conservative John M. Olin Foundation.

Arguably, this wasn’t a coincidence. The idea of a conservative, pro-capitalism movement to counteract leftist orthodoxy on college campuses started in the early 1970s—embodied by the now-famous 1971 Powell Memo, drafted by future Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell, which called for the creation of more right-leaning academic centers like the one that John Olin had funded at the University of Chicago, and also for a new conservative mass media.

The second half of this equation was boosted in 1987 when Reagan’s appointees on the Federal Communications Commission scrapped the broadcast Fairness Doctrine, paving the way for right-wing talk radio. Limbaugh’s trailblazing show launched a year later, and unlike the intellectually sophisticated Bloom, his on-campus liberalism was loud, profane, and tailored to his working-class audience.

The ultimate example of how Limbaugh popularized college culture wars for his listeners came in 1993, with an incident on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania. There, an Israeli student named Eden Jacobowitz was charged by the university with racial harassment after yelling at some Black sorority sisters who were making noise outside his dorm late at night, calling them “water buffalo.” Jacobowitz was largely successful in arguing that the term wasn’t a racial slur but a translation of a common phrase back home in Israel. But the fracas epitomized the growing uproar over what by then everyone was calling, à la Limbaugh, “political correctness.”

Still, it’s important to note that even as college identity politics became a standard bête noire on the right, conservatives had not truly lost faith in a diploma as the ticket to the American Dream—not yet, anyway. Their main critique at the end of the 20th century centered around a call for more conservative professors and a return of classical Western literature to the academy, not a demolition of the ivory tower.

But the culture wars of the 1980s and ‘90s had shattered the once widely shared consensus of American higher education as a public good. That softening of support would soon be reinforced by other developments that would convince a growing number of Americans that the university had lost its way.

The carping around political correctness and strange-sounding new majors like gender studies started to overlap with other questions and concerns. To begin with, many wondered why students were paying so much more to go to college, with inflation-adjusted tuition rising around 150% between 1980 and today. Meanwhile, critics asked why the same students were studying less (down from an average of 40 hours in a week to just 28 today), while at the same time getting higher grades thanks to runaway grade inflation.

To a growing legion of critics, four years of overpriced college in the 21st century was less about learning and personal growth and more about simply getting the credential that recruiters demanded in a dog-eat-dog job market. Those complaints gained currency after the 2008 financial crisis, when stories of recent grads with $100,000 in college debt working as low-wage baristas abounded and helped fuel protest movements like Occupy Wall Street.

The outrage over the student-debt crisis is currently the centerpiece of a much broader progressive critique of modern universities: that they have become far too corporate and far removed from the 1960s and ‘70s, when faculty played a much greater role in institutional governance. To naysayers on the left, predatory loan policies walk hand in hand with the growing clout of venture capitalists or Republican politicians as university trustees and donors, the increasing use of poorly paid adjuncts as classroom instructors, and anti-union policies meant to discourage organizing by grad students or campus workers like food service and janitorial employees. Meanwhile, they argue, administrators are overpaid and overly concerned with their school’s U.S. News and World Report ranking, while legacy admission policies favor children of the wealthy.

But the current crisis stems largely from conservative control of government. Many leading politicians who came of age during the culture wars of the latter 20th century are building on the cultural grievances that blossomed during that era to punish the academy. They support President Donald Trump’s cuts to university research and his determination to end the diversity, equity and inclusion programs, which they see as the cornerstone of higher education’s embrace of identity politics.

In a 2021 speech on his way to the vice presidency, then-Ohio Sen. JD Vance declared that “we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” There was no turning back. The simmering conflicts identified back in the 1990s by leftists like Gitlin and ultra-conservatives like Limbaugh have boiled over into a full-blown war for the future of higher education in America. The fight over who has a voice on our college campuses is louder than ever, and the only certainty is that the U.S. university of the mid-21st century is likely to look vastly different than it did during the golden age of the mid-20th century.

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There has been much online commentary over the past week about the Report on the State of Scholarship in the Humanities and the Humanistic Social Sciences. The Report, commissioned by Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier and Washington University Chancellor Andrew D. Martin, and authored by a distinguished commission of ten scholars (five of whom are HxA members), argues that scholarly standards have been distorted by political criteria, dissenting voices suppressed and alienated, and some academic fields have displaced genuine open inquiry with ideological conformity.

This isn’t a new claim, of course, but the prestige underpinning the report and the political context in which these old debates have been made anew have catapulted this report to front-page news across the academy. The Chronicle of Higher Education was the first to cover the report, provocatively asking whether the Left has “ruined the humanities.”

Just as the committee claims their “internal reports” produced a “mixed picture,” so too have the reactions to the report, which have been wide-ranging, but sometimes harsh. In the week since the report was published, academics have taken to the op-ed pages, Substack, and social media to air their praise — but with a healthy dose of criticism.

Matt Lutz, an associate professor at Wuhan University, said of the report that “It’s not perfect, but I loved it.” He concludes that he does not think the report will convince the skeptics who the report criticizes, but he hopes it will spur “an overall improvement to the intellectual life of the humanities.”

This is largely what the praise for the report looks like: Yes, there is a problem of politicization in these fields, but… And the “but” is doing much of the legwork online this week. Reactions and responses largely agree with the broad conclusions, while also identifying key areas where they feel the report falls short.

Nicholas Dirks, president of the New York Academy of Sciences and history professor at UC Berkeley, penned a constructive critique about the second half of the report, arguing that it “abandons caution and mounts a blanket critique of various movements in the intellectual history of humanistic thought, covering an ill-defined suite of views it calls postmodernism.” He concludes:

There are important reasons to be concerned about the loss of scholarly and epistemological rigor in some humanistic work, and even more seriously to accept that there is a cost when political arguments are used in ways that mistake advocacy for analysis and political intolerance for acknowledging that political views can influence scholarship. But in rendering its own verdict on another intellectual disagreement and dismissing an extraordinarily important element of contemporary humanist knowledge, the report too misuses the concept of the political. In so doing, it is not nearly as helpful as it should have been in helping us understand not just the nature of this cost but how best to mitigate it.

The report’s sweeping critique of relativism in the humanities also stirred up negative reactions from those scholars whose work is lambasted in the report. Those scholars criticized in the report describe it as “lazy scholarship” and even “diabolically evil.”

There has also been a wide-ranging conversation about the report’s methodology and the extent to which it can support its conclusions. The report itself acknowledges these limitations when it says:

…our conclusions about the overall state of humanistic scholarship, and in particular about the extent of the problems we have identified, are not yet supported by the kind of quantitative evidence that would be expected in a peer-reviewed study of these matters. In this connection we must stress that the examples cited below are meant to illustrate the phenomena we have identified, not to establish their prevalence.

The report does not portend to be a quantitative analysis, yet there is a certain irony when a “widely circulated report that slams the humanities for a lack of rigor is ... not itself rigorous,” as UVA Public Policy professor John B. Holbein pointed out on X.

Others critique the report for employing double standards. Regina Rini, a philosophy professor and chair at York University, argued on X that “The Boghossian et al. report on the humanities has some good points, but ultimately it is a failure.” Rina argues that the Report supports there being “some political line beyond which scholarship may be suppressed. It just disagrees with the postmodernists about where that line should be drawn.”

In Thursday’s HxA webinar on the report, hosted by HxA President John Tomasi, Rini and report co-author Ashley Rubin, a sociologist at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, discussed the report’s findings and limitations. Rini, who said she agrees with most of the report’s conclusions, expanded on her X criticism by explaining that she took issue with its reasoning: “my problem is the argument. I think the argument doesn’t work in a particularly worrisome way.” Specifically, she faulted the report’s reliance on relativism, arguing the conclusions could stand on stronger arguments: “We don’t have to get into fights about relativism.”

For many HxA members, the negative effect of politicization on scholarship and the academy more broadly is old news. The challenge is in understanding what to do about it. The report does not answer this “now what” question. What should happen if a discipline or department falls into a closed, intellectually homogeneous trap wherein knowledge is stalled and intellectual diversity no longer thrives?

HxA Executive Director Michael Regnier wrote yesterday in these pages that the critical politicization issue facing the humanities (and other social-oriented disciplines) is “already being discussed by university leaders” because everyone from faculty to politicians to the public is also asking questions about what these fields should be doing. He continues:

The Vanderbilt-WashU report calls for more study, and for more department-level study, since a national committee cannot parse the scholarly health of a given campus or department. The report’s supporters and its critics, who also don’t want universities acting without local evidence, should take up this opportunity to give an account. In specific fields and in specific institutions, what is the state of scholarship? More reason-giving, more evidence, and more public explanation of principles would be a fitting way for scholarly fields to renew public trust in our universities.

When asked directly in the webinar on Thursday about the report’s implications, Rubin (speaking for herself) said:

Nothing in this report suggests we should go out and start closing departments. The very next step if you have concerns in your own university is to do a faculty-led self-study. Our report looked at field and national level trends. That doesn’t mean your local department has the same problems. But this has to involve faculty; that’s the really important thing.

Despite its limitations, the Vanderbilt-Wash U report joins a growing trend of institutional self-examination that gives us real cause for hope on the internal-reform front. We saw it in Yale’s recent report on trust in the academy. We saw it in Harvard Medical School’s recent report on open inquiry. Now we see it here, in a sweeping report on the state of the humanistic disciplines.

