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

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

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

Carnival Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get Real

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By John Mac Ghlionn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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According to academic publisher Wiley, peer review is the process whereby experts “assess the validity, quality, and often the originality” of a peer’s research with the aim of “safeguarding the quality and integrity of scholarly research.” And while it is often thought of in the context of academic circles (research papers and grants), the basic concept of peer review is integrated throughout our everyday lives, from the judicial system (“jury of one’s peers”) to sports refereeing and even job references.

There are an estimated 2.82 million academic articles published every year, partly attributed to the “publish or perish” culture in academia. While this high volume is putting an increasing strain on peer review, the practice is still generally supported and is currently the norm. And yet, there is growing sentiment that peer review should be abolished, or at a minimum, undergo major reform. After all, the “peers” in peer review are people, with all the usual biases and blind spots, and so, unsurprisingly, peer review carries these same flaws.

Calls for Reform

The primary criticism of peer review is that it serves as a “gatekeeper” dedicated to preserving the status quo. And since peer review holds substantial influence over what research ultimately gets funded, critics say it stops, or at least slows, progress in science and other scholarly areas. When serious consideration of new ideas can only occur after the gatekeepers literally die (“science advances one funeral at a time”), it’s obvious that there’s a problem. As author David Sinclair put it bluntly, “Peer reviewers are in fact the midwit, careerist paradigm enforcers. They shut down all new thinking.” Even Nobel Prize-winning research gets rejected.

Sociologist and philosopher Zygmunt Bauman sums up the outdated and bureaucratic system this way: “With my tongue in one cheek only, I’d suggest that were our paleolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would be still sitting in caves.” With these sentiments in mind, calls for reform are not surprising.

In addition, critics of peer review point out that it has not been able to assuage the public’s mistrust of research reliability. In particular, they point to the continuing replication crisis, which has plagued so much of scientific and other research. While these critics all have a point, there’s reason to be wary of viewing peer review solely as an outdated, useless, and status-driven process. This perspective is overly pessimistic and misses peer review’s value and unique strengths. Which is why, rather than eliminating peer review or staunchly defending it, the best way forward is to find ways to improve the process.

Start with Transparency

One possible way to make peer review better would be to improve its transparency. The lack of transparency, particularly the anonymity of those conducting the review, sows mistrust and leads to questions like, “Who are these reviewers?” and “Why did they reject my research?” Most review processes maintain the reviewers’ anonymity and provide limited rationale for their decisions, especially when the decision is “no.”

So as a start, one way to lessen the sense of “gatekeeping” could be to ensure that peer reviewers are made known to researchers and that meaningful feedback is provided, even if that feedback is highly critical. This could help strengthen trust, accountability, and fairness in the process.

Losing anonymity could also have the added benefit of curtailing some reviewers from being “outright cruel” and unprofessional with their feedback. The leading scientific journal Nature is already adopting these kinds of strategies and now publishes all reviewer reports and author responses for every research article. Furthermore, the open-access journal eLife uses an alternative approach to the traditional “accept or reject” decision and publishes all pieces that undergo peer review, along with their reviews, even if reviewer feedback is uniformly negative. This removes the power of reviewers to decide which ideas get through while maintaining a form of peer review, but without the gatekeeping.

Although worthwhile, these and other transparency efforts might have an uphill battle to gain wider acceptance. For instance, modern academics often self-censor, and research suggests that only a small minority of academic referees would remove anonymity in their peer reviews.

Can AI Make a Difference?

Other reformers look to AI as another possible way to make peer review fairer and more efficient. Proponents of AI in general view it as a deus ex machina, a one-size-fits-all solution to many of society’s problems. However, when it comes to peer review, we should be cautious about integrating AI too quickly into the process.

In many ways, AI embodies the same flaws of human-led review—errors, bias, and lack of transparency. A recent editorial in Leadership Quarterly clearly presents the risks, detailing special considerations for AI in publishing, such as tendencies to reinforce biases, reward what’s popular over what’s needed, and allow a lack of accountability. I’m reminded of the writer and philosopher Aldous Huxley when he quipped that “progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.” Just because it’s new, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. On top of these concerns about accuracy and bias, overreliance on AI takes away the reviewer’s unique “voice.”

Still, there may be a role for AI in peer review. For instance, we could possibly use AI for task-oriented work (e.g. proper formatting), while reserving the artistry of reviewing for reviewers. This could help address the criticism that peer review is laborious and slow. Who will make the distinction between “tasks” and “artistry” is up for debate, but these delineations are needed, and soon.

Meanwhile, scientific publishing is already making its position known. For example, Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific publisher, states their policy is for AI to support human judgment, not replace it. Overall, when used appropriately, AI, like any tool, can enhance our efforts. But additional wisdom and guidance are needed to help clarify the optimal use of AI in peer review.

A New Paradigm

Finally, we must commit ourselves to continuously improving the process, in large part because getting rid of peer review would be disastrous for the simple reason that it remains an indispensable tool. Indeed, while rigorous review is resource intensive, it also is crucial for developing and disseminating high-quality research. The very fact that those who submit their work for review know it will be under scrutiny by definition raises standards. A less rigorous process might speed efforts, but would also likely lead to false, misleading, and poor-quality information, as was seen a few years ago with COVID-19 research dissemination. Furthermore, inadequate vetting could lead to disastrous effects, as evidenced by the U.S. Public Health Services’ Tuskegee Syphilis Study.

We should choose to live by the mantra “Feedback is a gift,” and embrace our work being challenged. When done right, peer review refines ideas via an iterative process. What’s more, since academics are infamous for their lack of intellectual humility, peer review is a critical opportunity to receive feedback and get outside of one’s echo chamber. As the late Carl Sagan pointed out, while most scientists don’t like criticism, “the hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away.”

It takes humility and vulnerability to submit one’s ideas to external criticism, but peer review is a powerful tool in promoting self-reflection and professional and even personal growth. Peer review also has relational benefits. Indeed, we often forget about the “peer” in peer review. Sharing ideas with colleagues is one of the great benefits of going to a workplace. Academic life, and life in general, is filled with the proverbial “faculty lounge” and “water cooler talk.” Specific feedback from colleagues in your discipline is an especially important part of developing as a scholar.

Unfortunately, growing mistrust of peer review puts these benefits at risk. So, one important step forward then is to improve the review process while simultaneously coaching researchers to be more receptive to feedback. The goal here is to entirely reframe the perception of peer review from an adversarial dynamic to a welcomed, colleague-based relationship, assuming the positive intent of reviewers who are focused on open inquiry and constructive disagreement.

Researchers would be wise to heed John Stuart Mill’s argument in On Liberty when he writes, “Nor is it enough that he should hear the opinions of adversaries from his own teachers, presented as they state them, and accompanied by what they offer as refutations…. He must be able to hear them from persons who actually believe them.… He must know them in their most plausible and persuasive form.”

At the same time, reviewers should adopt an open mindset as described by C.S. Lewis: “The first demand any work of art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way.”

There’s no obvious solution or “silver bullet” to peer review’s problems. Even though there are clear flaws in the process, the alternative is much worse. Completely open publishing with no quality checks or rigor? Total AI control of research, funding, and resultant policymaking? No thanks. I’ll take the system we have and trust that moving forward we can reform it for the better.

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I’m sitting in the audience at the Nightmare in the Ozarks Film Festival watching a panel I helped organize, and I have the feeling that something I’ve been building for years is actually working.

On stage, comedian Shane Mauss and evolutionary psychologist David Pinsof are in conversation with Justin Best, the writer-director of the supremely campy horror film Sheryl, and Anthea Neri Best, the movie’s lead actress. The topic is dark comedy: what it is, why it works, and why it matters. Pinsof is explaining how humor helps us recognize and correct coordination failures, how laughing together at something scary is not a form of avoidance but of shared reckoning. The audience is half horror fans and half open-minded interdisciplinary academics, and they are completely with him.

This is horror meets cooperation science (the study of cooperation in nature) meets epistemology, and nobody seems to find that strange. That’s the point.

Camp as Epistemic Technology

Academia has a problem dealing with scary futures, such as institutional failure, existential risk, influence and manipulation, and, more broadly, the genuine possibility that things could go very, very wrong. Talking about these topics carries reputational risk. Engaging with them can mark you as alarmist or fringe, or simply not serious. The result is a kind of collective epistemic avoidance: We know we should think carefully about catastrophic risks and uncomfortable possible futures, and yet the social environment of higher education makes it genuinely hard to do so openly.

