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

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

Higher Ed’s Inner Conflicts, Now AI-Enhanced

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

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

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

Public Accountability in the Trump Era

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

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

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

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

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

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

Give Me One Reason

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Class matters for career progression

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Study suggests faculty have no “liberalizing” effect on students

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• “Scientists and scientific results are biased.”

• “Information from the scientific community is trustworthy.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The politics of commencement speakers are predictable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Johns Hopkins’s president is taking viewpoint diversity seriously.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading at The Washington Post

What is college for?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tyler Austin Harper contributes a hit to academic quit lit.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another attempt to ban legacy admissions reaches the Senate.

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

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

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

Texas A&M gets sued over its course bans.

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

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

Faculty largely on board with diverse viewpoints for research and teaching

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

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

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

Two cheers for regional public universities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New framework proposed to understand political bias in AI chatbots

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

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

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

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

Federal science funding’s three-body problem

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is where university leaders come back in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The AAUP is now endorsing political candidates.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production

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

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

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

Woof, indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Course cuts to appease lawmakers continue at Texas universities.

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

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

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

University of Texas at Austin professor denied tenure without explanation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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