The first step is admitting there is a problem. And now university leaders are trusting and empowering academic insiders to critically examine the factors negatively impacting the knowledge function of our universities. Of course, the harder work of fixing the problems comes next.

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Imagine if, at a certain university, the Astronomy Department gradually morphed into the Astrology Department. Hard evidence was replaced by unfalsifiable speculation. Telescopes were traded for horoscopes. How, exactly, could the university’s leaders — responsible for excellence but not themselves trained astronomers — recognize the change? What signs could they have spotted earlier, before all trust was lost?

This is part of the provocative framing of the Vanderbilt-WashU “State of Scholarship” report that has drawn intense debate this week. Commissioned by the chancellors of the two universities, the report was written by a distinguished committee of scholars charged with assessing the state of scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social science fields. All is not well, the report says. The pursuit of knowledge in humanistic fields is, not always but too often, distorted by politicization — skewed by a priori commitments to certain results and muddled by selective skepticism about knowledge itself.

In arguments that are familiar to HxA members, the report claims that work in humanistic disciplines that support favored (largely progressive-left) political views tends to be uncritically accepted and celebrated, while heterodox work has a way of being scuttled. This can happen by treating politically charged questions as prematurely “settled,” or even drifting away from empiricism into unfalsifiable language games. The result is a distortion of scholarship that calls into question the academy’s legitimacy.

As the report acknowledges, its main conclusions are not backed by quantitative analysis, it doesn’t profile any single discipline, and its “internal” analyses have not been made public. These are significant limitations to the report and its ability to persuade skeptical readers. The report also leaves important points unexplored, such as how ideological homogeneity can narrow the research questions that are asked in the first place.

At its essence, however, the report is a call for accountability in its most basic sense of giving an account. For any academic field to survive and thrive over time, a wide range of stakeholders must be allowed to ask questions about the rules of the game. Questions such as:

• What does this field claim to be doing? Does it claim to pursue some kind of verifiable truth or knowledge, however imperfectly?

• If the field is seeking knowledge, what are the field’s standards of evidence and methods for self-correction over time? (Is it making empirical or normative claims, or both? Does it follow Mertonian norms, or something else?)

• If the field is not seeking verifiable knowledge, how does it evaluate different claims, and is that epistemic standard consistent? Is the field sensitive to positionality and power dynamics within its own work, or only those of its external critics?

• Does the field also claim to be pursuing certain changes in the world, such as a progressive vision of social justice? If so, how does that aim interact with the truth-seeking process, and what are the trade-offs?

The online response to this report has largely followed a predictable pattern. One camp says the report is written in bad faith, a scheme to smear all humanities scholarship and prepare the ground for future censorship or political retaliation. The other camp says the real bad faith is in denying what some humanities fields do instead of simply defending it. Can it be noble for me to embrace “scholar-activism,” but a smear for you to point that out?

It has been heartening, though, to see another layer of online discussion: scholars accepting the challenge and sharing their own reasoned answers to these questions about scholarly purposes, standards, and integrity. We rarely link to social media here at FTI, but I’m referring to posts like Alexander Kustov making the case for a “problem-solving approach” to public scholarship, or David Porter offering an exemplar of scholar-activism on the treatment of Uyghurs, or Regina Rini offering two alternative arguments against politicization.

What most academics seem to know is that the topic of politicized scholarship is already being discussed by university leaders. Trustees, donors, elected officials, accreditors, parents, and even other faculty are asking questions. How should they answer, and based on what information?

The Vanderbilt-WashU report calls for more study, and for more department-level study, since a national committee cannot parse the scholarly health of a given campus or department. The report’s supporters and its critics, who also don’t want universities acting without local evidence, should take up this opportunity to give an account. In specific fields and in specific institutions, what is the state of scholarship? More reason-giving, more evidence, and more public explanation of principles would be a fitting way for scholarly fields to renew public trust in our universities.

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For most states, the 2026 legislative session has wrapped up with significant implications for open inquiry in higher education. Officials in several states are taking bold positions on higher education policy to force action through legislative mandates. Legislation obviously matters. It can broaden or restrict what faculty teach, the books students read, and how universities pursue their truth-seeking mission. However, policy implementation also matters, especially because most legislation is a mixed bag of strengths and weaknesses. Yet implementation is noticeably absent from conversations about legislative mandates. If we care about the state of open inquiry on college and university campuses, then we also should be looking at policy implementation as a tool to advance these efforts.

I speak of policy implementation from a place of experience. I was an implementer myself for several years within a public university system, working behind the scenes to translate legislation and system-level strategic initiatives into actionable policies designed to optimize student experiences and streamline administrative workflows. Despite my belief in the transformative power of policy in higher education, I sensed that my role was simply that of a conduit, not an interpreter. There was an implied expectation that system employees were to remain impartial and diplomatic. I adopted that persona to avoid damaging relationships, revealing my personal views, or disrupting the leadership structure in my office, even when I had legitimate concerns about the legislation, the strategic direction of the university, and how policy would be operationalized.

That experience revealed an unsettling paradox that diminishes policy implementation to a bureaucratic exercise and policy implementers into invisible architects. Those who implement policy — the group with the most practical power to advance viewpoint diversity on campus — are also hesitant to use that power. My role as a policy implementer shaped how I understand the gap between what legislation says and what implementation produces, and why filling that gap matters for open inquiry.

As we transition from state-level policy adoption to system- and campus-level policy implementation, filling in this gap in our understanding is critical. Without it, recently passed legislation risks becoming nothing more than a compliance exercise when it could accomplish so much more to advance open inquiry. Understanding the policy implementation role situates university administrators as active agents –– rather than passive participants –– in the quest to advance open inquiry. It also clarifies that legislation at the point of policy adoption has gaps that only thoughtful implementation can address.

This understanding starts with the difference between policy making and policy implementation. Policy making is a dynamic, cyclical process initiated by government officials to shape higher education including setting an agenda, establishing values, and approving mandates. State-level policymakers, then, are members of the state legislature who pass a campus free speech law, for example. Policy implementation is part of the policy-making process that occurs within university system offices and at individual institutions in response to state-level policy making. Policy implementers are the administrators and leaders within institutions and university system offices whose daily decisions determine, in practice, how laws shape campus life.

In comparing the effects of policy makers and policy implementers, often the latter matters more than the former. While legislation establishes values and often arrives with effective dates and specific requirements, the burden of interpretation and operationalization sits with university administrators — the policy implementers. For example, a student affairs administrator becomes a policy implementer when adapting the university’s process for approving speaker invitations and events to comply with viewpoint neutrality mandates. Likewise, academic affairs administrators become policy implementers when revising promotion and tenure criteria.

What does policy implementation look like in practice? Several states, including Arizona, Tennessee, and North Carolina have passed legislation requiring universities to ensure that any time, place, and manner restrictions placed on speech be “viewpoint-neutral.” Despite the common terminology at the level of legislation across several states, policy implementers were left to operationalize what “viewpoint-neutral” means for their system or institution. The Arizona Board of Regents implemented mandatory accountability requirements with system-level oversight. Without clearly defining key terms, Tennessee’s law authorized each institution’s governing body to operationalize the term “viewpoint-neutral” independently, producing inconsistent standards across systems and campuses. The UNC Board of Governors intentionally delegated implementation power to individual campuses, which produced a patchwork of approaches with similarly uneven results.

There is an iterative process behind this example. For policy implementers, reading new legislation is only the beginning. Government relations staff and general counsel at colleges and universities are typically the first to interpret the bill, outlining where compliance is required and flagging areas where institutions retain autonomy. Only after the interpretive work is complete does policy implementation begin in earnest. This phase involves convening groups, hearing competing perspectives, revising policy language, and acting with discretion to outline appropriate procedures.

The personal tension I experienced as a policy implementer is evidence of a structural problem in higher education. Policy implementers are largely invisible –– as I was –– both in public discourse and within their own institutions. Michael Lipsky called this phenomenon “street-level bureaucracy” in his landmark work on how frontline workers shape policy outcomes in practice. Lipsky’s central insight was paradoxical: frontline workers wield real influence over how policy is implemented, yet go largely unseen. Morrison and Milliken’s research on “organizational silence” explains the internal conditions that make policy implementers invisible. Their argument was that there are “powerful forces” — actual or perceived — within organizations that cause employees to self-censor despite the power they have to positively shape outcomes. Self-censorship reinforces implementers’ invisibility.

Policy implementers’ relative insularity within the structure of higher education comes at a cost to viewpoint diversity. First, it situates colleges and universities as passive entities when they, in fact, retain quite a bit of room to shape a policy’s impact. Second, policy implementers are failing to embrace the influence for good they can have, even when the legislation they are implementing is clearly driven by a partisan agenda, and especially when the legislation is vague or overreaching. Third, most discussions around viewpoint diversity apply directly to faculty and students, yet we have too rarely called out the need for policy implementers and other administrative staff to center viewpoint diversity in their work. Policy implementers drive change. Distinctive to their role is defining vague terminology; assessing the actual condition of viewpoint diversity a legislative mandate is meant to address; shaping programming and education; and determining accountability structures that support cultural change.

To be clear, I am not advocating for more legislation, and thereby, more policy implementation. Texas has passed more legislation than almost any other state, yet the culture of open inquiry on its campuses remains contested at best.

