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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Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier didn’t fly all the way to Berkeley, California, to deliver another talk about what’s gone wrong in the academy: he came with an urgent prescription that set the tone for a two-day Heterodox Academy regional conference where over 80 scholars from across the West Coast have gathered to discuss practical action on how to improve viewpoint diversity.

Diermeier has been one of the most outspoken voices in the national conversation about university reform. But to reform effectively, we must understand what has gone wrong. “The fundamental problem is the erosion of scholarly standards under a political agenda. That’s not the same as viewpoint diversity. 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.”

The consequences of this politicization are all too familiar for members of HxA: “There is a suppression of ideas, questions that cannot be asked, research not published, books not reviewed, papers rejected; prizes are given because work is aligned with a particular point of view.” For Diermeier, these are failures of the scholarly enterprise itself.

How did this happen? Diermeier pointed to three distinct factions of faculty on campus. The first and most consequential has been a vocal, organized minority who “look at their scholarship and education as a manifestation of a political agenda. They are organized, motivated, and politics are critical to their identity.” The second, the majority of faculty, “just want to be left alone and do their work.” The third — faculty who could push back — have until now been “unorganized and dispersed throughout campus.”

The consequence is that institutions have been drifting toward politicization and away from the core mission. “The purpose of the university is path-breaking research and transformative education. Full stop. That’s what we do. Once you believe that, lots of things follow. If we don’t agree on that, it’s difficult to have discussions about what should happen in the classroom.”

“Universities are drifting like a sailboat without a keel,” he said. University presidents and other campus leaders, faced with relentless political pressure, “muddle through because it’s painful to engage and push back.”

Diermeier urged the faculty in the room to get organized with others across campus to keep the pressure on for change, because without faculty support, campus leaders have little basis for making such principled changes happen. “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.”

Despite the dire diagnosis, Diermeier is hopeful the progress of the last couple of years means that “things are moving in the right direction.” He cited cultural changes like more diverse speakers being encouraged on campuses and increasing institutional neutrality adoptions, a policy he has advocated for many years.

“This is a generational opportunity,” he said. “We’re going into a new chapter that will require even more thought. But I’m optimistic.”

The conference continues today, with the work Diermeier called for already underway in the room.

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James Manzi, a DPhil (PhD) student in sociology at the University of Oxford, unleashed a wide-ranging discussion across social media with the publication of his paper, as researchers around the world discussed the methodology, findings, and implications of the research.

In the conversation below, Manzi walks us through the paper’s central findings, responds to questions about methodology, and sketches next steps. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity and brevity.

Justin McBrayer: For the benefit of our readers, I want to start with a high-level overview of your findings. Your paper draws five conclusions:

1. Roughly 90% of politically relevant social science articles leaned left 1960–2024, and the mean political stance of every social science discipline was left-of-center every year during the period under review.

2. All disciplines showed leftward movement between 1990 and 2024.

3. Policy-proximal disciplines generally showed limited rightward moderation between roughly 1970 and 1990, though policy-distal disciplines did not.

4. Disciplines with greater leftward orientation generally displayed greater ideological homogeneity.

5. Sociocultural content was more consistently left-leaning than economic content, and that gap widened over time.

In your view, which of these findings is most important and why?

James Manzi: The most important finding is the consistency of the left-of-center orientation across all disciplines and across the full 1960–2024 period. That pattern is not driven by a small number of extreme cases, but by the relative scarcity of right-of-center work in most fields. This makes it a structural feature of the published output rather than a transient fluctuation. It also provides a baseline for thinking about how ideology might shape research agendas over time.

McBrayer: You did this analysis using ChatGPT-4. It’s amazing that we can do things like this — it would take a human reader years just to read all of the abstracts, much less code them! However, LLMs have well-established biases of their own. To cite just one example, David Rozado has shown that when LLMs answer questions on standard political orientation tests, they are routinely categorized as left-of-center. Given this, why should we trust the output of a LLM analysis of political ideology?

Manzi: The key point is that the results do not rely on taking the model’s outputs at face value without validation. The paper tests the method against multiple external benchmarks, including blinded think tank texts, where the model places content very accurately on the scale. It also shows extremely high stability across repeated runs and robustness to alternative prompts and model choices. If model bias were driving the results, we would expect those checks to fail or produce unstable estimates, which they do not.

McBrayer: You conclude that 90% of the politically relevant abstracts lean left in the period under review and that the leftward lean becomes more apparent over time. But, of course, ‘left’ is a relative measure, not an absolute one. In general, what counts as conservative or liberal is always measured against a contrast class. For example, there are likely positions that would have been described as liberal in the 1960s (where this analysis picks up) that were mainstream in 2024 (when this analysis ends). So, why think that academic papers have moved left rather than thinking that mainstream culture moved right?

Manzi: The analysis uses a fixed 2025 reference frame precisely to address that issue. By holding the scale constant, it measures how texts from different periods map onto the same contemporary ideological benchmark. That means the results are about how the content of published work would be interpreted today, not how authors understood themselves at the time. Within that frame, the observed shift reflects changes in the composition and positioning of research output rather than changes in the scale itself.

McBrayer: Stephen Colbert famously quipped that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.” The aphorism makes me think that something like that could be going on here. In other words, it’s not clear that the leftward tilt of social science is a distortion. Perhaps it’s not that the research is biased but that good research happens to confirm liberal assumptions over conservative ones. In the article, you mention this possibility by suggesting that it’s possible that “sustained, disinterested inquiry into social phenomena has arrived at conclusions that happen to align more closely with liberal than conservative viewpoints.” Can you explain this interpretive limit on the study? Why doesn’t the paper show that social science is biased, and what would show such a bias?

Manzi: The paper measures ideological orientation, not the truth or falsity of the claims being made. A body of work can lean in one direction and still be correct if the underlying evidence supports those conclusions. Demonstrating bias would require showing systematic distortion — such as selective use of evidence or consistent error in one direction — which this study does not attempt to do. The results therefore describe a pattern in output, not a judgment about its validity.

McBrayer: OK, so pivoting from methodology to significance, what is this research really telling us? I was struck by the explanation that you offer for the leftward shift: “…positional change in stance scores is driven primarily by the kinds of abstracts entering the publication stream — new contributors and subfields whose work is classified farther to the left under the fixed 2025 rubric — while within-author shifts exist but play a materially smaller role under the same evaluative frame,” (p. 25). As I read this passage, it means that social science research is moving left not because the same body of scholars is producing different results over time but because the body of scholars itself is changing. People are driving the leftward shift. Is that right?

Manzi: That is broadly correct. The evidence suggests that most of the movement comes from changes in the mix of contributors and subfields entering the publication stream, rather than large shifts in the positions of the same individuals over time. In other words, newer areas of research and newer cohorts of scholars tend to be positioned further to the left under the fixed scale. Within-author changes do exist, but they appear to play a smaller role in the aggregate trend.

McBrayer: What’s the epistemic upshot? Should your findings undermine our trust in social science research?

Manzi: It should not be read as a reason to dismiss social science research. The findings show a pattern in how research is positioned, but they do not evaluate the quality of individual studies or the validity of their conclusions. At the same time, any persistent asymmetry is worth understanding because it can shape which questions are asked and how results are interpreted. The appropriate response is closer scrutiny and replication, not blanket skepticism.

McBrayer: Given all of this, what should we do? If universities were to commit to truth-seeking and knowledge transmission as their highest goals, how would this change the stream of social science research?

