In this virtual panel, Heterodox Academy’s Justin McBrayer convened four scholars to talk through the nuts and bolts of faculty-initiated reform: how to build checks and balances into hiring and curriculum, where administrators and trustees fit in, and how to strengthen open inquiry and viewpoint diversity without inviting the kind of top-down censorship that undermines academic freedom.

The panelists were Michael Jindra, a cultural anthropologist at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University; Ashley Rubin, a sociologist at the University of Hawaiʻi who studies the history and sociology of criminal punishment and was a commissioner on the recently released Washington University–Vanderbilt report on the state of scholarship; Len Gutkin, editor of The Chronicle Review and author of its weekly newsletter; and David Bromwich, who has taught literature at Yale since 1988 and writes widely on politics, civil liberties, and the life of the university.

Their conversation ranges across shared governance, institutional neutrality, legislative overreach, ideological homogeneity in the professoriate, and the practical question of how to rebuild public trust in universities.

A transcript of the discussion is below.

Justin McBrayer: Welcome everyone to A Faculty Blueprint for Higher Ed Reform, a virtual panel discussion. My name is Justin McBrayer. I’m at Heterodox Academy, where I’m the Director of University Partnerships, and I’m delighted to have all of you with us today. This is going to be an exciting discussion about faculty-initiated reform and how to build universities that are resilient in an open-inquiry sense, and we’ve got an illustrious group of panelists here with us.

A few intro issues to cover at the beginning. First is a guide to intellectual norms for our conversation today, both across the panelists and with our audience. We encourage you to follow The HxA Way. These are basic intellectual virtues that we at Heterodox Academy and our members take seriously. I encourage you to make your case with evidence; to be intellectually charitable, especially with those you disagree with; to be intellectually humble; to be constructive; but maybe most importantly, to be yourself — to say what you really think, in ways that are charitable, so that we can get genuine viewpoint diversity into our conversation.

Also, if you are a graduate student, or if you work at a university as a faculty member, an administrator, or a staff member, please join Heterodox Academy if you haven’t already. You can become a member, subscribe to our newsletter, and subscribe to our Substack. Grab those QR codes and join us for future conversations around open inquiry and higher ed reform.

And a big reveal: Heterodox Academy has announced a date and location for our 2027 national conference. It’s going to be April 12 through 14 in Boston, Massachusetts. We’re putting together a great list of programming and speakers, and we’re really excited to bring together Heterodox Academy members from across the world.

Let me introduce our panelists, and then we’ll jump right into a discussion on higher ed reform. We’re joined by Michael Jindra. He’s a cultural anthropologist at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University — though we found out he’s surreptitiously in Idaho. His writing centers on cultural and lifestyle diversity and their relationship with social issues and problems.

We’re also joined by Ashley Rubin, from the beautiful shores of Hawaiʻi. As you can see in her background, Ashley specializes in the history and sociology of criminal punishment, especially incarceration, with additional interests in applied criminology, research design, methodology, theory development, and the production and reception of academic research. She’s the author of The Deviant Prison and Rocking Qualitative Social Science, and a former co-editor of Law & Society Review. I should also mention she was a co-author on the Washington University and Vanderbilt report that came out just last week. We’ll talk more about that in a bit.

We’re also joined by Len Gutkin. Len is the editor of The Chronicle Review, the ideas and opinion section of The Chronicle of Higher Education. He also writes the Review‘s weekly newsletter. Gutkin joined the Chronicle in 2018, and prior to that he was a postdoc in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He earned his PhD in English from Yale University. I should ask, by the way, in our Q&A — Len, whether you knew David when you were at Yale. Maybe you did.

Len Gutkin: I did, yes.

McBrayer: Great. Lastly, we have David Bromwich. David has taught literature at Yale University since 1988. Among his books are Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic, Moral Imagination, and The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke. His essays on modern poetry were collected in Skeptical Music. His commentaries on civil liberties and America’s wars have appeared in The Nation, The London Review of Books, and The American Conservative, among other journals.

Okay, with that introduction, let me dive into some questions. The first one, David, is going to go to you, and I’m afraid I’m going to date both of us a little here. I read selections from your book Politics by Other Means when I was an undergraduate in the 1990s. Can you give us some sense of the main thesis of that book, and how, in your view, the university climate of today differs from the one you described 30 years ago?

