The higher education news didn’t exactly focus on open inquiry this week. A shocking and hotly contested allegation of sexual assault at Cornell, a $3 billion gift to Carnegie Mellon, and Senate passage of a college sports overhaul were all in the headlines. On more academic matters, it was a week of questions about dialogue, diversity, and the disciplines.

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

Is the Civil Discourse Movement a Right-Wing Plot?

If its job ads are to be believed, the storied American Association of University Professors now aims to “transform… into an organized, fighting union.” That’s consistent with its recent political endorsement and this summer’s leaked recording of Prof. Isaac Kamola, director of the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom, planning to target university civics centers with “a robust research project on these right-wing centers and individuals—like, naming and shaming and discrediting and undermining the legitimacy…. I would love to strategically map who these f---ers are, and figure out what the weaknesses are, and design a research agenda that just goes through them and tries to knock them out.”

The Uncivil Collective, a group of scholars whose leadership includes Kamola and other prominent AAUP members, seems to be taking a similar approach. This week, the group published a dubious dossier about a long list of groups promoting dialogue and pluralism on campus — a movement Uncivil says is driven by a conservative, pro-Israel agenda. This time around, Heterodox Academy was among the “f---ers” in question, although the Uncivil folks were, ironically, more polite in their choice of words.

Inside Higher Ed published a roundup of responses, including Arthur Vining Davis Foundations president Michael Murray pointing out Uncivil’s flawed methods. Disagree Wisely co-founder (and HxA fellow) Simon Cullen says that “Uncivil uses many of the habits of argument that Disagree Wisely helps students learn to avoid: guilt by association, circumstantial ad hominem, and unsupported insinuations about people’s motives.”

As for HxA, John Tomasi clarified that our members are a politically diverse bunch, and a plurality are self-described moderates or centrists (see the chart). Compared to the professoriate, it’s true, our members are on average more conservative or libertarian. Compared to the American public, they are less likely to call themselves conservative or progressive.

On issues of Israel and Palestine, longtime members know HxA has done research and analysis; hosted discussions, panels, workshops, and podcasts; opposed academic boycotts; opposed physical violence and antisemitism; and regularly spoken up for pro-Palestinian expression and academic freedom.

We think that approach is principled, not partisan. But if it makes us part of a pluralistic conspiracy with the likes of FIRE and BridgeUSA, we are proud to conspire.

Uncivil does make one good point: pluralistic rhetoric can be misused to stifle discussion if we aren’t careful. As I have argued, if the toughest issues are taken off the table by well-meaning moderators, dialogue programs will fail to prepare students for real democracy. And as Tomasi argued last year, dialogue is no substitute for a real variety of viewpoints on campus in the first place

Structural Explanations for Thee, Not Me

Speaking of viewpoint diversity, sociologist John M. Kainer has a terrific essay with an interesting observation about his field:

If you want to send a group of sociologists into an uproar, tell them a group disparity is the result of individual choice. Take your pick of groups and issues. Try telling a room full of sociologists that women are underrepresented in STEM because they prefer people to ideas, or that intergenerational poverty persists because the poor make bad decisions with money.

But when conservatives are outnumbered 27:1 in their field, Kainer says, sociologists claim it’s because the conservatives lacked merit or just chose differently. No structural forces to see here, folks. Move along.

Those of us who see political monocultures as a problem for social research might chuckle at such inconsistencies. But that’s too easy. Inconsistency is everywhere, and if we can fault the “other side” for violating our principles or their own principles, we will never be wrong. Meanwhile, they will find chuckles of their own.

Are We the Identitarians?

For instance, isn’t it equally odd for critics of the excesses of DEI to turn around and advocate for a different type of diversity and inclusion? What is this, people ask HxA, the new affirmative action?

Those who say that usually support affirmative action, but it doesn’t matter. To get beyond finger-pointing and make any progress, we have to get into specific proposals.

HxA has never advocated for quotas or hiring preferences based on political identity. We want to strengthen research and build a university the world has never seen, using the lessons of past diversity efforts to enhance knowledge production while preserving the universalism and individualism at the heart of science and scholarship.

We think universities can pursue excellence and protect academic freedom while diversifying the ideas they teach, the questions they ask, and the explanations they test. For starters, institutions can take the steps listed in our Open Inquiry U reform agenda: broadening narrow curricula, job postings, and research agendas; removing ideological litmus tests, both formal and informal; and adding incentives for pluralistic approaches.

Interpreting the Interpretive Fields

Even that is not specific enough, though. Close studies of individual academic disciplines can help spot the places where promising ideas have been ignored and talented scholars have been wrongly excluded.

Such reviews must acknowledge the good news where they find it, too, and uncover the potential where it still exists. In the latest insightful take on the interpretive disciplines, historian Steven Mintz gives his account of the value of history, anthropology, sociology, and literary studies. Balancing appreciation with concern, he suggests a simple standard for accountability:

A field cannot live indefinitely by interrogating other people’s explanations. Eventually it must offer explanations of its own. A useful test would be simple: ask any discipline to name three findings from the past generation that an intelligent outsider would be surprised to learn, explain why those findings matter, and show why the discipline’s methods were necessary to uncover them.

A field that can do that has a strong claim on students, resources, and public respect. A field that cannot has a problem deeper than politicization.

The supply of students and public respect is still looking shaky this week, with only 31% of Americans calling a college education “very important,” an all-time low in the Gallup poll. College doesn’t have to be for everyone, but what students learn there is certainly “very important.” It’s worth arguing about, and worth fighting for.

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Disclosure: Heterodox Academy receives financial support from the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations and has partnered with Disagree Wisely on grant-funded projects.

Following up on last year’s roundup of convocation speeches and welcome addresses, we took another look at what campus leaders are saying to their communities at the start of the 2026-2027 academic year. Across a non-exhaustive set of speeches at influential universities, several themes stood out. Like last year, civil discourse and constructive disagreement appear to be top of mind for many university leaders, alongside curiosity, uncertainty, and the growing presence of artificial intelligence.

Civil discourse and constructive disagreement emerged as a dominant theme, as university presidents framed disagreement as a core feature of the university experience. President Chiang of Northwestern told incoming students that they are “supposed to sweat through disagreement, debate and dissent” in the “intellectual gym” of the university — sentiments echoed by President Mnookin of Columbia, who praised the necessity of “productive tension.” “Great universities like Columbia,” wrote Mnookin, “are places of productive tension—tension between tradition and innovation, certainty and doubt, established knowledge and new ideas, agreement and disagreement. That tension is essential to our intellectual life.”

At Cornell University, President Kotlikoff emphasized to his students that they have the freedom to form their own views, but that this freedom comes with a responsibility “to protect and respect the freedom of expression and exploration for everyone around you. Even, and especially, for the people with whom you have the least in common, and the ideas with which you most disagree.”

Curiosity — a timeless intellectual virtue and critical prerequisite for open inquiry — was roundly celebrated across campuses. President McInnis of Yale encouraged students to adopt “a kind of egalitarian curiosity, one that embraces every variety of knowledge, and debates even the most agreeable assumptions.” At Johns Hopkins, President Daniels urged students to nurture an “insatiable, unquenchable, driving curiosity.” President Levin of Stanford told incoming students that Stanford aspires to “to have a culture of dignity,” best cultivated when students are “curious, not judgemental.” Similarly, leaders at Columbia, Penn, Denison, and Georgetown all named curiosity as an explicitly cherished value.

At Denison University, President Weinberg’s welcome back message linked the preconditions for curiosity to institutional neutrality: ”An essential part of being curious is keeping your mind wide open. A college campus isn’t expected to reflect or speak with one voice,” wrote President Weinberg. “The purpose of a university is to give ourselves space to explore, create, and refine ideas, thereby adding to the world’s knowledge and understanding.”

Many speeches also acknowledged the uncertainty of today’s world — not as cause for fear, but as a driver of knowledge. Uncertainty was the central theme of President McInnis’s address at Yale, where students were told “uncertainty is not something to fear. Uncertainty is something to welcome.” President Price at Duke University encouraged students to “embrace” and “nurture” their uncertainty, while President Beilock at Dartmouth described the university as a place to “learn to exercise sound judgment, navigate ethical complexity, grapple with uncertainty, and take responsibility for your decisions.”

Artificial intelligence was mentioned by leaders from Princeton, MIT, NYU, and Denison. Mentions of AI were woven throughout President Eisgruber’s remarks at Princeton, culminating in his observation that leadership and expertise depend “on finding and leveraging the human advantage, the ways of knowing that allow us not simply to consume the products of information technology but to evaluate, critique, harness, and build upon them.” Across all references to AI, the message was consistent: students should use AI thoughtfully, not as a replacement for their own judgement and cognition.

Other university leaders highlighted complementary intellectual virtues and practices. Intellectual humility and rigor were the cornerstones of Provost Jackson’s speech at the University of Pennsylvania. “During your relatively brief time here,” said Provost Jackson, “you have the chance to do something extraordinary: to experiment intellectually, to push yourself ideologically, to question your assumptions, and to learn how to engage the world with both rigor and humility.”

Last year, “viewpoint diversity” as a specific phrase was rarely mentioned. But this year, it was named directly by President Peñalver of Georgetown University. In a particularly striking speech, he told freshmen, “the air that allows the fuel of intellect to catch fire is an atmosphere that celebrates fearless inquiry and fierce but collegial debate, robust discussion, and deep disagreement. You can’t experience the spark of intellectual surprise on a campus where different perspectives or divergent points of view are smothered by censorship or censoriousness.” He went on to say that Georgetown’s “conception of diversity is and must be a broad and inclusive one. It includes diversity of identity to be sure, but it also includes diversity of life experiences and diversity of viewpoints.”

There’s reason to think that this is more than just talk. There is real, concerted effort to not just articulate these values, but to meaningfully embed them throughout campus life. From Cornell’s recent Future of the American University Report, to the Provost’s Initiative on Pluralism, Free Inquiry, and Belonging at Duke University, to the Georgetown Dialogues Initiative, these commitments are being backed up by action. Time will tell how effective these programs will be at strengthening open inquiry, but the willingness to actually support these commitments rather than just name them is promising.

Though these opening remarks may not take up permanent residency in the minds of students, the values espoused in these speeches are signals that these institutions are places of vibrant intellectual exchange. And by following up on these words with actions, campus leaders are contributing to the growing momentum and successes of the internal reform movement. The gap between aspirations and actual campus climate will wax and wane, but the values enshrined throughout the campus will endure.

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He finds widespread support for impartiality in principle. But when respondents judged specific acts of political favoritism, that principle bent: partisans rated identical conduct significantly more harshly when the beneficiaries were opposing partisans rather than their own side. Torres discusses what that double standard means for research, policy, and classroom practice — and where his data cannot yet go. A transcript of Torres’s talk follows below.

Eric Torres: So today I’m going to be talking about how the American public thinks about political impartiality in educational contexts. I’m going to present the results of a couple of survey studies that I did over the last year or so that I think shed some interesting light on what to me, what I think is a really important and pressing question in the politics of education. So to provide a little bit of background, as I’m sure everybody attending this talk is well aware, there’s been much furor in American politics about the politicization of education.

And by that, I mean the intrusion of the inappropriate intrusion of political considerations into what should be politics free domains. So a couple of examples of this recently, last year, Donald Trump, the Trump administration issued an executive order accusing K through 12 schools throughout the country of being rife with radical intent to indoctrinate students into left-wing worldviews, PEN America and many and others replied that in fact, the administration’s ostensible, project to undo indoctrination is itself imposing, political ideology on educational processes.

We see similar dynamics in the context of higher education, where critics both inside and outside the university have argued that the well-documented, ideological imbalances in faculty and controversies around policies in higher ed are turning these institutions into political indoctrination centers. On the other hand, initiatives to increase ideological diversity in the academy have themselves been called acts of political interference. And so we have a situation where partisans in America are accusing one another of politicizing education. This raises or rests on the premise that political intrusion in education is a bad thing.

But somewhat surprisingly, there’s very little research on whether or not the public agrees with that premise and how the public thinks about the relationship between political considerations and education more generally. Much of the recent work on this subject has focused on how American partisans think about controversial issues in education, so how issues of race and gender should be thought. But there remains quite a bit that we don’t know and that hasn’t been studied, such as whether the public wants schools to be politically impartial in principle, and whether they apply their standards of political impartiality even-handedly to making judgments about cases that involve their own team and the other guys.

And even though, to just say a little bit more about that first question, whether the public wants schools to be politically impartial. Although I think for many of us that might seem obvious, there is some evidence, especially coming from the field of political psychology, that as the country has polarized and as partisans increasingly see the stakes of education or of political conflicts as existential, that we might expect a sort of abandonment of principles of impartiality or expectations of norms or impartiality on the grounds that these conflicts are so important that we have to use schools to culture students into our way of thinking about things, or simultaneously, because our way of thinking about things is just obviously correct.

Liberal worldviews are right. So of course, it’s okay to promote liberal worldviews in schools. Conservative worldviews are right. Of course, it’s okay to use schools to promote conservative worldviews. And so figuring out the degree to which, where the public falls on these questions, I think, is quite important. So today’s research, I’ll be describing two surveys, first a pilot and then a follow-up study that I’m just now getting into the thick of analyzing that are aimed at helping us understand how Americans are thinking about these things. The first survey is a pilot study looking at support for impartiality in both K through 12, or I’m sorry, just in the K through 12 context.

I won’t spend as much time there because I think the HxA audience is probably more concerned with higher ed. The follow-up study, which is larger, better powered, and it involves hypotheses that I pre-registered looks at these issues in the context of both K-12 and higher ed. So first, very quickly, this first study comes from an opportunity that I had when I was a grad student. So I did my PhD here at Harvard as well, and I was an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies. I was able to get a couple of items onto a poll in 2024, the Capps-Harris poll, which is a nationally representative sample or a nationally representative poll that’s run monthly in conjunction with Harris polling.

And these responses were collected on March of that should say 2024, not 2025. So they’re a little they’re a little old now. But I was able to get a handful of items on this one of these polls that were distributed to a random sub sample of 528 respondents. It. So not too many and not too many items, but it gave me an opportunity to probe some questions that I had and to see if they were worthy of follow-up. So I’ll just quickly show you what those items are and then describe the results and then jump into the second study, which I think will be more substantively interesting.

So first, I just asked people straightforwardly to select which of the following statements they agreed with most, that schools should promote liberal views, schools should promote conservative views, schools should not promote any specific political views, or I don’t care if schools promote specific political views. These are non-exhaustive, obviously, but they give us sort of a coarse sense of how the American public is thinking about the relationship between political socialization and schooling and whether or not they are, you know, the degree to which they’re comfortable with schools being used explicitly as vessels for what we might think of as either indoctrination or acculturation into a political community.

Second, I asked a question that sought to get at the relationship between what they wanted and what they perceived to actually be happening. So I asked whether they believe public schools in their area were promoting liberal views, whether they believe they’re promoting conservative views, whether they believe they were not promoting any particular political views or whether they didn’t know. And then I also gave them an option in the first two cases to indicate whether or not they thought that was a good or a bad thing, just both as a sort of consistency check and as a way to see if there are differences between abstract principles and principles applied to the local context. And finally, I gave them a, and there was, I included a survey experiment.

So I gave all the participants a vignette in which a teacher tells students in his 10th grade government class who he supported for president in the last election. I chose this because this is an issue about which people disagree. I don’t think there’s necessarily a right answer about whether or not teachers should, in the context of teaching, be able to disclose their own political views. But there were three versions of this scenario, one in which he expressed support for Trump, one for Harris and one for an ambiguous and unnamed candidate.

And these were randomly assigned to participants so that we could look at the effect of matching between their own political ideology and the expressed support in the vignette and see if that affected whether how they evaluated the appropriateness of that behavior, whether they said it was wrong for the teacher to tell the students, whether they said it was fine for the teacher to tell the students, or whether they said they didn’t have enough information. And so here’s what I found. First of all, I saw that a majority of Americans across groups, about 50% preferred that K-12 schools refrained from promoting liberal or conservative worldviews.

I next saw that a plurality of people were unsure about what schools were actually doing this sort of makes sense. Most of us don’t have a lot of insight into our local schools. But unfortunately, twice as many, more than twice as many, believed that schools were involved in some form of ideological promotion, either of liberal or conservative worldviews, mostly of liberal worldviews. And only 17% believed that they were not. And perhaps most importantly, I found that Democrats and Republicans alike were about one and a half times more likely to judge teachers’ political disclosures as inappropriate when they supported the opposing party. So this is suggestive, but this is a small sample.

And so I wanted to rerun this study and dig a little bit deeper in order to understand some of these issues better. I wanted to figure out for one, what it means to promote liberal or conservative worldviews. And I thought I might be able to do that by asking about more discrete practices in I read and K through 12 schools. I wanted to know whether Americans had similar sorts of attitudes about impartiality in K through 12 and higher education. And I wanted to see whether we observed these effects of what we might think of as bias and judgments of others politicized behavior across a variety of scenarios rather than just a single one in which we’re asking about the relatively unique case of telling students who you happen to support politically.

So this second study I carried out in the spring of this last year, not very long ago. This study was funded by my fellowship at the Siegel Center for Academic Pluralism, and the hypotheses and design were pre-registered with the Open Science Foundation. I contracted with Verasight, the survey firm Verasight. They composed a hybrid probability, non-probability sample of around 1,500 Americans. There’s some prior work on their sampling strategy is found to perform similarly well to other probability-based samples, although we should be cautious about inferring exactly what the American public in general thinks from samples like these.

The results that I’ll present of the descriptive items are weighted for representativeness, and these items were collected actually just a month ago. So this is fresh data. Instead of three items, this time I had an opportunity to put together a full survey. So there’s 75 items on attitudes about impartiality in higher ed and K-12 education, including how people define impartiality, perceptions of what’s actually happening, like in the pilot. I asked about their trust in these different institutions and again ran a series of experiments assessing their consistency of judgments about various policies and practices.