Manzi: Universities already articulate truth-seeking and knowledge transmission as core goals, so this question is best understood as asking how those goals are operationalized in practice. This study does not evaluate institutional performance or prescribe specific reforms, but it does highlight a measurable pattern in research output that may be relevant to ongoing discussions about how inquiry is conducted and evaluated. The appropriate response is to continue applying standard scientific norms — transparency, replication, and open debate — to ensure that findings are as robust as possible.

To learn more about HxA’s work on viewpoint diversity in higher education, see our website.

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In light of this, we ran a poll asking folks about their perceptions of academic job market vibes, using an informal member email survey. We collected responses from 244 people working in higher education (77% of whom are HxA members). Here’s what we found.

First we asked respondents about the job market in general compared to recent years. Exactly half (50%) rated the market as worse than prior cycles, while 22% rated it as about the same, and only 2.5% rated it as better. So overall, the “vibes” aren’t great as far as hiring in general. This makes sense when considering that universities are tightening their belts given some drastic federal cuts.

Then we asked respondents to consider whether the academic job market was friendlier towards non-progressive academics (center-left, moderate, conservative). Thinking about the climate for those folks, the largest share (37%) reported thinking it’s about the same as it has been in recent years. Others were roughly split between those who think it’s easier for non-progressives (13%) and those who think it’s harder (16%).

We next asked respondents for their impressions of search committees’ interest in viewpoint diversity. The largest share (42%) thought that interest in viewpoint diversity is about the same as it has been. The next largest group was respondents who thought committees are less interested in viewpoint diversity (16%), followed by 7.8% who thought committees are more interested. (It’s worth noting that 26-34% of respondents reported having no basis to judge each of these things about the market; when excluding them, the share of respondents answering “worse” for each of the preceding questions increases to over half.)

Finally, poaching scholars in an effort to increase viewpoint diversity doesn’t seem to be widespread. Only 4% of respondents reported it happening to them or someone in their professional network. Still, this would be considered anecdotal evidence, even if it’s occurring rarely. Perhaps it will catch on and become more of a thing in future years, assuming a healthier budgetary environment.

So what can we take away from these numbers? Overall, the job market vibes aren’t that great, so it wouldn’t make sense to call the period we’re currently in a hiring “boom” for anyone, conservatives least of which. For the most part, respondents indicated that it’s business as usual in terms of prioritizing viewpoint diversity and in terms of the ease for non-progressives to land faculty positions. Of those who detect any kind of change, they appear divided between those who perceive negative change (harder for non-progressives and less interest in viewpoint diversity) versus those who perceive positive change (easier for non-progressives and more interest in viewpoint diversity).

Since this is an informal member email survey, we can’t extrapolate to the whole population of academics. But at the very least, the survey responses suggest we don’t have good evidence that academic hiring priorities have changed in a systemic way. That said, there may be a different set of priorities (pro-viewpoint diversity and pro-conservative) happening within civic centers, which sometimes operate in a different way than traditional academic departments. It remains to be seen how civic center hiring priorities will evolve alongside potential changes in hiring within traditional academic departments.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t anecdotal evidence of some departments here and there getting creative and trying new things, but overall, they are the exceptions that prove the rule. Our data pour some cold water on the idea of a “conservative hiring boom.”

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The biggest news of the week is the release of a landmark report from the Yale Committee on Trust in Higher Education. Tasked by Yale president Maurie McInnis to “examine the problem of declining trust in higher education,” the report finds three major factors behind the plummeting public trust, one of which is an “array of issues about what is said and taught on university campuses, including matters of free speech, political bias, and self-censorship.”

Coverage was swift, and the message clear: the blame lay with the academy. The New York Times called it a “brutal assessment” of the academy’s role. The Wall Street Journal said the report explains “why everyone hates the Ivy League.” Fortune remarked that the report “savages” the Ivy League for “destroying American trust.”

The report authors note a foundational issue underlying the decline of trust: a lack of clarity about the purpose of the university.

The range of topics revealed another challenge related to declining trust: widespread uncertainty about the fundamental purpose and mission of higher education. Trust is earned by doing what you say you’re going to do — and, ideally, doing it well. In recent years, however, universities have been expected to be all things to all people: selective but inclusive, affordable but luxurious, meritocratic but equitable. Rather than build public support, this diffusion of purpose has contributed to distrust. Without a clear mission and purpose, it becomes difficult to judge whether colleges and universities are living up to their fundamental commitments.

The Yale Report represents what many Heterodox Academy members have been saying for a decade now: the highest mission of the university, its telos, is truth-seeking and knowledge generation. Teaching and research are fundamental to this mission. Everything else is superfluous to what a university is.

The Yale Report follows a recent shift in the reform discourse that has been playing out all academic year, albeit sometimes quietly: academics, who largely lean left, are increasingly self-critical about the academy and the internal work that must be done. This is probably motivated in part by the onslaught from politicians since Trump’s return to office and the need to get our own house in order before someone else tears it down. But it’s also in part due to an increasingly vocal community of academics who have long called for viewpoint diversity in the academy for the good of scholarship and teaching.

Consider the Yale Report in this context: co-chaired by an HxA member with dozens of HxA members’ scholarship on these issues cited. HxA had a seat at the table alongside organizations like the American Association of University Professors and the Association of American Universities. Even a couple of years ago, this would have been highly unlikely.

This change goes beyond the Yale Report, though. Harvard is “recommitting to free inquiry and civil discourse.” Presidents are increasingly speaking out on the national stage about the need for reform. Folks like Sian Leah Beilock of Dartmouth and Daniel Diermeier of Vanderbilt (who will be speaking at the West Coast HxA conference at UC Berkeley on Thursday) are the most notable examples.

Earlier this month, academics were discussing the impact of the latest large-scale research replication effort in the social sciences, led by the Center for Open Science, which showed that only about half of the thousands of claims evaluated replicated in the same direction. HxA member Ashley T. Rubin told the Chronicle of Higher Education it was “a huge problem.” Ian Adams, also a member, explained to the Chronicle that the lack of transparent sharing of data in his field of criminology is eroding trust in the field and makes replication extremely difficult. Today, academics on the whole are candid about the problems in social science research, and research on political bias continues to make headlines; 10 years ago, many were dismissive.

The humanities are also turning the mirror on themselves. In the Chronicle this week, Justin Smith-Ruiu, a professor of history and philosophy of science at Université Paris Cité, offers his own brutal assessment of why the humanities are collapsing and closing down across the academy.

Have the humanities departments responded to their falling enrollment numbers by renewing their commitment to the great tradition, to helping their students wake up to the wonder of the human mind as manifest in its most enduring monuments? They have not. Instead [...] the humanities are undergoing a rapid process of what Tyler Austin Harper has called “business-schoolification.”

The solution in the case of the humanities is less clear, but many like Smith-Ruiu are advocating for a return to the core of what the discipline historically was, and doing things like returning to the “Great Books” style curriculums and shedding its modernization and vocationalization that have taken hold of many non-STEM areas of the academy in recent decades.

All this to say that there seems to be a genuine turn in the tide this year. Despite the obvious external stress on the academy, it really does seem to be a proverbial “moment.” Large-scale meta-research on ideological bias is coming out consistently across fields; academics are taking to the media and Substack to analyze and discuss fundamental issues like the mission of the university; presidents are taking viewpoint diversity and open inquiry seriously; HxA members are creating institutional policy and driving internal reform. It’s all happening now.

There still remain substantial risks at this moment, though. State legislatures are continuing to gut tenure, programs, and content from public universities; reformers must be careful to not repeat old mistakes from the last decade; and universities risk the presidency becoming a tool of the state. Even internal reform, like what is proposed at Yale, must still be worked out and implemented. There are many outstanding questions, such as the efficacy of department “self study,” and how an “analytically thin” diagnosis of the problem could lead to imprecise solutions, as some academics have shared this week.