David Bromwich: Right. Thank you — and thank you for the mention of a book so old. It was written partly during the Reagan years and just a little after. The thesis of the book is that American political culture — that is, the culture in which people vote for members of high office — was becoming conservative and, what to say, results-oriented in a way that was quite conventional in relation to America’s past. Meanwhile, the university culture, the academic culture, had developed its own version of radicalism, which I called institutional radicalism. The divide between, to call it so, the politics of the academy and that of American society outside universities was extremely unhealthy, even pernicious, as an influence on the way we think and talk with each other, and it would be a good thing if the two were brought closer together. I didn’t suggest any instrumental means of doing so. I think the two have not come closer together in the years since.

Let me sketch just a few brief points about continuities between the academic milieu of that time and now. I would say that the institutional radicalism coming from various disciplines — from social history, for example, from literary theory, from anthropology — was militant in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, but it more or less triumphed, and, like all doctrines triumphant, became settled, established, and hardly combative in the same way. So what you have now, within university faculties, is a fair appearance of congeniality — not much disputation on intellectual terms, even within departments, let alone between administrations and the faculty more broadly.

What has persisted is the tendency that I, not with any originality, called professionalism: the dedication by upcoming scholars to do the most noticeable, leading-edge, and unique kind of work in their field. Of course, that’s always a goal of research in universities, but it’s not the same as knowledge, and it assumes a model of progress in academic pursuits that I don’t think applies in the way people want it to — in the humanities, at least, and to some extent in the social sciences.

There are certain ways of dividing up subjects, by race, by gender, which imply that race and gender carry with them a special kind of knowledge. Those have persisted, and where they haven’t issued in studies programs devoted to those separate subdisciplines, there are clichés that are very hard to dispute — they’re so taken as common sense within the academy. For example, that the self is constructed and mainly only knowable as constructed; that we are not to talk so lightly as we used to about truth, but only about narrative, or the narratives. And this goes with something quite general in American society, a point of unity between the academy and the society outside, which is a belief in progress. If you’re with the program — if you believe that the things you do in technology and in forms of discourse lead toward something not yet known, away from what have been traditional or customary ways of knowing — you’re doing the right thing. And progress is often opposed to, I would say, nature: what was, what has been, what has been known — human nature as we’ve known it. To cite that as your point of reference betrays you as reactionary.

McBrayer: Interesting. Let me ask a quick follow-up, both for you and for Len — since you were a student at Yale too. There’s this sense I get that Yale is wrestling seriously with questions about open inquiry and viewpoint diversity, maybe in a way that other elite universities are not. Even way back when I was an undergraduate, I read that selection from your book, David, in connection with selections from Buckley’s God and Man at Yale, as preparation for William F. Buckley actually coming to campus to give a talk. So I’ve always had this vision of Yale as wrestling with these kinds of issues — and, of course, the Yale report came out in the spring. Can either of you comment on whether you think Yale takes university reform along open-inquiry lines more seriously than some of your peers?

Bromwich: Let me say it fast, so Len can say something more objective and more slowly. I would like to think so, so much that I distrust my own judgment. But let’s hope.

Gutkin: I was a student at Yale over ten years ago now, so I won’t try to comment on any perspective from inside the institution. But speaking as a journalist and editor who covered some of these events: because Yale was so prominently in the news with respect to a handful of really scandalous spasms of campus censorship or repression — around certain disfavored kinds of quite harmless, frankly, speech — I’m thinking of the Yale Law School Trent Colbert incident, and also of the infamous Halloween incident — those became national news stories. My assumption, and David can speak with more intimate knowledge, is that the notoriety those incidents brought to the campus probably galvanized an already-existing reform movement on the inside.

I’ll say one thing, and I’d love to hear what David says. David Bromwich has been writing about some of these issues for a very long time — in the more recent phase, not the ‘80s and early ‘90s version you wrote about in the book you mentioned, but beginning in 2015 or so. And correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know, nobody in Yale’s leadership was interested in his opinion, particularly, until now, when he’s on the committee that authored this trust report. That, to me, seems like an indicator that something is changing.

McBrayer: Yeah. Maybe these are the times, and people are now taking seriously some of the critiques that Jonathan Haidt and other early HxA founders were making a decade ago.