Today because I only have so much time I’m going to focus just on a quick overview of their normative attitudes about impartiality in higher ed as well as to review the results of the experiments. The subjects that I explored in the higher Ed context included the deliberate value cultivation. So again, should schools be attempting to promote liberal or conservative worldviews? Should they attempt to promote tolerance for multiple perspectives or a commitment to advocating for one’s own worldview? View. I looked at whether how the public felt about selection, political selection criteria for both students and faculty. Should admissions take students’ politics into account? Should hiring committees take candidates’ political leanings into account?

I looked at attitudes about viewpoint diversity in the faculty, how important it was for students to be exposed to a range of views versus to get an education from faculty who all hold similar views, similar questions about syllabi. I looked at norms of social inclusion and exclusion on campus, how important people thought it was for schools to be places socially where if you’re liberal or conservative or neither. You felt like a member of that community. And I looked at treatment of controversial speakers as well. So here’s just a snapshot of some of those items. And these are pretty reflective of the patterns that I saw. So first, I’ll show you this one.

I asked respondents how colleges and universities should try to influence students’ political views. I gave them the options where that they should encourage students to adopt liberal or left-wing views, moderate or moderate views, conservative or right wing views to develop their own independent views, or if they should not try to influence students political views at all. And here’s what we saw. I’ve disaggregated these. I’ll just presenting the results only among people who identified as either Democrats or leaning Democratic and Republican or leaning Republican, just to kind of be concise here. And you see basically no appetite for at least the explicit promotion of any particular ideological or political worldview.

But we do see some differences here in support for whether schools should be helping students develop their own political views or whether schools should be trying to stay out of the politics game entirely. With Republicans being pretty evenly split between those two sort of North Stars and Democrats being more in favor of schools attempting to help students develop their own views. Next, here’s an item looking at just a binary choice, asking whether the public thinks that colleges should teach students to understand multiple political perspectives or teach students to advocate for their political beliefs. And here we have a really striking finding where Democrats and Republicans are in remarkable agreement.

About 80% prefer that schools attempt to promote students’ ability to understand diverse views, whereas only around 20% of both Democrats and Republicans want schools to be teaching students to advocate for their own views as a priority. I also asked whether colleges and universities should take applicants political views into consideration, whether they should give preferences to students with some political set of political views, whether they should try to generate a mix of political views in the student body, whether they should not take political views into consideration at all. Here again, we see a really remarkable consistency between Democrats and Republicans.

It’s a little bit cut off on the left there, but you see again very little appetite for giving preferences to students on the basis of their politics. And surprisingly, against my expectations, very little appetite for attempting to create a deliberate mix of views on campus. Instead, at least in the context of admissions, Americans seem to think that political views shouldn’t factor in at all. I asked the same question about faculty hiring and got a slightly different result, where here there’s more enthusiasm for deliberate attempts to create a mixed faculty on campus. But again, majorities of both Democrats and Republicans are saying that they prefer that political views didn’t factor into hiring at all.

And finally, here’s a handful of items on how issues that cover politically controversial subjects should be taught. So I asked about what readings should be on the curriculum, whether students should read mostly liberal, moderate, or conservative perspectives, whether they should read a mix of different perspectives, or whether they should read the best work regardless of perspective.

And here again we see a little variation, but again, that the general patterns are of consistency where most the a majority in fact of both democrats and republicans would prefer that students be exposed to a mix of perspectives and some amount number of democrats republicans around hovering around 40 percent feel that you know if the best work is all of one ideological camp so be it as long as they’re we’re teaching the best work. Here, a similar item assessing how people think how much how important they think it is to learn from faculty members with different political views. And this one again I just gave them sort of a binary choice.

Is it possible to have a good education from faculty who all the same views, or students must study with from faculty with a mix of political views to get a good education. Here we see a little bit more significant difference between Democrats and Republicans, but the trends very similar. Both Democrats and Republicans largely agree that a good education, at least on subjects that involve these controversial issues, requires faculty political diversity. Potentially at odds with their opposition to deliberately cultivating a mix of faculty perspectives in hiring, but an important finding, I think, nonetheless. Now I’ll just quickly gloss over these handful of experimental items.

So here I gave them a scenario following a similar approach as I did in the pilot. I gave there were these scenarios in which some content, the politically valence, the political valence of the scenario was randomly altered. So there was a control scenario in which the politics of the actor in question are ambiguous. And then there’s one in which the actor in question is sort of has a right wing affinity or a left wing affinity. Here we have a faculty member in the philosophy department saying that they are not going to hire a new candidate despite him being very qualified because of his political views. And again, we now the option categories here are sort of a five point Likert type right to wrong plus a I don’t have enough information to decide.

I’ll talk a little bit, talk a little bit about how I analyze this in a moment. What we see here. So here I’m presenting the results of exclude excluding those who say I don’t have enough information to decide. I actually have a separate analysis to see whether partisan alignment affects that. The likelihood of indicating that you don’t have enough information. But just looking at those who felt like they did have enough information. We see something very similar to what we saw in the pilot, which is that when the actor is aligned with their own political leanings.

So when a Democrat is exposed to a liberal actor, in this case, a faculty member excluding a conservative on the basis of his views, or a Republican is exposed to the version of the vignette in which a conservative actor excludes a liberal on the basis of their views, they rate that as about one point on the five point scale more acceptable. So like less severely bad. In this case, we see the movement between approximately 1.4 and 2.2, which corresponds to the shift between saying that was a little bad and that was quite bad. And the control sits right in the middle. A second scenario here. We’ve got the college Republicans, the college Democrats, or an unnamed campus group inviting a speaker to campus.

And there we find out that activists of opposing persuasion are planning to disrupt the event. We ask whether how much they approve or disapprove of that disruption. We see again a pretty striking pattern here where those exposed to aligned versions of the vignette are much more likely to endorse the activist disruption. And here a scenario in which a state legislature is passing a law that requires teaching a particular course with a particular leaning on social justice. Here we look at whether or not they approve this law mandate. End date. And again, we see more or less the same pattern, although in this case, there’s the control behaves very similarly to the condition in which they’re exposed to the opposing group, right?

I pooled the results of these three as well as the scenarios in K through 12. So I had three similar survey experiment vignettes in the K through 12 context that I didn’t show you. And As I had predicted in the pre-registration and as we saw in the pilot study, the effects of partisan alignment on judgments about the appropriateness of these various sort of politically inflected behaviors in higher ed are pretty straightforward. This is also actually a pretty large effect that we’re observing here. So again, it’s about one scale point on that five point scale. And when we pool these results, what we see is that the movement is from essentially ambivalence in the case of scenarios in which you are aligned with the actors in question.

So you say, if it’s someone in your team doing the thing, we say, well, it’s neither right nor wrong. But when it’s somebody else, the average response becomes it was wrong. That’s an important qualitative shift in addition to just a shift of magnitude. I should say too, I don’t think I mentioned this is a multi-level mixed effects model here. So we controlled for the content of the vignettes and included a participant level random effect since each participant was exposed to a random assortment of these vignettes. So let me wrap this up quickly here. First, by saying, what are some of the things that this research does not tell us?

So for one, I don’t have any evidence of how, I’m sorry, why the public endorses impartiality in principle on these items and how they’re thinking about the trade-off between using schools as organs for advancing ideological interests versus as organs for education. I don’t know whether they are motivated by pragmatic or principled concerns, for example, whether opposition to schools teaching liberal conservative views comes from a belief that is inherently wrong or because they think it’s politically intractable to do that. If you were to pursue that policy, it would generate a backlash.

We don’t know whether the motivation is primarily a concern with fairness or a belief that a marketplace of ideas is better for student learning or for the country in some way. I don’t really know if these attitudes that we see, this is a survey study. What people say on surveys may, for one, be driven in part by research or demand effects. They might look at this and say, well, of course, the right thing for me to say is that I oppose, you know, politicization of education in these different ways. Whether or not the discrepancies that we picked up in the experimental section translate into differences in behavior, I think warrants further study.

I do have some unanalyzed items that I will be looking at that instead of outcomes asking about moral judgments about the appropriateness of these acts. They are asked to endorse punishments of varying severity. So that maybe provides us a little bit of interesting texture to see if this is just like a right wrong thing or if this also translates into support for more severe punishment for out groups when they do the same thing. What can we make of these results? I think the evidence of shared values is worth taking seriously. At the very least, we see opposition to bald politicization across basically all of the policies and procedures that I inquired about here.

Like I said, it’s not impossible to imagine a world where polarization has become severe enough that people would say, no, in fact, I do want my schools to be promoting my particular worldview. But that’s not what we’re observing. And I also do think this evidence of double standards is meaningful. So these experiments do suggest that partisans are more likely to call foul on politicization when it’s done by the other team. And then that might have really important implications for designing policies that can protect academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, and the rigorous and pursuit of knowledge in a divided America.

So I think there’s more to be asked about here, but it’s my hope that this helps us, those of us who care about this issue, to get a better feel of how the public is making sense of these controversial issues. So with that, I’ll pause. I’ll just say thank you, everybody who’s here for listening. I look forward to talking with you. Thank you to HxA, the Siegel Center, my colleagues here, both for funding this research and for this opportunity. So with that, I will stop presenting and turn it back over to my colleagues.

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By James Lileks

Walking around Boston the other day, I saw an exhibit of masters theses projects at the Boston School of Architecture. The school is housed in an ugly building, of course, which is like making Frankenstein’s Monster the spokesman for a plastic surgeon. You would like to think that the exhibit might have some grand, ennobling public structures—a train station with a broad vaulted roof, statuary showing the old Roman gods of transit and timetables, a slender skyscraper piercing the empyrean beyond.

Alas, no. Most of the exhibits had a social justice angle. They were out to fix the world. An office building for neurodivergent workers. Swoopy waterfront structures for the homeless. A prison that had nicer cells, with an entrance that was designed to reduce anxiety.

If this is the spirit abroad in architecture departments, how deeply soaked in dreary modern thought are the rest of the academic disciplines? You’ll find the answers in Higher Education in America: It’s Worse Than You Think, a new compendium of philippics and prescriptions edited by Kevin D. Roberts.

The essays, written by educators and intellectuals united by a dislike of the smothering caul of wet-wool Marxism and modern wokery, approach the state of higher ed from three directions. The first section of the book, “The Economic Model,” concerns the hideous costs and low returns faced by many graduates. If you’re up for a hammer-and-tongs attack on credentialism, this is for you. The second section concerns the bureaucracy, and the way the nomenklatura stifles change. It includes Jonathan Butcher’s chapter on the critical race theory (CRT)/diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) problem—a brisk and damning account of the way the Frankfurt School scuttled across the ocean to burrow into American education. It really belongs in the third section, “The Leftist Domination”—but then again, every aspect of the problem comes back to that.

The entire book is about the leftist domination, and that’s the reason the right is alarmed about higher ed. There would be fewer conservative complaints about tenure, bureaucracy, and inflated costs if the universities leaned right. Conservatives make jokes about useless degrees in Peruvian Basket Weaving Studies, but would probably be less annoyed if someone went into debt to get a history degree with an emphasis on Betsy Ross’ influence on post-colonial flag sewing.

But that’s not the world in which we live. As economist Andrew Gillen notes in his chapter “The Leftist Monopoly Problem”: “By the early 2020s, for every professor on the right, there were 6.9 professors on the left.”

Imagine if you were going in for surgery and learned that your surgeon had graduated from a school where 7 out of 8 doctors believed in leeches and humours. You’d get off the gurney. But we have no such problems with an imbalance in higher education. Even if a teacher isn’t tamping a wad of ’60s radical twaddle down the students’ throats, they are dispositionally progressive or liberal, and hence that cannot help but tinge the curriculum.

Why It Matters

If you’re a parent shelling out tens of thousands of dollars, you might not want your child’s brain reformed at an impressionable age into something that thinks Texan Christians are the domestic Taliban but Gaza is full of queer-friendly venues.

If you’re a taxpayer, you might not want public money going to an institution whose professors believe that the country is irredeemably and uniquely evil, even though it’s paying them to do nothing but put Howard Zinn and Michel Foucault in a blender and serve the brackish slop in red Solo cups.

If you’re a student, you might want a more rounded education, something that holds the Western experience as unique and valuable, and gives you a grounding in your own civilization that makes you less likely to fall for a romantic vision of a deindustrialized multi-culti groupthink commune divorced from history and human nature.

If you’re an employer, you might want that degree to mean something. Hah! As college president Fr. Deacon Kyle Washut observes in “The Student Experience”:

Employers who could once use a college degree as a shortcut human-resources check for the qualities of grit, critical thinking, communication skills, and basic professionalism can no longer make that assumption; more than a quarter of surveyed managers say that they would refuse to hire a recent college graduate today precisely because of this lack of basic soft skills.

What to do, then? There are proposals. You can build your own institution, such as Hillsdale College, which the elites will always regard with sneers: “explicitly traditional” equals “home-schooling for flat-earthers.” Or, you can remake existing universities from within. As former Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein writes in his chapter “The Woke University Decline”:

The alternative is this: to build centers that do what humanities departments used to do in a more prosperous era. These centers would run as independent units in schools of arts and sciences, integrated into the undergraduate program, not standing merely as extracurricular add-ons . . . These centers hire their own people, mount their own classes, graduate their own majors, and report directly to the provost. Funding would come from state coffers and private donors, not drawn from the regular budget and thus resented as a drain on other departments. The curriculum would impart exactly what the professors have renounced: Western civilization, Great Books, high art, and the American heritage, all of it taught in a mode of understanding and appreciation, not nihilism and discontent.

Sigh. What a wonderful world that would be. This is preferable because—ideally—you end up with the institution intact, but improved. Lots of nice old buildings with ivy, a good brand name with a solid rep everyone respects out of habit. But there’s no guarantee of success, and it takes a while. We want a quick trot through the institutions, not a long march.

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Call it “Judgment Week.” This week, an extensive report from Cornell calls for universities to cultivate judgment; Vanderbilt report asks if anthropologists can be more than moral “witnesses”; and the ACLU indicts higher ed and the feds for censoring pro-Palestinian viewpoints.

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

Think a Little Longer with Big Red

Cornell University released its faculty committee’s long-awaited Report on the Future of the American University. On the heels of similarly self-reflective reports at Yale and Harvard Medical School, it is encouraging to see Cornell’s committee call for differing opinions to be “not only tolerated but embraced” on campus, while endorsing the scholarly practice of adversarial collaboration.

But as its expansive name suggests, the Cornell Report zooms out far beyond ideological disagreement. Given all the pressures pulling apart the modern university, or “multiversity,” what should hold it together? The committee has an answer. Other institutions work with knowledge in many ways, including research, teaching, and application. But “[o]nly the American university links them together into a single learning ecosystem unified by a critical practice — deliberation — toward the goal of cultivating a vital capacity: sound judgment.”

The Report goes on:

Judgment is the skill that learning produces. It is the slow, consequential, evidence-based discernment that resists the hot take and the hasty verdict. It is the common catalyst of research, teaching, and engagement alike, and it is the university’s most important contribution to a modern democracy.

Over its 238 pages, the Cornell Report considers a wide range of steps toward this vision, including more “two-way engagement” with the public and revisiting admissions incentives that leave students “ill-equipped for the open inquiry and intellectual risk-taking” of college.

Takes on the Report are already rolling in. Some observers see political positioning and a bid to avoid future federal action. The Wall Street Journal faults the Report for not taking more blame for the loss of public trust. Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey see hope for human-centered judgment and a more astute kind of “academic civics.”

But what will the Cornell vision look like, in practice, at Cornell? Will we see a new coherence in the teaching, research, and deliberation there, or will “judgment” become an empty buzzword? We might have to wait and see. No hasty verdicts, please; this is a university.

Anthropology on Trial (or is that Divorce Court?)

In the latest supporting chapter to the Vanderbilt-WashU report on the State of Scholarship, Harvard anthropologist Joseph Henrich takes stock of his discipline by tracing anthropology’s “epistemological ruptures” that have called into question the most basic foundations of the scientific-humanistic field. After a touching tribute to the value of his discipline, Henrich articulates his own view of how anthropologists should try to improve the world:

While our goals are ultimately applied — improving the world — we should work as a scholarly community to keep our moral preferences and political goals as separate as possible from the machinery of knowledge generation. This is a challenge, but field-level scholarly standards (e.g., in peer review), rigorous methods and formal theory (e.g., mathematical models) offer important guardrails that shield the knowledge-generating process and thus improve our scholarship.

This view is not shared across the discipline. As Henrich argues through an eight-part review of evidence, an ascendant “new epistemology” now judges anthropological claims based on considerations of power (who is powerful or oppressed?), positionality (is the researcher proximate to the oppressed group?), and ethics (who is helped or hurt by the research?).

Three decades after Nancy Scheper-Hughes argued for a shift from scientific “observation” to moral “witnessing,” Henrich makes the case that anthropology has blurred the lines between inquiry and activism — and this shift is far more pronounced in the subfield of cultural anthropology. The split in anthropology as a field sometimes runs through individual departments that actually divide in two, but by the end of Henrich’s analysis one wonders: maybe that’s for the best?

Complex Issue, Simple Censorship

Finally, this week the ACLU and Amnesty International USA issued a report entitled Student Speech Under Attack: Suppression of Pro-Palestine Speech and Dissent on Campus. The two advocacy groups draw on data from a range of sources, including FIRE’s case work, to argue for a pattern of viewpoint-based suppression by universities and the American government.

While much of the report concerns encampments and law enforcement at the complex intersection of speech and conduct, there are also troubling and verified examples of clear-cut censorship — a student detained over an op-ed, a Texas State professor fired over political opinions, and a student expelled over views posted online, among others. The free exchange of ideas, even and especially unpopular ideas, is an essential ingredient for open inquiry on campus. As we regrettably see every year, it must be defended against both Left and Right.

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Have campus news related to open inquiry that we should be aware of? Send it to communications@heterodoxacademy.org

When Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” on the first episode of “The Colbert Report” in 2005, the context was not trivial. The United States had recently invaded Iraq, with the administration successfully making the case for the war with much confidence but much less evidence.