Camp is one solution to this problem. By camp I mean the deliberate embrace of irony, humor, and self-aware playfulness, with more than a touch of subversiveness running through it. Camp doesn’t take itself seriously, which is precisely what allows it to help us take scary and difficult things seriously. It creates a framework in which engaging with frightening or heterodox ideas is leavened with play. And that shift in frame is not merely psychological. It has real consequences for how we think about the world and how we work together. In other words, it is an intellectual tool with power to shape shared epistemologies and our capacities to coordinate effectively with each other.

The power of camp as an intellectual tool rests on three things. The first is shared attention on a counterfactual reality. When a room full of people imagine the zombie apocalypse together, they are building a shared mental model of a possible world. This is much harder to do with abstract risks like nuclear war, infrastructure collapse, or AI misalignment. The zombie apocalypse is a stand-in for all-hazards preparedness, and it works better than imagining real disasters because it is specific enough to allow for everyone’s shared attention, while playful enough to engage in without triggering the fears and defensiveness that make grappling with real risks often difficult for us to do, both individually and collectively.

The second is common knowledge. Common knowledge is when we all know something and we all know that we all know something. This plays out in zombie apocalypse camp. When we imagine a zombie apocalypse counterfactual reality together—especially in a participatory, embodied way—we generate something uniquely valuable: Everyone knows that everyone else is also playfully imagining a zombie apocalypse. This common knowledge is the foundation of coordination, in this case coordination around thinking through and preparing for a variety of risks and hazards we might face in the future. Coordination requires that knowledge is shared and visible. Camp creates that visibility through participation.

The third is honest signaling. Engaging seriously with the zombie metaphor in your research is not a costless act. It requires a willingness to be seen as a little weird, to risk the raised eyebrow from colleagues who may think you’re not being serious enough. That cost is, from a signaling perspective, part of what makes participation meaningful. People who show up to the various zombie-related events my colleagues and I organize have already demonstrated that they can hold rigor and irreverence simultaneously, that they are not so invested in their professional persona that they can’t play. This self-selection means that the people in the room are the people you want in the room.

A Camp Proof of Concept

Zombified Media is an education nonprofit that has been operating in this deliberately camp space since 2018, hosting a number of different programs. For instance, the Zombified podcast (which I co-host with Dave Lundberg-Kenrick) uses the idea of zombification—the hijacking of behavior by parasites, pathogens, and social influence—as an entry point for thinking seriously about how biology, technology, and ideas shape us individually and collectively. This camp approach allows us to have fun with these challenging issues and also to be playful with intellectually serious topics that might otherwise be a little dry.

The Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting takes the same approach, weaving in disaster preparedness and existential risk with zombification topics. The meeting brings together researchers, policymakers, artists, humanities scholars, and doctors to ‘share brains,’ through a combination of traditional talks, workshops, livestreams, art installations, and public events. We collaborate with the Nightmare in The Ozarks Film Festival to produce crossover programming, like the Dark Comedy panel I described earlier.

But it’s not just horror crossover events that have come out of Zombified Media. The kind of free inquiry and intellectual exploration that our approach affords has led to ‘serious’ science as well. Two years ago we received a $1.5 million National Science Foundation grant to study collective risk management, looking at the rules of life that allow organisms across the tree of life to do so effectively. This grant explicitly includes game development and funding for public engagement.

The most recent Zombie Apocalypse Medicine Meeting generated a research collaboration spanning multiple labs, focused on AI and cooperation. This is real science, with real stakes, that emerged from a room full of people thinking seriously about zombies. We are now launching the Cooperative Futures Institute at Arizona State University, a serious endeavor that grew out of our engagement with the real world, yet facilitated by playful shared attention on a counterfactual reality where we are all navigating the zombie apocalypse.

We have seen in academia the erosion of intellectual space for dissent, unconventional thinking, and genuine engagement with uncomfortable ideas. We can think of camp as a viewpoint diversity technology. It suspends the normal social penalties for heterodox thinking by relocating the conversation to a space where the rules are explicitly different. You can’t be accused of being alarmist about the zombie apocalypse. You can’t be accused of not taking AI risk seriously enough when you’re at a show called Surviving AI (more on that in a minute).

It is not about making serious topics frivolous, but rather about recognizing that trying to be too serious—the grave tone, the careful hedging, the avoidance of anything that might seem too weird—is itself an epistemic constraint, and one that can be broken by embracing camp.

All the Camps

Which brings me to Surviving AI—a variety show with music and comedy and an ironic ‘80s retro-futurist aesthetic focused on how we build a positive future with AI. For example, at our inaugural show we had a battle between AI-generated bluegrass music and live bluegrass musicians. (The AI bluegrass was technically impressive, but as soon as the live musicians started playing, the room filled with collective energy and people spontaneously started dancing.)

Surviving AI’s camp tone is deliberate. We think the future with AI is genuinely open, genuinely scary, and genuinely worth imagining together—with rigor, with humor, and with the honest acknowledgment that none of us knows exactly how this will unfold.

Here’s where I want to play with the word “camp” for a moment. In contemporary discourse about AI, there are the camps—the doomers, the accelerationists, the cautious optimists, the techno-utopians. These camps often talk past each other, locked into positions that feel more like identities than arguments.

What Surviving AI tries to create is an epistemic space that can hold all the camps. Not by flattening the differences, but by creating a shared playful context in which those differences can actually be productive. A room where doomers and accelerationists can watch an AI bluegrass battle together and feel, for a moment, that they are working on the same problem.

That is what camp does. It creates the shared attention, the common knowledge, the honest signaling of investment in a shared future. It is a tool for collective risk management and positive future-building. And the key word is collective. We cannot manage the risks of transformative technologies alone, through individual analysis or institutional positioning. We need to imagine them together, which means we need frames that make that imagining possible.

The futures we want won’t build themselves—but they might just emerge from a room full of people willing to imagine them together, zombies and all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Second Chance in My Birth Country

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

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

The Biggest Taboo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Heterodoxy in the Classroom

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

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

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

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

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

A Deliberately Edited Misquote

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Defending a ‘Privileged Denialist’

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

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

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

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

Choosing My ‘Hard’

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

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

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

Why I Still Believe

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

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

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

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By Will Bunch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what the heck happened?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Great Bundling

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

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

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

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

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

Revising the Social Compact

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Time of Profound Change

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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On Sept. 18, 1894, the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents issued the greatest declaration in defense of academic freedom ever made by a university—an achievement even more remarkable because it was the first statement espousing academic freedom ever made by an American college, and one that introduced the concept of institutional neutrality.

The declaration arose out of a controversy involving liberal economics professor Richard Ely, a highly esteemed scholar and co-founder of the American Economic Association. Oliver Wells, the state superintendent of public instruction, denounced Ely in a letter to The Nation magazine, accusing him of “justifying and encouraging” strikes and “practicing” boycotts. Wells also accused Ely of being a secret socialist, writing: “Only the careful student will discover their utopian, impracticable and pernicious doctrines, but their general acceptance would furnish a seeming moral justification of attack on life and property.…”

Because Wells was also an ex-officio member of the Board of Regents, and his attacks drew nationwide attention, the Board of Regents felt obliged to create a subcommittee to investigate Ely. Ely was a scholar who studied socialism with a critical eye, and many of the specific accusations made by Wells turned out to be untrue. Ultimately the regents refused Wells’ demand for them to investigate everything Ely had ever written. So it would have been easy for the Board of Regents to simply exonerate Ely against these unproven accusations and quietly dismiss the controversy.

Instead, the Board of Regents issued a report on the case (secretly written by the university’s president, Charles Kendall Adams) that defended free thought in the strongest possible terms:

“As Regents of a university with over a hundred instructors supported by nearly two millions of people who hold a vast diversity of views regarding the great questions which at present agitate the human mind, we could not for a moment think of recommending the dismissal or even the criticism of a teacher even if some of his opinions should, in some quarters, be regarded as visionary.”