Nor am I suggesting that we can fully mitigate legitimately bad legislation with good policy implementation. Other bills like the ones in Alabama, Kentucky, and Oklahoma will place power over faculty tenure appointments and dismissals, curriculum, and governance in the hands of boards and administrators, threatening academic freedom and shared governance. These bills are hostile to open inquiry at the level of policy-making, a problem good implementation cannot fully resolve, though thoughtful implementation can make bad legislation less bad. Indiana’s 2024 legislation, by contrast, arguably supported open inquiry, yet vague requirements and a mandated complaint system can tilt implementation against that goal. Policy designed to enhance open inquiry is dependent on conscientious implementation.

Higher education needs principled policy implementers who care about viewpoint diversity, who own the power they have to shape legislative mandates, and who choose visibility over self-censorship. Owning this power means assessing new legislative mandates through a nonpartisan lens and clearly defining vague terminology in ways that support viewpoint diversity. It also means building a network of diverse partners to assist in using political mandates as a lever for change rather than as a mere compliance exercise. Institutions and those responsible for policy implementation can reject a passive, impartial, or homogeneous approach to policy to ensure these new mandates reflect and support a commitment to open inquiry. This moment demands nothing less.

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Subscribe to Heterodox Out Loud on your preferred podcast platform. A transcript of the episode is below.

John Tomasi: Cass Sunstein, welcome to this special edition of Heterodox Out Loud and Heterodox Academy. So thanks for being here.

Cass Sunstein: A pleasure and an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

Tomasi: So let’s just jump into this. You know, the sequence of events that led us to this conversation was this beautiful Substack piece you posted on April 22nd, which a bunch of us read immediately and with great interest. It was called “Viewpoint Diversity,” which caught our attention, of course, at Heterodox Academy. And you did two things that really struck me. One, you said early on in that piece that this is an issue in which you admitted, with your normal, classic humility, in which you see through the glass only darkly. And yet you also wanted to tell a love story, as you described it, about something you experienced as a professor at the University of Chicago in the 1980s. Something that may illuminate our thinking about what viewpoint diversity is. Would you mind for our audience just saying a bit about the love story, about what it was you saw at Chicago in those days before we dive into the more conceptual questions?

Sunstein: Sure. So as a young, you know, Harvard grad, I went to Chicago and there was Richard Posner, who was awe-inspiring and definitely right of center, and a law and economics kind of guy who was skeptical about rent control and maximum hour laws and didn’t much like an active Supreme Court. Left-of-center shibboleths were to him, you know, embarrassing and kind of thin. Then there was Richard Epstein, who was like a volcano. And he was a libertarian. He was as quick a mind as I had ever encountered. He was funny. He was full of life. He thought Posner was completely wrong in his embrace of utilitarianism, or maybe fundamentally but not completely wrong, because he had a rights-oriented view of how to think about things.

Shortly after I joined Chicago, Michael McConnell, who was and is a social conservative, joined the faculty, who believed, you know, Burke was on the right track on many things. And the Supreme Court on religious issues in particular had gone off the rails in a way that was unfaithful to our constitutional tradition and in some ways contemptuous of religion. And I’m just referring to three. There was also, by the way, Antonin Scalia and David Currie, and they were writing a casebook together. People know the name Scalia. Currie is in my eyes a giant, and they were both originalists. And Scalia thought the Constitution should be understood to mean what the public meaning was at the time of ratification. And Currie thought the same thing. Now, Currie in his politics was kind of a Democrat, and Scalia in his politics was more than kind of a Republican, but they shared originalism.

And for me, these were just sunbursts. You know, the libertarian view of life, to encounter it on the part of someone who was, you know, full of intellectual fire, that was new to me, at least at that degree of proximity as an adult. To see someone who was an economics-oriented utilitarian, that was new. And originalism hadn’t been on my view screen, though I’d clerked for the Supreme Court of the United States and graduated from Harvard Law School. And it was just like, you know, a celebration in a way that was hard but thrilling, of thinking. And I almost said a word like combat, but it’s not right because everyone was trying to figure out what was true. So it wasn’t like trying to win, though of course people with different views would try to win. But figuring out, you know, was Posner right about the minimum wage law? That was really interesting. And is Epstein right? He developed thoughts about property rights. You know, I tended to think not, but I was keenly interested and learned a ton from his view of property rights.

Tomasi: That’s all fascinating. There’s so many pieces in there of interest. One that just struck me in the way you described it just now is, you used the word proximity. That there’s something about you as an adult being in proximity to these diverse thinkers that struck you. But, you know, an outsider would probably say that in the 1980s at Chicago, well, certainly in the economics department, there was something like a Chicago School, which in many people’s minds represents the idea that to some degree of conformity, at least about methods or baseline assumptions, can help advance scholarship in intensified ways. And one view of viewpoint diversity is that having pockets of intensity is all we need, as long as there are many different pockets. But what you’re describing is a kind of ecosystem that itself, because of proximity, had what you called a love song. Do you want to say anything about that?

Sunstein: Yeah, completely. Thank you for that. And this is a fantastic point that the Chicago School, which was amazing, had proximate people who had a great overlap in their views. So we wouldn’t say that the Chicago School of Economics was defined by viewpoint diversity, though it certainly added a ton of viewpoint diversity to the stock of knowledge. At Chicago, at the time, there was proximity among members of the Chicago School, and people at Chicago, who thought the Chicago School was fundamentally wrong. So I got interested in behavioral economics, and Richard Thaler came to, guess where, Chicago. And both of us thought the rationality assumption wasn’t right. I certainly, and I’m sure Thaler would say the same, had untold admiration for the Chicago School and learned a lot, but thought that they were, on important matters, wrong. And engaging with them was essential to what’s good in behavioral economics. And Gary Becker, who was maybe the mind with the greatest integrity I’ve ever met, he was just so curious and he wanted to know what’s the evidence. And he with some mildness but ferocity too, said in response to anything, what’s the evidence? And that kind of got under my skin.

Tomasi: Interesting.

Sunstein: In a good way. And so Becker was maybe defining in some ways of the Chicago School, but in response to anything, he would not say, you’re wrong. He’d say, what’s your evidence? And then there’d be a discussion. So we can think of Becker as incarnating openness to the force of argument, even as he was part of a school which he wasn’t at all ambivalent about.

Tomasi: Interesting. So maybe we could say, and that’s extremely interesting, maybe we could say, just as a marker for now, there’s some questions about the units within which we want to see viewpoint diversity, or the universe or perhaps the units across which we want to see viewpoint diversity, that we haven’t yet settled and may not in this conversation. But if we’re going to develop a clearer understanding of VPD, we’d want to know things about Chicago School styles pushing through together. Different departments doing the same things perhaps at one university. But there’s something about that proximity point that you made that seems really striking, I think, to me certainly, in the face of that need to push through with a methodological group. So let’s just maybe we just mark that as something maybe we’ll come back to in this conversation.

I’d like to move to, I want to move to kind of, as it were, the big questions. And this is like the big stone that I think once you push it over, things start to roll. And that’s what I sometimes call the great fact. And the great fact is just about the viewpoint diversity, the change in viewpoint diversity among the professoriate over the past thirty and forty years. So the great fact can be stated in different ways, but the fact says something like this. In the ‘80s, when you were at Chicago, the ratio of left to right leaning professors across the country was about two to one. By the 2010s, that ratio of left to right was about five to one, six to one. Currently it’s even steeper than that. And if you break out into certain subfields or some areas like humanities and social sciences, we find greater imbalances.

Sam Abrams has done, I think, some just really seminal work showing us that, making that data point a little more sophisticated because he points out that geography matters a lot. So it turns out, according to Sam’s data, that if you focus on New England, you find that the ratio is always, even in the ‘80s, about 26 to 1. Sorry, was about five to one, forgive me, about five to one in the 1980s in New England. And now it’s about 30 to 1. So there’s going to be geographic things that are going to make the great fact more complicated.

But I mentioned the great fact, I’m playing as some of you probably know on Deirdre McCloskey’s idea that the great fact in economic history is the fact of the hockey stick theory of growth. This GDP change happened, and that change requires an explanation. And so my question finally to you is some kind of change, significant change, in the breadth of the ideological orientations of the professoriate has occurred over the past 30 years. We can describe that fact in different ways, of course. But that great fact, that delta, that change seems to require some kind of explanation, as it does in economics. Do you want to give us your first thoughts about that? When you see that fact or hear that fact, the great fact in this area, what do you think? What’s your first reaction?

Sunstein: Well, it’s alarming. That’s a normative point. On the empirics, I want to know whether people who are interested in academic life have become disproportionately left of center recently compared to the ‘70s. So I want to ask: are the people who are right of center and amazing thinking that academic life isn’t for them and why would that be? Or are people coming in as assistant professors or graduate students moving to the left? And is that because of faculty inclinations or something? Or is it because of some more general split among super-educated people and the rest of the country, which has an ideological component?

So I would wonder about hypotheses. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you took a pool of people who want to be academics in, let’s say, 2018 and compared them with those in say 1978. And it turned out that those in 2018 are just much more left-leaning. I’d be keenly interested to see whether that’s the case. Now that would itself need explanation. Is it that people who are right of center are thinking, you know, the educational life is boring, or it’s not dynamic enough, or the economic options are not promising. These are the things I’d wonder about.