Colbert’s point was not merely that people sometimes accept something by trusting their gut; it was that a gut feeling can sway the public, even in something as important as whether or not to go to war. Truthiness is what happens when the case feels settled before the evidence has even been presented.

That sounds backwards, particularly in the academy. Universities are supposed to be the institutional enemy of truthiness. They have laboratories, libraries, peer review, seminars, archives, and all the rituals of organized doubt. Their public claim rests on a simple promise: They do not merely announce what is true; they repeatedly test it.

Yet public confidence in higher education remains well below where it stood even a decade ago, and not all or even most of that distrust can be dismissed as cheap anti-intellectualism or partisan theater. Indeed, while the trust crisis at universities has a number of causes, one of them is certainly related to this question of truthiness, namely that they often ask the public to accept conclusions without showing the argument, criticism, and revision that produced them.

We trust surgeons, engineers, and pilots not because they never fail, but because failure in those professions is supposed to be examined, learned from, and corrected. Universities should be no different. Their authority cannot simply be based on claims of infallibility. It has to rest on a visible willingness to test these claims, answer criticism, and revise the record when they get things wrong. Trust grows when inquiry is visible.

Truthiness is not simply false belief. It is a way of dealing with reality, one that is more concerned with “what feels right” than “what the world might force me to acknowledge.” Someone who embraces truthiness forms a picture of the world, then treats contrary evidence as noise, bad faith, or contamination.

As Princeton University philosopher Harry Frankfurt once wrote, the liar still has to track the truth closely enough to hide it; the bullshitter does not. Truthiness has a similar carelessness: It does not always bother to defeat the evidence. It simply demotes it.

Institutions can do that too. A university can become attached to a flattering narrative about itself—that it stands with science, progress, justice, reason, expertise. The trouble starts when the story of the university matters more than the process of generating knowledge. Then criticism sounds less like a contribution and more like an attack. Reputational defense crowds out honest reflection. The university still speaks in the language of truth, but it begins to act in the language of truthiness.

Erosion of Trust

The damage shows up most clearly in research credibility. When major findings fail to replicate, when a prominent paper is withdrawn, when incentives reward novelty more than robustness, the wound is not only technical. Trust erodes because outsiders see not just error, but an institution that is offended by being questioned.

Recent university crises have made the pattern hard to miss. For example, after weeks of high-profile public criticism, Harvard was ultimately forced to acknowledge that its review of plagiarism allegations against university president Claudine Gay was insufficiently transparent.

By contrast, Stanford University’s board of trustees handled a potential scandal with its president Marc Tessier-Lavigne quite differently, promptly releasing both a public statement and a full report that concluded that he had repeatedly failed to take sufficient steps to correct mistakes in his research papers, forcing him to resign.

Together, these two episodes show the distinction that matters for trust: Visible correction can restore confidence even in a scandal, while an opaque process quickly starts to look like institutional self-protection. Because Gay and Tessier-Lavigne are presidents of two of the most prestigious universities in the world, the allegations against them made headlines around the country. But every day, universities are dealing with similar if less newsworthy reproducibility problems that are steadily eroding trust in higher education as a whole.

For instance, a 2026 Nature study of 600 research papers across the social and behavioral sciences found that authors made data available for reproducibility assessment in just 24% of the sample. And among the claims that could then be assessed, only about 54% were judged precisely reproducible. The fact that problems like these are so common weakens trust in the institution that houses and vouches for these scholars.

A second problem—conformity and self-censorship on campus—further sharpens the impression that universities are more interested in truthiness than truth. Universities are unusual institutions in the best sense. Their legitimacy depends on allowing highly educated people to disagree with one another in public. That disagreement is not a flaw in the system; it is part of the system. Yet on many campuses, students and faculty alike have absorbed the lesson that some questions are better left unasked, some doubts better left unvoiced, and that some inquiries come with potential reputational costs that far exceed their intellectual merits.

In a 2024 Knight Foundation survey of college students, 2 in 3 said self-censorship limits educationally valuable conversations on campus, and 2 in 3 said they self-censor on some topics during classroom discussions. What’s more, FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey also found disturbing evidence of self-censorship on campus. In this case, 35% of faculty said they had recently toned down their writing for fear of controversy.

And sometimes the chilling effect is not just ambient but direct. At the University of Southern California, for instance, administrators canceled valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s commencement speech after saying the backlash had created “substantial risks relating to security and disruption.”

A university does not owe every idea equal esteem. Some ideas are obviously foolish and empirically bankrupt. Standards matter. But standards are not the same thing as anticipatory silence. A community of inquiry becomes less trustworthy when people suspect the boundaries of the sayable are being tightened before the conversation even begins.

Outsiders do not usually see the fine distinction between rejecting a weak argument and discouraging a risky question. They see a university nervous about contestation. That is why official institutional language matters here. Princeton, for example, clearly states that the university must protect “free and open inquiry” while remaining a place where students can “think for themselves.” The institution’s job is to keep inquiry open enough that weak claims can be met with argument rather than preemptive closure.

Revision Is Not Defeat

Trust in universities is not won by marble facades and inspiring Latin mottos, and it is not only the responsibility of administrators and tenured faculty. Trust is also built into seminars, labs, archives, and the daily labor of graduate students and junior researchers. Reputation may be conferred at the top, but credibility is produced lower down, where claims are tested, methods are defended, and people learn how to revise a view without treating revision as defeat.

That is why visible heterodoxy matters. It is one of the ways a university shows that its knowledge is being stress-tested rather than stage-managed. Students should see senior academics reward replication, criticism, and correction—not only more often, but more visibly than they do now. They should see retractions treated as evidence that quality control exists, not merely as scandals to be contained. The well-known Chicago Principles are useful; they show what it looks like when a university states plainly that free, robust, and uninhibited debate is part of its educational mission.

A university can become attached to a flattering narrative about itself—that it stands with science, progress, justice, reason, expertise. The trouble starts when the story of the university matters more than the process of generating knowledge.

None of this requires universities to endorse grotesque ideas or to give every provocation the same platform. Instead, their public task is to defend the conditions of inquiry in which researchers test claims, challenge one another, and sometimes pursue bad ideas far enough to show why they are bad.

It also requires universities to stop imagining that confidence can be outsourced to a communications strategy. Polished language cannot substitute for appropriate conduct. That is the logic behind restrained institutional speech policies that are becoming more common at universities. That’s because official pronouncements by an administration on contested public matters can interfere with free inquiry and the diversity of views within the university. Institutional restraint is not indifference. Instead, it preserves the space in which scholars, students, and teachers can argue, test, and revise claims for themselves.

Universities do not deserve confidence because they sit high atop the social hierarchy. They deserve it when they make themselves answerable to reality in ways ordinary citizens can recognize, even from a distance. The public does not need to watch every lab meeting or read every referee report. It does need to see an institution that publicly tests its claims, answers criticism, and treats revision not as embarrassment, but as part of the work.

Colbert’s word still matters because it names a permanent temptation. Truthiness appeals to every person and every institution that would rather preserve their self-image than submit it to correction. It is easier to look certain than to show the work. But trust does not grow where revision is hidden; it grows where people can see the failed result or contested claim and hear the awkward question. Arguments survive because they have been tested rather than protected.

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It’s been a big week for big questions about open inquiry and higher education in general. Is academia too incoherent to last? Too deferential to Trump? Or perhaps, as the old song goes, too legit to quit?

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

Higher Ed’s Inner Conflicts, Now AI-Enhanced

In The Atlantic this week, Ian Bogost of Washington University in St. Louis makes the case that “college is at war with itself.” He argues that the external shocks of AI, COVID, and funding cuts have only deepened the internal problem: a bundle of activities that pull in different directions. Can the same institutions provide teaching, research, professional preparation, and a young-adult coming-of-age experience?

Maybe not coherently. “The appearance of college can endure,” Bogost writes, “even as its spirit—a community organized for the education and formation of young people—comes undone.”

Others are thinking similarly. In a paper circulating this week, economist Jason Potts argues that AI is the first technology to disrupt the university’s core product: its credibility in evaluating unobservable qualities, such as a graduate’s ability to think. Potts speculates that this may lead colleges right back to human-intensive routines like Oxbridge-style tutorials. We could do much worse.

Public Accountability in the Trump Era

“Bow down to Washington” is the fight song at UW-Seattle (home to a mighty group of HxA members). It’s also what higher ed reformers are often accused of doing, with regard to the Trump administration in that other Washington.

In the New York Review of Books, Jacob Weisberg charges Dartmouth and its president Sian Beilock with putting self-preservation over principle, for not more vocally objecting to Trump’s funding cuts and related pressures. It’s a sharply critical piece that relies heavily on one reading of where institutional neutrality should stop. But, since neutrality is meant to encourage more debate within the institution, how is Dartmouth doing on that score? The Wall Street Journal’s James B. Meigs sees a bright picture: big discussions of contested issues, a major dialogue initiative, and enough improvements on speech policies to bump Dartmouth to the Top 10 of the newly released FIRE rankings.

Speaking of federal pressure, Harvard’s Danielle Allen argues that universities should not be above fielding the kinds of questions recently posed by the federal Department of Education. Elite institutions especially, she argues, need to learn to listen:

[Universities] ask themselves: What do we do that we think is good for society? They find an answer: economic growth and scientific breakthroughs. And then they ask: OK, how do we tell the story about this self-understanding of ours to the American public?

What they do not do is ask: What questions does the American public have for us? What are our answers? How do we share those answers with the American public?

Allen proposes that universities hold a grand series of public hearings, not on the Hill but on campuses across the nation, to openly answer some of higher education’s most pressing questions. (All of these event planners should start by taking notes at the HxA Conference in Boston, April 12-14. End of shameless plug.)

Give Me One Reason

Although Allen does not focus on the influence of ideology on research and teaching, that debate has hardly died down. In the wake of the Vanderbilt report, chancellor Daniel Diermeier took to the Washington Post to argue that critics are sidestepping the report’s core concerns, which can’t be addressed without faculty: “Scholars evaluate what rigorous work requires — and they have a duty to speak up when work falls short.”

As I have suggested, it is important and fitting for scholars to engage the public with reasoned arguments and clear explanations. That’s true for both critics and defenders of a given discipline, and for scholars predisposed to the Right as well as the Left. This week’s headlines demonstrate that.

Robert George gave a forceful explanation of the teaching approach at the James Madison Program, which he founded at Princeton University. “Everyone knows I have opinions — my students all know what they are — but they know they’d better not just try to parrot them back at me.” George explained the readings he assigns, from Marx and Gramsci to Hayek and Solzhenitsyn, because he views his job as preparing critical thinkers, not necessarily conservatives.

Contrast that clarity with the muddle at the University of Iowa’s nascent Center for Intellectual Freedom, where interim director Luciano de Castro told a student newspaper that the mission was non-ideological, but also used charts of red and blue dots to make the case for crude political counter-balancing. Surely there is a clearer way for the Center to explain this, and operate.

At the University of Texas, meanwhile, plans to eliminate several ethnic and gender studies majors broke in the news this week, with virtually no official explanation.

There are conversations to be had about whether such majors, and their host departments, have strayed from academic ideals — concerns that have been part of such departments from the start, as Vincent Lloyd describes in the case of Black studies. But until the University of Texas communicates credibly about its process and criteria, “quiet” decisions like this will undermine its commitment to academic freedom and civic deliberation. UT should stand up and make its case.

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Have campus news related to open inquiry that we should be aware of? Send it to communications@heterodoxacademy.org

Cullen tests whether that convergence is real persuasion or just measurement noise, and shows why the noise explanation doesn’t hold. Partisans on the left and right both rated the AI facilitator even-handed — so uniformly that the team inserted bias into transcripts to check whether people were paying attention. Everyone caught it. His argument: the right role for AI in higher education is facilitative, not generative. Not a tool that thinks for students, but one that pushes them to think better. A transcript of Cullen’s talk follows below.

Dylan Selterman: Welcome, everyone. Greetings. I want to welcome everyone to today’s event as part of the Heterodox Academy Research Colloquium Series. My name is Dylan Selterman. I’m the Director of Research and Resource Development here at Heterodox Academy. Simon is the co-founder and president of Disagree Wisely. He developed the award-winning Dangerous Ideas in Science and Society course at Carnegie Mellon, a course that helps students explore diverse viewpoints on polarizing topics by teaching them the art of constructive disagreement. Sway is that course’s approach, built so that instructors anywhere can give their students the same experience, whatever their resources.

His research combines philosophy, cognitive science, and educational technology to improve reasoning and communication across moral and political divides. In addition to his work with Sway, Simon is also a senior fellow at Heterodox Academy’s Segal Center for Academic Pluralism, and a visiting research professor of civil discourse and artificial intelligence in the School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC Chapel Hill. Without further ado, I’ll hand things off to Simon.

Simon Cullen: Thanks so much, Dylan. And thanks everyone for coming out today. Or rather logging in today. So I’ve got so much that I want to tell you about. So I’m going to move somewhat quickly and there’ll be lots that I can’t get to, but hopefully more of it will come up in the Q&A because we’re going to leave a lot of time for that. So for anyone who doesn’t know, Sway is a chat platform. It’s the sort of familiar thing from WhatsApp or iMessage, but it’s built to be used in courses. So students who disagree with each other are paired for one-on-one private text-based chats on topics that are written by their instructors.

And over the next roughly half an hour, I’m going to tell you about what we’ve been learning from this platform over the last two years, because it’s just extraordinarily surprising. So let me start by just giving anyone who’s not familiar a sense of what the platform is so you can understand the shape of the data that come out of it. So this is the instructor interface. This is where instructors create discussion assignments. So every assignment is going to have a number of topics that the instructor will write, and we require at least three because that helps us make better matches. The aim is to pair as many students who genuinely disagree as possible. They then provide the topic statements.

These are the statements that the students are going to discuss, and the first thing the students will do is rate them on a seven-point scale. They’ll provide at least three of them. Then they’ll tell us what they want the minimum duration to be. Now, it’s not measured in minutes and seconds because the discussions can unfold asynchronously over days. So it’s computed from patterns in the data itself, and it’s gated on the slower of the two students. So a very eager student can’t carry through a student who’s just coasting. That’s really it. Then they provide us with three deadlines. When the assignment launches and students can get started, when they have to get their opinions in, and when they have to finish chatting.

That gives you a sense of the shape of the data that we get, that the students will then fill in. So from the student perspective, this is what it looks like. When they come in, we invite all of them to participate in our IRB-regulated research program. They don’t have to, but happily about 75% of them do. And so any data that I have today which involves transcripts is from de-identified transcripts where both of the students volunteered to participate in research.

We ask students for their preferred first name and we tell them it doesn’t have to be your name but it should be a real name so most of them do choose to chat under their real names just judging by the correspondence between the email addresses and then we tell the students what we’ll share with their partners what their stance on the topic is their preferred first names and their pictures if they upload one so what happens is the student will then go in and they’ll complete the opinion survey these are the three statements that the instructor has chosen for this particular assignment they put their ratings in and then off they go. So this is the way matching works, and this is an important point for understanding the data that’s going to come.

So prior to that opinion deadline, students can initiate a match, and you can see here the list of topics. A green topic is one where we’ve already found someone right now who’s waiting to chat about this topic and who disagrees with you. And if there are multiple people, we’re going to select the one who’s furthest away from you to promote as much viewpoint diversity as we can. If you don’t do this, then you’ll get matched automatically at the opinion deadline. But almost all students initiate the chat like this. So we drop them into a chat, the facilitator introduces the topic, and then the students chat away with the facilitator occasionally intervening when it thinks that it can deepen or otherwise improve the discussion.

I’ll show you what that looks like much more. At the very end, this is another data point that we get. We give each student an understanding quiz. These are generated from the transcript at the end of every conversation, and they quiz each student about their partner’s reasoning. So they’ll ask them questions like, when you argued that once someone has served their time, they’ve already paid for what they did, how did Levi use that claim to support restoring voter rights? And we’ll ask the other student, Brooke, sorry, we’ll ask Levi about Brooke. At the beginning of the discussion, Brooke asserted criminals should be denied voting rights. What was the main reason? So this is a five-item quiz. It’s a mastery learning style of assessment.

We’re not trying to make fine-grained discriminations, but we’re just trying to get a measure of whether the students were paying attention and remembering in detail the logic of the arguments that their participants that their partners were making after they complete that the quiz they do a quick post chat survey so we ask them for their opinion again on the statement that they just chatted about and we remind them don’t don’t worry your responses are private and will not be shown to your instructor actually there’s a little bit of text here there’s also missing in the real ux there’s something which says it’s equally informative to us whether you move towards agree, disagree, or stay put.

So we’re trying to help reduce any social desirability bias that they might detect, although it’s unclear exactly what it would be. Then we sample from a larger bank, five questions for each student, and they respond to them. And one, we give, you know, I’m gonna show you the results to some of these in a moment. Students can then provide written feedback, and they often do, and then we can plot how their opinions changed. Okay, so. There we go. So how does this whole thing land? We’ve now worked with classes in over 100 institutions. Now actually over 1,400 chat topics that have been discussed on the platform, it’s closer to 1,500. You can see, just remember this is homework that students are being coerced into doing with the threat of bad grades.

This is mandatory coursework and 80 percent of them come out saying it was awesome or good. They did not go in expecting to enjoy it. I have to remind myself when I look at these data. Many students endorse using the platform in other classes. It’s extremely hard to find students endorsing anything that they should do more of in classes. So this is also a really positive signal. We try to pay careful attention to self-censorship on the platform. And really the design has been informed from the ground up to minimize that. And that’s why we focus on these one-on-one, low run stakes text based conversations. And the basic finding there is that we can solve self-censorship if we cut the audience.