Despite all this, “there are indeed some positive signs that university leaders are correcting course.” Yet, “there is much work still to do,” as HxA member Roger Pielke Jr. opined this week.

I agree.

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After vague signage policies led to backlash at Boston University last month for the removal of a pride flag hanging visibly on a faculty office window, the president announced on Monday that the university will be “pausing” their “long standing, routine university policy” of removing outward-facing signs. As well-intentioned as this might be, such vague policies, inconsistent implementation, and pausing that appears viewpoint-contingent only contribute to chilled expression.

But expression policies aren’t the only thing chilling speech on campuses right now. Across the U.S. there are a variety of state-mandated and other institutional policies that are threatening academic freedom protections for faculty and their comfort in speaking freely.

In Salon this week, an op-ed by Tracy Kuo Lin, an associate professor of health economics and chair of the Committee on Academic Freedom at the University of California, San Francisco, explains that in the era of intense academic freedom policy changes, the felt experiences of are not always positive:

There’s a profound chilling effect when faculty are no longer protected for speech the university deems troublesome, and academic freedom is merely a consideration they can raise while going through a burdensome and stressful disciplinary process.

Tenure, a fundamental job protection for academics that affords freedom in research and teaching, is also being increasingly threatened in states across the country, including most recently in Alabama, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Tennessee state legislatures, none of which has “garnered any public faculty support.” Weaker or eliminated tenure not only chills speech, but also disincentivizes faculty’s pursuit of open inquiry.

HxA member Deepa Das Acevedo, a legal anthropologist, associate professor of law at Emory University, and an expert in tenure law, explains in Inside Higher Ed that even the job protections that do remain aren’t protecting faculty expression because many universities seem to be adopting a “fire first” practice that she argues will deeply harm university’s core knowledge mission.

Firing faculty in violation of their legal rights is expensive because, after all, litigation is not cheap — and neither are settlements. But it is also bad crisis management because it is shortsighted. Universities that are known to adopt a “fire first” policy are likely to lose some employees who decamp for safer, if not greener, pastures, and they are guaranteed to lose the goodwill of employees who stay. That goodwill is what keeps faculty in place, recruiting the best students and colleagues, and fulfilling the academic mission.

Across the northern border in Canada, William J. McNally, a professor of Finance at Wilfrid Laurier University and HxA chapter co-chair at the university, argues that mundane university practices like faculty orientation can also chill expression among dissenting faculty. At his university, faculty are required to take an “anti-racism 101” course as part of their on-boarding experience. McNally says this practice not only “chills dissent by presenting a single interpretive lens as authoritative and morally compulsory,” but also is inconsistent with a university’s mission.

A university is a collegium of scholars, with academic authority resting in the faculty, whose role is to safeguard academic judgment from external pressures — ideological, political, or economic. Collegial governance works only if faculty remain autonomous thinkers — free to dissent without pressure to conform to prescribed doctrines. A faculty onboarding course incorporating only one ideological lens is inconsistent with the collegial model, as it threatens intellectual independence.

All of this matters because dissent and viewpoint diversity are essential for universities to be what they are supposed to be: institutions where truth-seeking and knowledge generation occur for the greater good of our society. Without actual and experienced academic freedom, we run into ideological homogeneity in the academy. HxA member Jesse Smith, a sociologist and assistant professor at Ohio State University, explained this issue in earlier this week, worth quoting at length.

Academics and politics ought to be fundamentally separate activities, the former oriented toward open pursuit of truth and the latter toward the enactment of substantive social policies. Political affiliation should thus be irrelevant to academic activity, with any explicit consideration of (current or prospective) faculty’s politics operating as a kind of contaminant. Existing political skew strongly indicates an academic environment already contaminated. Yet intentionally seeking more political balance would, by definition, represent still further contamination. This is something of a catch-22.

The liberal-to-conservative skew is not the actual problem. It is a measurable proxy for the problem, or rather a set of problems. First, it suggests censoriousness of various kinds in higher education at odds with ideals of open inquiry. Second, it creates a fertile environment for explicit progressive activism among faculty. Third, it suggests a narrowing of academic activity, both in teaching and scholarship, in which important lines of inquiry are neglected while those pursued are insufficiently scrutinised, thereby creating orthodoxies and blind spots. As a result, the intellectual environment is degraded. This becomes clear enough in critiques of higher education, which may start by highlighting political skew but quickly move on to its larger implications.

You can’t have genuine inquiry if dissenting voices are systematically absent and face risk of retribution from peers or political actors when they do speak, teach, or conduct their research. What we face now is an ideological narrowing of the university that has accelerated over the past 15 years, along with weakened protections that are the bedrock for faculty free inquiry.

Of course, these limits of these protections are still actively debated, especially when it comes to classroom teaching. But we see an increasing trend of universities codifying academic freedom protections to make these boundaries explicit. Following on the heels of UNC, the Yale College Council Senate and Graduate & Professional Student Senate have each passed a joint resolution in support of faculty groups’ demands for more explicit academic freedom protections, aligned with the AAUP definition.

Perhaps the biggest contestation over academic freedom right now, however, is with the proposed overhaul of accreditation coming out of the White House this week. Accreditation reform has been underway for years now, with HxA writing back in 2024 how changes to the Western Association of Schools and Colleges Senior College and University Commission (WSCUC), which accredits universities in California and Hawai’i, weakened academic freedom protections, for example, by stripping language about due-process for faculty (see for example what Das Acevedo said above).

But there is another dimension to the accreditation debates: the extent to which ideological conformity has played a role in accreditation. As of HxA has previously pointed out, accreditation has carried broad DEI requirements, which can inadvertently create ideological conformity on campus. The proposed new regulations require institutions to adopt “viewpoint and ideological neutrality in policy implementation,” and that institutions provide “support for and appropriate prioritization of intellectual diversity amongst faculty.” While we support these in principle, details of implementation requirements and enforcement of regulations of course make all the difference between ideas and the reality on the ground.

It’s imperative that we continue to push back against the politicization of viewpoint diversity as a concept given how essential it is for open inquiry to flourish on campus. You can help stand up for the principles of open inquiry on campus if you work in higher ed by taking just a few minutes to become a member. How reform plays out over the coming years depends on who shows up and how. Join us.

We’re starting off the series strong with highlights from March 2026, including a new study on the “diploma divide”, an analysis of ideological trends in social science research since the 1960s, a new “Words Can Harm” survey scale, and a working paper from HxA Segal Center Postdoctoral Fellow Eric Torres on political messaging in K-12 schools (spoiler: some people want neutrality… until they don’t).

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College grads have shifted more liberal, non-grads hold steady in political identity.

Prinzing & Vazquez (2026) find that the relationship between education and political self-identification has shifted over the last 15 years. Using large-scale survey data, the authors found that although college grads have held more liberal positions than non-grads for the last 50 years, the gap between how grads and non-grads actually identify themselves politically (e.g., liberal or conservative) only emerged during the 2000s. That gap has been widening since 2012, reflecting what commentators are now calling a “diploma divide.” Interestingly, the gap is driven by college grads increasingly identifying as liberal; meanwhile, the average non-grad’s political identity has remained steadily “moderate.”

In a second study, Prinzing & Vazquez explored changes in students’ political orientation during college. Using survey data tracking over 360,000 undergraduates from freshman to senior year between 1994 and 2019, their analysis revealed that the average college grad has left college more liberal than when they entered. This trend began around 1997, and the size of the within-person shift toward more liberal views increased substantially between 2012 and 2017 and remained high through 2019. Women, Black and Hispanic students, social science and humanities majors, and those with high SAT scores tended to move more to the left, while business and engineering majors tended to shift right.

