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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading at Washington Examiner

Survey finds that most faculty favor institutional neutrality.

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

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

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

Institutional neutrality gains traction in the UK.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In January, HxA hosted a member-only workshop hosted by HxA member Mary Kate Cary who originally launched the “Disagree with a Professor” event series at and University of Virginia. Inspired by the success of the event, HxA Chapter co-chair at Stanford Adam Spitzig and Director of Graduate and Undergraduate Programs at Stanford’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society Collin Anthony Chen hosted their inaugural event on campus last month.

In the conversation below, Spitzig and Chen explain how students and professors engaged constructively on contentious topics, plans for their next event given the success of this first event, and offer advice for others wanting to start this series on their campus.

Nicole Barbaro Simovski: The “Disagree with a Professor” event featured some genuinely contentious propositions for students to engage with — abolishing the presidency, scrapping in-person voting, questioning whether we’re less pandemic-ready now than before COVID. How did students actually engage with those positions? Were you surprised by any of the conversations that unfolded?

Adam Spitzig and Collin Anthony Chen: While we weren’t able to observe the conversations directly — we were managing logistics during the event — we did speak with participants afterward, and a few things stood out. Students came in genuinely energized, not just to listen but to contest and push back, which was exactly the spirit we’d hoped for. One exchange that seemed to generate particular heat involved a faculty statement about whether student medical data could be used without consent for research purposes. Many students actively disagreed with the position, and the faculty member pushed them to go beyond a gut reaction and articulate precisely what bothered them about it, which by all accounts made for a really constructive back-and-forth. Students also told us that the informal setting mattered: without the grader-gradee dynamic in the room, both sides seemed freer to engage more honestly and go deeper than a typical classroom exchange might allow. They also mentioned appreciating being challenged with evidence when they pushed back, having their counterarguments taken seriously and tested, rather than simply validated.

Simovski: This was described as the “inaugural” event at Stanford. What was the impetus for launching this new event series to foster constructive disagreement between and among students and faculty?

Spitzig & Chen: Stanford already has a robust and growing ecosystem of constructive dialogue initiatives — COLLEGE, Summer Frosh Civil Dialogues Program (which Chen runs), several ePluribus initiatives — and we wanted to add to that, filling a niche by specifically targeting the interactions between professors and students. This was partly motivated by surveys of students at Stanford and elsewhere that have suggested that a majority of students are reluctant to publicly disagree with their professors (likely for some of the reasons noted in our answers above). We were also inspired by the Disagree with a Professor program series at UVa, and thought a similar program would draw lots of interest from students and faculty at Stanford. I should note that we benefitted from HxA’s January member workshop on launching a “Disagree with a Professor” event, which offered lots of helpful guidance for launching our event series at Stanford.

Simovski: You helped build this as part of HxA’s Chapter at Stanford. What was the organizing process like? How was the experience of recruiting faculty willing to argue a provocative position and getting student interest?

Spitzig & Chen: The organizing process was lots of work, but lots of fun. It was a great way to connect with professors from across campus, and across a wide variety of research domains, schools, and departments. This was one of our favorite parts of the organization process. The faculty response, generally, was very positive: there was lots of interest, across schools, disciplines, levels of seniority. Ultimately we had more interested faculty members than spots, and had to postpone some faculty members’ participation until our next event. Some HxA members were among our faculty participants, but most were not HxA members. Faculty seemed to really enjoy the chance to develop their own statements to defend, with several developing more than the three we requested (in these cases, it was difficult to narrow down their great suggestions!). We also had more students sign up than we had spots, indicating a strong interest.

HxA co-sponsored the event with an established center on campus, the Stanford McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society (where Chen is the Director of Graduate & Undergraduate Programs), which helped strengthen the event and further integrate our new Stanford HxA Chapter into the university ecosystem. The McCoy Center provided financial and administrative support for the event, and probably helped to boost name recognition and event legitimacy in the eyes of the university, students, and faculty, who are already familiar with the McCoy Center.

Simovski: In a campus climate where many students and faculty feel the need to self-censor on contentious public topics, what do you think this event format does to help change the culture on campus?

Spitzig & Chen: Students reported that engaging with faculty outside of the classroom lowered the stakes of the conversation and gave them deeper insight into how faculty members think about topics as an interlocutor rather than an authority figure. The format helped make students more comfortable trying out different ideas since it is in the context of a conversation rather than a formal paper or classroom discussion where there is heightened concern about grades and appearances.

Simovski: Beyond the conversations that happened in the room, what’s the lasting effect you hope this event has — on the students who attended, on the faculty who participated, and on Stanford’s broader campus culture? How do you measure success for something like this?

Spitzig & Chen: We hope this event spurs broader excitement for similar events in the future. We are already planning follow-up events in the fall and hope to expand the “Disagree” series to include events with alumni, administrators, graduate students, and other groups, encouraged by the positive feedback we’ve received. We hope that the event adds productively to the existing Stanford constructive dialogue ecosystem, addressing the specific opportunity of facilitating more student-faculty dialogue outside of the classroom. Measuring success is challenging, but we intend to track participation rates, seek and record participant (student and faculty) feedback, and expand to include greater numbers of Stanford students, faculty, and other community members.

Simovski: What advice would you give to other HxA members who are interested in launching their own “Disagree with a Professor” series on their campus? What things should they keep in mind when organizing this?

Spitzig & Chen: Don’t underestimate branding and marketing — try to develop a quality logo and coordinated marketing materials well before the first event. Try to recruit students or others to help promote and document the event (by conducting, editing, and posting post-event exit interviews, for example, which one of our student assistants did). Seek campus newspaper coverage, if possible. Cast a wide net when inviting faculty members. Drum up interest and clarify the event format, among faculty members and students, by providing examples of statements that faculty have developed and will defend; this was a key moment in our organizing process – once we started using a few great faculty statements in our promotional materials (see below), student interest expanded quickly. Use the event as an opportunity to develop and expand relationships between your HxA Chapter and other established organizations, centers, or groups on campus (as we did with the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society).