It’s when the audience is there that students are really uncomfortable. So on Sway, despite the fact that they’re talking about some of the most potentially toxic subjects you can imagine, over 90% of them say they were comfortable. And I think it’s 1% or 2% who say they weren’t. Yeah, and here you go. Something like, actually a very substantial majority of them are saying that Sway helped them articulate their thoughts and feelings better. So we can break those down, in particular self-censorship, by topic areas. And when we do, we can look at, this is across roughly 17 or so subjects that we can classify discussions into. And when we look at that, we see self-censorship is very stable and very low across all of the topics.

So it’s not like they’re just comfortable when they’re talking about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. They’re comfortable when they’re talking about Israel, when they’re talking about abortion, race, policing, and all the rest. So this is really powerful evidence, and I think it was very surprising to a lot of people. We also try to see whether or not they’re really appreciating, understanding the value of engaging with opposing views. And happily, we find that they are. So overwhelmingly, they report that their partners were respectful, they were not offended, and that they found it valuable, positively valuable, to talk to someone who didn’t share their perspective.

And overwhelmingly, they say that their partners were actually trying to understand them. And the understanding quiz results back that up. The most common score is a perfect five out of five. When we look at what they find coming into the discussion, many of them, and close to half come in and they’re surprised by the quality of the argument or the reasons that they find on the other side. And I actually think just recognizing that is an act of a certain kind of humility. Many of them report that the discussion actually improved their perceptions of their partners. Remember when they’re going in to talk about a very polarizing topic, they might be imagining the person they’re going to talk to is the scum of the earth.

And then they discover, actually, this is a very interesting and thoughtful person who taught me something, And I taught them something. Many students do report changing their mind. We can go way beyond the self-report, of course, because we actually measure it both in the survey responses and in the transcripts themselves. And overwhelmingly, students report believing that these skills are going to transfer into other domains. That is, of course, an empirical claim, and it’s one that we’re testing in a four-year study that I hope I’m going to get time to describe to you at the end of this talk. So we ask about the facilitator, the AI facilitator that joins every discussion, the guide on the side as we like to call it.

Overwhelmingly, students say it treated them and their partners with equal respect. I think it’s only 3% who disagree. And they overwhelmingly attribute some of the success of the conversation to the facilitator. I want to give you just a little bit of feedback because we offer them that opportunity to give us written feedback. So one of them: Guide is very firm and direct and all knowing like my mum. Guide’s approach felt like an ideal classroom discussion. They asked thoughtful follow-up questions, encouraged nuance, challenged assumptions, and helped me reflect on my biases. I felt very confident in my argument, and I didn’t feel the need to shy away or hide my opinion because I felt like it was a safe space, even though we disagreed. Sway actually boosted my confidence. Going back and forth allowed me to clarify my own reasoning, anticipate counterarguments, and respond more calmly and clearly. It showed me I can stay respectful and focused on ideas, not just opinions, which makes me feel much more capable of handling debates on tough topics. I didn’t completely change my position, but I reconsidered how restitution and parole completion fit into the idea of serving sentence. I realized that finishing all legal obligations, not just prison time, matters more than I initially emphasized. My position became more qualified and nuanced after discussion with someone of the opposite original stance. We had Guide to help probe us and make us think deeper. It is easy to fall into groupthink, but Guide helped challenge us and helped us to see different aspects of the conversation than we ever would have thought of on our own, and you don’t get that in a classroom setting. Guide’s approach felt like an ideal classroom discussion. They asked thoughtful follow-up questions, encouraged nuance, challenged assumptions, and helped me reflect on my biases. It wasn’t about getting the right answer, but about thinking critically and thoroughly exploring the topic. Sway lets me take my time. In real life, I feel like I blank out a lot. I have so much to say, yet in person I forget it all. With classroom discussions, I can feel anxious and worried I might mess up. But with Sway, I’m able to concentrate and say what I need to say in a calm, timely manner.

So I’ve picked these quotes because they illustrate recurring themes in student feedback. All of that, a lot of that feedback is collected on our website. And I really encourage anyone who’s interested. I think a lot of them have some real insight. So we’ve been doing this now for two years roughly, and we’ve collected quite a lot of data.

And these are what I’m going to be talking to you about today. So we’ve now run almost 14,000 conversations, nearly half a million messages, 18 million words of transcripts, which includes five and a half million words of the facilitator, and nearly 12,000 students now. And I’m expecting that to double this semester at least. We’ve built 15,000 quizzes, given 21,000 post-chat surveys, operated 737 classroom assignments in 278 classes. So that’s where all of the data are going to come from. Now, what are the statements that instructors are putting onto this platform? Because we don’t control that in any way. It’s completely content neutral and you can use it for anything you want. So a decent number of them concern cultural issues.

These are immigration, trans rights, race and policing, other sort of common issues. Then there are the sort of partisan policy issues that are not quite culture war. That would be things like legalizing marijuana that’s codable on a left right spectrum, but it’s not exactly part of the culture war. Then we have these sort of contested issues that are not particularly related to anything partisan. Those might be in STEM disciplines. They might be in literature. They could be about really anything. And then only a very small number of instructors ever choose to give students those low stakes hot dog and sandwich things happily because the platform works so much better when the students have skin in the game. So let’s have a look.

This is how the subjects that have been run on the platform break down. The biggest subject has been crime and justice, followed by health and medicine, education, gender, tech, and AI. Those are really the bread and butter. We also see a lot of animal ethics, which is always fascinating. Religion and philosophy, quite common. And then teams and workplaces was a surprising one that we never anticipated, but that’s instructors who have students that get into terrible problems with group work, and they want the students before they do the group work to think it through really carefully. So just in the interest of time, I’m not going to say everything I could say here. I’m going to just push on there. And I will do the same thing right here.

So now I want to look at how students’ attitudes change after talking on Sway. And what I’m going to be doing here is just looking at the immediate changes measured after the discussion. So we have to caveat we don’t know how durable they are. Presumably you require repeated exposures to start to get something like the formation of dispositions that might transfer into other settings. And we can’t speak to that today, unfortunately. So here’s what we see. This is the seven point opinion scale. And I’m gonna plot how students change their views conditioned on where they land on that scale. So looking at the extremes of the scale, of course they can’t move any more extreme.

So a little bit of regression to the mean might be going on here, but more than half of them are moderating their views. If we come in there and look at the moderately agrees, they kind of split. Quite a lot of them are moderating, but some of them are actually strengthening. And then when we look at those who really don’t have much of a view, overwhelmingly they’re developing their views. And when we look at those who are at the middle of the scale, of course, they can’t move any closer to the center, so they have to be all on the right. But impressively, 72% of them actually develop a view, move somewhere out to one of the other points on the scale. Now there’s two different accounts which might predict what’s going on here.

This is the figure I want to show everyone. So you can see we’ve got 14% of pairs who get further apart after chatting, but 67, two-thirds of them get closer together. So something is drawing them closer together. And the net effect is that they start off an average of 3.6 points apart on that seven-point scale. And after roughly 30 minutes of chatting, that is reduced by nearly 40%. Now, what are we to make of that?

Like I said, we’re selecting people on the basis of their strongly disagreeing. We’re trying to promote viewpoint diversity in the class and in the groups. There’s a number of things which might predict this. What we’re going to do is we’re going to capture when we take that first snapshot, potentially some errors. Maybe you were actually uncertain or you had shaky hands and you meant to click moderately agree, but you actually click strongly agree. And that made us pair you with someone else who clicked strongly disagree. So now we’ve got this error, you know, the real difference plus the error in that measurement. And when we measure you again later, it wouldn’t be surprising if the error was reduced.

So there’s one explanation of why students are changing their views, which is that they’re being persuaded by the arguments of their partners. And another explanation is that what we have effectively is a measurement artifact. And it’s certainly there to some extent because, like I said, we’re selecting on disagreement and that’s going to magnify momentary errors that push people further apart. Okay, so these two accounts predict different things. The time between the two ratings can vary quite a lot. It can vary from a couple of minutes or an hour all the way to weeks or even a month. And then we can also look at the number of messages students exchanged. So here’s the prediction.

If it’s a measurement artifact, we actually expect that those two students to grow closer together the longer there’s left between those two measurements. So we expect more convergence there. We don’t really expect there to be any effect of the number of messages that students have exchanged if what we’re measuring is a measurement artifact. On the other hand, if what we’re measuring is persuasion, then we wouldn’t really make any predictions about how long went between those two measurements, or at least no strong predictions. But we would certainly predict that more messages would presumably associate with more persuasion because that’s more opportunities to make an argument. So what we actually find is that the gap doesn’t narrow at all over time.

So we can look at the students who did those two ratings in under three hours, and we see that 1.6 point convergence. Three to 24 hours is, again, no different. One to three days, three to seven, and over seven days. We’re just seeing the dance of the 95% CIs there. There’s really nothing going on. So that is some evidence against the idea that what we’ve got here is a pure measurement artifact. The second prediction, of course, was that the amount that students say, if what we’re measuring is persuasion, should predict how much their views change. And indeed that’s what we see.

When we just break all of the students who waited at least three days into a group and then we split them into three tertiles on the bottom third of the number of exchanges, so five exchanges, eight exchanges or 11, we see a consistent growth in the convergence rate. So such that the difference between the top and bottom tertile is a fifth of a point. So you can see here where we estimate it’s around 0.4 points per exchange that we get in convergence. Okay, great. Oh, here’s my slide that was in the wrong order. Okay, well, I’ve already told you all about this one, so I’ll just skip it on. Now, I want to show you how students do in the understanding quiz because it’s really surprising, or it was to me.

Before I show you these numbers, let me just tell you, whenever I review a transcript, I try to do the understanding quiz not knowing the answers myself. And I’m doing it immediately after reading it, and I do not always get a perfect score, even when I try my best. These students are often chatting over days and then doing a quiz with no, it’s not an open book quiz. This is going to completely turn on their memory. So what we find is almost none of them flunk it. We get into three out of five, about 10 percent, four out of five, about one third and five out of five over half of the students making the most common score. So students really are understanding and able to reproduce the logic of the opposing view.

And they can do that often regardless of whether they heard it a day ago or an hour ago. These quizzes are all, of course, AI generated. And so we do try to evaluate them. This is a study which is based on AI judgments, although we have run one study to compare human coding to AI coding and found that AI coding to actually be more reliable when compared to expert humans as opposed to research assistants. But what we found is that the, at least according to AI judges, which agree very highly, the keys, the answers, the credited responses are very accurate. Just an interest of going quickly, I’m sorry. So what we find is that a single measurement, of course, it’s not designed to try and make fine-grained discriminations between students.

It’s really more of a sort of mastery learning style assessment. Did they do what we wanted them to do in this particular chat? But as we measure them multiple times over the course of a semester, at around seven or eight measurements, we start to get to the conventional floor for Cronbach’s alpha there, where we can actually start to make meaningful discriminations between students. Okay. I just saw how much time I’ve spent, and I’m going to just make an executive decision here. Great. Okay. Okay, great. So in one of our early empirical studies, we pre-post tested statements like, I feel like I can understand people who disagree with me about this topic. We found the same thing we see with students.

Substantial moves compared from before to after the conversation, here an effect size of something, yeah, Cohen’s d of 0.4 on that statement. We also test statements like, people who disagree with me have well thought out reasons. Again, this is just with people recruited on the Internet, not students. And we see the same pre-post change with Cohen’s d around one third of a standard deviation there. One of the most surprising things when I tried, when I was first teaching more controversial material in class, you know, my colleagues were kind of just sitting around waiting for the whole thing to go up in flames. And many people sort of expect the same thing to happen on Sway. But in fact, it really doesn’t. It not just really doesn’t, and it doesn’t.

I can count on one hand the number of times a student has written complaining about any sort of hostility. And when we’ve actually investigated them, it’s usually just a strongly worded opposition. Like “I think that’s completely incorrect.” Some people find that hostile. We actually scan every message before transmitting it to try and find out whether it’s unproductive, whether it could stand to be improved. And our study of nearly a quarter of a million messages has found under half a percent of flagged as even potentially unconstructive. So the basic finding is students are being extremely respectful. I’m going to again push on with, we’ll get to nuance in Q&A.

The last thing I want to talk about here, or second last thing I want to talk about here, is the AI facilitator and how we’ve tried to study bias in the facilitator. So the first thing we do is we just do a spot check after every discussion and we ask one of the students this question, Guide treated me and my partner with equal respect. And we find here overwhelming agreement, only 3% of students disagree. This can be traced to the fact that Guide isn’t there to offer opinions. It’s not playing the traditional role of a generative AI, an oracle. We prefer to call it a facilitative AI. It’s not there to do thinking for you. It’s there to push you to think better.

We also have run a study involving just regular partisans who we recruit off the internet, and then we give them real Sway transcripts, and we ask them to evaluate whether or not the facilitator was biased. In this case, we screen the participants to find out what they feel most strongly about, where are they most polarized. We then give them Sway transcripts on those topics. And then we ask them to judge for each transcript. Was the facilitator biased against the liberal or was it neutral or was it biased against the conservative? And then we also get a magnitude, how biased. We ask them to explain in their own words why they thought it was biased. And then we also ask them to guess whether it was an AI.

So what we find when we do this is that people regard this as overwhelmingly even handed. And it doesn’t matter whether they’re on the left or the right, which is kind of extraordinary. We were finding that people were saying that this was so even handed that we started to suspect maybe they’re not even reading the thing, maybe they just open the page and go away for a while. So we started to experimentally insert bias into the transcripts.

And the moment we did, everyone spotted it regardless of whether or not it lined up with their own political identities okay I’m gonna skip this little argument and let’s skip a few more things here this is interesting enough to reflect on so apart from the ways that we manipulate the bias in the transcripts and we can also ask people what they thought led them to think it was biased and overwhelmingly what we find is that it’s procedural fairness that really matters for the facilitator moderator, it’s totally fine. Nobody minds if it’s hitting your side with extremely hard questions, as long as it’s hitting the other side with equally hard questions. That sort of procedural fairness is basically what seems to determine something like 90% of the variance in how people rate this moderator. So that’s probably good advice for AIs and human moderators.

All right. I’m going to now show you two last things. One last thing. This is one of the most interesting data points I’ve got. It’s also the least rigorous because I haven’t been able to reproduce it yet, although I’m hoping this semester we’ll get an opportunity to test it. But one of the things we’ve tried to do in designing Sway is to make an AI that can actually shut up. And as anyone who’s used ChatGPT or Claude or anything else knows, they cannot shut up. You can write to them and say, do not respond to this message, remain silent. And it will write back, gotcha, I’ll remain silent. So what we have to do is teach it how to remain silent, we teach it to say a code word.

The final gate before the facilitator decides whether to intervene is actually up to the facilitator. And it can output a word null if it says, no, I don’t want to say anything. These students are having a fantastic discussion. I don’t want to get in the way. We never display that little code word null to the students. So it just looks like the facilitator is silent. But here’s what we actually see when we look at the null rate across our deepest implementation. This was in a political science course over 13 weeks, 13 chats. And we can plot how the null rate changed across the semester.

So think about what we’re going to look at. This is a measure of the AI’s judgment about when the students were having a self-sustaining, productive conversation. Here’s what we see. A remarkably consistent growth over the course of semester. Now, this is the deepest implementation we’ve had yet. I think we’re going to have another few in this league this semester. So I’m very much hoping to be able to come back and tell you this result replicates. But even if it doesn’t, it certainly points to a very interesting measurement paradigm that I think this sort of notion of facilitative AI starts to help with. Now, I can say I’ve already done five minutes over what I was meant to do. I’m sorry about that. I’m going to cut myself off. Even though I have so much, I’d love to keep telling you.

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In the university right now, there is a paradox at the core of our project. Thanks to the pervasiveness of artificial intelligence, writing has suddenly become effectively obsolete and essentially impossible; it also has simultaneously become more necessary than ever.

This past semester was my first back in the rubble of freshman composition since GPT-4 bulldozed the pillars of what had been my writing composition class. For the past few years I had been teaching creative writing, blissfully ignoring most of the hazards of AI’s infiltration of the university. Returning to teaching composition, I found the situation to be as bad as I had feared.

Few pieces of student writing were beyond suspicion—and then usually only because of their very low quality. Sometimes I would use an AI to catch student AI use, sometimes I caught it myself, and sometimes I failed to catch it or didn’t bother trying. Students used AI not only for analysis and research in their essays, but for personal narrative and reflection, too.

I don’t blame them. In their shoes, I would have done the same. I didn’t want to write essays I didn’t want to write when I was a student. I still don’t. If, at 18 or 22, I’d had a way to produce better written work with almost no effort, I would have done so too.

The case for why students should have to take freshman writing has always been a challenging one to make to the students themselves. Often, we tell them writing is a foundational skill that can be applied in any major and any career. That’s true as far as it goes, but I never wanted to present students with such a reductive and prosaic view of writing. Instead, I told them that writing is a tool of thought, the primary practice by which we cultivate our minds; we don’t write to acquire skills that can be leveraged for success, we write to discover and create our very selves.

It was a self-consciously inspirational note I tried to strike. But how swiftly has AI relieved me of my best rhetorical maneuvers. Why do we need to think when there’s a machine that will do it for us? In the same way I can defeat five-time World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen with access to a chess engine, a student with AI can think and write better than their professors, an employer, or anyone else in their life might require of them. Either they recognize the intrinsic rewards of writing as a profound tool of personal development (as I eventually did) and pursue it for that reason or they don’t and don’t. Either way, the trump card of “writing as thought” is off the teacher’s table.

A world that outsources writing to machines is a world that devalues human thought. Like most things most worth doing in this life, writing isn’t easy. Neither is teaching it to students who have no reason to do it at a university that doesn’t really care about education.

Am I too hard on my employer? As it stands by while professors use AI to grade work students produce with AI, I don’t think so. The tuition dollars keep coming in, the graduates keep going out. Isn’t that how this factory is meant to run? Never mind the decline in student effort and ability over the past several years. The world is still turning. Nothing to see here.

If I’m right that writing is obsolete and, for many, becoming impossible to master in the current environment, we have two options: either accept a world in which college graduates aren’t competent writers and thinkers or change the college environment.