Of course, these studies are subject to the usual caveats about causation: without a randomized experiment, we can’t conclude definitively that experiences in college (as opposed to other experiences correlated with college attendance) are driving these shifts. Still, the results suggest that educational attainment is becoming increasingly entangled with people’s political identities, widening the cultural rift between those with diplomas and those without.

Social science research skews left.

An abundance of research points to a largely left-leaning professoriate, which raises concerns about ideological homogeneity, especially given the possibility that ideological positions influence research approaches. But until recently, there was limited information about the political and ideological leanings of research itself. Manzi (2026) used an LLM to evaluate the political leanings of nearly 600,000 scholarly works from 11 social science disciplines published between 1960-2024. About 180,000 of the abstracts were determined to be “politically relevant” abstracts, 90% of which lean left. Manzi also found that all disciplines moved leftward between 1990 and 2024, though not always steadily. Gender studies, ethnic studies, and anthropology had the most left-leaning research. Economics, while still mostly left-leaning, had the greatest share of right-leaning research.

Manzi takes care to emphasize that the assigned political scores of the abstracts are anchored to the modern-day political landscape, not the political landscape at the time of publishing. The scores may not reflect how authors situated their research within the political context of the day. But even with that important limitation in mind, Manzi’s work points to worrying trends in the political valence of research.

New survey to measure the belief that words can harm.

Great news for the survey nerds out there: a new survey scale just dropped. Pratt et al. (2026) developed the ten-item “Words Can Harm Scale” (WCHS), which measures the belief that speech can cause lasting psychological damage. A sample of 956 American adults recruited online reported the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with statements like “Exposing someone to a triggering idea can seriously damage their mental health,” and “Even a simple phrase can be emotionally traumatizing for someone vulnerable.” Pratt et al. found that those more likely to believe that words cause harm tend to be younger, female, non-White, and politically liberal.

Unsurprisingly, higher scores were associated with a preference for safeguards against potentially harmful speech (e.g., trigger warnings and safe spaces). Higher scores were also linked with greater self-perceived empathy, a tendency towards interpersonal victimhood (i.e., as perceiving oneself as a victim in social situations) and moral grandstanding (i.e., proclaiming one’s moral attitudes as a way to gain status and popularity).

Clinically, higher scores mapped onto worse outcomes across every well-being variable examined: more depression, anxiety, emotion dysregulation, and lower resilience. But the largest correlations were found with censorship, particularly top-down censorship, one of three components of left-wing authoritarianism (e.g., “University authorities are right to ban hateful speech from campus”). The WCHS gives researchers a precision tool for understanding who supports speech restriction, and why.

Neutrality for thee, if you don’t agree with me.

Should 10th grade government teachers be revealing their political candidate preferences to their students? According to one survey experiment, the answer is no — unless those preferences align with the respondent’s own political views.

This standout working paper by Eric Torres, HxA member and postdoctoral fellow at the Segal Center for Academic Pluralism, offers new empirical research on Americans’ attitudes toward political neutrality in public schools. Torres (2026) analyzed responses from the March 2025 Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll, a nationally representative survey of American adults, which included a vignette experiment. He focused in particular on a random subsample of 537 respondents (out of 1,080) who were given, among other items, one of three classroom scenarios featuring a 10th grade teacher who revealed his political preferences to his government class, either for Trump, Harris, or an unnamed candidate.

The findings are striking. First, Americans across party lines generally endorsed ideological impartiality in their local public schools, at least in principle: 57% opposed schools promoting either liberal or conservative viewpoints, with support for impartiality outpacing the promotion of ingroup views by at least 2-to-1 among both Democrats and Republicans.

But (... and it’s a big but) stated principles appear to bend significantly when ingroup interests are at stake. Among a small number of people who identified with a party and perceived that their local schools were promoting their own side’s views (n=66), 71% rated this favorably. And in the vignette experiment, partisans in general were 1.5 times more likely to object to a teacher’s political disclosure when it favored the opposing party.

What do these findings mean? For those of us interested in affective polarization in the United States, Torres’ study highlights that further work is needed on the “permission structure[s]” and “mechanism[s] by which teaching in politically conservative and politically liberal districts might systematically drift apart.” For those interested in viewpoint diversity in the academy, Torres points the way for a research agenda that takes seriously the uniquely influential role of educational institutions as sites where political identities are shaped and contested.

Have a recommendation?

Have you heard of interesting new research that we should include next month? Drop us a line at research@heterodoxacademy.org. We welcome suggestions for recent articles on HxA-relevant issues, ranging from hot-button topics to evergreen methodological research across all disciplines.

Yesterday, Erin Shaw wrote in these pages about how presidents must take open inquiry and the intellectual climate on campus seriously if they are to restore public trust in our universities. Although it seems that not yet enough of them are doing so according to Inside Higher Ed’s latest survey of presidents, many are finally being public about supporting the values for which Heterodox Academy has long advocated.

During an address earlier this week, Senior Fellow and Chair of the Harvard Corporation (the governing board of Harvard University) Penny S. Pritzker said the university is “recommitting to free inquiry and civil discourse.” As the Harvard Crimson reports, Pritzker praised the leadership of president Alan M. Garber, who has set civil discourse as the university’s “north star” and enacted new campus policies, including one of institutional statement neutrality back in 2024. Newly appointed Harvard Corporation member Michael S. Chae also noted the “importance of fostering and protecting a culture of academic freedom and intellectual diversity” at Harvard in his remarks this week.

Harvard has long been one of HxA’s top universities by membership, with 85 members on their faculty and staff, including founding member Steven Pinker and HxA board member Jeffrey Flier. The values of open inquiry, free expression, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement are finally being put into practice on campuses across the country as our more than 8,400 members are increasingly involved in decision making.

The president of Pepperdine University, Jim Gash, also spoke out in an op-ed recently, arguing that the “fractured campus culture we see all around us” is the result of having replaced “the fearless pursuit of truth with the comfort of echo chambers” where we’ve “inadvertently cultivated a climate where the presence of a dissenting opinion is viewed as a threat rather than an opportunity for growth.” Gash continues by advocating for HxA’s solutions:

Colleges should form academic communities that promote viewpoint diversity, safeguard academic freedom and nourish intellectual curiosity. Students and faculty must be encouraged to question assumptions and engage in constructive dialogue about competing viewpoints.

Scholarly research is strengthened by multiple perspectives, without undue influence or censorship in service of the then-prevailing viewpoint. Truth is best found in robust conversation with others, with the wisest voices of both past and present.

Other presidents, like Sian Beilock of Dartmouth, have been vocal in the need for internal-driven reform at our universities. Beilock has led campus cultural change, explaining to John Tomasi on the HxA podcast this week how her institution is seeing an uptick in applications due to their strengthening reputation for having an intellectually challenging campus environment.

I think young people want this. Our applications have gone up as our Ivy peers’ have not. Our yield has gone up and 74% of students we accepted came to Dartmouth as their first choice. And 66% of our incoming students said they chose Dartmouth over another institution because of the Dartmouth Dialogues program. They are hungry for having different viewpoints and hearing from different people. Students are constantly telling me, even our most liberal students, that their best experiences are often when they hear conservative speakers on campus.