Try to hold the event in a visible, central, semi-public space on campus, and use great signage to pique the curiosity of passersby and generate a buzz. We had one member of our team speaking with individuals in the general vicinity of our event, and many people came up to our registration-table during the event and wanted to know more about what was happening (we gave them pre-printed flyers). We also had a large, professionally-made banner that we had pre-ordered, with our “Disagree with a Professor” logo on it, hung up on our registration/food tent. It was visible from a distance, and likely helped generate interest and increase our brand recognition.

We also had placed printed flyers in a stand-up plastic menu-holder on each table. They displayed the professor’s name and their three statements, and included our “Disagree with a Professor” branding and logo. These helped orient the faculty and student participants and were a nice visual touch on the tables.

We also worked with Stanford’s event services to pre-plan the event layout and request specific tables, chairs, umbrellas, food, registration tables, canopy tents, audio system, etc.

Cater the event with easy-to-grab food (we got pre-made boxed lunches with sandwiches, and bottles of water) so that everyone can smoothly and quickly check-in, confirm which table they are at, grab food and a drink, and sit down at their table.

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Want to launch your own “Disagree with a Professor” event on your campus this fall? Use HxA’s official How-To Guide to get started.

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Faculty across the country are increasingly deciding what not to say, what not to teach, and what not to study. This isn’t an isolated problem either. At least three faculty surveys this year, from different types of institutions and situated within different political contexts, all converge on one finding: roughly a third of faculty are self-censoring on campus, and the trend is getting worse.

At Yale, an AAUP Chapter survey of 177 faculty showed that more than 30% of faculty have avoided contentious topics in class (32%) and a similar share have changed or reconsidered their teaching plans (32%) in response to the political climate since 2025. Over a fifth of faculty said they avoided scholarship on contentious topics too.

A survey across Iowa’s public universities released last month shows that 32% of faculty did not feel that their university “provides an environment for the free and open expression of ideas, opinions and beliefs” — a 10-percentage-point drop from the 2024 survey.

And at the University of Michigan, results shared in February show that 31% of respondents say they’ve censored themselves or have been censored by others in teaching and 28% have felt pressure to censor their research.

The Yale survey frames the faculty experience as an outcome of the federal political climate, which changed in January 2025 when Trump returned to the White House. The University of Iowa survey, which has been administered three times since in 2021, suggests that changes in the state’s political climate (where several bills have been introduced to change state university policies regarding DEI) is the impetus for self-censorship. The University of Michigan hasn’t yet released the full report, but given that Michigan state exerts less anti-DEI pressure on its public institutions, it may be reasonable to speculate that federal pressure is at least partly to blame.

Yet, the obvious external threats to academic freedom are not the only cause here. These recent surveys confirm a troubling trend that has been gaining traction for years, even before the latest bout of legislation: a significant portion of faculty do not feel free to teach or conduct their research. Nationwide faculty surveys from FIRE in 2022 and 2024 (before the political tenor reached its current heights) found that the share of faculty feeling unfree ranged from 20% to 40%, with faculty generally perceiving their academic freedom in teaching to be more restricted than in research. Internally, censorship pressure mostly came from the left in the 2010s — given the large campus political skew and alienation of right-of-center viewpoints — whereas the 2020s have been marked by retributive censorship from the right in the form of federal executive and state legislature policy changes.

As the Yale report states, “a quieter faculty is not the faculty of a great research university. Self-censorship is not conducive to extraordinary teaching and scholarship.” And this is certainly true. For years we’ve known that generally conservative perspectives were more likely to be censored than liberal ones, as documented by many surveys on self-censorship among students and faculty. But in the changed political climate of recent years, liberals are increasingly self-censoring to evade political retribution. The causes of this self-censorship may be different depending on which side of the aisle you’re on, or which year you’re looking at, but the resulting education is the same: a vapid middle in which the bounds of inquiry are cut off and expressed viewpoints reflect merely what is politically or socially “safe” rather than what is intellectually lively.

There continues to be debate about whether the left or the right pose the greatest threat to universities. The reality is that pressure campaigns, regardless if they stem from internal left homogeneity or external right political forces, are corrosive to higher education’s purpose and to the trust people have in our great institutions of knowledge. Neither source of corrosion exists independently of the other.

A safe “middle” that appeases both the campus left and the political right won’t allow free inquiry to flourish. It will only undermine the mission of universities, and at great cost to our students, ourselves, and the future of knowledge. To protect free inquiry, academics must work within their institutions to effect lasting change that rebuilds our institutions in a way that is oriented around foundational principles, and empowers reformers to fight bad policies originating from both within and outside their institutions.

Heterodox Academy’s growing membership shows that a critical mass of faculty believe in these principles and are willing to stand up for principled change. Michigan’s survey indicates that not all faculty who feel pressure necessary submit to that pressure — a sign that many faculty feel emboldened to hold the line.

We can exercise the power we hold in our unique positions to rebuild the academy. As the research shows, this is not an acute problem; this is a generational problem that will require long-term solutions. The question is no longer whether the academy must change, it is who will show up to do the changing and what changes will occur.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That perception matters…

Continue reading at The Boston Globe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Types of Trust

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

Continue reading at Inside Higher Ed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Perspective-taking practices halt declines in open-mindedness.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Among Heterodox Academy members on campus, it is happening.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who Must Be Neutral?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unleashing vs. Constraining Free Expression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Next Era of Statement Neutrality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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