Let’s pivot to some more concrete moves. Mike, you and some colleagues published a piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education just over a year ago, in March of 2025 — we’ll put that in the chat — and the piece offers a blueprint for reform. In particular, it argues that higher ed needs a series of checks and balances. I’m going to ask a pointed question: Can you tell us clearly who you think needs to be checked, and who you think can play the role of balancer?

Michael Jindra: Okay, let me update that a little too. That piece came out a year ago, and it was more conceptual — checks and balances. Over the past year, I’ve worked with a large group of faculty, gotten a lot of feedback, and we now have a follow-up document. It was linked in the more recent roundtable that Len Gutkin hosted at the Chronicle, and it lays out the specific steps — how to actually do checks and balances. That should be in the chat too. So that’s the nuts and bolts of how to actually do reform.

The Yale report was a good start. It recognizes there’s an issue and talks about what the problems are. The next step I see is: how do we influence both the faculty and the curriculum? The faculty make-up — some of the problems David talked about go way back. You’ve got issues in departments with groupthink and with intellectual silos. Faculty naturally hire people like themselves, people they agree with, and so you’ve got this lopsidedness now, and often an activism that dominates. So how do we affect that through checks and balances?

We have to be careful about it, too. There’s a notion that the faculty should be mainly involved in hiring, and they should be — but there needs to be a check there. The main groups that should check the faculty, so they don’t always hire people who think like themselves, are administrators, provosts, presidents, and ultimately the trustees, who I think have the responsibility for the quality of the university. Now, we don’t want them micromanaging — we don’t want them saying, “You’ve got to hire this person.” These are real, sensitive issues that should be collaborative, but you need the involvement of other parties who keep the faculty from just hiring people like themselves.

There are other parties that can be involved. External departmental reviews, I think, should be looking at this issue of viewpoint or intellectual diversity when they come in. Getting somebody from the outside is effective. Accrediting agencies can be another group that checks. So there should really be a number of parties who can look at this issue and help departments and universities have more intellectual and viewpoint diversity, leading to better scholarship and teaching — which is the ultimate goal here.

McBrayer: Thank you. I want to distill your comments into a slogan you might not like — and then you can respond and tell me if it’s not right. On one reading, what you said, Mike, is that it’s the faculty who need to be checked, and it’s the administrators who need to be the checkers or balancers — maybe it goes as far as boards of trustees or accrediting bodies. I understand the appeal of that reform, but of course the concern is that faculty are protected by academic freedom, which is the idea that academics should be making academic decisions, not some non-expert.

So maybe I’ll open this up to the whole group. Can people give us some examples where you think checking by an administration or a government violated shared governance or academic freedom — and then examples of checking faculty prerogatives in ways you think are consistent with academic freedom or shared governance? Let’s get a few examples on either side, so folks listening can get a sense of what we’re thinking about.

Jindra: I’ll say briefly, and then let others chime in. Obviously there’s been overreach by state legislatures — micromanaging, especially telling faculty what not to teach. That’s been a real problem. That is not a good way to do a check. They’re clearly out of their league; in some ways they don’t understand. I’m a cultural anthropologist. I’ve taught diversity. In some of these states, I’d be excluded from teaching certain topics and issues that should be taught. So that’s just one example, and I’ll let others chime in.

McBrayer: Good, thanks. Len?

Gutkin: I would add to that the difference between private research universities — with their own endowments, in blue states — and R1 public universities in red or purple states, in terms of which strategies or tactics are appropriate. It’s really stark. A place like Harvard or Yale or Princeton — a certain kind of reform, a certain kind of check, can proceed just from a kind of consciousness-raising, via conversations like this one, and from administrations that refuse to authorize certain kinds of cancellation campaigns. But in some red states, in particular in Texas, the risk of a prescriptive, really totalitarian, Christian-conservative, top-down takeover is very severe. I don’t know how reform should be approached in those cases, but it behooves everybody who’s not teaching at Texas Tech or Texas A&M or wherever to realize how stark the difference between their situation and some other situations is.

McBrayer: Right. Thank you. Ashley or David — examples where you think the balancers or checkers overreached their authority or violated academic freedom, and then examples where you think their applied pressure or guidance was appropriate.