It was an extraordinary declaration, one that made “diversity of views” the foundation for a university’s neutrality and linked that neutrality to absolute academic freedom. As a neutral institution, the university could not punish a professor or even engage in “criticism” of his “visionary” opinions because to do so would require taking a side on political matters. Academic freedom was not just an individual right—it was a fundamental obligation for an educational institution that had to permit controversial views in order to serve the diverse people who supported it.

The notion that universities served all the people, and therefore could not silence any voice, represented the strongest ideal of institutional neutrality ever put forth in academia—a goal so essential that even institutional criticism of teachers could never be considered. The regents rejected any limits on academic freedom: “In all lines of academic investigation, it is of the utmost importance that the investigator should be absolutely free to follow the indications of truth wherever they may lead.”

What’s more, the report refuted censorship of controversial views as antithetical to teaching: “Such a course would be equivalent to saying that no professor should teach anything which is not accepted by everybody as true. This would cut our curriculum down to very small proportions.”

Wisconsin’s stand on institutional neutrality also was politically useful—by disclaiming any power to dismiss or denounce controversial professors, the regents sought to protect themselves from political intrusion and further demands for investigations. While most debates about institutional neutrality today focus on the minor question of statement neutrality, the Wisconsin declaration recognized the core meaning of academic neutrality, that universities must not punish or denounce anyone for their beliefs.

The Wisconsin declaration is remembered today in part because of another academic freedom controversy. Edward Ross’ dismissal from Stanford in 1900 stands as one of the legendary moments in the history of academic freedom. Ironically, after his firing, Ross ended up at the University of Wisconsin. But in 1910, anarchist Emma Goldman visited Madison and was invited by students in the Socialist Club to speak. After Ross saw a woman tearing down posters for Goldman’s speech, he told his class about the talk: “I take no stock in philosophical anarchism, but I do believe in the principle of free speech.”

Once again, critics demanded Ross’ firing, and though the regents did not punish him, they did not publicly defend him as they had with Ely. The students of the Class of 1910 decided to remind the regents of their prior noble words by presenting them with an inscribed plaque quoting their 1894 statement. The board preferred their words to be historic rather than metallic, and declined the gift. But the students were not easily deterred and launched a campaign with ads on Madison cable cars and with the support of newspapers across the state, demanding to be heard. The board finally agreed to accept the plaque, and today it remains a literal part of the foundations of the University of Wisconsin, mounted outside Bascom Hall on campus.

The students chose the evocative phrase that concluded the Wisconsin declaration for their plaque: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.” It was a noble statement for freedom, and a nice way to trash talk other colleges.

While some might misinterpret “sifting and winnowing” as an argument for censorship, the true message of the phrase is that professors and students must do the sifting of ideas and discover the correct theories without political intrusion or prohibitions. The concept of “sifting and winnowing” requires allowing bad ideas as an essential part of the intellectual process—you don’t sift something that’s already pure.

The 1894 declaration inspired resistance when academic freedom was threatened at the University of Wisconsin. A century later in 1996, UW-Madison professors invoked it when they created the Committee for Academic Freedom and Rights and overturned a faculty speech code. In 2015, the Wisconsin Board of Regents responded to concerns about growing censorship of offensive speech by issuing a statement that quoted the 1894 declaration’s “sifting and winnowing” clause, and reiterated its support for academic freedom and free expression, albeit with some exceptions made to “restrict expression.”

Ely wrote in 1938 about “that famous pronunciamento of academic freedom which has been a beacon light in higher education in this country, not only for Wisconsin, but for all similar institutions, from that day to this.” Unfortunately, the words of the declaration that weren’t emblazoned on a plaque have been largely forgotten. “Sifting and winnowing” rather than “diversity of views” and “absolutely free” became the legacy of the 1894 declaration. The Wisconsin arguments for institutional neutrality as the basis for academic freedom have disappeared over time.

Reexamining the 1894 Wisconsin declaration can help clarify academia’s core values of academic freedom, truth, institutional neutrality, and intellectual diversity. Absolute freedom for academic inquiry is not a naive ideal, but an essential part of a free university. Truth is not a fixed object decreed by authorities, but an elusive goal that requires the full freedom to consider and express ideas that can be sifted and winnowed. Institutional neutrality means that universities must refuse to punish or condemn controversial ideas. And “diversity of views” justifies not political intrusion and administrative compulsion, but the liberty to explore any views without repression.

In the 131 years since the Wisconsin regents defended the freedom of a controversial professor, we have witnessed growth in legal rights, policy protections, and organizations devoted to defending academic freedom. But our concept of academic freedom has narrowed in some ways, with a growing number of exceptions and caveats now accompanying every ideal. The 1894 declaration by the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents provides not just a look back at the early history of academic freedom, but also offers a reminder that powerful and courageous institutional defenses of free expression can be found in academia’s distant past.

While a more recent academic freedom movement has pressured colleges to adopt the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report and Chicago Principles, no similar movement has arisen calling for universities to embrace the eloquent and powerful Wisconsin declaration. The 1894 Wisconsin report is such a clear and concise statement of uncompromising academic freedom in the name of neutrality that it seems unlikely that any university would have the courage to adopt its principles today.

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“When all think alike, no one thinks very much.” —Walter Lippman

My field of social work finds itself at an interesting juncture. To the general public, it is typically seen as a profession geared toward helping people from all walks of life. Recently, however, it has been all in on endorsing and conveying a particular flavor of truth and social justice born out of one side of the United States political two-party system.

Take, for example, the standards promulgated by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), which are the foundation of all accredited undergraduate and graduate social work programs. Even a cursory perusal of this document reveals that it is infused with “critical social justice” rhetoric and terminology. What’s more, the National Association of Social Workers’ (NASW) Code of Ethics, used to guide all social work practitioners in the field working with clients, has not remained untouched by the influence of critical social justice ideology, as evidenced by its emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion. Indeed, NASW’s “Standards for Clinical Social Work in Social Work Practice,” used to guide social workers within the mental health profession in particular, was recently revised to reflect a similar political leaning.

The NASW standards evidently emboldened a pair of researchers at my former university to conduct a study in which white and male undergraduate students were purposefully made to feel unsafe, resulting in a Department of Education Office of Civil Rights complaint. This is indicative of larger trends, given that a highly ranked social work journal had accepted for publication this research that documents what can only be described as “re-education” and “struggle session” pedagogical practices in teaching university students.

All of this matters because the role the social work profession plays is both large and societally important. For instance, according to the CSWE’s Directory of Accredited Programs, there are nearly 1,000 social work programs in the United States educating at least 150,000 students. Meanwhile, the U.S. Bureau of Labor estimates that there are more than 800,000 practicing social workers. Social workers provide assistance in areas ranging from child welfare and geriatrics to health care and support for people with developmental disabilities. Moreover, social workers comprise over 500,000 of the behavioral health workforce—meaning that if you step into the office of a psychotherapist, there’s a good chance that you’re meeting with a social worker.

Social workers are being trained in an academic ethos that remains ideologically tilted to the left, both among social work faculty and the professoriate at large. And yet, these same people are serving a politically diverse country. For example, a July 2025 Pew Research poll suggests 46% and 45% of Americans lean Republican and Democratic, respectively. And in the 2024 presidential election, the Republican candidate received 49.8% of the popular vote, compared to 48.3% for the Democratic candidate.

In his 2021 book Why It’s OK To Speak Your Mind, the philosopher Hrishikesh Joshi introduces the idea of the epistemic commons. Described as the shared “stock of evidence, ideas, and perspectives that are alive for a given community,” Joshi argues that the epistemic commons is a vital resource to ensure groups of people can more effectively pursue truth while addressing biases and blind spots. It necessitates viewpoint diversity, encouragement of dissenting and alternative views, challenges on consensus, and a group-wide commitment to protecting the commons. Crucially, Joshi contends there is an ethical responsibility for shielding the commons to safeguard against social pressures to conform.

For social work, I believe that the ethical imperative in maintaining our epistemic commons is doubly important—both for the health of the field as a discipline of study as well as to better equip budding practitioners for working with clients from all walks of life. And yet, thanks to critical social justice ideology, the overall tenor of contemporary social work education strikes me as severely limited in scope. It is focused more and more on engaging in proselytizing practices, such as continued efforts to “purge” the social work field of what many perceive as the presence of ableism, neoliberalism, and white supremacy. This academic ethos is antithetical to how I was trained in my master’s program just a decade ago when the emphasis was on respecting differences and empowering clients while employing a strengths-based approach—ideals that still remain in the NASW’s Code of Ethics and that, until very recently, social work textbooks have written about.