Tomasi: Yeah, thank you. So there’s a report that we’ll put in the chat that HxA has done looking at all the reports and analyzing the strength and weaknesses of them, and although there’s been so many reports through the years about this question about the ideological orientation and how you define what the ideologies are and more. And one of our most general findings in our report is that studies that show the greatest imbalances are often the least methodologically sophisticated. But nonetheless, those that are sophisticated show a very significant delta from the ‘80s, say, till now.

And as you say, I put it a little bit differently but I like the way you put it. I would say it this way, that about the two to one ratio in the ‘80s, you know, there’s no obvious answer as to what the correct ratio should be in a free society. People choose different kinds of professions, being priests, being plumbers, being stockbrokers, being artists, being politicians, maybe being professors for all different kinds of reasons. And if we think the ideological differences are important, it’s probably because those ideologies reflect deep understandings of values that we want to see reflected. But those deep values might very well steer some people towards this profession and other people away from them. It’s almost like it’s a circle, right? We can’t fully escape from that. But there’s a big delta there. I love the way you ask those questions. That’s a whole bunch of social scientific research problems that our members in the audience and other people in the audience should be considering and perhaps undertaking.

I want to just continue with another question, if I may. Some people, when they hear the great fact, or some variation of the great fact, they react with alarm and they think that something like proportional political representation should be appropriate. There’s a simplified version of that that I think I’ve already said enough to throw some doubt on. But there are more sophisticated versions of the proportional political representation. This is a normative claim about what the ratio should be, they should be roughly proportional or something like that. And a more sophisticated version of that says something like, well, whatever the natural number might be, just whatever the natural distribution might be, in a free democratic society, where there’s public funding for universities, there’s some kind of matter of fairness, like democratic fairness, that universities have some kind of correct balance on representation. And the idea is that universities have a special role to play in educating citizens, and not just citizens, but the more power people like to be more powerful citizens in our democracy, people with greater voice. So that’s a more sophisticated version of the political representation view. Do you have any first thoughts about that? Can you make it stronger or weaker? Or what do you think of that?

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

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

Tomasi: I didn’t know.

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

Tomasi: Nice. So I hear us putting another marker down. There’s a question: where does viewpoint diversity matter and where might it not matter? Or more we might say where does it matter most directly or most proximately and where might it not matter?

Sunstein: And with respect to what? So physics, there are forms of viewpoint diversity that are crucial, but they probably aren’t about whether the War Powers Resolution is constitutional.

Tomasi: No, I love that point. And I have dinner regularly with some professor friends who are computer scientists at Brown. And they say, yeah, viewpoint diversity, we’re really for that. You’re really right. Then they go off on these things I can barely understand when they explain the paradigms they want. But I think there’s another dimension now we’re adding, another marker, VPD of what? Because I describe the great fact because it’s such a, that’s the politicized fact, the politically charged fact about viewpoint diversity.

But the other great fact, I think, the same 50, 60 years of our universities have seen a tremendous increase in diversity in terms of identity diversity, gender and sex diversity particularly, but not only that. So there’s been a remarked increase. And we’ve seen some areas, some fields where the presence of African American voices, the presence of Palestinian and Arab voices, the open discussion, the open, we hope, conversations from Israeli voices, improves conversations. So again, there’s this question about where it matters, and there’s also a question again floating in the background, what exactly is it? I’m using the great fact to refer to ideological diversity because that’s so politically charged. Do you want to say anything about that?

Sunstein: So this is great. So one thing that Chicago in the ‘80s did was to put in doubt left-of-center shibboleths on the part of everyone, including left-of-center students and faculty. And that was good for many reasons. One reason is the left-of-center shibboleths might be wrong. Another is that lots of people don’t believe them, and it’s good to see other people who don’t believe them, so you understand what’s going on in your society. And a third is that the shibboleths, and this is John Stuart Mill’s point, become not a dead, like, you know, yeah, it’s not like the body snatchers, it’s like a living, and so that’s very good. And it could be that in some fields, you know, the belief that...

Tomasi: Yeah, dogma.

Sunstein: The New Deal was great and Johnson’s Great Society was great. Those are taken as like “dropped objects fall” and, “you kind of need oxygen,” but in my view they aren’t that. I tend to like the New Deal and the Great Society personally, but it’s not like dropped objects fall. And so intellectual diversity, viewpoint diversity is essential for those things. But in a psychology department, if people think Roosevelt was fantastic or Roosevelt was a demon, it probably wouldn’t matter unless they’re teaching that. And then they wouldn’t be teaching psychology.

Tomasi: Right. As you know, Bernard Schweizer and I have a new book that just came out on viewpoint diversity called Viewpoint Diversity. And we have some great contributors in there. It’s an edited volume of people puzzling about these issues, including some of your colleagues like Danielle Allen, other people, Yascha Mounk and others who think about these things. I wrote the first essay where I try to distinguish, I try to open up the stage, for the conversation by distinguishing two responses to the great fact. One, which I just mentioned, and I’ve already mentioned this, the idea that that’s a very worrying fact, and someone ought to do something about it. There ought to be a law, whatever it might be, proportional political representation or whatever. But the other approach that I described is what I call scholarly sanctification. And what I’m reaching for there is some idea of some way to understand the role of academic freedom in all of this.

And as you’ll know better than I, in the Sweezy v. New Hampshire case and some other cases, and not just cases, also in AAUP documents, is even more clear. There’s a principle about academic freedom that involves something like academic self-governance. And it’s based on the idea, I think, that whatever the ratio should be, or it should be determined by experts who have the specialized knowledge to know what excellence is. Therefore the professors should have some special powers to make their own choices one by one of what they count as excellence. And if the overall pattern emerges through time, turns out to lean one way rather than another way on some dimension of diversity, let’s say ideology, well, that’s just a consequence, the outcome is sanctified by the process because it’s scholarly. Do you have any thoughts about that view? I don’t know if that’s familiar to you. What do you think of the idea of academic freedom being able to override the proportionality people and dominate the decision about what ought to be right here?

Sunstein: I think a pox on both houses. I love your essay and I think you have that view, but I’ll say what I think. And the special powers idea makes me think of Spider-Noir, which is a new TV series, which I recommend, with Spider-Man and special powers, of course, as all Spider-Men do. Spider-Women also.

Two ideas. One is that the profession gets to set the right level of viewpoint diversity given its expertise. I think that’s too stark. You could have a profession that is in the grip of a view. You know, take your pick that capitalism is great and perfect and anything that intrudes on it is part of the road to serfdom. Let’s say this is Hayek University. And I’m a great admirer of Hayek, but that would be a disservice to students. Now if everyone thinks that, that’s very different from everyone both thinking that and proselytizing it.

So we could think that some places are now left and they’re like a mirror image of Hayek University, and the fact that they are specialists wouldn’t immunize them from external objection. So the professional sanctification view seems to me a little like Narcissus looking in the river and saying how beautiful.

A more technical thing, which is to say there’s academic freedom, which is either a legal thing, or whether or not legally protected is an ideal that we should observe so that even if institutions are screwy, they deserve to govern themselves. I don’t agree with that either. So there are some forms, some conceptions of academic freedom which are legitimate inferences from the First Amendment. So they do have a constitutional status. But the notion of academic freedom, as used in the discussion you’re pointing to, outruns the legal idea of academic freedom. So this is just a way of saying if there’s an institution that is very proud of its own standards and its standards are subject to an external objection, it’s the duty of the institution to defend its own standards against those objections. And what happens if the external authority, let’s say, has power, either because it’s wealthy or it’s the government. You know, it’s not clear what should happen. And the idea that the academic institution can claim academic freedom and just win by virtue of that is too simple.

Tomasi: And I’m interested that you just now in your final sentence used the word whether the institution can rely on academic freedom, which is one of the formulations in Sweezy, of course. But we also see departments wielding academic freedom and making choices that maybe led to this bigger delta, the great fact and the big delta dimensions. And those departments have some kind of claim to disciplinary authority. I think we both agree with that. They are the experts in that university about these things. I just wonder if we can say a little bit more about this idea about expertise and why it matters.

It seems to me that, well, I’d like to get your take. Universities have a truth-seeking mission, and administrators, or at least trustees, are fiduciaries to keep the university on whatever its defined institutional mission is. It often involves knowledge-seeking as a primary or the primary purpose, let’s say. But they have other purposes too, obviously. But is there a role for administrators who are not experts in disciplines to correct the trajectory of departments that, I’m not sure what the right word is here, have gone astray on viewpoint diversity? They’re not experts themselves, they’re administrators. But they do have this thing in view, the idea of the mission, I think, which may be different, the departments aren’t necessarily thinking mission, they’re thinking academic expertise. Can you do anything with that at all? I’m not putting this question very sharply, but it seems as though departments have disciplinary expertise and that gives them a claim to decide for themselves. What’s the role for administrators in all of this?

Sunstein: Okay, so I’ll tell you an analogy. When I was in the White House, I oversaw government regulation. And I had a team that was amazing and not partisan, and I learned a lot from them and from my experience. And then the president appointed a group of outside advisors who were concerned about over-regulation, and they didn’t have any legal authority, but they were kind of getting in our business. And our initial reaction, including mine, was: really? But then after some engagement, it was clear that the non-expert outsiders knew some things and had a perspective and a set of questions that was extremely valuable for the insiders to hear.