Ashley Rubin: I’ll jump in, kind of echoing Michael and Len. One overreach example I particularly have a problem with is where government actors have basically said, “Here are words you simply can’t use.” At the end of the day, that’s censorship. We can have complicated questions about whether, when you’re teaching in particular ways, you’re open to different perspectives or essentially trying to impose one perspective — that’s a very different question from just saying, “You can’t do research that uses this word,” or, “If you have a grant proposal that uses this word, you’re not going to get funding.” That’s a much less nuanced way to say we want research that has, let’s say, pro-social ends. It’s just a very blunt, inefficient way to handle these questions.

McBrayer: Good. Thank you. David, do you have an idea you’d like to offer?

Bromwich: Let me just make a distinction between what we’re talking about now — which is a development of President Trump’s second term, the top-down government discouragement of certain kinds of teaching in states they control, which is just outright censorship and control of knowledge and of the pursuit of truth — and something different, which I think did exist, and is not as immediately harmful: a censorial or censorious attitude toward certain unwelcome views by people in departments, or in whole divisions sometimes, which led to self-censorship among teachers who might have disagreed but didn’t want to be called on it, and among students. So students, if they said something traditionalist about religion in a class that was being taught the other way, you’d find — and we heard testimony about this — the teacher wouldn’t scold them or shame them or any of the things that are often supposed to happen. The teacher would just be silent for a few seconds and then go on to something else, so that certain things are just not said.

I think both kinds of censorship are bad, but the one that involves actual withholding of funds, or prosecution of people who offend, or people being fired — that is very much what the McCarthy period brought in the 1950s. The free speech movement, which I think was very good, and developments after it, which weren’t all good, were in part a reaction against that right-wing, top-down censoriousness and censorship.

So it seems to me the right place for administrators — if they can do it, and they probably need some academic training, background, and self-confidence, which not all university administrators have; they tend to be technocrats, and can come from corporations — but if they’ve got that sense of things, is to encourage subjects or whole lines of work that should be taught, rather than saying, “Here are things you can’t do.” You’ve seen this in a big way in what are called civics institutes now — that’s one way. But there should be other ways of studying, say, the older literature, or political doctrines that are not much in evidence, where administrators can say, “We want people who can do this. Can you get people who will do this?”

McBrayer: Nice. I want to go off script a little here, David, because something about that last comment strikes me as deeply right. Think about the examples Len, Ashley, and Mike just gave — they’re all examples of what university administrators shouldn’t be doing: don’t censor, don’t tell people what can and can’t be on a syllabus, don’t tell people what can and can’t be in their research. So maybe the right way to think about this is that, even if you’re right, Mike, that there should be some checks and balances, maybe those balances come in the form of incentives and encouragement — adding to, rather than subtracting from or trying to say no to, what’s happening in current classes. Does that strike the rest of you as right? Reform by adding rather than reform by subtracting?

Rubin: I can jump in. I think that’s probably one of the more promising and, let’s call it, democratic approaches. We have a number of ways the future can go. One is a very hard, authoritarian approach, where we’re just going to cull certain faculty — that’s a really scary prospect, I don’t think any of us want to see it, but it’s on the table. Conversely, there’s finding a way to rebalance, which I think is what Mike’s proposal is more about: how do we add in those balances, how do we encourage people? That more positive approach, using incentives, is the way to bring people along, because at this point we have a faculty that is against a lot of these ideas — even against the idea that we need reform at all. So if we’re going to have a university that survives in something resembling its current form, using more of a carrot than a stick is going to be really important.

McBrayer: Nice. Len and/or Mike, weigh in on carrot versus stick.

Jindra: Yeah, I can say something — again, nuts and bolts. The evaluation process is important, and we see moves now to encourage faculty to present all sides of an issue. The work of John Shields, looking at curriculum, indicated there was a real problem with faculty presenting only one side of a controversial issue. He gave several examples — Michelle Alexander’s book on crime, for instance — where there are really good, legitimate viewpoints on both sides, and faculty are often presenting only one. So the teaching process, the faculty-development process — where you’re really looking at an issue and presenting it fairly from all sides, not just trying to indoctrinate students into one side — that should be encouraged in the evaluation process. Not always an easy thing to do, but I think you can do it.

McBrayer: Len, do you want to weigh in quickly before I go to the next question?

Gutkin: Sure, I’ll just quickly say that, when they’re done well, some of the civic-center-style initiatives can be really good in that additive rather than subtractive model. The proof will be in the pudding — we’ll watch what happens in those places over the next five or ten years — but there’s reason to be both optimistic and skeptical about some aspects of them, which we might talk about more later.