Instead, elites within the profession employ social justice talking points as a form of status signaling. Some of those talking points promote beliefs that benefit the upper class and inadvertently inflict harm on lower classes while maintaining distorted socio-political narratives in moralizing and conformist ways. This tends to occur in an academic environment in which emotional safety is prioritized over real learning and other higher education values, and group identities and divisiveness are accentuated over universalism, cohesion, and genuine inclusion. This is a culture arguably bolstered by professional organizations’ (e.g., CSWE, NASW) standards and policies providing permission for people in the academy to tailor their meanings to push a particular socio-political and ideological hegemonic agenda.

If this doesn’t change, social work will remain an über-biased encapsulated bubble of oil floating amidst a sea of diverse socio-political beliefs and values. Indeed, if the status quo remains in place, I am especially worried about the long-term risk of producing more and more ideologically intolerant practitioners in an academic ethos defined by group polarization, likely in the name of conformity, obedience, or by virtue of being gaslit. Unfortunately, however, instead of calling for a rethinking or reassessment of these recent trends, many scholars in the field are advocating for the social work profession to double down on ideas like dismantling capitalistic and ableist “collective structures of oppression” in order to counter perceived conservative existential threats.

Collectively, this begs the question of what will be the likely impact if the stark discrepancy is not reconciled to ensure that the profession is more sensitive to and inclusive of the beliefs, values, politics, and experiences of people from all walks of life? Social work can’t be choosy about what kinds of diversity and inclusivity the profession tolerates and advocates for—or, for that matter, what kind of ideas, questions, and perspectives are worth exploring and seriously considering in a university setting, even if they go against the grain. If this incongruity is not addressed, the likely long-term impact cannot be understated: Social work risks being considered an undisciplined discipline with increasingly limited influence and, most importantly, negligible social utility.

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Students come to law school eager to learn what the law is. They quickly discover that in our federated common law system, there often are no easy answers. Instead, they must read prior judicial decisions and attempt to glean from those cases legal rules that can be applied by analogy to new disputes. Still, as their first semester goes on, they come to realize that law has a rhythm, and even if there are fewer hard-and-fast rules than they anticipated, there are at least general principles, developed over centuries, that they can apply to the facts of a given case. And then they get to constitutional law.

As one might imagine, courses on constitutional law introduce students to the various modes of interpreting the Constitution. Issues such as the relative powers of the three branches of the federal government, the powers of federal vs. state governments, and the rights of individuals to due process and equal protection are all subjected to diverse, nuanced and often conflicting analyses. Indeed, more than the law of torts or property or contracts, constitutional doctrine is a morass of different rules, standards, and modes of interpretation that has shifted dramatically over time and frequently lacks an internal logic.

The Constitution is arcane, and while it is not infinitely malleable, there are often a range of reasonable interpretations of almost any constitutional provision. Supreme Court cases interpreting the Constitution regularly conflict with one another, and the court has often been only too willing to discard past precedent where it would lead to a result undesirable to a majority of the justices.

All of this is compounded by the fact that the work of the federal courts comprises only a fraction of constitutional law: Congress, the executive branch, state and local governments, and the people are all constitutional actors, too. The result is a course that is singularly frustrating to students who have painstakingly learned to apply common law reasoning, because values and historical circumstances do much more to dictate the outcome of constitutional disputes than any discernable legal principle.

This uncertainty makes constitutional law challenging to teach even at a good time; and as many constitutional law professors will tell you, now is not a good time. Under the stewardship of Chief Justice John Roberts, the Supreme Court has evinced a willingness to overturn or disregard longstanding precedents on issues such as abortion rights, affirmative action, and gun rights, to name just a few. One professor told The New York Times that she started crying while preparing her syllabus because she “couldn’t figure out how any of [the court’s recent doctrine] makes sense.”

Claims that the Supreme Court has created a “crisis” in teaching constitutional law have inspired a wave of scholarship from constitutional law professors. As many of these scholars have noted, the crisis in constitutional law is hardly a new phenomenon: The criticisms liberal law professors make of the court today—that it is lawless, policy-driven, and out of step with public opinion—could have been (and were) made by abolitionists in the mid-19th century, progressives in the Lochner era during the early 20th century, and conservatives during the Warren Court in 1950s and ‘60s. For this reason, Marquette University political science professor Patrick Sobkowski refers to the challenge of conveying clear doctrinal rules as “the enduring crisis in teaching constitutional law.”

Constitutional law teachers have proposed a range of solutions to this problem, from “teach[ing] constitutional law as a historical narrative” that has developed over time, to training students to make legal arguments applying various modes of constitutional interpretation “so well that they are indistinguishable from the arguments that would be made by those who actually subscribe to that methodology,” and even encouraging students to assess “the ultimate questions of power” and “what futures” a decision creates. While the specific approaches vary, all agree that the proper role of a constitutional law professor is not to impose a particular set of values on students, but rather to equip them with the tools necessary to make solid constitutional arguments.

All of this is fine as far as it goes. Effectively teaching students this subject requires introducing them to the reality that legal doctrine can only explain so much constitutional reasoning. I worry, however, that we do our students a disservice if we introduce them to the limits of constitutional “law” as such without helping them develop the tools to reframe those limits in a more optimistic light. That is why in my classes, I encourage my students to view the doctrinal uncertainty that creates viable arguments on all sides of an issue not as a hindrance to effective lawyering, but as an opportunity.

As I explain to them, doctrinal uncertainty is good for legal employment. Partially, of course, this is a flip remark about job security, but it also hints at something more fundamental. As the University of Chicago Law School’s William Baude suggests, “What really drives constitutional argument at the highest level of our system is not three-part tests, but more fundamental principles.” If Baude is correct—if constitutional law is ultimately a reflection of values—then students should embrace doctrinal uncertainty as an opportunity to make the law reflect their values.

There are at least four distinct advantages to this approach. First, it is fundamentally hopeful, in the sense that it encourages students to view themselves as constitutional actors who have a meaningful opportunity to effect change, rather than as passive participants subject to the whims of a capricious and dogmatic Supreme Court. Moreover, a hopeful message about values encourages students to consider themselves as part of the broader constitutional project, allowing them to develop more common ground with each other, their professors, and the broader legal community.

Second, emphasizing the opportunity that values-driven constitutional decision-making creates could help increase the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. As the late Harvard University Law School professor Richard Fallon explained, two different but important aspects of the court’s legitimacy are moral legitimacy (should people treat the court’s decisions with respect and obedience?) and sociological legitimacy (do people treat the court’s decisions with respect and obedience?). If students are trained to view the court’s values-driven decision-making as part of the iterative process through which we seek to structure a better and more just society, that could help bolster the court’s moral legitimacy.

This is particularly true where professors emphasize that on many contested constitutional issues there are often a range of values that could be legitimately pursued. Moreover, to the extent constitutional law professors have the power to shape their students’ attitudes about the court, as some argue, framing values-driven decision-making in a positive light could help lend the court more sociological legitimacy.

Third, this approach encourages students to develop the practical skills they will need to be effective constitutional lawyers. Just because constitutional law is often values-driven does not mean there is no doctrine. Training students on how values intersect with constitutional principles arms them to effectively advocate for clients—including in circumstances in which effective advocacy requires arguing for changes in constitutional law.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, encouraging students to consider how their own values can be reflected in constitutional decision-making helps ensure that constitutional law professors will not—wittingly or otherwise—impose their own views about what the law ought to be on their students. Because there is only so much time in the semester, professors must necessarily curate their course materials and topics. And in doing so, it is impossible for them to avoid making value-laden judgments about what to include—and more importantly, what to leave out. Centering students’ values—and the meaningful possibility that those values could come to dominate constitutional thinking—helps to de-emphasize the professor’s biases, encouraging more robust classroom discussions and increasing the perception of fairness.

The “crisis” in teaching constitutional law is unlikely to abate while our republic endures. Indeed, the reality is that “constitutional law” is a verb, not a noun; and constitutional law professors will become happier, more effective, and more inspiring teachers if they learn to embrace that fact—and all the opportunity it contains.