So if there’s an administrator, let’s say, who thinks that a political science department is disturbing its students and truth-seeking because it lacks viewpoint diversity, that’s a completely legitimate question for it to ask. And for the administrator to say, you know, we’re going to push hard in the direction of viewpoint diversity, whether it’s more rational actor models, whether it’s more people who are Burkean and traditionalists, whether it’s more people who are celebratory of traditions, that’s not an objectionable intrusion on academic freedom.

So I think we should be very cautious in all domains when people wield a large ideal in a way that is protecting their longstanding practices and their self-interest. It may be that the ideal is properly invoked for those purposes, but raised eyebrow. And here it’s hard to give a conception of the university such that the department would have immunity from external scrutiny on the part of those who run the university. Now we want a discussion here. So if the people who run the university are clueless and don’t understand the field, and saying in physics we need people who know that Newton had it right, and what followed Newton was completely wrong. So we need Newtonians. It’s going to be very hard to find them. Then the physicist can rightly say why it’s hard to find them because there aren’t any, and that’s because we know better than Newton did. And then the administrators should be inclined to back off. But these are fair discussions.

If in a history department it’s urged that, you know, they’re kind of Marxist and Foucauldian position people here and that’s not all of what history should be by any means. And we need people like, I’m going to mention two, maybe they won’t be familiar, Gordon Wood and Bernard Bailyn, who are very careful historians of the American Constitution and Revolution. We need more people like that. Then how a history department would have a convincing answer to that is, at least for this non-historian, mysterious.

Tomasi: Struck by your example of the physicists thinking about looking for Newtonians, and you said it may be hard to find them. As we know that people often make a parallel argument or claim about conservatives in the academy, it’s hard to find them. Maybe not for the same set of reasons, maybe for some other sets of reasons, but it does seem to be a parallel claim at least. And I just noticed something that you were doing, I think I was detecting this. And I do the same thing, so I’m with you on this, but I’m still not quite sure where it comes from exactly. I think there should be wider viewpoint diversity within the academy, within the fields where it matters, let’s say, on the ideological dimension. And I think it should more closely represent something like missing views on the right. But where does that directionality come from? Why do we think that? Is it the son of the proportional representation view coming back to haunt us? There’s something there, even though I don’t like that view, but there’s something.

Sunstein: This is a completely great question. So you could imagine a parallel world in which two people are having exactly the conversation you and I are having, and maybe they look exactly like us (this is science fictional), in which the impetus is for more viewpoint diversity on the left that we don’t have, and this is true in American law schools, people who think that, you know, communist China basically has it right, and people who think that Lenin is a hero and that Stalin was great, we don’t have anyone like that. And that’s a problem.

Tomasi: Right.

Sunstein: Yes, and people aren’t saying that. So, and there are people I’ve seen in the law school world, not a lot, but who emphasize that far-left views, let’s say, you know, critical race theory and feminism of a quite radical sort isn’t adequately represented. And you know, these are fair things to discuss for sure, but we’re not seeing in our world impetus for viewpoint diversity in the form of much more in the way of critical race theory and in the way of much more people who follow Andrea Dworkin, let’s say.

Tomasi: That’s nice.

Sunstein: So the people who are urging viewpoint diversity, at least in Washington, aren’t saying, where are the Andrea Dworkins? And why aren’t you talking more about intersectionality? I can say that I haven’t heard a student in my entire career, I don’t think, refer to intersectionality. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that. And I’ve hardly ever heard, not never, a faculty member refer to intersectionality, though it’s a very prominent idea by a very prominent professor. So is that a problem?

I think the only way to think about this, you can’t avoid something either about the distribution of views that are out there or something normative about what is a reasonable distribution of views. So I’m thinking in my own field, law, I’m in favor, at various institutions that are to the left, of getting more conservatives. And that’s not hard, by the way. There are amazing conservatives in high numbers in law. Why I’m in favor of that? I think a combination of two things. One is if you don’t have people who think kind of along the lines of the majority of the current Supreme Court, that’s a big problem for the academic institutions, not students. And the other thing I think is that the American conservatives in law schools, they have a lot that’s either correct or productive to discuss. And the first points to something in the direction of the proportional, but it has more pragmatism that even if the majority of the Supreme Court were full of complete nonsense, lawyers need to have people who sympathetically engage with that, and one needs to.

Tomasi: Thank you. We’re going to go to the Q&A. So this is a question about your work on the effects of the internet and social media. Do you have any thoughts about how social media’s changed academic life? And take the question as you like.

Sunstein: I’m going to be very narrow here, meaning just the little slice of academic life that I see, not a whole lot. So social media has changed life, but not a whole lot of academic life, at least in the mostly law school world that I occupy.

Tomasi: I can’t resist adding to that that I was at a dinner recently at Vanderbilt and I was sitting with some faculty members there, and I was stunned to hear a German intellectual historian make the claim, to me startling claim, that AI is at the point where it’s doing German intellectual history at a level that’s close to what he and his colleagues do. I’m just mentioning that as a possibly interesting fact or take it for what it is.

Do you have another question for us? If you haven’t put one in, this is your chance. So another question: is there evidence (thank you for asking an evidence question), that in order to expose students to a sufficient variety of views, the faculty must truly hold that variety of viewpoints? This is a classic, difficult question. One can at least imagine that a great teacher can teach multiple viewpoints, even ones differing radically from their own. And I’ll add that the AAUP in the 1915 statement talks about the responsibilities we have to teach in ways that allow people to be liberated rather than controlled. But this person’s asking, is there something about, do faculty need to truly hold the views? Have you ever thought about that?

Sunstein: Well, John Stuart Mill thought that the person really needs to hold the view. But it’s an empirical question, as the audience member suggests. And you need a randomized controlled trial, and we need to know who are the actors in the randomized controlled trial. It’s easily imaginable that if you have a faculty member who, let’s say, is left of center, but is fairly and sincerely putting right-of-center views in their best light, that could be better than a right-of-center faculty member who’s just a poor teacher or not that articulate. So we need to know what exactly we’re holding constant.

The great fact, as you mentioned, I myself do find alarming, but I think it’s only like a first-order entry into the problem. Because if you have a bunch of people who are in an ideologically inflected, let’s say, classroom, but they don’t teach it in an ideologically inflected way, it might be just fine.

Tomasi: Yeah, it might be, and if we pushed on that “might,” I’m really struck by some work by one of our colleagues at HxA, Musa al-Gharbi. And Musa looks at just this, the fact that we’re human in these really deep ways and that biases are part of our nature. Your colleague, Steve Pinker, makes this point really, really eloquently as well. And so I wonder in response to this question, and it’s the Mill point to some degree, that even if we do our best to try to see the other views differently, there’s a reason why we hold the views we do. There’s a reason why, in some all-things-considered I hope way, we come to the conclusions we have. And that might give us certain blind spots despite ourselves. Steve Pinker talks about scholarship being an unnatural practice. And I kind of think that’s right. It’s easy to say we’re open-minded, but to actually be open-minded, I don’t know. I wish we could do that. I’m just not sure humans can.

Sunstein: It’s an empirical question. But I agree with that. For someone who, let’s say, thinks that Justice Kagan is right and Justice Thomas is always wrong or almost always wrong, to teach Justice Thomas in a sympathetic way that would convey the best version of what Justice Thomas thinks, that would be much harder than someone who actually agrees with Justice Thomas. So I agree with you, but it’s a really great empirical question.

Tomasi: Yeah, and this is a great question. I just want to say one more thing about it. Perhaps there’s a test in something about the efficacy of our research taking by its own standards. So people talk about the replication crisis in social science. And some people think the replication crisis is perhaps partially caused by something having gone wrong with our framing and with our inability to be sufficiently self-critical of ourselves. By ourselves, I mean social science of the last 30 years. So maybe there’s some external test in the quality of research that comes out that might bear on this empirical question too, though I’m not quite sure how we get to that.

Here’s another issue. Cass, you said in your piece a couple of weeks ago that started this whole conversation that we were looking through a glass darkly. Here we go again. How do we ascertain what people’s views actually are? Is it possible for a spiral of silence to be at play across many departments where people are reluctant to voice views that are in opposition to the majority? And you’ve had some colleagues at Harvard and there are others, all of us who are professors have had this experience at universities, I think, in recent years where some people say things quietly, but they won’t say them out loud. And that obviously is not what a university should be. Do you want to say anything about this idea of a spiral of silence, either from your experience or theoretically as you like?

Sunstein: Yeah. So we know that people self-silence because of perceived convictions on the part of others. We have a lot of data on that, that in Saudi Arabia, young men are reluctant to say that they’re fine with their wives working outside of the home unless they’re informed that other young men think that, in which case they say, well, me too. And then you see more women working outside of the home because young men know that other young men think it’s fine. And interesting: there’s a whole literature on preference falsification, and what undoes it completely.

I think DEI is something that many faculty members have been ambivalent about, at least in certain forms. They’re certainly in favor of hiring people who are demographically diverse, but the emphasis on DEI or the incarnation of DEI is something that many faculty members have been more skeptical of than they’ve been willing to say. And that’s an example.

So I think the numbers, John, that you gave about people being more left than right and the proportions growing, it would be surprising if that were a product of people right of center giving a false answer to an interviewer. But there’s undoubtedly much more sympathy with, let’s say, unpopular views of various sorts than is visible because people don’t want to make other people think less of them.