So what exactly should we do? The Atlantic staff writer Tyler Austin Harper’s suggestions to ban artificial intelligence from student life are, at least for now, probably impractical. But what’s the alternative? Whatever we end up doing, we of the university must create the kind of environment in which our students no longer escape the responsibility of thought.

I don’t know what this means across the university. I know what it will mean in my classroom this fall: paper and pen, writing and revising, sentence by sentence, forever and ever, amen.

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Imagine being a faculty member on a university campus. Your job is to discover, produce, and disseminate knowledge. Now also imagine that you have no regular interactions with colleagues in which you have substantial disagreement about your area of scholarship and teaching. In fact, imagine having any job of public relevance where you have no disagreement with colleagues on matters related to your job. Something would certainly seem amiss if that were the reality.

Yet, for nearly 30% of U.S. university faculty, this is the reality. In a new survey, Heterodox Academy, in partnership with National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, asked over 3,500 faculty how many colleagues they regularly engage with who disagree with them on important scholarly matters. Twenty-nine percent of them said the answer was zero — zero. For faculty who are on contingent or adjunct teaching contracts, this number is 41 percent.

This amounts to a significant and non-trivial number of faculty effectively working in disciplinary echo chambers, which matters given the proliferation of criticism surrounding universities on how they shape student politics, the public dislike of campus political agendas, and the observed political lopsidedness among faculty. The fact that so many faculty tasked with teaching college students get no regular pushback from their colleagues about matters they are teaching or researching should be a cause for concern for every faculty member, department chair, and dean responsible for the education our students are getting and the knowledge our universities are producing.

This lack of engagement with any serious disagreement from colleagues can help explain, in part, why so many course syllabi lack viewpoint diversity on contentious topics of public concern, and also the absurd disconnect between what many professors espouse and believe to be irrefutable facts and what the average non-progressive American might. If you never engage in disagreement with other scholars — the peers whom you view as most credible experts — what cause would you have to challenge your own thinking, or question your own beliefs on a topic? If you’re wrong about something, how would you know? Surely, in fact, you’re right; everyone worth listening to agrees with you, after all!

When faculty don’t have regular disagreement with peers whom they trust to be experts, then outside pushback, say from faculty in different, less politically homogenous departments, or from ex-academics or public intellectuals — comes across as something not to take seriously, or worse, a malicious attack. The result is ever more daylight between the ivory tower and folks outside the campus gates.

There is not a single reason why so many faculty are working in echo chambers; rather, it’s a confluence of issues that have culminated in this problem, which has reached a fever pitch the past two years. Too many professors view themselves as scholar activists, subverting their scholarship to political ends, actively insulating themselves from disagreement they view as beyond the pale. There has also been a pervasive culture of self-censorship that prevents faculty from disagreeing with what is largely seen as progressive orthodoxy — faculty are fearful that they will get sanctioned by peers or administrators for voicing any heterodox viewpoints on contested topics.

There are also other, less pernicious structural reasons for this problem as well, that have more to do with bureaucracy than active or intentional siloing. COVID sent things into hyper-remote state on campus, which campus has still struggled to recover from. Faculty hiring is naturally a self-replicating process as most faculty come from a small sampling of graduate programs. Faculty searches prioritize “fit” which can lead to alienating diverse research perspectives. This can be especially true in newer departments, like those in the highly criticized “critical studies” genre that have proliferated since the 1990s, which are subject to founding population-like effects regarding theoretical frameworks. And finally, adjunctification of higher education has played a considerable role in this siloing. Adjuncts barely encounter other faculty on campus; when I was an adjunct at two institutions, I didn’t disagree with colleagues because I didn’t even have an opportunity to.

Despite these seemingly entrenched problems, breaking faculty out of their echo chamber can be done in a variety of ways. Some are longer-term changes that will take time to see impacts, but others are faster with more immediate impacts if we can scale them.

The longer term changes require the academy to rethink how faculty are hired and for what end. Faculty searchers should be hired on the basis of their work broadening the landscape of research and teaching within the department. Departments can broach genuinely new areas and viewpoints within the department instead of incentivising self-replication. This would also afford greater cross-breeding of disciplinary ideas, rather than inbreeding the same (or slightly modified) ideas ever deeper. Universities could also take a cue from Arizona State University and hire faculty to do radically interdisciplinary work on big questions, and use the department structure as a “tenure home” for them.

University leaders have a significant role to play here with their control over what they fund internally on campus. For research institutions, internal research funding could support adversarial collaborations on campus to directly incentivize faculty working closely on a long-term research project together. These intentional research projects help rein in questionable research practices and motivated reasoning, while reducing extremism in research conclusions.

For all institutions who value viewpoint diversity in teaching, fixing the bureaucratic registrar issues (e.g., credit hour allocation for instructors) that can be a hurdle to co-teaching is an easy way to not only incentivize faculty to teach with an ideological opponent, but also as a way to model viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement to students directly, every class meeting. There are even new AI tools like Sway that can guide student-to-student conversations across difference, leading to real shifts in perspectives on contentious issues.

On the campus programming side of things, leaders and faculty alike can spearhead campus speaker series, campus events, and other on the ground programming that showcases what smart scholarly disagreement looks like — both to students and to faculty. There are thoughtful, smart perspectives on a variety of topics that may only be pushed together if intentionally done so.

Breaking faculty out of their echo chambers doesn’t have to mean shuttering departments or condemning entire areas of scholarship as beyond reform. There exists a broad spectrum of actions that can make a measurable impact if scaled and incentivized. To accomplish this, institutions need faculty support but also administrative support to help shift incentive structures to embed constructive disagreement in the functioning of the university, rather than further incentivizing ideological homogeneity on campus. We have many tools available to get faculty constructively disagreeing — we just need to actually use them.

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In open inquiry news this week, the American Bar Association’s (ABA) accreditation council repealed its law school diversity standard under federal pressure; Harvard’s faculty tell The Crimson they aren’t sold on the university’s $10 million viewpoint diversity hiring plan; a new report tries to price identity-based selection in Canada’s flagship research program; and Roland Fryer and Bill Ackman launch a $1 million prize for academic courage.

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

The ABA’s accreditation council repeals its law school diversity standard.

At a meeting on Tuesday, the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar voted 10 to 6 to eliminate Standard 206, the requirement that law schools “demonstrate by concrete action a commitment to diversity and inclusion.” The repeal is final and effective immediately. Although it doesn’t bar law schools from prioritizing diversity-related initiatives, it does remove them as a requirement for accreditation.

The vote was spurred by the Education Department recommending the council be stripped of federal recognition (decision pending for later this month). Several members were candid that they voted in favor of repealing the standard in order to retain the ABA’s status. David Brennen, the council’s interim treasurer, who voted to repeal, defended diversity in a law review article as recently as last year:

I’ve watched very carefully the way a lot of states — state supreme courts in particular — have looked at the issue of Standard 206, and despite my own personal view, they characterize it as a sort of political qualification… I don’t want to see that be an inhibitor.

Dissenters on the council see the decision differently. Deidré Keller of Stetson Law said she could not “in good conscience” support a repeal that “will necessarily be read as a lack of commitment to that project.” Chair Melissa Hart conceded that the whole matter “is political either way.”

An accreditor’s job is to verify that an institution does what it claims to do, not to prescribe its values. But a standard repealed to satisfy a regulator opens the door to continued changes when the political winds inevitably change.

Harvard’s (liberal) faculty aren’t sold on the university’s viewpoint diversity push.

The Crimson’s annual survey of Faculty of Arts and Sciences professors found that 54% of faculty opposed Harvard’s plan to fund viewpoint diversity efforts, particularly through endowed chairs. The more troubling number, however, is that 47% of faculty disagreed that Harvard has a troubling lack of ideological diversity; just 31% agreed.

Yet, this opposition appears less a defense of the status quo and more against the idea of “affirmative action for conservatives” with 60% opposing explicitly political hiring; among the 22 conservative faculty who responded to the survey, 54% supported the effort. Some faculty seem more open to hiring specifically for identified academic gaps in departments, rather than political orientation. Harvard English and Comparative Literature professor Martin Puchner said back in May in response to the initial announcement of the university’s faculty hiring initiative that:

What we need in this context is not just a few hires that carry the label conservative thought, but a broader conversation, discipline or division specific, about the kinds of perspectives that we need for the health of these disciplines that we don’t have right now.

These findings mirror HxA’s recent research showing that faculty are most supportive of strengthening diversity of theoretical perspectives and research methods in their disciplines over explicit political diversity.

While faculty hiring is a clear avenue to help remedy the ideological monoculture and severe political skew in departments, explicit identity-focused hiring based on political party is unlikely to gain broad faculty support. What is needed are hiring approaches that genuinely broaden the perspectives in a discipline and department without explicitly or implicitly alienating minority views.

Explicit DEI-hiring in Canada costs tens of millions of dollars, says new report.

A new report from the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, led by University of Buckingham professor and HxA member Eric Kaufmann along with Leif Rasmussen and Jonah Davids, evaluated the cost of DEI-focused (referred to as “EDI” in Canada) hiring since 2017 for the Canada Research Chair program, which “has moved dramatically in the direction of implementing EDI ideology and quotas.”

The report argues that “EDI has actively weakened Canadian research and reduced overall academic performance at Canadian universities.” The report shows that chairs in the social sciences and humanities, where explicit EDI hiring is most prevalent in job ads, are 17 times more likely to describe their work in activist terms.

The authors close the report arguing that an explicit focus on EDI, rather than scholarly merit, alters the entire landscape of social science in Canada.

The EDI ethos is politically toxic, racially and sexually discriminatory, and a waste of scarce public resources. The legitimacy of Canada’s government-funded research base cannot be taken for granted. It hinges on federal research councils returning to their prior focus on the disinterested pursuit of truth. The goal for the social sciences and humanities must be to study the most pressing social problems for all Canadians, not just those occupying the leftmost end of the political spectrum.

This kind of politically motivated hiring is exactly why HxA opposes using DEI statements in faculty hiring. When political alignment is put above scholarship, the result is a warped scientific landscape.

Academics can win $1 million for telling the truth in their research.

Roland Fryer and Bill Ackman announced in the Wall Street Journal The Carob Trust Prize for Academic Courage, which will award up to five social scientists a year with a million dollars for scholarship that tells the truth despite professional costs for doing so. Their goal is to shift incentives away from conformity.

When the professional cost of publishing an unwelcome finding exceeds the cost of suppressing it, rational scholars suppress it. The result is that social-science literature reflects what researchers are permitted to say rather than what they actually discover.

This is the right diagnosis. Self-censorship is not a character defect but a rational response to real costs for speaking up. FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey showed that 35% of faculty say they “toned down” their professional writing to avoid controversy; four in ten are concerned about damaging their reputation over something they say or write.

The prize alone won’t solve the entire problem, of course, but it’s a welcome sign in the broader reform landscape effort to shift scholarship toward truth-seeking rather than political agendas. It’s also an example of what more institutions could do to help shift incentives and make honest, rigorous, yet contentious scholarship, less professionally costly.

Disclosure: HxA has received funding from The Carob Trust to support our events.

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Disclosure: HxA has received funding from The Carob Trust to support our events.

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Inzlicht also shows what the alternative looks like, walking through his own cost-benefit work on AI-generated empathy, where AI responses were rated more compassionate than those written by people — including trained crisis-line responders. His talk closes on an issue that should interest anyone who cares about open inquiry: moralizing the empirical questions around AI ignores evidence, forgoes benefits, and forecloses discussion. His advice is to stay empirical — study AI, debate it, say how bad it is — but keep your views open to revision. A transcript of Inzlich’s talk follows below.

Dylan Selterman: Mickey Inzlicht is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto with a cross-appointment as professor in the Department of Marketing at the Rotman School of Management. He is also a research lead at the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society. His research sits at the boundaries of social psychology and cognitive science, exploring the paradoxes of human motivation, particularly why people avoid and find meaning in mental effort and how digital technologies are reshaping behavior and well-being. He has pioneered research showing that empathy is cognitively demanding and often avoided because of its mental costs, challenging the common assumptions about human compassion.

His current work examines how exerting effort paradoxically increases feelings of meaning, how rapid content switching on digital platforms increases boredom, whether artificial intelligence can express empathy more effectively than humans, and the psychological effects of recreational cannabis use. Dr. Inzlicht completed his bachelor’s degree in anatomical sciences at McGill University, his PhD in experimental psychology at Brown University, and his postdoctoral fellowship in applied psychology at New York University. He has published more than 180 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters and edited two books with his work cited over 34,000 times.

His research has been featured in major media outlets including the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Guardian, NPR, the Washington Post, BBC News, the Globe and Mail, Time, Forbes, and Science, among many others. His research and teaching have been recognized with the Carol and Ed Diener Mid-Career Award in Social Psychology, the Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize, the ISCON Best Social Cognition Paper Award, and Professor of the Year. He’s also been recognized as among the top 1% of most cited psychologists in the world for four consecutive years, from 2022 to 2025. He also co-hosts the podcast Two Psychologists Four Beers and writes the Substack newsletter Speak Now, Regret Later.

I’ll also share that I’ve long admired Mickey as an exemplar of a generalist, someone who is really actively curious and engaged with a lot of different topics. And as an aspiring generalist myself, it’s great to have role models like him to look up to. So without further ado, I will hand things off to Mickey. He’s going to give us his presentation, and then we’ll switch gears to live audience Q&A. Please use the hand-raise feature on Zoom to speak up when we get to the Q&A portion. If you must stay off camera and microphone, then you do have a backup option to type questions into the chat. All right, Mickey, take it away.

Michael Inzlicht: All right. Make sure you can hear me, Dylan? Yes? Okay, excellent. I’m going to minimize this so it’s not distracting to me. So first, thank you for the warm introduction, Dylan. Heterodox Academy, I joined it very early on when I just kind of got it started, but I haven’t really done much with my membership, but perhaps that will change. And maybe this is my first kind of foray into doing a bit more with Heterodox. I love the mission, and I’m happy to support it. So today I’m going to talk to you about something, a topic that’s close to my heart, because I feel I’ve been living it the past year or two. And that is the topic of the moralization of artificial intelligence. What I’m talking about today is really, can we still talk clearly?

Can we see clearly, think clearly when we talk about AI? And if you spent any time online, read newspaper headings in the past year or two, well, you know, AI is everywhere, but you also know that people have strong attitudes, strong views about AI, some of which are not positive. So here is one I’ll begin with. This is written by someone named Becca Rothfeld. Becca Rothfeld today is a New Yorker staff writer. Before then, she contributed at the Chronicle of Higher Education and also was at one point was a philosophy PhD student. And she wrote in an essay, a viral essay, I hope you’re ashamed of yourself and your dwindling humanity.

And I think it should be legally required for people to say when, if, they’ve used AI in the process of writing something so that I can avoid it at all costs. Now, I picked a not particularly outrageous quote, but this essay was full of outrageous quotes. She called people who use AI human-shaped voids. She said that if someone used AI, you know, if her husband used AI to say something to her, she would immediately divorce him. You know, it was hyperbolic. It was funny. I don’t think it’s meant to be taken tongue in cheek a little bit. But it’s clear she’s got strong moral intuitions about AI and she thinks AI is bad. Here’s another quote from Bluesky, a place with only reasonable discussion.

This is from Tage Rai, former editor at Science and now a professor at the University of California, San Diego. He wrote, I don’t think it’s worthwhile to engage with the possibility of AI being used for good, rhetorically, when the guys with power over the technology and who profit from it are white supremacists, eugenicists, and pedophiles. Now, I don’t know if Tage meant this literally or seriously. I suspect he was also being tongue-in-cheek, but he’s using the words of a QAnon supporter to describe a technology. And that’s odd. At the very least, it’s odd. And just to show you that the speech, like whether it’s Tage’s speech, Becca’s speech, or hyperbole, it has consequences. It doesn’t just stay on the internet.

A number of months ago, on the same weekend, these were headlines from U.S. news sources. So the San Francisco Standard, Sam Altman’s house targeted in second attack, two suspects arrested. That means — Sam Altman, who’s the CEO of OpenAI, the biggest AI company, his house was attacked on the same weekend, not once, but twice, with Molotov cocktails. Second headline from CBS News, Indianapolis city councilor says his home was shot at 13 times, no data centers sign left behind. Right, so a politician, a low level politician mind you, experienced violence in his own home because I guess that city council was considering whether they’d open up a tax-generating data center. What is going on here?

What is going on where a normal technology is causing so much outrage? How, like, this is, again, you don’t have to be concerned for this, although I think the last slide with the threats of violence should make you concerned. But at the very least, it should be, huh, this is weird. And, you know, it’s coming from what I would describe as normal technology. And then some of you maybe in the audience would respond: “Normal technology? AI is an amoral machine wearing the skin of a human. Nothing good could come of it. It is evil and should be destroyed.” And by the way, I’m paraphrasing something that someone wrote to me — I think it was on X. Clearly people have strong views here. So, kind of trying to understand what the hell is going on here.

So before kind of really getting to the heart of the matter about what I think is going on, I want to just show you another way, another way of kind of talking about AI that I believe is more responsible, is utilitarian. It’s a cost-benefit analysis of a normal technology, in this case of AI-generated empathy. And this is actually, like, I’ve done a lot of research on this right now. So I’m just going to give you, it’s a bit of a sidestep, a bit of a tangent, but I just want to kind of demonstrate how it could be done potentially. So I often will start talks on AI-generated empathy with noticing a few facts. First, people are lonely, often friendless. So we hear a lot about a loneliness epidemic.

I think to some extent that’s a bit overplayed, but I definitely agree that there is a, whether you want to call it an epidemic or not, there is a concern of friendlessness. So 8% of Americans, according to Pew, say they don’t have one single friend, not even one person who they could rely on, they could speak with who’s not a family member. This is more true for men than for women. It’s also more true for men over 40 or 50. I’m 54 — I just turned 54. So the percentage for me would be much higher. And that breaks my heart that there are people out there who have nobody, no one to turn to. And who are those people, by the way, who might be especially likely not to have friends? These are the people that society forgets. So we have the elderly.