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Psychology is the scientific study of the mind and behavior, which is inextricably linked to how people think, learn, feel, and act. Indeed, psychology touches every aspect of a person’s life. But while there are virtually no limits to psychology as a field of study, there are limitations to psychological practice.

This contrast between study and practice has become especially important in the digital age, when ordinary people have access to enormous amounts of information about psychology. Of course, learning more about psychology can help equip ordinary people with greater self-awareness, self-understanding, and perhaps enough of a self-diagnosis to know when they need professional help. But this wealth of information can also have unintended consequences, including a distorted sense of the challenges people face. That is, some people can develop the belief that they are more disordered than they really are.

I am not dismissing or trivializing the importance of mental health; as a psychologist, I would be remiss to do so. Mental health concerns and disorders are real and certainly require intervention. But I also believe it is important to draw attention to an overlooked aspect of what I call mental health pandemonium, which is the tendency to underestimate the resilience of ordinary people and to misdiagnose and attempt to treat the typical, and even healthy, responses to the range of events that happen in their lives. For example, experiencing an adverse event such as getting into a small car accident or even losing a loved one, followed by an unpleasant, but understandable reaction such as crying or grief, doesn’t necessarily mean that one should get therapy, nor does it mean that one is on track to developing a mental disorder.

Perhaps one of the best examples of this overreach or pandemonium is the social emotional learning (SEL) curriculum so common today in K-12 education in the United States. Social emotional learning is a curriculum that teaches students self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, responsible decision-making, and relationship skills in the classroom. In the United States, 27 states have adopted the K-12 SEL curriculum in conjunction with the standard academic curriculum. One of the big aims of SEL is to help students identify and become more aware of their emotions (such as doing a “feelings check-in” at the beginning of class); identify past situations that evoked certain emotions (for example, asking questions like: “When was the last time you were disappointed?”); and engage in perspective-taking (by prompting students to ask questions such as: “How would Sam feel if you took her cupcake without asking?”).

Considering the rapid cognitive, behavioral, emotional, and social changes that students are going through, proponents of SEL argue that the classroom is the appropriate place to help students develop these sorts of skills, which they will need to succeed after they leave school and begin to build their adult lives. In theory, integrating the SEL curriculum with the standard academic curriculum sounds great. In practice, however, SEL may distract from more important school goals and may even be harmful to students. There are several reasons for this.

First, the classroom may not be the appropriate setting for psychological interventions to take place. Some of these interventions can trigger upsetting emotional reactions, particularly when certain activities are completed (such as tasks like, “Write about the last time someone betrayed your trust”) or when certain questions are asked (for example, “When was the last time you felt sad and why?”). When students arrive at school to embark on a 6-7 hour day of learning and academic enrichment, care should be taken to consider the intensity of these interventions, so as not to trigger strong emotional reactions in children that could make learning hard or even impossible.

Second, teachers may not be qualified and trained to deliver the SEL curriculum in classrooms. Teachers are already dealing with a substantial number of tasks and pressures, such as teaching a curriculum that prepares students to pass standardized state exams; managing disruptive and disrespectful behaviors that interfere with classroom learning; dealing with rising class enrollment; and ensuring quality instruction with limited resources, among other issues. What’s more, many teacher-education programs do not explicitly train teacher candidates to deliver the SEL curriculum; therefore when teachers are tasked with using this content, they may feel unprepared.

Finally, prioritizing SEL may not be wise when K-12 students’ test scores are mixed or even poor in reading, math, and science. While it’s not impossible to teach SEL programming while ensuring that students meet benchmarks in these subjects, in districts struggling with basic learning, any available instructional time should probably be dedicated to helping students master basic reading, math and other skills. While emotional regulation skills and reading, for example, are both important, reading is far more practical and fundamental than learning how to regulate one’s emotions.

In her recent bestselling book, Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, author Abigail Shrier identifies the shortcomings of SEL and mental health education in general in classrooms, arguing that if the goal is to help students regulate their emotions, the “unceasing attention to feelings” is likely to undermine any opportunity for a student to achieve emotional stability. Shrier also quotes Leif Kennair, a Norwegian psychologist and an expert in the treatment of anxiety disorders:

“You can’t learn emotional regulation from a lecture…. You learn how to handle the disappointment of not making the basketball team by not making the basketball team. Not from classroom instruction. Social emotional learning exercises often assume that by discussing a hypothetical disappointment, kids can skip the painful experience and arrive straight at maturity and social competence. But there is no way to gain friendship skills except by attempting to make a friend. There is no real way to learn to overcome failure except by struggling and, eventually, managing to do it.”

As with anything, people should be aware that there are limits and even serious risks to patients using mental health services. For example, the rush to provide crisis counseling following a major natural disaster or mass casualty event (e.g., mass shooting) can cause more harm than good. Psychological interventions that take place right after these tragic events often provide minimal help for patients and can even promote “histrionics,” which impedes recovery and elongates the sense of crisis.

Therapy is also not necessarily the answer for those who are mourning the loss of a loved one. Crying, withdrawal, sadness, inattention, appetite changes, and more are typical and sometimes even healthy reactions in response to grief and loss. Offering grief therapy to those who are going through typical grieving could make things worse by tamping down these responses and not letting the person work through their natural and understandable sadness.

The ability to see the nuance here is important. It could be the case that individuals who survived a mass casualty event may need therapeutic services should they be suffering from unwanted symptoms such as intrusive thoughts, persistent guilt, reliving the event, panic attacks, etc. Or for those who have lost a loved one, if their grief response is much longer than would be expected and they are still experiencing lingering feelings such as emotional numbness, intense loneliness or identity disruption, then certainly a psychotherapeutic intervention would be appropriate.

But an important takeaway here is also that resilience, not maladaptive responses, is the norm for people. Although the magnitude of the adverse event varies, all of us have experienced things that have negatively affected our well-being, from losing a job or getting divorced to having a miscarriage or dealing with a difficult medical condition. These are common, yet stressful experiences, and many of us are able to surmount these challenges without therapy or other mental health services.

Of course, as I’ve already said, mental health services provide invaluable help to many individuals in genuine need. But in K-12 schools, redirecting students’ attention to their strengths and skillsets will better prepare them for the unrelenting changes and unpredictability of life. Although they may be vulnerable, dependent, and undeveloped, students will be better served by envisioning themselves as capable, self-empowered individuals. This is what is needed to promote students’ growth, learning, and resilience in a world where so many aspects of their lives may be out of their control.

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I have lived my life in the in-between, pressed against limits both visible and invisible. I grew up poor in a single-parent household, with aspects of identity that marked me as “less than” in the cultural scripts of class, gender, and sexuality. I have faced the “fell clutch of circumstance,” and as a result of that hardship, I now carry with me the steady conviction of William Ernest Henley’s oft-quoted poem Invictus—that “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” In spite of—or perhaps because of—“the bludgeonings of chance,” I grew determined to overcome the crushing weight of childhood poverty, ultimately rising to earn a doctorate.

Yet when I entered the world of higher education, seemingly having found a way through past challenges, new artificial boundaries lay before me—not a dead end but a maze of obscured obstacles. I was present but never fully accepted: too poor in background to be welcome in elite circles, too educated to be at ease in the communities I left behind, too outspoken for polite company, too cautious for activist spaces. Always straddling, never belonging.

This in-betweenness has become my vantage point. To live permanently at the margins of belonging is to see the walls when others see the whole world. We talk often about “limits” as barriers to opportunity or ceilings on advancement, but we rarely examine the experience of living on the border itself—where identity risks being shaped by constraint and survival requires constant negotiation. The liminal perspective, unwanted as it often is, makes visible what others cannot or will not see. What I notice is not unique, and it is not clairvoyance; it is simply the accumulation of 15 years of teaching, observing, and seeing patterns emerge that research has been documenting for decades.

In education, these ceilings are everywhere. My research with gifted and twice-exceptional learners reveals how these limits are constructed and enforced: Potential is capped not by ability but by institutional design. Tall poppies are told to duck, or they are trimmed until they wither. Supports blunt rather than sharpen, disciplining students into “acceptable” versions of themselves. The message is clear: Thrive, but not too much; question, but not too forcefully; succeed, but only within the box we have drawn for you.