From this presidential rhetoric is coming policy on paper. Penn’s Committee on Open Expression unveiled a draft of their new expression policies, last updated in 1993. Unlike the previous version, the draft policy now lists “speech or conduct that is threatening, harassing, severe, or pervasive such that it limits or denies a Penn community member’s ability to participate in or benefit from their education or work” as a violation, where previously the Committee declined to regulate such speech content. The draft states:

Such speech or conduct will be considered more severe if it targets individuals or groups on the basis of a characteristic or class protected by the University’s Equal Opportunity Policy and Nondiscrimination Statement, or federal, state, or local law, or other related Penn policies.

The policy draft also encourages the potential value of controversial speakers to campus, noting that such events affirm “the value of creating a robust marketplace of ideas and fostering reasoned debate, disagreement, and discourse.”

What’s notable about these stories is that many top institutional leaders are now taking the work of internal reform on open inquiry and viewpoint diversity seriously, as thousands of HxA members have been calling for since 2015. But this internal reform is now happening amidst unprecedented legislative action, calling into question the extent to which institutional policy is a response to external pressure.

Aside from the continuous lawsuits coming from the White House, universities across the nation, especially in red states, are being subject to increasing state-level legislation. The Chronicle of Higher Education tracks policy updates on their website during the busy legislative session, but here are a couple of highlights from this past week.

Out West, the University of Wyoming, the state’s only public university, recently dodged a $40 million budget cut. The crux of the tension between the state and the university is what the mission of the university is as a land-grant institution and whether the university is providing “practical” education to citizens. President Ed Seidel told The Chronicle, “This year we had our work cut out for us to make clear what the value of the university was,” noting that he thinks “public scrutiny is going to continue.”

The University of Wyoming has been a nation-wide leader in internal-led reform, adopting a set of policies designed to reinforce intellectual, academic, and expressive freedoms; institutional neutrality; civil discourse; and merit-based hiring. This work has been led by HxA members, including Martha McCaughey, who works with president Ed Seidel to build a culture of open inquiry at Wyoming.

In Kentucky, legislation that appears likely to pass will make it easier for tenured faculty to be fired for “low enrollment in a major or, more broadly, ‘misalignment of revenue and costs,’” according to reporting from Inside Higher Ed.

Detractors, including American Association of University Professors president Todd Wolfson and American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten, warned the bill “could be invoked to shut down research programs whose findings go against the financial interests of board members, to eliminate academic departments that have become easy ideological targets nationwide, and to silence faculty members whose speech board members dislike.”

While many see state legislation as an overall threat to self-governance and institutional autonomy, others see the state as a key player in reform. Writing for the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Jenna Robinson notes that “state policies and practices affect every interaction between students and their universities,” and advocates for increasing state involvement that she sees as “essential” for reform.

There’s no question that this era of higher ed is going to be marked by a continuous tension between lawmakers and academic insiders. Presidents now say they want open inquiry. New policies and programs show significant movement forward. Legislation may accelerate, complicate, or undermine those efforts — depending on who you ask and what specific policy is in question. That line between accountability and interference is what’s being contested right now.

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Concerns about the value of college are persistent. Nearly 80% of Americans say universities are doing only a fair or even a poor job of keeping college costs affordable. Between misunderstandings about college’s sticker price versus net price (which has actually declined in recent years), and pessimistic perceptions of college affordability (despite high college wage premiums), efforts to increase cost transparency and communicate the financial benefits of a degree are necessary and worthwhile. University leaders are right to address concerns and misconceptions about college affordability.

But presidents also recognize that the current trust-building initiatives are lacking. Only 16% of IHE respondents believe that higher education has responded effectively to declining public trust (up from 8% on last year’s survey), with just 2% saying they have been “highly effective.”

And this might be because the loss of trust in higher education is about more than just affordability. To truly rebuild trust, universities must acknowledge that public skepticism is also about the intellectual climate on campus. The two issues of cost and climate are likely intertwined: the high sticker price of an education perceived to be ideologically biased only deepens public distrust. But concerns about intellectual climate are worth addressing in and of themselves, not just as measures to overcome fiscal apprehension. Trust-building efforts that address cost concerns while skirting issues of open inquiry and the climate of free expression will not fully restore public confidence.

Surveys consistently show that concerns about political bias and intellectual climate are also major drivers of weakened trust among the public. A 2025 Lumina-Gallup survey found that those with a low degree of confidence in higher education often cited concerns about “political agendas” as well as concerns that universities are “too liberal/political.” The same survey found that across all respondents, many think that universities could bolster public support by being “less politically biased.” A 2025 Pew survey found that 45% of Americans think that colleges are doing only a fair or poor job of exposing students to a wide range of viewpoints, and a 2025 survey of over 31,000 Americans found that 77% of respondents (including 72% of Democratic voters) were concerned about liberal bias on campus.

Despite growing evidence that declining trust is tied to concerns about politicization and intellectual climate, college leaders are reluctant to see similar problems on their own campuses. IHE’s survey found that only 29% of respondents rated the climate for open inquiry and dialogue across the higher education sector as “good” or “excellent,” indicating broad recognition that something is amiss. But interestingly, leaders are much more optimistic about the conditions on their own campuses.

In fact, they are more than twice as likely to rate the climate of open inquiry and dialogue at their own institution as “good” or “excellent” compared to higher education more broadly. This has remained true for three years now. (Though, there has been a nine percentage point decline in the more optimistic share of presidents, from a high of 85% in 2025 to 76% in 2026.) Unless the hundreds of participating presidents came almost exclusively from the healthiest of institutions, this gap suggests that presidents’ rosy perceptions of the climate for open inquiry on their campuses may not fully reflect the reality on the ground.

If most presidents are confident in open inquiry on their own campus, even if less sanguine about other institutions and despite widespread public doubts, what motivation is there to pursue meaningful reform? To win back public support, and to protect the truth and knowledge-seeking mission of the university, effective trust-building efforts must address concerns about bias and politicization on campus.

Some institutions appear to be attuned to this, and have pursued more comprehensive trust-building efforts that go beyond return-on-investment messaging. Yale has commissioned a faculty-led group to study trust in higher education, and some public universities in Pennsylvania have undertaken efforts to strengthen trust through community partnerships, for example. These promising efforts are hopefully indicative of broader efforts to come. But if only a minority of leaders see the need to meaningfully strengthen open inquiry and free expression at their own institutions, then collective action in defense of open inquiry will remain a long way off.

Leaders are not entirely neglecting campus initiatives aimed at bolstering intellectual climate. Seventy-five percent of IHE respondents indicated that they had undertaken specific initiatives to educate their campus community about free speech and difficult dialogues. Yet here, too, we see shortcomings. The steps taken by the largest swaths of presidents are voluntary. Embedded programming and training on these issues are seen on only a small fraction of campuses, and required trainings for faculty and staff are rare. Moreover, while dialogue initiatives and trainings may be well-intentioned,programs that draw from an ideologically narrow range of views still fall short of promoting open inquiry.

Meaningful, sustained reform of higher education is best driven by those who care most deeply about their institutions and wield powerful influence over their direction. These inside reformers such as presidents, provosts, deans, and high-level administrators must adopt a clear-eyed view of the challenges at hand — all of the challenges, including the ones in which their own campus cultures are complicit.

To meet the moment, university leaders must move beyond messaging and also pursue a full-throated embrace of open inquiry on their campuses. This means undertaking initiatives that are overdue (and also potentially uncomfortable), such as improving strategies for identifying overlooked (or prematurely sidelined) research areas; broadening the range of scholarly perspectives in curricula; educating students and faculty about the principles of free speech and academic freedom; and emphasizing intellectual virtues such as humility and curiosity.

While cost transparency initiatives are important, they are less difficult and less culturally disruptive than addressing ideological homogeneity and its downstream consequences. But strengthening open inquiry on campus is well worth the difficulty and disruption — and it is essential to restoring public trust.