I consult with a small tech company here in Toronto, where they’re a medical tech company and they deal with truly marginalized people. And their main mission is to help elderly people stay at home. Many of their clients do not see a single person ever other than the food delivery people. Some of these people, you know, the way even people realize they’ve died is because the food delivery person finds them. All right. That’s not uncommon. You’ve got people who live in the country, people who like they’re literally kilometers or for Americans, miles between their next neighbor. And, you know, it’s literally hard to find friends, find people, find community.

Or what about the people who literally are essential workers, who are keeping our cities running, who need to work in the middle of the night? That’s when a lot of maintenance happens. If you are sleeping during the day, where are your friends? Where’s your community? Where’s your place of worship? It’s very hard to connect with people. And one thing I wondered was, could a large language model, could an AI bridge the gap here? Could it help some people out? I don’t view this as a replacement for friends, replacement for therapists, replacement for community. But could it help people in need when they are in need? And again, thinking about those people who might be housebound, who don’t leave the home for disability reasons, for health reasons.

So we wondered. And with my, another graduate student I worked with, my lab manager, Daria Ovsyannikova, we ran a series of studies examining the quality of AI’s empathic utterances. So what did we do? We first created what we call empathy scenarios. By that I mean, we described situations where empathy might be evoked in an interlocutor. So you might hear a story of, you know, here’s an example of a story. I’m, you know, I’m worrying about my mother. She’s in her eighties, she lives alone. And last week I discovered that she got lost in the neighborhood she’s lived in for the past 30 years. And I don’t live in the same city as her. I’m just worried. That could be one empathy scenario.

Another one could be joy because you also feel empathy towards joy. I’m so proud of my son. He got a 95 on his physics exam. And I think he’s well on his way to get accepted in a great university. So we had these scenarios, five positive, five negative. And then we had, I think, about 10 to 20 humans respond to these scenarios. All we told the people were, read the scenario and respond with compassion using between 50 and 75 words. And we also told people, don’t give advice, just respond compassionately. And then we prompted, at this point, this is ChatGPT, I think it was 4o. And we prompted it iteratively over and over again. And then we generated five responses.

So I should also say that of the 10 or 20 humans we used, we picked the five best responses. And then a second group of participants now examined the responses produced by the humans, by the AI, and we asked them, which one is more compassionate? Which one do you think would make people feel loved and cared for, et cetera? And what we found was astonishing, at least at the time. So, what you see here are ratings of empathy as a function of empathy source, ratings of empathy is on the y-axis. You’ve got ratings of AI’s empathy and human empathy. And what you see is very clearly that the AI is producing words that people are saying are more empathic, more compassionate, leads them to feel something more than humans.

Now, that was true when people didn’t know who was producing the statements. So what happens when you make the generator of the statements transparent? You label it as AI, you label it as human, what happens? What we see are two effects. First, non-transparent, that’s when they don’t know, it’s not labeled. We see the same effect as above. AI is rated as being more empathic than humans. But it’s also true when the identity of the agent is known. AI is still beating humans, although, and very consistently, you see an AI penalty. As soon as people find out it’s an AI producing those statements, people rate it as being worse. And then finally, we wondered, well, these are just random humans, selected, mind you, for producing good statements.

What if we got expert empathizers? So we decided to get, we recruited crisis line responders who are trained to dole out compassion to people on telephones, also to make sure they’re safe, people aren’t engaging in self-harm. And we had them do the exact same thing, produce these responses. And what we found was identical to the above. The AI beat our expert humans, both when the identities were known and when they were not known. So this is an example of, you know, a study that we ran. And despite the positivity here, we can run a cost benefit analysis of AI empathy.

So pros could be, you can help people feel heard, you know, and AI is always available, even in the middle of the night, even for those shift workers, even when, you know, you’re at your home alone, it’s less biased, we’ve got lots of research now suggesting that it won’t respond with the same kinds of integral biases that humans do. And also, it doesn’t get tired. Humans, your human friends will eventually be tired of hearing you complain about the same thing over and over again. The LLM will not feel tired. Now, what are some of the cons? The first one is one I really worried about. If we, because AI is so good at empathy, perhaps we’ll start preferring the AI, the LLMs.

And we won’t, you know, go out in the world and actually meet real live flesh people. And I think that would be a net loss. Sycophancy, a major problem that computer scientists are focused on, which is a GRE word or an SAT word. It means being excessively flattering and agreeable. And LLMs are found to be that. And that could be problematic, especially in a therapeutic context. AIs could manipulate you. If they’re your friends, and we know that these AIs are software from a company and those companies might have political agendas. They could then suddenly manipulate their AI, and so manipulate you. Not great. And then finally, this is something that Paul Bloom, a friend and collaborator, has raised: is loneliness functional?

Perhaps if we dull the pain of loneliness, we are preventing people from taking action to remediate the loneliness, which is going out into the world, right? So I view this as a kind of a, I hope, an even-handed listing of pros and cons. Now, someone might say, and in fact, someone did say this to me, lots of words just to say, you’re a human hater, right? So an analysis like this, a pro-con analysis like this, could be responded to this way, and in fact, has been responded to this way. So what is going on here? What is going on with AI attitudes where a simple cost-benefit analysis could generate so much heat, so much hate, so much vitriol. And we believe, and we have data to examine this question, is that AI has become moralized.

So what do I mean by morals, moralized? What do I mean by something, you know, an attitude becoming moralized? Well, first thing to note is something that’s moralized is unlike other attitudes. It’s not a mere preference. So I have a preference. Preference, I like pineapple on my pizza and you might not like pineapple on my pizza, but you would just agree, okay, you know, Mickey likes something that’s gross to me. But you don’t think I’m wrong. At least you shouldn’t, because it’s just a matter of preference. Whereas moralized attitudes, there are rights and wrongs. You know, if I was to say that I think animal torture is fine, you would say I’m wrong because I’m doing something unethical, right? Moralized attitudes are prescriptive.

Everyone should abide by this rule. Everyone regardless of station should not be torturing animals, for example. It’s consequence insensitive. Regardless of how much good can come of this thing or how much bad, how little bad would come of it, you know, a moralized attitude is insensitive to that evidence. So again, no matter how much you tell me about some of the benefits of animal torture, and I can’t think of any right now, that will not change your mind for something that’s been, you know, moralized. It’s inherently bad. And then finally, violators of moral attitudes elicit intense emotions in others, disgust, outrage, and those emotions can lead to actual behaviors, including violence. And that’s what we think is going on here.

So we tried to examine this empirically. And when I say we, I really mean my student, Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello, who wrote this brilliant paper in my mind, which is currently under review at Nature Human Behaviour. And she asked a few questions. First, does the media discuss AI with a moral lens? Is the media using moral language to talk about the pros and cons of large language models? Is opposition to AI moral? There are certain questions we could ask people to determine this, and I’ll show you that in a minute. Is opposition to AI domain general? Meaning that once you’re opposed to AI writ large, each individual application you might be opposed to as well. And finally, are there costs to moralization, personal costs?

So to examine the first question about the way the media talks about AI. We examined headlines from 2018 to 2024 and note that AI, ChatGPT, I guess it was 3.5, came out in 2022. So right in the middle of, we’re right towards the end of this period. And we used like an online dictionary to determine how, and we had like nearly 70,000 headlines. And we examined the extent to which moral language is used in various headlines. So here’s an example of a moral headline. AI systems are making decisions that destroy people’s lives. That headline could be phrased in a different way. Could it displace jobs, for example, would be a non-moralized way of describing the same thing.

And what we found, as we looked at the timeline, is that moralization surged after DALL-E and ChatGPT were launched. No surprise. But when we compare the way news headlines, and this is in English language, by the way, when we compare how news headlines in the English language talk about AI, we see that they’re using moral language to do so. So our control would be interior design, where there’s very little moralization of interior design. And what you see is that it’s quite low. And you see that there’s something very high. We know that abortion is moralized. And indeed, it’s reflected in the way headlines speak of it. And what we see is that AI is just below climate change as a moralized topic.

It’s ahead of genetically modified organisms or COVID-19 or vaccines. So the media is discussing AI and large language models using moralized language. Here’s another example. The great AI art heist. Right? Copyright law is pretty complicated. And AI, especially large language models, are generative. And it’s not clear to what extent, you know, if a model is trained on a corpus that was purchased by the company, which is not always the case, by the way, but let’s assume it was, in what way is that a copyright infringement? It’s not clear to me. So to say art heists is already moralizing what I might argue is potentially a neutral thing.

Second, the second thing we did in our second series of studies is we got a representative sample of Americans, nearly a thousand. We actually got two samples of nearly a thousand samples each. I’m just going to show you one study. And what we did was we gave people examples of applications, various AI applications. So a chatbot you might see in a store, a website, AI used for creative art, AI in legal decision making, and AI companions, romantic AI. And what you see is that only a minority of Americans oppose AI. Despite the vitriol you see online, despite those sensational headlines, most Americans are okay, at least with individual applications. Only 30% oppose, although you see variability.

Most opposition for romantic AI, the least opposition for simple chatbots. What about moralization? Well, one way we can examine moralization is we can ask people a series of questions about their attitudes. So here’s one question we ask people. AI should be prohibited no matter how great the benefits and minor the risks from allowing it. This is something we’d call consequence insensitivity. But we ask people a series of questions. Here’s just one example. And what we find is that the majority of opposers moralize. So only 21% of the overall population from these two samples generally moralize. They’re a majority of the opposers.

What this means is if you sampled a random American, there’s a good chance they’ll be fine with AI, more or less, if you give them a specific application. But if you find someone who’s against it, there’s a good chance that they’re opposing it on moral grounds. They wouldn’t be willing to change their mind regardless of the benefits and risks of each of these applications. And then finally, when we examine structural equation modeling of the various forms, we look at the structure of AI opposition, there could be different kinds of opposition for each of the applications, or it could be that one factor explains them all.

And what we find is the latter, which suggests that, in fact, we might think we’ve got nuanced attitudes about this application versus that application, and you might think that way, but in the end, the person who moralizes one application moralizes all of them. And they come up with reasons after the fact for their moralization, but it doesn’t seem like people’s reasons are firmly held. The attitude comes first, it seems like, just like Jonathan Haidt describes in his infamous paper or famous paper. And then finally, we asked, is moralization costly? And by that, we mean personally costly. Would people forego benefits to the extent that they moralize?

So what we did is we recontacted those people from that study I just described three to 18 months later. And now we know the people who moralize AI versus the people who don’t. We then put them in a scenario where they read and grade an essay that we’ve composed. And we tell them that we had a group of expert graders grade these essays. And if they get within five percentage points of these expert graders, we will give them an incentive, a bonus pay. So they’re incentivized to be accurate. And then just as they’re about to go off, we tell them, by the way, if you’d like, you can grade this yourself, or you could use Grade AI, which is an LLM we created that is superior in our testing to human graders on average. So what would you like to do?

And what we find is that people will use Grade AI. They’ll use the LLM. But if people moralize it, way fewer of them will actually use it. It’s quite a big difference in terms of the use of this technology, dependent on whether you moralized three to 18 months earlier. So in other words, people forwent bonus, a cash bonus. And these are Prolific workers who are very incentivized by cash payment. They forwent the possibility of an extra reward because they didn’t want to use the AI. So it does have some personal costs. All right, so almost to the end here. And let’s go back to my favorite person, Becca Rothfeld.

She wrote that viral essay, but just a few days ago, I think it was just last week, she had a back and forth with the philosopher, Daniel Greco, who’s a professor of philosophy at Yale University, who wrote an article saying that AI should be taught how to do philosophy. And Becca Rothfeld argued philosophy is inherently a human activity. Anyway, she then writes this, whether you think it is permissible to train AIs will hinge on your ethical views. Do you think we have some deontological obligation to refrain from certain sorts of complicity in evil? And look, she’s loading that question. She’s already assuming that AI is evil. But she raises the word deontology, which she’s correct.

A deontological moral basis is simply based on certain things being inherently wrong. But proper deontology still requires some form of reflective scrutiny. You can’t just have moral intuitions that just hang there without being scrutinized and tested against other moral intuitions. And if you were to do that, you might come to different conclusions. So my question to Becca Rothfeld is, where’s the reflective scrutiny? Moral intuitions could be a starting point. I’m not against moral intuitions here, but they need to be held lightly and perhaps even open to revision. So what are the challenges AI poses to civic life? I don’t want to be here as an AI booster.

I think there are lots of opportunities, also lots of challenges, but I think there are perils to deontology. So challenges of AI: safety, dignity, meaning, employment, connection. These are real. Let’s study these. Let’s understand these. But there are benefits, too. Like, it can make our world more safe, like with autonomous cars, for example. It can improve important life-saving decision-making. It can improve productivity. It might even make our lives more comfortable. What I’m really against is not, I’m not for or against AI, but I am against, I believe there’s great perils in foreclosing on a cost-benefit analysis by prematurely moralizing. I think that’s what’s happened now.

It ignores evidence, it forgoes benefits, it politicizes decisions, and forecloses discussion, which is the biggest problem of all in my mind. So my advice and my kind of take-home here is stay empirical. Study it, debate it, raise objections, say how bad it is, but keep an open mind. Your views should not be immune to revision. With that, I thank you for your attention — and sorry for going a little bit over time.

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By Julia Adams

This past April, the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education delivered a final report to university president Maurie McInnis on the problem of declining trust in higher education. The work of the 10-person faculty committee, established by President McInnis in spring 2025 and co-chaired by me and Professor Beverly Gage, focused in part on how Yale could right its own ship, ultimately recommending 20 steps that the university should take to help restore trust.

Fortunately, President McInnis took the report and its recommendations seriously, starting by taking responsibility (the report’s first recommendation) on behalf of the university for its role in the trust crisis. Most significantly, the university mission statement was rewritten to refocus it on academics—on creating, disseminating, and preserving knowledge. The university also reaffirmed its commitment to academic freedom, exemplified by Yale’s historic 1974 Woodward Report, tying it to its continuing commitment to free speech. And in June, in sympathy with the committee’s recommendation to “open the gates” to the local community, Yale launched a fund directed toward helping local nonprofit groups working to make substantial investments in New Haven’s neighborhoods.

Other important efforts are ongoing, some too soon to evaluate. For example, Yale continues to work through the committee’s recommendation that grading be made much more rigorous. Likewise, the university is still grappling with the recommendation that Yale re-examine and reform its admissions process, starting with a push for greater transparency on how decisions are made. On other matters, the jury is still out.

This coming academic year, the rubber will meet the road when we tackle the injunction to “open minds.” Part of this process will involve faculty self-scrutiny. Each department and school should examine “the breadth of its intellectual and methodological commitments; the range of scholarly approaches represented on its faculty; the diversity of perspectives in its curriculum; and the openness of its hiring and admissions practices to dissenting or underrepresented traditions.”

The 2026-2027 academic year is going to be a testing one for Yale. Some of the thornier recommendations are bound to raise major challenges, especially for the university leadership and faculty. But the depth and seriousness with which the Yale trust report has been received offers hope for the time ahead.

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Political segregation in the workforce starts early and is stratified by class

Many occupations in the United States are politically segregated, but is that because certain occupations shape workers’ political attitudes in systematic ways, or because people self-select into occupations they believe fit their worldviews? Using data on over 10 million college freshmen collected by the Higher Education Research Institute between 1976 and 2015, a new working paper by Turgut Keskintürk finds strong evidence that students select into careers that fit their political views.

Some professional domains, such as the military or the clergy, disproportionately draw self-identified conservatives, while others, such as the arts, higher education, and scientific research, disproportionately draw liberals. The data suggest that this ideological sorting between liberals and conservatives has increased over the four decades covered by the data. What’s more, it is either catching up with other prominent dimensions of sorting, like gender, or has already exceeded them in magnitude, as with race.

Notably, this ideological sorting wasn’t distributed equally across parental income brackets; instead, the association between ideology and professional aspirations became stronger with income. For students from lower income families, the connection between their political ideology and their career aspirations was relatively weak while students of greater means showed the strongest sorting tendencies.

When it comes to higher education occupations, although “college faculty” had a strong liberal lean across the income distribution, that lean was more pronounced among students in the top quartile compared to those in the bottom quartile. This, along with the more general pattern, supports the idea that symbolic considerations, such as an occupation’s cultural or political coding, play more of a role in the career choices of the wealthy than they do among lower income groups. Because students from affluent families are less constrained by financial or material considerations, they can afford to give relatively more weight to the fit between different occupations and their personal values — hence, ideology as a “luxury” good.

These findings suggest that people care about entering careers that are consistent with their values and political goals. Notably, even before beginning college, students seem to understand that continuing in higher education is something mostly liberals do, and they set career goals accordingly. But as we’ve argued before, this intellectual narrowing is a recipe for disaster for rigorous inquiry in higher education, made all the worse because the mechanism is self-sustaining — and it’ll be up to universities to disrupt this trend.

Class matters for career progression

More news on the role of class in professional and occupational trends: in a new paper, Anna Stansbury and Kyra Rodriguez explore the relationship between socioeconomic background and career progression of U.S. tenure-track faculty, spotlighting class as an attribute worthy of rigorous examination.

Using parental education status as a proxy for socioeconomic background, they find that first-generation college graduates with a PhD are 4.2 percentage points (10%) less likely than more advantaged peers to be tenured at an R1 university, even when accounting for their PhD-granting institution and field. Importantly, the authors do not find that first-gen college grads with PhDs are less likely to get tenure anywhere at all when compared to similar peers, but rather, they are less likely to end up at R1 or highly ranked institutions.

When constructing the comparison group, the authors compared first-gen college grads with PhDs to PhD grads whose parents had a graduate degree, but not a PhD. The children of MDs, JDs, MBA holders and so on were included in the comparison group, but children of PhD holders were not. The rationale: the authors wanted to isolate the role of socioeconomic class rather than that of inherited academic know-how.