Teachers are not immune. At times it feels as though we are asked to meet every need, heal every wound, and solve every social ill—even though we know we cannot. Expectations multiply as class sizes grow, stretching depth into breadth until structural caps dictate who receives attention and who is sidelined. Some boundaries are necessary for safety and structure. But when exclusionary barriers disguise themselves as neutral—or worse, as helpful—they become obstacles to growth and ultimately erode the foundation that makes collective flourishing possible.

The same is true of social emotional learning. At its best, SEL equips students with language and strategies to move forward through challenges. At its worst, it demands performance: Express your feelings in approved ways, and risk sanction if you do not. Students quickly learn the lesson beneath the lesson—that authentic expression is dangerous, and silence is safer. The Overton window constricts.

To survive, many educators adopt the stance of “see and don’t say”—bearing witness to hypocrisy, while knowing that speaking plainly would be treated as disloyalty. What’s more, constraint shapes more than behavior; it shapes reality. Systems that once existed to expand possibility increasingly function as calibration devices, producing predictable outcomes and calling it virtue. When students and teachers learn to mask curiosity, intensity, frustration, or dissent, the system mistakes the silence for consensus.

At times I find myself pressured into the role of spectator—watching without interacting, choosing a seat at the edge that allows me to see both sides of the divide. This vantage point does not resolve contradictions, but it does bring them into view, revealing the fear that builds the barriers, the realities the barriers conceal, and the possibilities they obscure. Visibility is the first crack in the surface—not sufficient to solve the problems, but enough to make them impossible to ignore for those willing to look.

The more I teach, the deeper I apply what I’ve learned, the clearer this becomes: Boundaries are not neutral. They are too often tools of exclusion disguised as necessities, walls erected in the name of safety or order. The insistence that we suppress emotion in the name of stability, that we cap brilliance in the name of equity, that we narrow discourse in the name of civility—these are all ways of manufacturing conformity.

But naming the cracks, while important, does not in itself repair them. The big question is what we do once we finally see the architecture for what it is. Over the last several months, in the classroom and in my writing, I’ve watched a pattern repeat itself: Educational systems—governed by boards and administered through K-12 districts and universities alike—create limits they refuse to name, and then demand that teachers create stability to hide the instability. We pretend the house isn’t on fire so no one has to take responsibility for the smoke in our lungs. This is how limits reproduce themselves—not through grand decrees, but through daily rituals of compliance.

Grading works the same way. In theory, grades are feedback. In practice, they have become instruments of regulation—sometimes punitive, used to restrain deviation; sometimes affirmative, used to disguise failure. A grade can function as a ceiling or a floor long before it reflects learning, capping some students while inflating others who conform to expectations. That is a limit—not of ability, but of sanctioned expression.

Classrooms themselves operate under an increasingly captured logic. The appearance of equity matters more than the experience of learning. We flatten differences because acknowledging real variation is politically inconvenient. We narrow discourse because honest disagreement feels unsafe. We script participation so tightly that students learn silence is safer than thought.

These are not dramatic limits. They are quiet limits—the kind that accumulate imperceptibly at first until eventually the range of permissible thought has narrowed so far that most people no longer notice the walls. These are the limits that concern me most because they shape not just what students—and teachers—learn but what they believe they are allowed to think. And yet, I do not write entirely from a place of despair. The vantage point of the in-between comes with its own tools to begin repairing those cracks.

The first is unfiltered observation: refusing to pretend the house is not burning when you can feel the heat. Simply telling the truth about conditions is an act of repair because systems that depend on illusion cannot survive accurate description—and anyone who has worked within the education pipeline, from K-12 classrooms to university campuses and district offices, learns how necessary and how difficult honest observation can be. The second is restoring meaning to evaluation: refusing to let grading become punitive theater or hollow affirmation. When feedback becomes a conversation rather than a weapon or a reward, ceilings lift. Students re-enter the learning process instead of performing obedience to it.

The third is making the invisible limits visible. When teachers, parents, and students name the subtle constraints—what can be said, what must be said, what will be punished—the spell begins to break. Limits lose their inevitability once they are recognized and acknowledged as constructed rather than natural. And the final tool is the vantage point itself. The in-between teaches a simple truth: Limits are real, but many are choices. Some boundaries protect; others simply pacify.

Limits will never disappear. But the invisible ones—the manufactured ones, the dishonest ones—are where systems quietly calcify. Repair begins by refusing to confuse walls for horizons, and by reclaiming the agency to decide which limits must be challenged and overcome, which must be kept, and which were illusions all along.

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The university’s chief mission is the pursuit, refinement, and dissemination of knowledge and understanding about the world and humanity’s place in it. To best accomplish this mission, the university must nourish a culture of free inquiry—a culture where ideas are freely and vigorously exchanged, where thinkers from all walks of life can subject their perspectives to searching discussion, and where disagreement is a key means to test and advance the frontiers of knowledge.

There is, however, an inescapable tension at the heart of free inquiry. One way to see the tension is simply by reflecting on the phrase “free inquiry” itself. The two words in the term pull against one another.

On one side is “free.” When something is free, it is unconstrained—wild even. Staunch defense of free speech on campus, from the McCarthy era in the 1950s to the free speech movement at Berkeley in the 1960s, through to our present time and the efforts of organizations like Heterodox Academy, is all a manifestation of the desire to lean into the “free” side of free inquiry. To lean this way is to place great importance on the open exchange of ideas, even by thinkers we find distasteful or immoral, as essential to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding. As John Stuart Mill put it in On Liberty, “There ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.”

Mill’s picture is one where the forwarding of every opinion, even those that we take to be wrong, offensive, irrational, or immoral, is of great value to our growth in knowledge and understanding. Consider the history of anatomy, which relies on systematic dissection of human corpses. Progress in anatomy was severely impeded by authorities who viewed dissection itself as sacrilegious. It wasn’t until such views faded that we learned more about the marvels of the human body. The moral here: Let a great tide of opinion flow—even with all its mud and detritus—so that the tree of knowledge might be nourished.

But on the other side of “free” is “inquiry.” Far from the turbulence of converging currents of opinion, inquiry requires discipline. The very term “inquiry” conjures images of scholars hunched over stacks of books in hushed libraries, or scientists meticulously calibrating instruments to eliminate the slightest error. Inquirers follow well-worn methodological paths, subjecting themselves to rigorous standards of evidence, logic, and argument. They laboriously sift through mountains of information, weighing each piece, discarding much.

They humble themselves before the collective wisdom of their disciplines, accepting criticism that may feel like personal rebuke—or even personal attack. And perhaps most difficult, they hold out their most treasured findings with open hands, knowing that what seems to be the most solid of truths may sublimate into vaporous ignorance in the face of new evidence.

In sum, inquiry demands constraint—the antithesis of unbounded freedom. The unfettered expression of opinion, so central to the “free” side of free inquiry, is just one actor of many on the stage of inquiry. The rushing river of free expression must be channeled through stone aqueducts and cast iron piping of disciplined investigation.

Thus, the tension at the heart of free inquiry: Freedom demands openness to all opinions, while effective inquiry demands constraints and discipline. And because our universities must be homes to free inquiry, this tension is inescapable. More importantly, it’s a good thing. Consider a guitar’s strings: They can make their dulcet tones only if they are tuned to a certain tension. Remove it and the string buzzes discordantly or flops about lifelessly.

Those who lead and inhabit our institutions of higher education must manage this tension daily. Freedom without constraint leads to a buzzing cacophony, where ignorance can blot out knowledge, where understanding is confounded by confusion. But too much constraint dams the wellsprings of discovery, choking off the streams through which new ideas might surge.

The challenge for those who wish to foster a culture of free inquiry is to strike the right balance—cultivating gardens where wild ideas may bloom, yet tilled and pruned enough to bear the good fruits of disciplined, rigorous inquiry. This tension cannot be resolved once and for all, but must be constantly negotiated through institutional practices and cultural norms.

Yet maintaining productive tension requires deliberate effort, particularly in communities where ideological homogeneity threatens to slacken the strings. When too many share the same assumptions, the instrument of inquiry produces only monotone droning rather than beautiful music. Universities must therefore cultivate what we might call “intellectual cross-training.” The progressive scholar learns to articulate conservative arguments in their strongest form; the methodologist practices wild speculation; the theorist submits to rigorous empirical discipline. These are not exercises in bad faith or false balance, but essential practices for maintaining the tension that makes real inquiry possible.