McBrayer: All right. Next question. Ashley, as I flagged earlier in your bio, you were a co-author on a commissioned report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and the more humanistic social sciences. It was just released last week. Can you give us a sense of the main findings, and how they map onto the practical checks-and-balances-type operationalizing of reform we’re talking about here?

Rubin: Yeah, thanks. Let me start by saying: everyone should read the report. Please read the report — instead of the summaries of the report, or the meta-reactions. And to get to the second part of your question, I’m only going to be speaking for myself, not the other commissioners.

So, our charge was to examine the state of scholarly standards — especially the extent to which internal politicization, coming from the faculty themselves, has potentially eroded scholarly standards. We found that things weren’t as bad as some critics are saying, but they’re also not as good as some defenders are saying — so it’s kind of a middle-ground report. We looked at a number of disciplines across the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and each one varied in the degree to which we saw this erosion. But each one did see essentially the replacement of traditional scholarly standards with either political or ideological criteria, in a number of different ways. There’s so much more to say about what’s in the report and what’s not — but folks should read the report.

How does this relate to Mike’s checks-and-balances plan? A few things. First, in that plan they encourage university administrators to do their own self-studies, and that’s actually one of our recommendations too: don’t rely on field-level trends — which is what we were looking at — but before you take action, look at your own departments or colleges and see what the reality is on the ground, rather than paying attention to overall trends, because there’s huge heterogeneity across fields, and within fields.

The other thing I want to flag is that Mike’s proposal, and our conversation, is really about encouraging faculty-led reform. This report was commissioned by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Wash U specifically as part of their larger effort at faculty-led reform, so this was a group of faculty evaluating research by faculty. But we do acknowledge a really thorny issue, which is that administrators might need to play a bigger role — as Mike and his group also say — in disciplines where the field-level norms are no longer about scholarly standards, no longer about deriving truth, and more about political missions, oftentimes quite explicitly stated political missions, which is not really what we’re supposed to do.

And the final thing I’ll say is that, at the end of the day, we’re all interested in the same thing. We’re trying to figure out how to get universities to regain public trust, and to ensure that academic research deserves that trust. These are different ways of going about it, but with a lot in common.

McBrayer: Great — and thanks for your work on that report. I just put a link to it in the chat, so if you’re interested in reading the full report, hit that link.

I’ve got a couple more questions for our panelists, and then we’ll pivot to Q&A. So, audience — if you have a question for one or more of the panelists, put it in the Q&A. You can also upvote other questions, and we’ll go with the ones that garner the most attention.

Okay — this is a question for the whole panel. Suppose you could wave a magic wand and change one thing about university process, governance, or policy. Let’s keep it grounded in reality — not full utopia, but something we could actually do: change a policy, change a process. If you could change one thing that you think would restore checks and balances, make universities a more truth-seeking place, or make them a place of more robust open inquiry — what’s the one thing you’d change? Just jump in.

Jindra: I could go first. I’ll just say I think the trustees, or board members — whatever they’re called at each institution — should be more concerned about the quality of the institution, rather than just its finances. As part of that, they could kickstart a self-study process. I’m glad Ashley mentioned that; that’s step number one in our program: each university should do a self-study. How do we start that? Trustees can do it — they’ve done it a few places. At the University of Denver, Jeremy Haefner, the chancellor there, is working with the trustees. The other part is that trustees need to hire presidents and chancellors who will help kickstart this process and see the need for reform.

McBrayer: Good. I’ll summarize quickly so the audience can follow the takeaway: self-study initiated from the top. Have trustees look at what’s happening at the university as a whole, to see whether it’s a place of open inquiry. Okay — next, anyone?

Rubin: I’ll dive in. I think we’ve done a lot of things to put our thumbs on the scale, where we’re not focusing on quality of research, teaching, and service, and instead looking at other factors. There are two versions of this that I think we have to fix. One: faculty especially — but administrators too — have to stop discriminating against conservatives, or conservatism. This means people who express conservative views, have conservative findings, or use theories that people think are conservative. When this happens, administrators have to intervene and make clear that it’s unacceptable — it has to be unequivocal. And then the converse — the other way we have our thumb on the scale — no more approving weak hires, tenure, and promotion cases. We’ve really got to stick to standards. So that would be my wish.