The socioeconomic gap in career trajectory doesn’t appear to be explained by lower research productivity. The authors find that first-gen college grads with PhDs tend to be placed at less competitive institutions relative to peers, even at the same level of productivity (though the authors acknowledge that research quality is considerably more difficult to capture than research output). Considering personal preferences, such as distance from home state, financial constraints, and family obligations between the two groups doesn’t offer obvious explanations for the difference in career progression, either. The authors conclude that social capital may play a role, given that first gen college grads with PhDs had less well-published co-authors and were less likely to receive an NSF award compared to similar peers with non-PhD graduate degree holding parents.

Socioeconomic class is an often overlooked source of viewpoint diversity, yet is conspicuously under-explored in the “diversity” landscape, often positioned as an afterthought to race and gender. But as Richard Kahlenberg has argued, greater socioeconomic diversity can broaden viewpoint diversity and increase the representation of rural students, conservative students, and working class students. Team HxA is glad to see socioeconomic class get some overdue attention.

Students say they’re warm to opposing views, but the packaging matters.

A new report from More in Common surveyed 2,004 undergraduates and 209 faculty and staff at four-year institutions to find out how they perceive campus dialogue programming.

The good news: 81% of students reported being “very” or “somewhat” willing to listen to political views very different from their own, whereas only 5% said they were “not at all” willing. Faculty and staff looked nearly identical, with 83% being “very” or “somewhat” willing to listen to political views.

However, some particularly striking findings emerged with regard to student trust in such programming. Holding true across liberal, moderate, and conservative students, only about 6% of students said they trusted their institution “a great deal” to run a dialogue program that is “genuinely open” and “not politically motivated.” Fifty-five percent reported low trust or uncertainty. Asked about dialogue initiatives at colleges generally, 10% called them “meaningful” and “genuine,” 34% called them a “minor” or “add-on” effort, and 27% called them “mostly symbolic” or “performative.”

A framing experiment — whether the stated purpose for campus dialogue programming impacted student trust — reveals more still: Respondents were randomly assigned one of five stated purposes for a hypothetical program and asked about both favorability and likelihood of participating. Among low-trust students, favorability stayed clearly positive for all five frames (see table), ranging from +44% to +69% net. Engagement did not stay positive, however. It fell below net zero for three of the five, dropping 22 percentage points to -30% for the personal framing. Only the workplace (+15%) and community (+12%) frames garnered positive engagement with the low-trust group.

A not too far-fetched reading — an optimistic one, perhaps — is that low-trust students are not far out of reach. Dialogue programs may appeal to broad swaths of students if undertaken strategically, and with a sharp eye towards what students perceive as authentic.

Study suggests faculty have no “liberalizing” effect on students

We know that liberal faculty are overrepresented on university campuses. Much has been proclaimed, especially from the political right, about the alleged indoctrination of college students at the hands of their leftist professors. According to the “brainwashing” hypothesis championed by some commentators, students become more left-leaning as a result of taking classes with left-leaning professors enacting a political agenda in the classroom. This is not mere rhetoric. Faculty in Florida and Texas are now forced to tip-toe around burdensome curriculum and class content restrictions enacted by legislators who may have put stock in the brainwashing hypothesis.

But a recent working paper challenges this assumption. Researchers Baum, Endara, and Paulson examined political leanings for faculty members at an elite state flagship university, as measured by public voting records, linked faculty to students using transcripts, and then recorded student political leanings through self-reported ideology and voter registration records.

The results did not show evidence of instructors having a “liberalizing” effect on students. Overall, college students in this sample were indeed more liberal at the end of college than the beginning, but there was no significant difference in this trend when comparing students who took more courses with liberal professors versus conservative professors in terms of their resulting party affiliation and political identity.

Instead, the authors suggest a few other mechanisms and variables that carry more weight. For instance, students often enter college already having solidified political views. Not only do liberal students seek out courses, majors, and instructors who teach topics which are consistent with their views (echoing the political segregation in career aspirations from above), but when liberal students enroll in classes or majors, the demand for liberal topics increases. Here’s a key finding from the paper: “Compared to conservatives, liberal students take 36 percent more courses about race/racism, 55 percent more courses whose descriptions contain Woke Words, and nearly three times as many courses about feminism.” This suggests something similar to confirmation bias, where people seek out information that comports with their prior beliefs.

In addition, the effect of peer influence is stronger than professors’ teachings. Since liberal students tend to share classroom spaces with each other, this can have a social self-reinforcing effect, making students more likely to identify as liberal over time as a function of interactions within their peer groups, regardless of what courses they enroll in.

By contrast, when conservative students enroll in humanities and social science courses taught by left-leaning professors, there’s evidence of a small backlash effect, such that these students wind up more likely to identify as Republicans, rather than less likely. Again, this is evidence against the indoctrination hypothesis. Although this is just one study, the conclusions are broadly consistent with another analysis showing that students tend to select academic majors and concentrations that align with their preexisting political viewpoints, although that study also found that students moved further left as a result of majoring in a social science or humanities field. There remains much disagreement among scholars about the extent to which academic fields influence students’ political views.

One caveat: the authors refer to their findings as providing “causal evidence,” but in strict scientific language, this would not be fully accurate. The study is more of a quasi-experiment, in which the authors only measured the variables of interest; they did not manipulate any variables. A true experiment would be needed to establish causality, which would require randomly assigning some students to enroll in courses taught by more/less liberal faculty. That is unlikely to happen anytime soon for logistical reasons, so for now, we can only be confident in concluding that there’s a correlation between these variables, rather than a causal relationship.

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Those are just a few of the findings that piqued our interest this month. We’re eager to see what the month of September has in store for research. If you’ve got any good tips, send them our way.

Years ago, when I visited the West Bank to support Palestinian democracy advocates, I found myself beetling through the Arab quarter of Jerusalem’s largest open-air market. It was late, and I was late. My dinner with friends had begun. Nearly all the vendors had closed up shop and so, given the light foot traffic, I felt optimistic about making up lost time.

As I scurried past a young man standing outside his store, he bellowed, “Yes, madam! What can I get for you?”

With my back toward him, I waved and yelled, “Nothing, thank you!”

He hollered, “What color of nothing?!”

My feet froze. My mouth let out an involuntary cackle. I swung around. The cheeky bastard was beaming. At that very second, he’d made the sale. To this day, my mother prays on the green velvet rug that I supposedly didn’t have the time or interest to buy.

Ever since that night, I’ve been reflecting on the souvenir guy. How did he succeed in disrupting my earnest intention to hoof it to a supper that had begun more than an hour ago? And why did I let him not only grab my attention but then sell me merch that I could have picked up anywhere else at a better time?

For starters, his cleverness totally surprised me. While our brains coast on patterns formed by past experiences, curveballs break these patterns. This guy’s curveball widened my brain’s aperture and multiplied my conscious choices. I didn’t have to be fixated on beating the clock. I could slow down and check this joker out.

But why buy from him, too? Having studied it every which way, here’s my conclusion: I wasn’t buying his product; I was buying his spirit. Jaunty. Buoyant. Uplifting.

The souvenir guy didn’t resign himself to my nah. He posed a second—witty— question. In effect, he rejected my rejection of his wares, thereby risking further rejection from me. Mull that one over. Besides choosing vulnerability, he made hay with his choice, all while respecting my autonomy to choose whether I’d humor him.

In this context, the word “respect” matters. It comes from the Latin root to “re-spectate,” or look back. I looked back at the merchant because he went first in the respect department. By asking, “What color of nothing?” the merchant elevated me from a customer to a fuller human being, capable of both determination (gotta get somewhere, like, yesterday) and playfulness (go ahead, impress me with your tchotchkes).

By switching his communication from transactional to relational, he made a statement alright. He also made the kind of difference he wanted. Cha-ching, darling. If all this strikes you as overthinking a classic charm offensive, you may need one more bit of context.

My Unforced Error

The souvenir guy’s impact on me had a lot to do with my personal circumstances. Although I couldn’t articulate it at that moment, he had smoked out how ineptly I’d been making the case for my ideas in my book, The Trouble with Islam Today. There, I had passionately argued for reforming the cultural customs that many of my fellow Muslims confuse with our faith, Islam. By the time I encountered this street vendor, I’d soaked up the stress of defending the arguments in my book.

Even before it was published, the voice in my head had whispered, “They’ll crucify you for daring to critique how mainstream Islam is interpreted. Don’t be intimidated. When you’re punched, punch back harder. Show “them” you mean business.” Already, I was othering my future “enemies.”

The voice in my head deserves some credit. It conjured up death threats from online randos and denunciations from self-appointed religious authorities. Sure enough, I got both. But there’s one reaction I wish I hadn’t swatted away. A lot of my detractors quipped that the book’s title should have been The Trouble with Irshad.

They weren’t wrong.

For the record, I stand by my message that Muslims ought to invoke the most glorious of our traditions to reform ourselves. What I’m ashamed of is how I communicated that message—with a win/lose posture that did no favors to me or my capacity for influence.

I warped the possibility of productive discussion into the probability of rancorous debate so I could psychically pulverize my critics. I minimized these opponents as bad-faith actors rather than recognizing their love for the version of Islam that spoke to their souls. I torpedoed rich opportunities to earn from Muslims what the souvenir guy had garnered from me: trust.

In its highest form, trust is the confidence I feel that you see me as more than an object for your immediate purposes. If I trust you to “see” me, I’m more likely to devote the time and energy to seeing you and then hearing you. Blatant hints about the bedrock need to foster trust sailed over my hot head.

Early on, a Jewish friend who championed interfaith peace told me, “You need more love in your narrative about Islam.” I silently scoffed. “More love? I love how Islamic civilization once led the planet in creativity, ingenuity, and diversity. I say so in my book. If Muslims don’t read, that’s their problem!”

It didn’t occur to me that I was mangling my friend’s benevolent advice into yet another win/lose debate. And that this habit ensured Muslims felt no emotional tug to read my book. And that “their issue” would thereby become mine.

Later, a Muslim influencer acknowledged that I had potent arguments. But, she asked, “Where’s your reverence for Islam?” I dissed the question because reverence doesn’t win arguments. Reason does.

False. Reverence—emotion—does win arguments. Why? Stand by.

Thinking and Feeling

Still clueless, I recall an imam summing up the trouble with me. He said, “You don’t have any feeling for Islam.” Can you say, “Triggered”? As a professor at New York University, I resented catering to the feelings of my students so we could milk them for donations down the road. Of course, this wasn’t remotely the imam’s point, but his reference to “feelings” pushed my buttons. Or, more accurately, I permitted him to push my buttons.

You know the meme, “Facts don’t care about your feelings”? The reverse is at least as true: Feelings don’t care about your facts. If I’ve ragged on your convictions and you feel belittled, you’ll be impervious to my facts. You won’t give them, or me, the time of day.

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor sheds light on why that is so, reminding us that humans aren’t thinking creatures with the capacity to feel, but feeling creatures with the capacity to think. Whatever stimuli hits our brains, we’ll first feel something about it. Unless we’re superintentional, even thinking about it will only amount to rationalizing our initial feelings.

Which returns us to the souvenir guy, who radiated joy as he persisted with his pitch. His verve made me feel good about him. Emotionally, I reached a judgment—that somehow, I liked this character. Then I justified my judgment by deciding to peruse his shelves.

Here’s the bottom line for my own attempt at “sales.” I didn’t exactly respect my Muslim skeptics, so how could they respect and ultimately trust me? I consistently reacted when I could have responded. I lapsed into assuming more than engaging. Above all, I duped myself into maintaining that I wanted to make a difference, when my actions (um, reactions) suggested that I wanted, mostly, to make a statement.

Contrast my approach to that of Sabrina Bhojani, the Muslim principal of a Jewish school in my Canadian hometown. Let’s just say she catches it from individuals on all sides. Sabrina is a professional through and through, so when she’s tempted to react to the “us against them” shenanigans of others, she first asks herself, “What’s my purpose here? And how would that purpose be served by what I’m bursting to say?”

It echoes the most powerful question we can ask ourselves before a potentially tense encounter: “Do I only want to make a statement or do I also want to make a difference?”

Sometimes you have to make a statement. Understood. But just beware of the trade-off. You can’t legitimately fault others for not listening if they can’t trust that you’ll listen too, which is where millions of us are now.

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This essay is adapted from Irshad Manji’s forthcoming book, Moral Courage: The Gutsy Practice for Influencing What You Can’t Control — at Work, Home, and Beyond (spring 2027).

In July of this year, the American Association of University Professors endorsed Abdul El-Sayed, a candidate in Michigan’s Democratic primary election for U.S. Senate. Reactions from higher ed commentators played out exactly how you might expect: where defenders saw an obligatory bulwark of academic freedom against GOP incursions, critics saw an own-goal that only further justified those attacks.

However justified the AAUP’s decision may have seemed to some, new research suggests that it will only further fracture public trust in higher education. Worst of all is that this will play out along well-worn political lines: the biggest losses of trust will happen among the science-skeptical conservative public, while leftwing, self-avowed allies will continue to #TrustTheScience.

Across three studies conducted around the 2020 and 2024 elections, Syropoulos and colleagues found that left-leaning candidate endorsements by scientific journals undermined trust among moderates and conservatives. After reading a press release describing either a neutral announcement or a Democratic political endorsement, participants were asked to indicate their trust in science, assessed via agreement with statements such as:

• “Scientists and scientific results are biased.”

• “Information from the scientific community is trustworthy.”

• “Scientific research is influenced by the political values of scientists.”

Conservatives, and to some extent moderates, trusted science less if they read the press release with the political endorsement compared to the one without it. Liberals’ trust in science was unaffected, whether or not the press release contained an endorsement. The takeaway, according to the researchers, is that scientists should think very carefully about the kinds of political statements they make if they want to retain authority with the public. I fully agree with this note of caution from the authors, and I’m equally concerned about what the results suggest. But what worries me even more is the psychological process that I think explains their results, although it’s not the interpretation the authors take.

The researchers attribute the pattern of results to conservatives engaging in motivated reasoning, but I’m not so sure. In the authors’ view, a political endorsement by a scientific journal shouldn’t influence views of science generally. To quote the authors, “[t]hese endorsements, though unrelated to the methodologies of science [the object of evaluation in the study], reinforced existing skepticism and deepened perceptions of bias, illustrating how ideological narratives shape interpretations of even peripheral aspects of science” (p. 794).

I don’t doubt that conservatives harbor significant doubts about the capacity for science to uncover knowledge. And the authors are right to note the existence of cues that carry no signal about how science as an institution is functioning and should therefore not influence general trust in science. (The classic cue for motivated reasoning research is the political implication of a scientific finding: people evaluate otherwise identical scientific studies as higher quality when the results affirm, rather than undermine, their political views.)

But the cue used in this study — public endorsement of a political candidate in an election — seems to me like a legitimate reason to lose trust in an institution we rely on to be objective. Trump and his coalition railed against school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Who knows how much the reasoning was based on empirical evidence versus COVID denialism, but at least some evidence now suggests that the long-term costs of school closures will outweigh the benefits. For a 2024 voter, knowing that the editors at Science have communicated their desire to see Kamala Harris elected over Trump, and the dire stakes they attach to the outcome of the election, would it be unreasonable to lose confidence in the editors’ ability to fairly evaluate evidence that would incidentally vindicate team Trump? (The question is not whether such research could get published at all, but whether it is evaluated at each outlet by the same standards as research suggesting the opposite conclusion.)

In fact, you don’t have to be aligned with any particular party to raise an eyebrow at a scientific community that so clearly communicates a stake in specific political outcomes. (After all, in Syropoulos et al.’s study, the candidate endorsement caused even moderates to lose a degree of trust in science.) If you simply value finding out what is true and accurate about the world, then it should be concerning to observe a scientific body issuing blanket political endorsements, seemingly accepting certain priors about contentious issues.

For the same reason I’ve argued the non-liberals were right to lose trust in science following the political endorsement, I’m equally concerned with why the endorsement had no effect on liberals’ trust in science. The same pattern of results that suggests undue conservative skepticism is equally compatible with undue liberal credulity: already expecting science to affirm their worldviews, they don’t particularly care when gatekeepers signal a commitment to something other than truth. Of course, the true explanation is probably somewhere in the middle, with each side engaging in the distortion that suits their own political ends. The political psychology literature is littered with examples of similar double standards.

It’s not that scientists should never make politically relevant statements. As foremost experts in their fields, scientists are uniquely positioned to help the public make evidence-based political choices. But the quality of those choices depends on the accuracy of our information, and reality is messier than any one political party would like to admit. In advocating for a particular candidate, the gatekeepers of scientific knowledge signal a conflict of interest in their ability to recognize and disseminate knowledge irrespective of which policy conclusions it may support. That is what I believe the conservatives and moderates in Syropoulos et al.’s study were responding to, and what the liberals didn’t notice because they already agreed with the endorsement. Bias is like bad breath; we mostly notice it in other people.

So how should scientists tread the delicate boundary between communicating politically relevant information and trespassing into inappropriate advocacy? Luckily, we already have evidence regarding styles of political communication from scientists that win and lose trust from the public. One such piece of evidence comes from a 2024 experimental study where researchers had participants read news articles containing quotes by scientists offering policy advice. The scientists delivered their advice in one of two styles: the “epistocrat,” where the scientist framed one policy alternative as the only justifiable one based on the science, or the “honest broker,” where they identified likely costs and benefits of the policy and explained that it’s up to the public to weigh them. For example, in an article on restricting domestic flights to combat climate change, both scientists outlined how short-haul flights contribute to rising global temperatures. The difference was that one scientist used this to shut down debate about the appropriate policy response, whereas the other used it to invite one.

On average, participants trusted the epistocrats and their findings less than the honest brokers, but the biggest loss in trust happened among participants who were opposed to the policy proposal being discussed. Trust among participants who already agreed with the policy proposal wasn’t affected by the scientist’s communication style, echoing Syropoulos et al.’s findings regarding political endorsements.