For our institutions’ leaders, the temptation to minimize controversy often means dampening precisely that friction that generates sparks of insight. But a university that celebrates only comfortable discoveries is like a bridge with all its cables pulling in the same direction—structurally unsound and awaiting collapse. Better to understand that productive disagreement is not a failure of a community but evidence of its health.

This means seeking out people to join that community that unsettle departmental orthodoxies, funding research that tests rather than assumes foundational premises, creating structured encounters with those whose intellectual commitments pull in different directions. The goal is not chaos but a carefully maintained tension—taut enough to do real work and flexible enough to absorb the shocks of genuine discovery.

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Large swaths of the publishing industry have been captured by an ideological paradigm that prioritizes limitations and restrictions over quality. Instead of approaching manuscripts with a mindset that asks, “Does it have literary and intellectual merit?”—in other words, is it innovative, brilliant, daring, fresh, and beautiful?—the publishing gatekeepers, including agents, editors, and publishers, tend to pass new works through a filter of limiting rules.

One of those rules requires that the identity of fictional characters match their authors’ identity—otherwise the author is guilty of “cultural appropriation.” Another rule mandates that stories take an approved (read progressive) stance on issues involving minorities, diversity, transgenderism, racism, guns, immigration, etc., with little room for ambiguity and irony. Most importantly, perhaps, any words, phrases, topics, or ideas that are considered “problematic” have to be removed, and “sensitivity readers” are on hand to enforce this norm.

A recently published study by Adam Szetela, titled That Book Is Dangerous!: How Moral Panic, Social Media, and the Culture Wars Are Remaking Publishing, documents in exhaustive detail the censorious and creativity-suppressing effects when literary texts are passed through the prescriptive filter of sensitivity readers. None of the restrictions mentioned here are openly spelled out in a manual or checklist, but they have become a silent industry standard, which has shifted the focus away from the artistic merit and aesthetic value of texts toward a predominant concern with matters of theme and content.

How We Got Here

Things have not always been like this, and a look at the recent history of literary criticism can be instructive to understand how we ended up here. The 20th century has seen a succession of schools or movements of literary criticism, each one with its own strengths and limitations. Victorian and early-20th-century approaches to literature were often centered on the author’s life and private world of ideas. According to this method, a work of literature was assumed to be a direct expression of the mind, personality, or experiences of its author. Therefore, studying the author’s life was a reliable and telling way of unlocking the meaning of the text. The reaction to this biographical approach came in the form of New Criticism, an Anglo-American school of literary analysis that flourished between the two world wars. This method focused on the aesthetic and formal properties of literary texts, i.e. their internal order and formal artistry, to the exclusion of biographical or historical considerations.

After WWII, a new paradigm took hold—structuralism—which modified New Critical formalism by looking for the mental, societal, and cultural patterns and motifs embedded deeply in subtexts of narratives and myths (e.g. the father-son conflict, the hero’s journey, the role of the trickster figure, etc.). Both the New Critical and structuralist approaches have in common that they treated texts as the ultimate repositories of authority and the fulcrum of meaning, with the critic serving merely as an intermediary, revealing a work’s internal consistency and thematic universality.

The advent of Critical Theory in the early 1980s changed all that. Thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School and with French poststructuralism shifted the dominant perspective from a model that focused on aesthetic order and deep structure to one that prioritized the content and especially the content’s ideological implications. The Marxist outlook of philosophers associated with the Frankfurt School (thinkers like Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Jürgen Habermas) propagated the view that all human relations, as well as their cultural and artistic manifestations, were rooted in unequal power relations. This materialistic approach filtered down into the way literature was treated as a privileged cultural site where the drama of dominance and unequal social relations was being played out. And it dovetailed nicely with the work of French poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and Jean François Lyotard, who argued that “discourses”—i.e. unexamined verbal conventions to talk about matters of race, colonialism, sexuality, class status, disability, etc.—were not just passive linguistic habits but rather means of actively making these very categories.

According to this view, the discourse of Orientalism “constructs” the thing called the Orient, the discourse around homosexuality constructs what is a gay or a lesbian person, the discourse of race constructs what a black, brown or white person is, and so on. And since language socially constructs whole swaths of reality, language is also the lever by which those aspects of reality can allegedly be modified. Hence, if you can change the way people speak or write about something, then you change the very thing itself. Make certain “harmful” words disappear (or replace them with euphemisms), and the attitude linked to those words will disappear along with them. This logic, which has given us the entire politically correct lexicon, entails both verbal vigilance and self-censorship.

This paradigm acted as a catalyst for the growth of activist and prosecutorial approaches in literary and cultural studies, designed to reveal an author’s unenlightened, elitist, socially backward, patriarchal, colonialist—and occasionally also adequately progressive—views. In 1965, French philosopher Paul Ricoeur coined the term “the hermeneutics of suspicion” to describe this tendency. As programs dedicated to the study of race, class, and gender sprang up on campuses across the nation, a consensus took hold that the literary critic’s principal task was to identify oppressive ideological agendas and show how novels, short stories, plays, and poems were engaged in perpetuating harmful discourses and cementing iniquitous social relations. The spirit of this type of criticism is expressed in articles such as Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” and Anna Juhnke’s “Remnants of Misogyny in Paradise Lost.”

Such concerns would have been bewilderingly irrelevant to an earlier generation of formalist critics, who were beholden to a different paradigm, i.e. what structuralist critic Jonathan Culler called the “hyperprotected cooperative principle.” This concept denotes a kind of contract between reader and author, a bond of trust, where the reader approached a work of literature reverently, in the conviction that things were arranged the way they were for artistic, stylistic, poetic, and irreducibly aesthetic reasons, and the critical reader’s job was to figure out how to make sense of the seeming contradictions, tensions, and challenges.

Sins of Omission or Commission

But under the aegis of the poststructuralist hermeneutics of suspicion, generations of undergraduate and graduate students, i.e. the future professional class of literary critics, agents, editors, and commentators, not to mention general readers, were taught that to be a discerning judge of literary works meant to be able to sniff out what identity was unfavorably represented in a given text, what insensitivities pervaded a story, or how texts socially constructed, and thus made possible the status quo around race, class, and gender.

It hardly surprises that literary agents and editors in all echelons of the publishing industry are now willing to crucify works of literature, no matter how brilliantly written, on the basis of perceived sins of omission or commission. No wonder, too, that scores of readers—especially on Twitter and Goodreads— are loudly condemning certain “dangerous” works of literature (often without having read them) and that they seem unable to separate an author’s own moral (or immoral) stances from the characters and events contained in their fictional creations.

In 2023, PEN America issued a lengthy report of these limiting and censorious trends titled “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm.” In it, we read that:

“Since 2017, these trends in online literary behavior have extended from the YA space to publishing more broadly. Three recent examples, Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Snow Forest, Cecilia Rabess’ 2023 debut novel Everything’s Fine, and Gretchen Felker-Martin’s 2022 sci-fi horror book Manhunt were all targeted by review-bombing. In all three cases, one-star reviews began pouring in before the books were published, with critics objecting to the books’ premises—a story set in Russia, a story about a Black woman who falls in love with a conservative white coworker, and a story about a virus that targets trans people, respectively. In each case, critics objected to the presumed content rather than providing insights gleaned from reading the books themselves.”

Such an inquisitorial view of literary works gave rise to what Kazuo Ishiguro has called “a climate of fear” among authors and creatives. This trend has undermined academia’s and publishing’s ability to deal with the craft of literature as an artistic endeavor and a human striving for profound aesthetic experiences.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with having a distinct critical perspective when reading and discussing literature, and no theme should be considered off-limits for analysis, but we also need to keep in mind the integrity of verbal artifacts and their superior aesthetic value. To me, the time is ripe for a new paradigm that departs from the binary model of interpretation that either prioritizes content at the expense of form, or conversely, one that only concerns itself with aesthetic matters to the exclusion of personal, socio-historical, or philosophical contexts. The academic study of literature should not be self-limiting one way or the other, but should consider all the different approaches that have historically played out in the various movements and schools across time.

In my own teaching and research practice, I have realized that every literary text is asking for a different kind of approach. Some poems scream out for a formalist treatment; some novels respond well to a biographical approach; others benefit from a structuralist analysis; and certain plays are best read through the lens of social class or race.