Tomasi: Let’s pause on that DEI point you just made a moment more, because it goes to this question about what the role of administrators might be or should be. And with DEI, when DEI came in at Brown, I happened to be chairing a search committee with the philosophy department where we were looking at some candidates as we always had done in the past. It was a joint search between my unit, a center, and the philosophy department. And I remember we were all sort of surprised when we were now finding that we faculty members, that there was this other committee somewhere, an administrative body, screening through our applicant decisions. And we were quite alarmed for our academic freedom.

But I’m just wondering if I could push on this now a little bit with Harvard. Harvard’s been in the news, a great deal, in the Crimson recently, that a lot of us have been talking about. I want to ask, I won’t ask you about the details of the piece, but the general idea is that Harvard’s administration is making some push in perhaps the viewpoint diversity direction, perhaps creating an initiative to advance free inquiry which may involve faculty positions. There’s some, that article talks about the government department having two searches despite the hiring freeze across the university, where the searches are encouraged to find people who broaden the intellectual range in the government department. Do you have any thoughts about the administration getting involved in increasing viewpoint diversity? Is it like DEI?

Sunstein: This is such a great question. So I once asked a faculty member at Chicago, and I’m not going to out him, very, very conservative, what he thought of affirmative action. And he said, a little. He wants a little. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, a little. It was a great exchange.

And his view, which I think is approximately right, I mean, in principle, let’s say you can’t do it under the law, because we’re colorblind under this recent decision. But in principle, the view that he was stating was, you know, if you have a female or African American applicant, you notice that. That’s not a negative, something like that. Now you’re not going to have your standards lowered, but you understand it and you’re for it. Now that’s illicit now. And there we are. So race neutrality is the law of the land, and everyone should follow the law of the land. Exclamation point.

With respect to, I’ll just tell you my own view about law schools, which is if you have a left-of-center law school, it’s appropriate to search for people if it’s disproportionately, let’s say you don’t have anyone who thinks that, you know, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas is admirable substantively as well as admirable because of other things. You should try to get people who are conservative. I think that’s completely right. So I’m for that, both for the department and for the administration to urge it. Now you don’t want to hire someone who’s, you know, a terrible teacher or a terrible scholar, but there are many people who admire and agree with Scalia and Thomas who are amazing teachers and scholars.

Tomasi: In the case of, can I just note in the case of law schools, there again seems to be something like proportional representation at play because there’s some external standard that we look to to think what excellence in legal education might be.

Sunstein: Kind of with your article here, so the Scalia view of law, let’s just describe it crudely as textualism and original public meaning, that’s within the range of reasonable views. And there’s some people who don’t agree with that. I think the view that it’s not within the range of reasonable views is very hard to defend. And so then we’re golden. If it’s not within the range of reasonable views, then, and this is to your point, I’m still for it, on the ground that it’s a foundational part of our legal culture. And if people don’t see people who hold that view, then the educational enterprise is compromised. Now that’s not about just seeing what’s the range of views in America and tracking them.

It’s a little bit like let’s say there’s a practice of medicine, which is thought by people at a relevant medical school to be not state of the art, but it’s what everyone’s doing. You need to teach your students what it is and why they’re doing it, even if the instructor, because they want to save lives, reflects his or her own judgment, that’s not the way to go. With humility.

Tomasi: And that’s, and you and I both know, I’m attracted to a line like that, as you know. The challenge to it, I’m afraid, is something though that universities are aiming at knowledge, not public opinion polls. We try to, we hope for there being some consensus. We shouldn’t be surprised if there was consensus on some topics. So it’s an interesting twist that we’re faced in it within the academy.

Sunstein: Much more comfortable on the Scalia and Thomas view, saying both that the view is not unreasonable, even if it’s wrong, and that lawyers have to know it because it’s represented on the Supreme Court. If you only have the second and not the first, it gets harder. And it might be distinctive to the area of law that lawyers have to know what the Supreme Court thinks in a way that is attentive to the most sympathetic version of it. And I don’t know what the parallels are in history or physics or biology.

Tomasi: And there might not be parallels, but that’s part of the puzzle, perhaps. I wonder if we could take one more question. I know there’s so many questions from the audience. Thank you for these great points. So Cass, this is a question directly to you. You’ve long pointed to the dynamic of polarization to explain consensus in judicial decisions. Do you think that group polarization can explain the relatively extreme version of identity politics that dominates contemporary university campuses? Do you want to apply some of your previous thinking to this?

Sunstein: I want to, yes, I will, but with your indulgence, I’ll say that the educational institutions I know are not dominated by identity politics. So I was just at Duke and it wasn’t dominated by identity politics. Harvard Law School isn’t dominated by identity politics. I’m not seeing a domination by identity politics. It’s not like it’s Voldemort or Harry Potter and it’s taken. Maybe it’s the Jedi, maybe it’s this, I’m not seeing it. Chicago certainly not. So I think the availability heuristic, which is we think things are more probable if they readily come to mind, is behind the widespread judgment that identity politics is dominating contemporary university campuses. But it might be I just don’t know enough about university campuses and I’ve got my facts wrong.

Notwithstanding that, group polarization is really important, where if people go to an extreme view, let’s say identity politics or, you know, Chicago School economics or whatever, group polarization is typically a factor where if John, you and I and five other people are talking about something we tend to agree on, let’s say the amazingness of Olivia Rodrigo, and I hope you agree on that.

Tomasi: Of course.

Sunstein: She’s even more amazing even than I thought seconds ago, because you think it. And now we’re a group polarization machine. She’s even better than Bob Dylan. But she isn’t.

Tomasi: We have only a couple minutes left. I want to share with the audience that when you and I were talking before we came on this conversation to say that one of our hopes for this conversation is that we can open up some questions that people in the audience will pursue. We think as a democratic matter, we need to have a better understanding of viewpoint diversity than we do currently. Would you care to have the last word, Cass, and say a few things about what you think the stakes are in this conversation and how it might move forward?

Sunstein: Okay, really high. Thank you for that. So one thing I love about the topic and this discussion is that, reading you and reading others, I think some things are clear. Which is that the view that existing institutions get to define the right level of viewpoint diversity, that’s very hard to sustain. The view that we should mimic the distribution of views, let’s say within the relevant geographic area, that’s also very hard to defend. The view that an institution that’s dominated by, let’s say, left-of-center, right-of-center views as a problem and there’s explaining to do there’s explaining to do? That’s clear. There’s urgency in knowing what’s not a good practice. And I think we’ve made a lot of progress, that is, you have, and our country has in the last 10 years in understanding what’s not a good practice. And there’s also urgency in getting the right conception of viewpoint discrimination out there. I don’t have it in my own mind yet.

Still, to know what is a problem that needs improvement is essential for our students and our country’s well-being. Because take your preferred field, whether it’s philosophy or history or law or biology, we’re not going to progress enough and we’re not going to serve our citizenry unless we have a range of views that are productive of better knowledge.

Tomasi: Cass, thank you so much for taking this time to come on the show this afternoon. To all of you in the audience, thank you for joining us. Go to HxA if you’re not a member, if you’re a professor or work in an academy or not a member, please look at our materials, consider joining us. Our members direct what we do, they help us decide what we think because we’re a thinking organization. We need more smart people to join us. We’re always looking for more people. So please join us, help us, improve us, make us better, make us your own. Thanks again, Cass, and thanks to all of you for coming.

Sunstein: Thanks, everybody.

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Among the strengths of America’s higher education sector has been an uncanny ability to change and remake itself in the face of social, economic, political, artistic and intellectual changes—not just superficially and marginally, but significantly and even teleologically.

While the aspirational aesthetics of our universities—a pastiche of the ancient British and European institutions by way of pre-revolutionary New England and the mid-Atlantic—remain largely unchanged over the past century, their activities, outputs, constituencies, and funding sources have changed dramatically. This adaptive ability redounds to the benefit of universities and to the so-called higher education “system” as a whole, ensuring resilience and a (sometimes begrudging) willingness to change in response to internal and external challenges.

The Great Bundling

American universities have long bundled many different functions together, sometimes logically and sometimes opportunistically. Much of universities’ adaptability throughout the 20th century has been due to their ability to take on new roles and add ever more programs and services (not to mention donors and stakeholders) under their aegis. The story of the modern American research university is substantially one of bigger and bigger bundles.

But the period of bundling appears to be coming to an end, and an era of unbundling is beginning. While this has received far less attention than trends and events ranging from stagnating student enrollment to the Trump administration’s efforts to change campus policies concerning speech, curriculum, and research, unbundling is perhaps the most under-covered trend on campus today. The direct consequences of this change can be at least reasonably hypothesized, but it is far less clear what the second- and third-order effects will be—which means universities are closer to the onset of a period of tumult than to its conclusion.

While American research universities share some surface similarities with their older English, Scottish, and German counterparts, the 20th century American research university is not a timeless organization model, nor was it inevitable. Rather, it was the result of a series of choices that were particular to the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Starting with the Morrill Act in 1862, the country began building out a system of land grant colleges to produce useful knowledge and train engineers and applied scientists for the industrial era.

The American professoriate of the era was besotted with the German university model of early 19th century Prussian statesman Wilhelm von Humboldt, which included academic freedom, unity of research and teaching, and a focus that went beyond the traditional liberal arts. They grafted it onto these new institutions, giving birth to the modern American research university. New private universities not covered by the Morrill Act largely followed a similar trajectory. These new institutions combined research, teaching (in the sciences, humanities, and the emerging disciplines of the social sciences), and outreach to the public to create the model we know today. (Notably, these American universities charged lower tuition than their German counterparts.)