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Many universities have debated whether to adopt institutional neutrality policies in the last two years, but a quieter trend might be emerging: some campuses are behaving as if they are committed to neutrality without ever explicitly saying so.

The University of Maryland, College Park is a useful case study. They don’t have an institutional neutrality policy (no Kalven-style policy, nor an institutional voice framework, nor a formal presidential commitment to neutrality). Instead, UMD has relied on existing free expression commitments and ad-hoc presidential encouragement to remain neutral on controversial matters. It’s worth noting that institutional neutrality is not the same as support for voluntary faculty speech, although they are complementary. This makes UMD an illustrative example of a campus that appears to be flirting with some form of institutional restraint without codifying it.

In previous years, UMD administrators issued overt political statements on national events. President Darryll Pines released a strongly worded proclamation in the wake of George Floyd’s killing, which explicitly framed the event in moral and political terms, and opined on the January 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack, describing the events as “violence, chaos, and dangerous disregard for the rule of law.”

This changed in 2024, when President Pines framed the administration’s role as protecting faculty & students’ speech, while refraining from taking political positions. In August 2024, he sent a message to campus emphasizing that “freedom of thought and expression are the lifeblood of our academic community,“ encouraging faculty, students, and staff to familiarize themselves with the university’s Statement on Free Speech Values and emphasizing that universities exist to allow diverse thoughts and disagreement. Since that point, official communications have shifted toward internal community support. For example, a 2025 message from President Pines and Provost Rice acknowledged that members of the campus community were experiencing hardship due to federal layoffs and reductions in SNAP benefits, encouraging people to support affected individuals and promoting resources such as the campus food pantry.

This kind of mission-connected speech, which focuses on internal community welfare rather than external political controversies, is explicitly permitted by many neutrality policies. It appears that the administration rarely issues moral or political proclamations in their general announcements and communications post-2024. They have avoided direct commentary on national or international politics, taking positions on controversial policy debates, and institutional endorsements of political causes. This aligns with the underlying logic of many formal neutrality policies: the university is a forum for debate, and the administration’s job is to protect the environment for that debate.

So, what effect has this had on UMD constituencies? I recently came across a statement written by a group of faculty members (including active HxA members) at the University of Maryland, College Park, where I worked previously as faculty for over a decade. The statement, “UMD must stand in solidarity with Iranian students [and] colleagues,” was published in the student-run Diamondback newspaper as an opinion piece. The authors, writing before the current U.S.-Israel attack on Iran began, noted “with deep alarm and concern reports of thousands of innocent Iranian civilians who have been massacred by the Iranian regime.”

To me, this opinion piece came across as an excellent illustration of what happens when voluntary groups of faculty members, rather than university administrators, make moral proclamations or political statements. This is exactly what institutional neutrality is designed to enable: the administration steps back from political proclamation, creating space for individual faculty and other members of the campus community to speak freely on matters within their expertise and moral concern. HxA’s Extraordinary U: The HxA Model of Statement Neutrality encourages institutional statement neutrality precisely for this purpose — constraining the institutional voice so that individual voices can flourish, knowing that this often happens in areas of significant disagreement (as is the case with Middle Eastern geopolitics).

With all of this information, UMD appears to operate under a kind of “informal institutional neutrality.” They generally refrain from using their institutional voice to take positions on contested social and political issues while simultaneously supporting free expression and encouraging political engagement by students and faculty. Practically, this approach resembles what would happen under a formal neutrality policy, despite not officially having one.

UMD is certainly not alone in operating this way. I’m speculating a bit here, but this approach may have arisen as many universities grappled with the fraught complications of taking public stances on controversial issues, realizing that they may have been doing more harm than good. Those universities which did adopt formal neutrality policies may have had some downstream, normative influence on other campuses (such as UMD) have not elected to adopt such policies.

But informal restraint is not the same as institutional neutrality. The problems with the informal approach are real and distinct, and they deserve to be named separately.

The first problem is that chilling effects persist. Without a clear, codified policy, students and faculty have no formal guarantee that dissent is protected. Many already keep silent on sociopolitical issues, even those who fall in the political majority on their campuses. Students often cite fear of administrative retaliation for their speech. An informal norm offers no reliable signal that speaking up is safe, but a formal policy would. Even though the faculty group at UMD spoke up about the war in Iran, there may be others on campus who are not yet comfortable doing so due to unclear policy. As FIRE recently showed, Middle Eastern geopolitics is a particularly fraught topic.

The second problem is that informal norms are impermanent. A behavioral pattern, however consistent, is only as durable as the people currently in charge. Norms can be broken, or changed, especially as a new President and Provost eventually take over with their own prerogatives. Such normative changes are more likely to happen in the absence of a clear policy. Institutional neutrality restrains not only the people who currently hold power, but also their successors. Without a codified policy, what looks like neutrality today could quickly give way to the same institution putting its thumb on campus speech tomorrow.

The third problem is that informality requires constant ad hoc judgment. Every time a contentious event occurs (a political crisis, a campus protest, a national controversy), university leaders operating without a policy must decide from scratch whether and how to respond. A formal neutrality policy streamlines that decision-making process, removing the pressure to improvise and reducing the risk of inconsistency or perceived bias. This is why HxA strongly advises colleges to formally adopt institutional neutrality. Such a policy would apply to all non-voluntary sub-units (including academic departments and programs) in addition to the university administration.

These three problems compound one another. Chilling effects can be worsened by impermanence (why speak up if the protection could evaporate?) and impermanence is worsened by ad-hoc decision making, since inconsistent responses erode trust in the norm itself. Codifying neutrality addresses all three at once.

If universities truly want to be the “home and sponsor of critics,” as the Kalven Report puts it, then practice alone is not enough. Neutrality must be made explicit and visible; otherwise, campuses like UMD will continue to flirt with neutrality without ever fully committing to the conditions that make open inquiry possible.

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Boston University’s policies on free expression are facing scrutiny this week after the university removed a pride flag from a faculty office window. “If you have the privilege of having a window that faces campus, you don’t get the privilege of speaking for the university,” BU’s president Melissa L. Gilliam explained to WBUR. The controversy in this case rests on two questions: is a flag considered a sign? Are things visible in a faculty office assumed to be institutional speech?

The answers to both of these questions are unclear according to BU’s own policies — one of which governs event signs and the other publication distributions. As I explained to The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this week, nowhere in these policies are flags mentioned, nor is it clear that a faculty office is a special place of concern for events or “publication distribution.” The policies are far too ambiguous in this case to be of decisive use here; policies are only effective if they are clear.

A similar free expression controversy is playing out across the Charles River at Harvard. There, the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences revised its signage policy to now allow students, faculty, and staff to mount publicly visible signs in private spaces on campus — like faculty office windows — after two professors hung a “Black Lives Matter” sign across their office windows.

HxA members Jeffrey S. Flier and Steven A. Pinker penned a letter to the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson on Tuesday pointing out that such policies must be viewpoint neutral and enforced (and revised) evenly. In the Harvard case they questioned whether the policy would have been reversed if a “Make America Great Again” sign had been plastered across the faculty office windows. I question whether at BU a U.S. flag would have been interpreted as a sign and promptly removed from sight.

Cases such as these are becoming increasingly controversial at private universities because they are not bound to the same First Amendment speech protections as public institutions. The Chronicle of Higher Education explains that speech and expression “policies are increasingly dictated by college leaders’ efforts to prevent unwanted attention. Under the microscope of big donors, politicians, and trustees, private colleges are growing skittish.”