Whatever the case, we should avoid the blind application of fault-finding, bias-hunting, harm-locating approaches across the spectrum of literary texts and genres. Likewise, turning all serious readers—let alone literary agents and publishers—into ombudsmen for certain disenfranchised or victimized groups, and using a scolding tone to hold authors and books accountable for all kinds of sins, whether real or imagined, is extremely counterproductive. That’s because the best fiction often challenges our preconceptions, opens our world to new ideas and perspectives, and doesn’t chime with our moral certainties. Let us learn to embrace uncertainty, difference, and real wonder by truly listening to the works of literature we deal with, and respecting their artistic integrity while not closing our eyes to their implied messages. Most importantly, we must not crush these works of art under the weight of our own limited, righteous, and presentist agendas.

Some years ago, after realizing what a regressive, self-limiting state the world of publishing had become, I decided to do something about it: After retiring from my faculty position, I founded a publishing house by the name of Heresy Press—nomen est omen! Since its inception in 2023, Heresy Press has issued boundary-pushing, provocative works of fiction chosen primarily for their literary and intellectual merit. We’ve recently branched out into nonfiction, and the first book in that category, The War On Words: 10 Arguments Against Free Speech—And Why They Fail by Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen, makes an eloquent case against speech limitations and censorship.

Heresy Press’ second nonfiction project, forthcoming later this year in partnership with Heterodox Academy, is a book titled Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How To Get It. That volume—the first on its subject—offers discerning readers a wealth of diverse opinions and practical guidance on how to leverage and respect the critically important and yet often misunderstood concept of viewpoint diversity. In both intention and execution, this project is an object lesson in how to counter the self-limiting tunnel vision of viewpoint homogeneity and to embrace instead real diversity of ideas and constructive dialogue.

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Many states including Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Texas, and Utah now require instructors to make their course syllabi publicly available. The reasons are clear, advocates argue: The public has a right to know what is being taught in public university classrooms, and students should have clarity on the course content and objectives before spending their tuition dollars to enroll.

These are defensible arguments for more transparency, but there also appear to be underlying political motivations to the sudden surge of policy proposals by state legislatures and institutions. People and organizations on the right and center-right are eager to assess syllabi for left-wing bias and lack of viewpoint diversity. Professors and others also appear worried by the potential for online harassment of faculty that can ensue when their syllabi are openly shared.

But even if the political motivations behind these proposals and the potential risks to faculty as a result of them are real, it doesn’t follow that the core concept of course transparency is inherently bad. Classrooms are not sacred spaces. Just as we’ve come to expect transparency in scientific and other kinds of research, the knowledge work that occurs in classrooms should also be transparent, not just for the sake of the students or the public, but for the good of the profession and discipline. We academics need to leave behind the limits of “self-evident” instructional privacy and make our courses radically transparent, not via political pressure and legislation, but through internally led reform of our teaching practices.

U.S. universities are in the midst of a crisis of confidence. Public trust in higher education has dramatically declined in the past decade, especially among those who are politically in the center and right-of-center. The value of a college degree is in question as prices soar and many recent graduates struggle to find work. Partly as a result, the very notion of academic freedom that allows academics to teach how they want and to inquire freely is being threatened.

A common thread among all of this is that people have little idea of what is actually happening in the college classroom. Where opacity reins, narratives are easily spun—and external actors will step in to take control of them. The solution to this problem is not to bolt shut the classroom doors and pull down the shades. Instead we need to own our teaching, share our materials, and work collectively to improve our methods, practices, and content in the classroom. We need to treat our teaching as a discipline unto itself, a profession deserving of critical (expert) review, feedback, and improvement—not as a private act that is beyond accountability and questioning.

This should not be controversial. The very goal of academic work is to seek knowledge and truth in our disciplines, but we’ve become averse to the idea that classrooms should also be approached in the same way that we approach our disciplinary scholarship. There are entire fields dedicated to learning science and pedagogy. The problem is that we turn our heads when it comes to the application of this work as instructors in our classrooms. Teaching is an applied discipline. Imagine if it was the norm that medical research didn’t translate to medical practice. So why are we treating teaching as an exception?

University teaching has hardly changed since the lecture model we’re familiar with today arose in the late 19th century. In The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America, historian Jonathan Zimmerman explains how college teaching has “languished for too long under the dead hand of tradition.” Part of that tradition is that what happens in a classroom is no one else’s business. But it should be, not for political “gotcha” games, but because teaching should be treated as a profession. Evidence should be translated to practice, practices should be subject to rigorous evaluation and peer review as normative procedure, and standards for excellence should be defined and maintained.

For those who question this very idea, consider the other critical role of universities: academic research. Imagine a world in which a researcher toils away in their lab, makes a discovery, shares only the summary, refuses to share any methodological details or materials used, and doesn’t share a full report or show any of their work to their peers or the public. No academic would believe their results. Their work would not be considered a legitimate part of scholarly literature. Yet, this is the current state of affairs in university teaching.

Research at one point in the not so distant past, however, did look quite similar to the state of teaching now. Nature, one of the premier science journals, was primarily filled with high-level summaries of research, with details sometimes shared elsewhere or in closed academic societies; peer review wasn’t standard until the late 1970s; and open sharing of materials was not relatively normalized until the last decade. Teaching today looks a lot like research did a century ago: private, vague, and buoyed up by trust—trust that is now gone.

The history of academic research also provides a template for reform in the instructional realm. In the early 21st century, it was becoming increasingly clear that academic research was in trouble. As the publication standards of research required increasing levels of details about data and methods, meta-science researchers were able to begin analyzing how research was being done. This work showed the impact that different choices during the study design and data analytic processes had in influencing the results and producing false-positive findings. A scientific enterprise increasingly built on false foundations was bound to crumble.

And in 2015 it did, with psychology research becoming the poster child for a wider academic research crisis. The crisis was sparked after the Open Science Collaboration published a massive research report in Science showing that the majority of psychology’s “foundational” studies failed to replicate. What matters most is what happened next: the burgeoning of an academic-led reform movement.

The Center for Open Science, which led the large-scale replication effort in psychology cited above, set out to make research radically transparent to improve replication and the foundation of knowledge across science. Their results have been quite remarkable, including more than 100,000 users of their research templates and online infrastructure, widespread journal policy changes, and incentive structures built into research. But most of all, transparent, “open” science practices are now normative expectations in academic research. Transparency is now the default way that high-credibility labs operate at universities.

We need a similar reform movement for teaching, a movement not dictated by legislators and political pundits, but an “open teaching” movement, led by academics themselves, that encourages transparency of courses as the default. Making course syllabi public is a good start. Sharing materials, pedagogical approaches, citing our sources for methods is even better.

The “open science” movement did not start fully formed, and neither will an open teaching movement. But we need to start. We must take teaching seriously—bring it out of the 19th century and into the 21st—and we need to be transparent about it. We must fight back against political attacks on academic freedom in the classroom, but also work collectively to demonstrate that we can take control of professionalizing our teaching. In the end, students and knowledge transmission win.

But to improve anything, we must know what we’re starting with. And it is almost certainly not going to be great news out of the gate. Based on available data, we already know that there is political bias in course syllabi. As a result of the replication crisis, social science (and medical research especially) took huge PR hits in the 2010s. But thanks to the transparency that followed and the many researchers who took accountability for their professions and led the reform effort themselves, by the 2020s these disciplines ultimately became much stronger.

Better teaching is instrumental to any philosophy of higher education, including the two currently dominant ones—offering students return-on-investment professional training and providing a classically liberal education. Both of these philosophies want students to effectively learn what they are being taught. But without meta-research on teaching methods, course assignments, pedagogical practices and syllabi transparency, we cannot change teaching in any meaningful way. Instead, we’ll be stuck in the endless 19th-century cycle of lecture, test, repeat while trying to seal our classroom doors ever tighter to avoid scrutiny.

“Open teaching” will lead to better teaching practices, more up-to-date scholarship being taught, and more effective learning than what the current standard (internal and private) review practices of teaching—namely irregular “peer reviews” of teaching and student evaluations—currently afford. So, yes, syllabi should be public—as should the rest of our teaching materials and methods. It’s time for us to radically open up our classrooms and professionalize the critical role of teaching in the academy.

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