Over time, the products of these universities came to include subsidized arts, sports entertainment (including a de facto farm system for some professional leagues), consultancies for farmers through agricultural extensions, technology transfer to industry, non-academic workforce and vocational training, and much more. For their enrolled students, they provided an array of services, including instruction and intellectual growth, credentialing, certification of mastery, social and professional network formation, opportunities for homogamous assortative mating, and often (to the benefit of the advancement offices) a lifelong sense of membership in and attachment to a semi-exclusive club. They were truly thick bundles, offering something for almost every sector of the economy and society.

Revising the Social Compact

Many of the rationales that might have existed for such bundling a generation ago, such as economies of scale, are today rapidly disappearing. Take scientific research, which since Vannevar Bush’s famous 1945 report “Science: The Endless Frontier” has been a core competency of American universities. While the private sector has traditionally been the site of most American scientific and technological research, R&D has been a major part of what universities do and an equally important part of their public narrative.

But after increasing steadily since the 1950s, universities’ share of total national investment in R&D has in the last roughly 15 years declined from a high of 14.3% to 10.9% today. Put simply, as a function of the larger national research and development project, universities are playing a diminishing role. This trend seems likely to continue.

In its first weeks, the second Trump administration took universities to task over what it saw as profligacy in indirect costs that were being used to subsidize non-research functions. More recently, the National Science Foundation launched a new initiative called Tech Labs to invest up to $1 billion in research labs outside of universities. Notably, this initiative doesn’t fund research in the traditional NSF project-based fashion, but instead provides organization-level funding for non-university institutions, such as focused research organizations and independent research labs.

Meanwhile, the work of philanthropically funded institutions like the Arc Institute, Speculative Technologies, and Convergent Research, while still small in absolute terms, suggests that fundamentally different ways of funding and organizing the scientific research enterprise are not just possible but viable and fruitful.

Intellectual and cultural creation, exchange, and instruction are even simpler to divorce from university structures. For instance, the one-time tight link between universities and policymaking exemplified by people like Woodrow Wilson, Frances Perkins, Rexford Tugwell, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, George Shultz, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Ben Bernanke is much weaker than it used to be. Moreover, universities no longer play an outsized role in incubating original policy ideas and providing analysis, with think tanks and even independent policy entrepreneurs playing an increasingly outsized role.

Regardless of whether this is for the better, it shows that unbundling is revising the social compact between universities, taxpayers, and the public sector. This trend is no doubt exacerbated by the increasing hostility of many university departments to hiring faculty members who would develop ideas for, much less staff, a Republican administration.

Meanwhile, initiatives like the Catherine Project, The Clemente Course in the Humanities, and The Paideia Institute offer free or low-cost but serious classes and seminars in classics, great books, and humanities, revitalizing a culture of autodidacticism that was once more widespread before university classrooms became the primary place of instruction in these fields.

Finally, we see the rise of alternatives that explicitly unbundle education from traditional certification, threatening the universities’ effective monopoly on post-secondary credentialing. Some of these efforts are driven by employers’ workforce needs, for instance defense contractors Palantir and Anduril; others are driven by educational accreditors and state-level policymakers.

Once-niche areas like competency-based education, which focuses on skills mastery, are becoming increasingly recognized by students and employers as viable alternatives to traditional instruction-and-assessment methods. From an economic point of view, this unbundling is a function of both lower-cost alternative credentials and the perception of decreasing value of a university degree—including, or perhaps especially, from elite institutions.

Taken in toto, these new programs, projects, and institutions demonstrate that the bundling logic of the 20th century need no longer apply to universities. There may be no advantage to having scholarly research, technical development, education, and certification all done under the same roof. Indeed, there may be diseconomies of scale in continuing to do so. This also suggests that universities are becoming less attractive places to launch new research and pedagogical initiatives. Operating outside the constraints of a university may be on balance much more attractive than it was a generation or even a decade ago.

A Time of Profound Change

It is worth considering what all of this means for open inquiry and free expression. Unbundling seems likely to lead to greater institutional diversity, and therefore increased opportunity (and funding) to conduct research, teach, learn, and develop intellectual and cultural projects outside of traditional university structures. This in turn creates more chances for heterodox and post-disciplinary thinkers, teachers, and researchers to work without the sanction of gatekeepers, like hiring and tenure committees.

Put plainly, if universities shut them out, that is of less consequence than it once was to the overall state of knowledge and its transmission. Individuals and small groups working outside of universities have greater flexibility to focus: The 20th century American research university required faculty to be by turns researchers, teachers, communicators, grant writers, administrators, politicians, and mentors. Unbundling means more opportunity for specialization.

Note however that a net social increase in intellectual freedom does not mean that it will increase within legacy universities. To the contrary, as the costs of exit from bundled systems decrease, there is less incentive for intellectual nonconformists, especially those of a mildly entrepreneurial bent, to stay and work within existing institutions. Exits from traditional academe may induce additional exits at the margin, leaving the academy even less ideologically diverse and open to intellectual diversity, exacerbating an already vicious cycle toward conformity (and, potentially, mediocrity).

Unbundling also means that, as universities become less relevant to the content, manner, and veracity of ideas in general circulation, these ideas will certainly change. The revolution in the news media of the past 25 years offers an example of what I’m talking about. Media has seen an increase in the variance of quality of news sources.

Consumers now have access to information and analysis that would have been reserved only for small, well-connected audiences at the turn of the century, while at the same time fabricated stories, low-quality analysis, and reportage about the trivial abounds. Those committed to open inquiry who seek out new ideas will have unparalleled opportunities as universities play less of a role in the circulation of ideas—but so too will those who wish to consume (or allow themselves to be fed) emotionally charged pablum and AI-generated slop.

Finally, unbundling means an opportunity to shake off existing conventions around intellectual inquiry to refocus on its functions not its forms. Academic journals, university presses, and peer review are all of value—but in serving in their role as gatekeepers, they may also serve to induce conformity. This conformity is not just in the substance of ideas, but in their form: The number of peer-reviewed academic journals has increased by a factor of four over the previous 50 years. Surely some of the entrepreneurial energy that went into launching new journals could have been profitably directed elsewhere. Unbundling makes possible a recommitment to meaningful inquiry in whatever format ideas are published, discussed, and debated.

There will no doubt be significant variance in how unbundling affects American higher education. The phrase “system of higher education” is a misnomer. The word “system” implies some sort of planned rationalism or emergent order, while American higher education is anything but. The most elite universities, backed by endowments measured in the tens of billions of dollars, developed different bundles of services during the 20th century than did state flagships, which in turn differentiated their offerings from regional universities or agricultural schools. To take an obvious example, sports plays a dramatically different role in schools in the Southeastern Conference than in the Ivy League.

Arizona State University has developed a significantly different model of bundled services than many of its competitors—preaching excellence without exclusivity, and offering generous support for early-career researchers who don’t fit comfortably into traditional disciplinary categories. In the process, it has changed the social compact between its leadership and those who pay its bills. Unbundling will create more opportunities for universities to cultivate different bundles of services to increase their differentiation, rather than merely maintain the same programs as they have in the past, or that they feel they must produce to keep up with competitor schools.

The first-order effects of the unbundling of America’s universities are necessarily speculative and won’t be understood for many years. The second- and third-order effects are impossible to hypothesize. Whatever the eventual consequences, this is a time of profound change for American universities, though in ways that typically garner less attention than hot-button debates around campus culture, curriculum, and leadership.

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Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted to cap “A” grades in undergraduate courses at roughly 20 percent of enrollment beginning in fall 2027. Nearly 70 percent of voting faculty backed the measure. It’s one of the most aggressive reversals of grade inflation in modern American higher education.

The coverage has, predictably, focused on signaling. When two-thirds of letter grades are straight “A’s” and roughly 85 percent fall in the “A” range, the credential collapses under its own weight. Harvard’s report, written by Dean of Undergraduate Education Amanda Claybaugh, called the system “failing” and described grade inflation as a “race to the bottom.”

The signaling argument is correct as far as it goes. But it misses the more important consequence of capping “A’s,” the one that should matter most to anyone concerned about the intellectual culture of American higher education.

Grade inflation does not only corrupt transcripts. It corrupts the choices students make about what to learn and how to learn it. And it corrupts the choices faculty make about what to demand…

Continue reading at Washington Examiner

Survey finds that most faculty favor institutional neutrality.

In a recent survey of 250 tenure-line faculty at R1 institutions without institutional neutrality policies, Eren (2026) found that about 60% of respondents would prefer that their institutions remain neutral on political and social matters not directly related to the institution’s core academic mission. About 35% reported that they had withheld their opinion about university statements because of job security concerns, and 44% reported that they would feel discouraged from engaging with an issue if their position and the university’s position were to be misaligned.

The findings also point to some nuances around perceptions and interpretations of institutional neutrality. For example, even though 60% of respondents prefer their institution to remain neutral, only 53% of respondents disagreed when asked whether universities should make statements on political or social issues outside their academic mission. This may reflect confusion or ambiguity about what institutional neutrality actually refers to in practice. It could be that many faculty find the principle of institutional neutrality appealing, yet do not necessarily object to institutional statements. What’s up with that? Well, as academics love to say, this may warrant additional research. (Don’t threaten us with a good time!)