In these cases, things can get legally complex, as HxA member Nadine Stroseen expounded to The Chronicle:

First Amendment principles can be enforceable even at private colleges, said Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, through contracts, state statutes, and state constitutional rulings. (For example, California’s Leonard Law codifies the First Amendment at all private colleges.) Beyond that, Strossen said, private institutions are largely free to change their policies as much as they want and as often as they want — as long as they refrain from viewpoint discrimination.

An opinion piece in The Hill this week illuminates the hazy limits of faculty speech and boundaries of academic freedom. Legislation in places like Florida and Indiana have shown how the lines can be drawn differently based on legal interpretation:

We agree that universities must have some authority to evaluate and regulate faculty speech. A professor assigned to teach physics cannot be expected to teach poetry instead. But academic freedom has always rested on a simple premise: experts in their disciplines — not politicians or even administrators — are best qualified to decide the content of teaching and research.

Recent events highlight the dangers. In addition to passing laws dictating curriculum and mandating viewpoint diversity, red state governors and legislatures are increasingly shifting power from faculty to politically appointed governing boards. In Texas, for example, a statute adopted last June gives boards the power to reverse changes to the curriculum and block key academic appointments.

If courts accept the views advanced by Florida and Indiana, legislators could dictate what faculty may say in public university classrooms.

Many universities are now working to codify academic freedom definitions to get in front of potential faculty expression controversies on campus, as I explained a few weeks ago in these pages. Now, the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom published a report detailing how academic freedom has been written into collective bargaining agreements across U.S. universities. This can serve as a useful resource for universities as they work to embed academic freedom protections in institutional policy.

Debates about the role of faculty expertise and academic freedom also continue to play out in the classroom, especially as questions over whether courses are viewpoint-diverse enough continue to take center stage. “Some of the critiques that conservatives have made about college curricula are sound,” Danielle S. Allen, a political theorist at Harvard, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “We haven’t taught enough bread-and-butter basics of U.S. history, constitutionalism, and the like. Some of the critiques from Black studies, which require us to expand our horizon of what voices matter, are also sound.”

In this ongoing battle between politicians and the academy, Florida officially removed sociology from Gen Ed across the 12 state public universities on Thursday after weeks of headline-making controversies. Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System, argued during Thursday’s board meeting that “sociology as a discipline is now social and political advocacy dressed in the regalia of the academy.”

At the federal level, “area studies” and “critical studies” have taken significant funding hits under the second Trump administration, creating uncertainty around the future of these programs, majors, and centers on campuses. Inside Higher Ed this week reports on the historical federal partnership that launched many of these programs decades ago and how that relationship may ultimately be their undoing:

For years, area studies centers were funded through National Resource Center grants as part of Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Congress partially restored this funding in its most recent budget, but the damage to area studies may be irreversible. The University of Washington, home to one of the nation’s oldest area studies centers, lost $2.5 million in National Resource Center and foreign language grants — half of which went directly to student scholarships — for the 2025–26 academic year. The University of Michigan lost about $3.4 million and the University of Kansas lost $2 million. Western Washington University’s Center for Canadian-American Studies reportedly took a 70 percent hit to its budget after the Title VI funds were pulled.

These cuts — though small compared to STEM fields — represent huge proportions of funding for humanities and social sciences, as a new analysis by the American Enterprise Institute this week shows. As federal cuts occur in these disciplines, the outsized influence of private foundations will play an even bigger role.

What connects a flag in a faculty window to a sociology department in Florida and private disciplinary funding is the same question: who decides what speech belongs where in the academy and on what authority? Until institutions build clearer, viewpoint-neutral policies, these controversies won’t slow down.

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It’s increasingly obvious that politicization is a problem in American higher education. You can see this in the public stances universities have taken on everything from the legality of abortion to the justice of the Israel-Palestine conflict. You can see it in the faculty they have hired. And you can see it in the syllabi they are teaching and the research they are producing. Some of today’s universities look more like political action committees than institutions of higher learning.

In response to this politicization, organizations like Heterodox Academy (HxA) are advocating a return to truth-seeking as the university’s central mission. One necessary condition for this work is viewpoint diversity on campus. Other organizations share this concern but use different terminology. For example, the American Council of Education uses the term intellectual pluralism in its statement on academic rights and responsibilities, while the Commission for Public Higher Education requires that accredited universities have policies and practices that “support the intellectual diversity of its faculty and students in academic and co-curricular life.” What these notions have in common is the idea that universities must cultivate a wide range of perspectives on campus to ensure scholarly inquiry and teaching proceed in an open and lively way.

Echo chambers are great for tribal mobilization but lousy for the discovery of truth and the generation of knowledge. When certain disfavored viewpoints are excluded from the university, dissenters are silenced, flawed ideas go unchallenged, research questions go unasked, and classrooms become places of affirmation rather than discovery. Viewpoint diversity is an antidote to this kind of stagnation.

While there are a number of objections to viewpoint diversity, perhaps the most common is the “flat Earth” objection. The objection comes in the form of a reductio ad absurdum: cultivating viewpoint diversity on campus would require a geology department to hire a flat earther, and what university would want to do something as silly as that? This charge has been levied both by faculty and advocacy groups like the AAUP. For example, a recent piece in The Stanford Daily argues that “If the discipline of Geology collectively determines that the flat-Earth theory doesn’t meet its standards, geologists do not, simply for the sake of “viewpoint diversity,” need to continue to hire flat-Earthers and provide lessons in flat-Earth theory to their students.”

Implicit in this objection is the assumption that there is an inverse correlation between viewpoint diversity and intellectual standards. Strengthening the one would thereby weaken the other. For example, a recent AAUP statement on the issue concludes that promoting intellectual diversity will “pressure institutions into teaching unsupported or discredited ideas.” And since a university’s highest goal requires rigorous intellectual standards, the call for viewpoint diversity represents a threat to the university’s purpose.

The steelman version of the objection can be fleshed out a bit further. The very point of a university is to winnow ideas on the threshing floor of reason. In that process, some ideas will go extinct. Others will survive or evolve. It’s appropriate to abandon viewpoints that are internally inconsistent, refuted, or poorly evidenced. To purposefully cultivate such viewpoints would frustrate the academic enterprise. We don’t improve the academy by hiring phrenologists, Lamarckians, or Ptolemaic astronomers even when that makes the campus more viewpoint diverse.

Despite its popularity, the flat Earth objection is a bust, as Jonathan Haidt pointed out in HxA’s very first blog post back in 2015:

We don’t want viewpoint diversity on whether the Earth is round versus flat. But do we want everyone to share the same presuppositions when it comes to the study of race, class, gender, inequality, evolution, or history? Can research that emerges from an ideologically uniform and orthodox academy be as good, useful, and reliable as research that emerges from a more heterodox academy?

The answer to these rhetorical questions is no: we should expect an ideologically diverse academy to do a better job thinking about controversial issues than their ideologically homogenous counterparts. So where does the flat Earth objection go awry?

First, it assumes that today’s university ecosystem has captured the whole truth and nothing but the truth. As the AAUP understands it, increasing intellectual diversity on campus increases the pressure to teach discredited ideas. But that’s true only if we assume at the outset that all underrepresented ideas are bad ones. There’s no reason to think this, and an institution that takes the discovery of truth seriously can’t afford to make such an assumption.

Second, the objection assumes that minority viewpoints are in the minority because they are discredited, unsupported, unworthy, or intellectually dubious. In other words, it assumes that the sole reason that a viewpoint would be excluded from today’s university is a good one. Again, there’s little reason to think that’s true. Ideas can be winnowed on the threshing floor of reason, but they can also be winnowed by cultural fad, ideological fiat, or generational gatekeeping.