These findings were about an individual scientist claiming to settle a policy debate in their area of expertise — a relatively minor overstep. But a scientific body that endorses a candidate for office implicitly asserts that its members’ expertise can settle architectonic debates about the correct ordering of priorities on every issue of public significance. (Similarly, in endorsing El-Sayed specifically for his stance on higher education, the AAUP implicitly argues that that issue supersedes others, such as healthcare, foreign policy, or technology, in importance when deciding how to vote.) I can understand why someone would think twice about the credibility of such an organization, and I agree with Syropoulos et al. when they argue that organizational statements correcting misinformation, explaining scientific consensus, and defending science as an institution may be better alternatives. In my view, they are also much more legitimate.

I believe that the AAUP, along with the scientific organizations that issued endorsements in recent elections, were trying to protect the infrastructure of science and higher education. Actions taken by the second Trump administration have undoubtedly undermined scientists’ ability to pursue knowledge through funding cuts and potentially illegal idea bans, often automated by blunt-force keyword searches. I am just as concerned about these attacks. But I see them as excellent reasons to stop politicizing expertise in ways that alienate half of the voting public, entrench political fractures within universities, and subvert higher education away from its purpose as a non-partisan, public good. That doesn’t mean disengaging from political discussions altogether — but being truly pro-science means accepting evidence that full-throated political advocacy won’t solve our issues, and may even make them worse.

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This week we’re following a variety of stories, including a new review policy at the University of Alabama campuses that leaves an open door to dismissal for tenured faculty; a new study showing how the politics of commencement speakers vary; some drama that has ensued from the release of a report about who is funding “civil discourse” programs on campuses; and what Johns Hopkins University is doing to address viewpoint diversity on campus.

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

University of Alabama system enacts post-tenure review in new policy.

Earlier this year, the Alabama state legislature passed a Republican-backed bill requiring post-tenure review at its public state universities. This week, the board of trustees unanimously voted to put in place that review process for all tenured faculty, which will recur at least every five years. The new rule states:

Post-tenure review is intended to promote ongoing academic quality and institutional excellence as well as to recognize faculty contributions. In addition, it is also to assist a faculty member to improve their service, teaching, and/or research abilities through an assessment of performance and outcomes, identifying any areas of incompetency, serious or pervasive neglect of duty, or other good cause (including serious misconduct), which adversely affects the institution or the faculty member’s performance of duties or meeting of responsibilities.

The last reason in that list is cause for alarm, allowing for the firing of a tenured faculty member if “there is other good cause.” This “good cause” is left undefined and underspecified — a recipe for these rules being used to violate the academic freedom that tenure is designed, in part, to protect.

Tenure has come under greater scrutiny in recent years. On its face, post-tenure review can function as its advocates claim: to hold faculty accountable for their performance, such as underperformance or abusing the security to pursue political advocacy. However, HxA member Deepa Das Acevedo provides a persuasive rebuttal of such claims that everyone interested in tenure policy should read.

Tenure is necessary to ensure the job security needed to do the long-term work of research and teaching and to protect free expression. For it to produce the best scholarship and education, however, these rare appointments need to be given to highly qualified scholars. This suggests the problem that needs addressing is faculty hiring, not tenure.

The politics of commencement speakers are predictable.

A new study published this week provides more data in the ‘what is going on with commencement speakers’ genre. And while, unsurprisingly, they found commencement speakers tend to lean liberal — increasingly so since 2011 — there is also some variation.

…public colleges were more likely than private ones to invite speakers who supported conservative candidates, as were colleges that focused more on occupational and professional programs. Meanwhile, institutions that enrolled more students of color and those with larger endowments were more likely to select liberal-leaning speakers. Unsurprisingly, the state’s political leanings also had an impact; institutions in blue states tended to invite more left-wing speakers, and the same was true for conservative speakers in red states.

A more intriguing finding from the study is what happens in the years after there is public pressure to disinvite speakers from commencement. Commencement speakers are drawing increasing controversy, especially in just the last few years, and the long-term impact is universities selecting for “safer” speakers in the following years.

In principle, commencement speaker politics shouldn’t matter very much, as the event is not about the speaker but the graduates. Speakers shouldn’t use their stage and captive audience as a stump speech for their political advocacy.

Everyone is arguing about what “civil discourse” programs are or are not really about.

The past two weeks have seen a ramp-up in sometimes “uncivil” discourse about civil discourse programs, as the efforts have proliferated across the academy this past year. Besides debates on what these things should be called and whether they will work, there is now argument about where the money is coming from and what that says about whether they are part of a nefarious right-wing plot on campus.

The new report published by a group called “Uncivil” whose goal is to expose the “Civility Industrial Complex” claims that “Based on our analysis, the funders most deeply committed to ‘bridge-building,’ ‘viewpoint diversity,’ and ‘depolarization’ projects are those that also hold a substantial stake in conservative and/or ‘pro-Israel’ causes.” Uncivil’s spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed that the programs are “abetting an authoritarian capture of the public sphere.” The implication, in other words, is that anything conservative is automatically bad for higher education.

Others are pointing out problems with the report’s methods and derived conclusions. Responding in Inside Higher Ed, Michael J. Murray, the head of the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, which funds many civil discourse-type programs on campuses (including some that HxA runs), fired back, calling out critical issues with their data that arguably presupposed their conclusions.

That funding chart, moreover, was constructed in a way that all but guaranteed its own conclusion. To reach its list of “23 top funders,” Uncivil discarded every foundation that gave less than 1 percent of its total grant making to civility work, a threshold that, almost by definition, excludes large foundations with diverse portfolios, while keeping smaller, sometimes more ideologically focused ones. This threshold thereby excluded 19 foundations active in this space including the Ford, Hewlett, Knight, Packard and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations; the Democracy, Omidyar Network and Rockefeller Brothers Funds; the Lilly Endowment; the Carnegie Corporation; and George Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Society.

Per Uncivil’s own data, these 19 other foundations gave more money to civility programs, in absolute dollars, than the 23 foundations Uncivil kept in their dataset combined. A filter that excludes the majority of the money in a field before calculating what share of the remaining dollars is conservative is not a neutral filter. It is a selection effect, and it deserves scrutiny before its output gets treated as a “finding.”

Aside from the emerging polarization within the “civil discourse” space, this broad group of programs still needs to reckon with the deeper issue of viewpoint diversity on campus. As HxA president John Tomasi has previously written, these programs risk being mere “academic theater” if the viewpoints that are talked across remain narrow.

Johns Hopkins’s president is taking viewpoint diversity seriously.

Ronald J. Daniels recently sat down for an interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education and made the case that the underrepresentation of conservative scholars in the professoriate is not primarily a fairness problem — it’s a quality problem.

The fact that conservative scholarship is underrepresented in our institutions ultimately means that the left gets flabbier because it’s not being tested and challenged in the way it ought to be. At the same time, the right, to the extent that it moves outside the university and finds itself in think tanks and is not subject to challenges or critiques from the center and the left, becomes more radicalized. This is not just a problem for our institutions. It’s a problem for America. So I do feel urgency in trying to remedy this issue.

And Daniels is working to do so. Under his tenure, Hopkins has opened the Agora Institute to get conservative and progressive scholars working directly with one another, launched a new School of Government and Policy to create a truly pluralist environment, formed a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute to gain advice on faculty recruitment, and created new faculty lines to get more viewpoint diversity across the university.

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

Ghent University suspended postdoctoral scholar Nathan Cofnas as a “precautionary measure” pending a “preliminary disciplinary investigation.” The reason he is being suspended, however, has little if anything to do with him legitimately criticizing Jason Arday’s scholarship last month by documenting plagiarism in Arday’s doctoral thesis. Ghent is instead suspending Cofnas because his expressed public views are misaligned with the university’s values and therefore “creates a reputational risk”. This is not how academic freedom should work.

At this point, the timeline of events over the past month is clear. On July 21, Cofnas published a blog post alleging plagiarism of Jason Arday’s work, evidenced by side-by-side comparisons of his doctoral thesis against Paula Zwozdiak-Myers’s 2009 dissertation. That same week, Retraction Watch broke the story that a reporter at Times Higher Education had been building this same case back in September 2025, but the outlet killed the story after Arday retained the defamation firm Carter-Ruck to send a letter threatening legal action.

The blog post sparked the predictable reactions and op-ed media frenzy. Arday resigned on August 5 amid Cambridge opening an investigation. (While Arday denied the plagiarism charges, he acknowledged errors in his work.) He was found dead on August 14. On August 20, Cofnas was suspended from Ghent.

The statement by Ghent on their suspension of Cofnas is bizarre for anyone who cares about academic freedom. It’s framed as a statement on the university’s values rather than anything specific to Cofnas’ writings or any alleged misconduct that would warrant a disciplinary investigation. The statement then goes on to specify that Ghent University’s view of academic freedom is predicated on specific values, stating:

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

It is true that academic freedom is not unlimited. Yet, it should alarm every academic who holds any potentially contentious view on any subject that a university such as Ghent is openly declaring that academic freedom is only protected insofar as one’s publicly expressed values are aligned with the university’s.

Ghent is suspending Cofnas because they don’t like his views. In a leaked letter that appeared online the day after the public statement, university officials detail the reasons for his suspension by citing (among many disputable things) “offenses committed in private life” that argue his views on race and intelligence “may be interpreted” as racism, which is against the university’s values. This is despite Cofnas being hired in the spring with years of published writing on group differences in intelligence. His hiring at Ghent this past spring drew a petition with more than 2,000 signatures within weeks (with a new petition now appearing for him to be dismissed, along with a counter letter to keep him). Ghent defended the hire anyway, with Ghent rector Petra De Sutter (now ironically) stating at the time that “Dissenting opinions are allowed to exist and debate must take place at a university. It is primarily up to experts and fellow researchers to test ideas, criticise them and, where necessary, contradict them.” The only thing that has changed since March is that Cofnas’s views are now too big a liability to the university’s reputation for them to defend, and therefore now he must go.

Now with Ghent’s decision to suspend Cofnas, academia should be alert to the precedent such an event leaves for scholars who criticize the work of other scholars. First, if you express views that are unpopular, could cause “tension,” or “may be interpreted” in any type of way, keep your mouth shut. Second, such unpopular views are subject to the heckler’s veto via public pressure campaigns, so again, keep your mouth shut.

The suspension of Cofnas only serves to entrench academic self-censorship and erodes trust in the academy’s ability to reform itself. If academics cannot trust that alleging academic misconduct about another scholar won’t cost them their job, then who is going to risk sticking their neck out to criticize scholarship when warranted? Criticism of scholarship comes with the job, and in today’s environment, that is certainly going to play out online, especially when the scholar being criticised is a publicly lauded academic at a nation’s top university.

To academics who think public criticism of a lauded scholar at a prestigious university is too harsh, consider how this situation could have played out differently. Had the original Times Higher Education story run, backed by an even more extensive dossier of alleged plagiarism, the scandal would likely have broken anyway, just under a different byline. Outlets like Retraction Watch exist specifically to call out academic misconduct — as they should. Scholars, no matter their background, personal characteristics, or public standing, are subject to scholarly standards and peer criticism. That is what happened here: at root, this is a case of one scholar exposing another’s misconduct.

Academics need to police our own scholarship and take the lead on intentional reform to build back public trust in scholarship. And if we don’t, we’re handing the reins over to legislators and politicians eager to regulate campuses themselves. For the scholarly record and the institutions that safeguard it to be trustworthy, they must be seen as places that uphold scholarly standards to generate knowledge that can be trusted.

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At many American universities, progressive assumptions seem embedded in the machinery of campus life. Left-wing speakers and views are applauded, while conservative views (on abortion, for example) are often treated as beyond the pale.

Yet mission statements and promotional materials tend to describe the university’s purpose in nonpartisan terms. When studies show the dearth of right-leaning faculty, administrations typically insist this is just the result of neutral search processes. A gap has opened between the impartial, truth-seeking role universities claim for themselves and the policies they pursue.

A Gallup poll from June showed public confidence in higher education dropping yet again. A viral article in the Atlantic by a former professor has set off alarms about the depth, and apparent hypocrisy, of progressive commitments at elite colleges. Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s recent call for universities to recommit themselves publicly to “rigorous teaching, pathbreaking research, and national service” could be read as an effort to restore public trust by realigning what universities tell the public they stand for and what they do in practice.

McMahon, readers of the professor’s story and disillusioned poll respondents all presumably hope that colleges will respond by reforming campus practices to better align with the ideal of the impartial university.

We share that hope. But if universities are unwilling to abandon the progressive commitments they hold dear, we propose an alternative: Admit it…

Continue reading at The Washington Post

What is college for?

If you ask four different people, you’re likely to get four different answers. Universities teach students how to think. They produce groundbreaking research. They create citizens. They prepare students for jobs. They archive the wisdom of the past. And so on.

Even the experts seem to agree that universities have no single purpose. For example, in A Time to Build, Yuval Levin sorts a wide variety of university purposes into three broad categories: professional development, moral activism, and liberal education. The first is about producing employees. Universities prepare students to enter the workforce. Polling data confirms that this is the primary reason students and parents cite for going to college.

The second is about moral development; recall that most universities in the United States were formed with a distinctly religious mission. Historically, as Steven Poskanzer puts it, “college existed to inculcate and eventually spread particular religious views.” Schools were Baptist, Presbyterian, or Catholic. They saw themselves as cultivating virtues, defending doctrine, and producing the next generation of clergy.

The third is about producing self-governing citizens. A liberal education is one that acquaints students with the foundational ideas of civilization, refines their aesthetic tastes, and develops their ability to reason and choose for themselves. College graduates are autonomous in a way that their uneducated counterparts are not.

Looking through mission statements of contemporary universities confirms this diversity of purpose. For example, Emory University’s mission is “to create, preserve, teach, and apply knowledge in the service of humanity.” Tufts educates “future leaders through the creation and application of knowledge.” BYU wants to “assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life.” Franciscan University “educates, evangelizes, and sends forth joyful disciples empowered by the holy spirit.”

However, beneath the veneer of diversity, all university goals ultimately come down to the same thing. At their core, universities are epistemic institutions, committed to the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge.

To see this, it’s helpful to draw distinctions across different kinds of knowledge as they are understood in academic philosophy. The most generic is propositional knowledge, knowing that a particular thing is true. I know that Albany is the capital of New York and that humans are prone to anchor bias. Propositional knowledge is about knowing the facts.

Compare this with know-how. Knowing how to do something is very different from knowing the facts. I might know that a golf club is a driver without knowing how to use one. I might know the difference between a credit and a debit and yet not be able to audit a company. And in the reverse case, I might know how to do something without knowing very many facts about the overall scenario (think of a worker on a production line). Know-how is a distinct form of knowledge. It’s about skill rather than facts.

Finally, philosophers think about knowledge by acquaintance. You can know who Barack Obama is without knowing Barack Obama. There is something special about being acquainted with someone or something rather than learning about it third-hand. Resolving the data in your experiment, walking through an art gallery, and reading a poem are often illuminating experiences even if you don’t learn any new facts. That’s because experiences like these bring their own phenomenology–we learn what it’s like to do or feel or complete something. That kind of knowledge is central to the human experience.

Understanding knowledge broadly in this way shows that virtually everything we do in a university is tied up with one of those three forms of knowledge. Archivists, librarians, and museum curators preserve the knowledge of the past. Researchers and scholars uncover the facts. Creatives produce art, music, and performances that give students the chance to be acquainted with the sublime. And virtually every discipline offers know-how: we teach students how to run a marketing campaign, how to produce a note on a saxophone, and how to reconstruct an argument from a primary source.

University mission statements appear divergent only when we understand knowledge in a very narrow scope. But understood more broadly, it’s easy to see how virtually every imaginable component of a university mission is about knowledge. Research universities want their faculty to discover the facts and new systems or tools for discovering those facts. That’s propositional knowledge and know-how. Liberal arts colleges expose their students to great ideas and art and teach them the skills to live autonomously — knowledge by acquaintance and know-how. Religious institutions defend doctrine, build opportunities for religious experiences, and produce clergy and disciples — all three types of knowledge.

This is why, at root, the university is an epistemic institution. Knowledge undergirds all other purposes of a university. Universities are not political action committees or social engineering experiments. Everything we do had better ground out in knowledge.

I once interviewed for a job where the dean flatly rejected this view. The university, she said, was here to make the world a better place. We need to uplift the downtrodden, protect the environment, and build citizens who would respect the rights of others. She said that if a student graduated from her institution voting the same way as his parents, she was a failure.

I understand her point of view. And I don’t deny that universities have a role to play in making the world a better place. There’s a strong correlation between places with strong university culture and peace, prosperity, and liberty.

But universities contribute to these larger goals in distinctly epistemic ways. A thought experiment illustrates the point. Suppose a dean receives a gift of $50 million from a donor. If the university’s direct, immediate goal were something like social justice, the dean should donate the full amount to the production of mosquito nets, the building of wells, and the inoculation of children in undeveloped countries. Those interventions would do far more social good than most things we can do on campus.

But it would be wholly inappropriate to spend the money that way. Instead, the university should use the money to provide scholarships for students, endow professorships, purchase research equipment, or build a new theater. All of these expenditures are appropriate because they improve the production of knowledge in its various forms.

Even though mosquito nets would be a more direct route to a social good, it bypasses the epistemic purpose of a university. Universities don’t exist to directly make the world a better place. Universities exist to preserve, create, and transmit the knowledge we need to make the world a better place. It’s a difference of telos: universities directly produce knowledge we need to recognize and solve political and social problems. In that sense, universities indirectly make the world a better place.

If you want to save lives, protect the environment, and build peace, prosperity, and the like, you need to know what the world is really like, what counts as truly making it better, and how to do that efficiently and effectively. The university is poised to answer those questions. Without answers, we are fumbling in the dark.

It should be obvious that social progress requires good information, and universities are one of the best places to get it. What’s less obvious is that recognizing that order of operations is important. If we let our social or political aspirations compromise the knowledge-making process, we will be left with ignorance, distrust, or both. And that’s a recipe for social stagnation rather than progress.

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