We’d be remiss not to mention that the author, Colleen Eren, is a former Faculty Fellow at HxA’s Segal Center for Academic Pluralism and we’re delighted to revel in the fruits of her labor.

Institutional neutrality gains traction in the UK.

Research from across the pond that reminds us institutional neutrality is not only a US conversation. A new report from Alumni for Free Speech (AFFS), a non-partisan, alumni-led campaign group, found that 32 of 178 UK universities have now made a formal, public commitment to institutional neutrality. Among elite UK institutions (referred to as Russell Group institutions) the number of adoptees has risen from three in January 2024 to seven institutions as of the report’s release. Adopters span the country, from the University of Edinburgh and the London School of Economics and Political Science, to the University of Bristol and the University of East Anglia.

The AFFS report evaluated the strength of each of the 32 institutional neutrality policy statements. The majority of statements (78%) earned a “good” or “excellent” rating, while the remaining seven statements were “materially’” or “seriously flawed.” The ratings system relied heavily on the precise wording of the policies. Consider the methodology for awarding bonuses and penalties across several distinct qualities: schools gained +0.5 points for robustness and comprehensiveness, including specifying that neutrality extends to social and cultural matters, not just political ones. They earned +1 point for not affiliating with external organizations that would require the school to commit to a particular perspective. Meanwhile, schools were dinged -0.5 points for affording too much discretion to the Board of Trustees, and -1 point for limiting institutional neutrality to not “normally” or not “usually” taking a position.

Indeed, as HxA has recently documented on the state of institutional neutrality in the US, policy adoption alone is not enough. Important questions remain, such as, how will implementation be realized? What topics fall under institutional neutrality? Which units of the institution does the policy apply to? So while a growing number of UK universities have been recognized with generally positive ratings, when pressure arrives, an enduring commitment to institutional neutrality may depend on policy clarity and its consistent application.

In academic publishing, prestige and testability are substitutes in evaluation.

Author prestige boosts the citation count of papers with claims that don’t lend themselves to empirical testability. But when testability increases, as indicated by use of empirical and statistical analyses, name recognition matters less. Hingl (2026; working paper) examined academic papers published between 1900 and 2015 and found that a 10-percentile rise in testability corresponded to a 9% decrease in the concentration of author citations (year held constant).

Hingl applies a supply and demand model of scientific research, in which researchers represent the supply side, and evaluators (e.g., referees, editors, and funding agencies) represent the demand side, or the “consumers of science.” The upshot: researchers have an easier time “selling” their work to the scientific community when they have some name recognition, when their claims lend themselves to empirical testing, or both.

The author also highlights the role of the “credibility revolution” within economics in pivoting the field towards more testable hypotheses, and uses this era as a case study in the testability-prestige relationship. During the 1990s and in response to internal criticism, the field of economics began leaning more heavily towards testable and empirical claims. Hingl found that “credible-methods” papers, which utilized empirical methods, experienced a citation bump relative to papers with less testable hypotheses.

Interestingly, Hingl’s work indicates that certain fields, namely, history, political science, philosophy and sociology, rank lower than others in testability, and by extension, rely more on “prestige” indicators. This raises some interesting (and perhaps pointed) questions about the extent to which in-group bias and ideological conformity potentially relate to “prestige,” and the role that groupthink may play in shepherding along non-empirical research.

People are less critical of scientific findings that align with their moral convictions.

Trust in science, and particularly science skepticism, has been a dominant topic of discussion in recent years. A new study by Bayes (2026) tells us about the conditions when people are more or less likely to accept scientific findings. Participants in the study were first shown mock-ups of press releases about new scientific findings on the topics of climate change, GMO labeling, and gene editing, and then evaluated the studies and their authors on dimensions like credibility, objectivity, and competence. Importantly, participants were randomly assigned to see findings that either supported their self-reported views on each issue (the pro-attitudinal condition) or findings that contradicted them (the counter-attitudinal condition). Replicating a pattern shown repeatedly in prior work, participants reading about findings that supported their attitudes evaluated the studies and their authors more positively than participants reading about identical studies whose findings contradicted their attitudes. Researchers call this biased assimilation.

The key novelty of this study came from its focus on participants’ moral conviction about each issue: how connected their beliefs about the issue were to their core beliefs about right and wrong. As it turned out, those who held attitudes with deep moral conviction showed the largest biased assimilation effects, while those who held their attitudes with little moral conviction showed little if any evidence of biased assimilation. The pattern of biased assimilation was also notable in that it was driven by morally convicted people in the pro-attitudinal condition rating the studies and authors particularly positively. By contrast, there was no consistent effect of moral conviction among people evaluating counter-attitudinal findings.

One might assume that the biggest risk to fair-minded evaluations of scientific findings comes from an unwillingness to accept results that challenge our beliefs. But this study suggests that it’s just as important to combat the uncritical acceptance of findings that support our beliefs.

That’s a wrap for this month’s Research Roundup. Got any hot tips about great research coming out in June? Drop us a line at research@heterodoxacademy.org.

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Oversized inflatable beach balls get bounced out on college campuses by student organizations that invite everyone to write on the “speech ball.” Students scrawl political slogans, insults, and provocative symbols. On some campuses, it might be a speech wall or a boulder. In all these cases, the idea, we’re told, is to exercise free expression. But what actually happens is a spectacle of empty rhetoric, where showboating and shock masquerade as meaningful discourse and campuses become stages for provocative performances rather than spaces for genuine intellectual exchange.

Students sometimes scribble penises and swastikas, or write “Women shouldn’t have the right to vote” on these speech props. Rather than reading such messages as expressions of genuine belief, I see them as deliberately exaggerated gestures meant to provoke reaction and generate spectacle. In this way, participants turn a profound civic and intellectual freedom based on the hard-fought guarantees in the First Amendment into a moment of rebellious posturing. The more obnoxious the gesture, the quicker the audience reaction, and the more visible the performance. Such public provocation is hardly Socratic inquiry; it is agitprop wearing a civil-discourse costume.

But the campus provocateurs are only part of the cast. The audience of the outraged and offended also is an active participant in this performance, shaping meaning through their indignant responses. This audience, including the students, social media followers, alumni, advocacy organizations, and the press, magnifies the spectacle. After the provocateurs scrawl the predictable images and words on the speech ball, multiple people will take to social media—amplifying, denouncing, and circulating the offending expression as proof of their enemies’ depravity—and demand that the university punish the students responsible.

Both the slur scribbled on a plastic ball and the social media rant that follows are pieces of political theater. Each is the intellectual equivalent of cotton candy: brightly colored, briefly exciting, and nutritionally void. Both the offensive statements on a speech ball and the demands to punish them are dripping with the same rage-baiting syrup. Both sides substitute audience engagement for healthy intellectual exchange. And when outrage becomes a substitute for sound argument and reasoning, censorship is always the next step.

Both sides, knowingly or not, play roles in a predictable script: One side gets to showcase its opponents as histrionic and censorious, while the other side gets to point to the provocateurs as hateful, bigoted bullies. What we get is not intellectual debate but campy political theater in which extremism is stylized in a spectacle rather than articulated as argument. Like camp, the actors rely on hyperbolic symbolism, turning themselves into caricatures rather than participants in serious inquiry and debate.

Would that the spectacle of moral signaling stopped with the student scribblers and their outraged audience. But on many campuses, especially those that have not embraced institutional neutrality, another set of actors enters the scene: the risk-conscious university administrators. Pressured by moral warriors to “do something” about the provocateurs, and aware of a wider public watching the culture war unfold, these administrators must consider reputational concerns, political scrutiny, harassment claims, and the potential impact on student recruitment before taking any action.

Ever watchful for these risks, administrators might issue a statement on expressive freedom that sounds principled but that is laced with escape clauses and vague commitments. Like the speech balls and the reactions to them, such pronouncements are performative: a kind of governance theater that projects virtue while preserving institutional flexibility in hopes of shielding their university from socio-political risk.

At the university, we don’t exclude ideas because they cause moral or emotional distress. While we must take unprotected behavior seriously—harassment, true threats, defacing property, and conduct that undermines safety—ideas themselves should remain open to debate. But debate requires something more demanding than a marker and a camera phone. It requires slow, good-faith, reasoned exchange structured by shared standards of evidence, accountability, and intellectual humility.

We cannot stop our students from bringing society’s toxic polarization to campus—indeed, doing so would only get us accused of quashing free expression, or being “woke” or “fascist” (depending on whom you ask). But we can try to find ways to better provide students with a compelling opportunity to think deeply, engage seriously, and speak thoughtfully.

Universities need not be theaters for rehearsing the culture war. As Michael Rohd, a leader in the field of civic practice theater, demonstrates, theater can be designed as a venue for fostering structured, participatory dialogue. In this light, perhaps we should set up a giant speech umbrella with a big blanket beneath it, where students can sit and actually discuss something. Unlike the staged spectacles of campy performance, this space would reward thoughtfulness over grandstanding, slow reasoning over instant reaction, and curiosity over posturing.

Likewise, university administrators could move from managing expression as reputational risk to cultivating it as an intellectual good that helps foster the university’s knowledge-seeking mission. And we could all remember the distinct reason universities embrace free expression and civil discourse: not to rehearse democracy on a campus stage, but to create the conditions under which ideas can be examined, evidence weighed, and knowledge advanced.

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