All of these options are likely thanks to a host of ingrained cognitive tendencies that undermine our ability to identify our own biases or give ideas we dislike a fair hearing. Worse, the political imbalance of today’s faculty makes it even more difficult to decipher why some ideas are championed and others neglected on university campuses. Faculty hire people and teach ideas for all sorts of non-epistemic reasons. And survey after survey shows that many faculty openly admit to discriminating against minority political viewpoints in everything from publication decisions to hiring. In other words, it’s not just a remote possibility that ideas are being filtered for non-intellectual reasons; it’s a near certainty. Simply knowing that an idea is disfavored doesn’t tell you all that much.

Third, the objection assumes that viewpoint diversity requires violating discipline-specific standards. Hiring a flat Earther would contradict the epistemic norms that govern the geosciences. That’s what makes it bizarre. But the analogy doesn’t carry over to many of the other minority positions excluded from the university. It’s hard to believe that the disciplinary standards of English literature require Marxism in the way that geology requires commitment to a spherical Earth, or that robust historiography requires left-wing ideology or that the epistemic framework of sociology requires a commitment to antiracism. In other words, the discipline-specific standards of today’s academic departments don’t explain the echo chambers we find there.

A thought experiment should make this point clear. Suppose in the future it turns out that nearly all historians in America are politically right wing. How should our future selves explain that fact? Should they conclude that this political distribution is required or even made likely by the disciplinary standards of history? Should they conclude that Stephen Colbert was wrong when he said that reality has a well-known liberal bias? Should they instead conclude that reality has a right-wing bias and that it just took us time to recognize it? I have a hard time believing any of these options.

The same lesson applies to today’s university. Pursuing the truth within disciplinary standards alone is unlikely to result in a politically skewed echo chamber. And yet that’s exactly what we see in many disciplines today. That means something else is also afoot. The upshot is that we can uphold disciplinary standards of evidence, excellence, and the like while still pursuing viewpoint diversity in our ranks.

Fourth, viewpoint diversity is as much about values and interests as it is about empirical beliefs and disciplinary conclusions. What faculty value and where their interests lie have profound impacts on what they teach and what they research. Take two geologists, both of whom eschew the flat Earth theory but hold different political values. One might spend her time researching petroleum reserves whereas the other investigates carbon capture. Both abide by the scientific standards of their discipline, but they have radically different research profiles. While the evidential standards remain consistent across the field, the spotlight of academic inquiry can be pivoted to many different projects. Where that light shines is largely a function of value and interests. The flat Earth objection assumes that the only kind of diversity at play is diversity of empirical commitments or disciplinary methodology. As this example shows, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

The takeaway is that advocates of viewpoint diversity have never been in favor of hiring flat Earthers into geosciences departments. Instead, they want to ensure that all positions defensible by disciplinary standards and evidence remain discussable, even if only a minority of scholars hold them. If a position hasn’t been settled by a discipline’s own standards, it remains an open question. As Jonathan Rauch puts it, we want the funnel of ideas to be broad at the top and narrowed only by epistemically relevant reasons. Geology has settled the question of the shape of the Earth. But philosophy has not settled the question of what makes a government just. We would benefit from intellectual diversity on the latter score.

Further, advocates of viewpoint diversity want a university where faculty and students with values or interests at odds with the majority are able to shine the spotlight of academic inquiry in directions that make the most sense to them. Given this, we should encourage those with marginalized yet intellectually intriguing and defensible positions into the collective work of the university.

That’s why the flat Earth objection is a failure. Viewpoint diversity isn’t a call to denigrate the epistemic standards of the academy. Not all ideas are equally good. But neither are all minority positions epistemically wanting.

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This week the Friedrich Alexander Universität Institute for Political Science and the V-Dem Institute released the 2026 update to their Academic Freedom Index. The United States shows a marked decline in just the past year to the bottom 30-40% of nations, with the report noting, “the decline in institutional autonomy in the United States stands out as a case of fast and steep deterioration.” This continues a conspicuous decline for the U.S. on this measure that began in 2019-2020.

The New York Times interviewed several professors to learn about their experiences teaching and conducting research amidst declining academic freedom. Christopher Kutz, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Times, “I have to think very hard about whether it’s worth talking about something that’s obviously clearly relevant to the course.”

Many faculty, who disproportionately lean left, are restricting what they say in the classroom out of fear of political retaliation in a red-dominated climate of government intervention. Not long ago, however, it was right-of-center faculty who were disproportionately self-censoring. Some of these faculty now feel more free in aspects of their classroom expression in a climate where the dominance of left-wing identity politics is fading.

Jessica Trisko Darden, an associate professor of political science at Virginia Commonwealth University and HxA member, told the Times her classroom now feels more open for discussion without the pressure to center everything on identity. “My students are no longer circumscribed in their beliefs, opinions, analyses by identity categories that people are ascribing to them,” she explained.

This political dynamic has notably been playing out in the discipline of sociology. As I covered previously, the state of Florida has censored leftist viewpoints from their state-approved textbook for sociology. And many faculty are pushing back against the state censorship by “quietly defying” Florida’s new restrictions. “What I find most concerning is that we’re in this phase now where instead of telling us what not to teach, they’re telling us what to teach,” Zachary Levenson, sociologist at Florida International University, told The Guardian. “That feels especially terrifying and authoritarian.”

Several HxA members have been vocal in their support for reform of the discipline. Jukka Savolainen, a sociologist at Wayne State University, has called the government intervention in Florida “a wake-up call” for the discipline.

Instead of defending the ideologically corrupt status quo, we should listen to critics inside and outside the discipline… If this formerly exciting field of inquiry is to have a future, we must return to its roots. This will demand a collective commitment to impartial research and teaching. This shouldn’t be too much to ask. After all, it was a sociologist, Robert K. Merton (1910-2003), who formulated the enduring norms of science, which include organized skepticism and disinterestedness.

HxA member Ashley Rubin, a sociologist at University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, published an analysis of scholarship in American Journal of Sociology on her Substack this week “to explore whether and how the top articles in the field are homogenizing around ideologically preferred topic areas.” She finds that the identified trend of “woke” scholarship overall having peaked around 2021 has not replicated in this prominent disciplinary journal. Speaking with the Chronicle of Higher Education this week, she said, “if we don’t get our own house in order, we will see more of this government-led scrutiny or rules about what we can and cannot do.”

In other countries, Americans are experiencing broader academic freedom to pursue highly contentious work. Ghent University, located in Belgium, which is among the top 10% of institutions on the Academic Freedom Index, just appointed philosopher Nathan Cofnas to the position of postdoctoral fellow. His research, which focuses on the area of genetic variation among human groups, has drawn controversy in the form of a 300 signatory letter demanding explanation of his appointment, alleging his research violates the university’s code of ethics.

But many academics, including HxA president John Tomasi, have signed a counter-letter in support, arguing that “While we are not endorsing any specific claims Cofnas has made, we believe that academics must be able to put forward controversial or provocative claims without fear of losing their employment.”

Signatory Abhishek Saha, professor of mathematics at Queen Mary University of London and HxA member, explained that the demands to dismiss Cofnas “misunderstands both philosophy and academic freedom” and that “academic freedom exists precisely to protect contentious, controversial and offensive work.”

This gets at the heart of what we must do next. The uneven experience of academic freedom, increasingly along political lines, is a sign that we have failed to sustain genuine viewpoint diversity within our institutions. Without critical introspection and principled reform, outside actors will step in and make changes that sway with the political winds, causing turmoil for our institutions and diverting focus from what they should be doing: producing knowledge.

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