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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tyler Austin Harper contributes a hit to academic quit lit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another attempt to ban legacy admissions reaches the Senate.

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

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

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

Texas A&M gets sued over its course bans.

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

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

Faculty largely on board with diverse viewpoints for research and teaching

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

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

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

Two cheers for regional public universities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New framework proposed to understand political bias in AI chatbots

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

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

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

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

Federal science funding’s three-body problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is where university leaders come back in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The AAUP is now endorsing political candidates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free the Inquiry

How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production

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

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

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

Woof, indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Course cuts to appease lawmakers continue at Texas universities.

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

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

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

University of Texas at Austin professor denied tenure without explanation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Is there such a thing as legitimate politicization?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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