McBrayer: Great. So, removing thumbs, in the sense of excising non-academic, non-intellectually-serious criteria from our hiring, promotion, and the like, and focusing on intellectual merit and evidence. David or Len?

Gutkin: Sure, I’ll jump in. I’ll speak not to institutional mechanisms or governance, but to a scholarly-culture question. Beginning in 2020 — though I’m sure there were instances that preceded it — at the departmental level, departments across the board, but especially in the humanities, started posting these long, verbose, politically prescriptive statements about their activist commitments to whatever racial, social, or political justice movement. This has analogs in the communications and resolutions of a lot of scholarly and professional organizations, and in the corporate pronouncements by professional organizations about the supposedly settled state of knowledge around some controversial question that isn’t settled at all. All of those things should be really strongly discouraged. I think they’ve been disastrous for the reputation of the fields afflicted by them.

McBrayer: Nice, good suggestion. The way I’d characterize that, from a Heterodox Academy perspective, is something like institutional neutrality at the academic-unit level — departments and schools should stay out of that. David, how about you?

Bromwich: Well, since you just used that phrase, institutional neutrality, let me clarify a little, because it’s been misunderstood. It’s hard to think of a better phrase, but it does not mean that the leaders of institutions, or members of the faculty, or students, should be silent on political issues outside the academy. What it does mean is that the leaders — the university president or whatever — should not be speaking for the university when they pronounce on questions that are non-educational. That has as its aim to emancipate students and teachers to have their own opinions and not worry about parting company with the institution that shelters them all. It’s meant to be the opposite of censorious. Whereas the situation we have now is institutional active voice, which says, “We speak for Yale, and if you disagree, even though you’re at Yale, you’re not part of us.” So, sorry for that explanation.

I would say — again, mostly negative, like Ashley’s suggestion — that universities should become less technocratic and more monastic. Not an ivory tower or a church tower, but a structure somewhat separate from society and from immediate social pressures. Pragmatic steps to assist this end would be a ban on social media — definitely in the classroom, but as far as possible, everywhere. In Connecticut, my state, they’ve done it in K-through-12 schools. Why not extend that beyond K-12? And an absolute ban on AI in courses that have writing as one of the skills they’re trying to teach. Let me just leave it at that. I think that would encourage a whole different sense of the milieu you’re in when you belong to a university.

McBrayer: Great. So the concrete suggestion is to curb the use of tech — phones, social media, AI — in particular in classroom settings. And I appreciate the clarification you made regarding institutional neutrality. In fact, let me post this in the chat: Heterodox Academy has a model statement on neutrality and an explanation of what it looks like. In particular, we’ve seen abuses from institutions that adopted institutional neutrality and then turned around and used that policy as leverage to censor students or faculty for making political statements.

Bromwich: It should mean just the opposite.

McBrayer: That’s exactly right. So I appreciate you making that clarification. It’s an important contribution.

Okay — last question before we pivot to Q&A, and Len, this one’s for you. You’ve been writing about higher ed reform for a while now, and last month, as Michael flagged earlier, you did this fantastic interview with Michael, Ashley, and some others. In general, given this concatenation of proposals for how to reform higher ed, which aspects do you — or you and your journalist colleagues — find most persuasive, and which ones leave you skeptical? When other folks are thinking about higher ed reform and what faculty are proposing, what is it they’re not buying?

Gutkin: Let me begin with one that leaves me skeptical — not that I’m adamantly opposed, necessarily. It seems to me that any empowerment of boards is very risky. Boards are so vulnerable to political capture, and so likely, in so many cases, to misuse hiring and promotion power if that kind of interventional capacity is amplified on their part. So it just sounds like a very risky way to fix things. The more concrete the mechanism, the more skeptical I become, because I have little faith that these mechanisms won’t be abused by partisan political actors who have no particular interest in a healthy academic culture beyond their own political power.

What I’m most convinced by — and I’ve written a lot about this — is institutional neutrality in one or another of its forms, including as applied to any kind of corporate-level opinion or expression by a department, a professional organization, and so on. I think various kinds of restraint would do everyone a lot of good there.

McBrayer: Good, thanks. Okay, let’s pivot to Q&A with our audience. I’m pulling up the Q&A now, and I’ll ask the question, and then you all can decide who takes it.

Here’s our first question. It’s a comparison of the kind of reform efforts we’re speaking about here — aimed at open inquiry, academic excellence, and viewpoint diversity — with DEI efforts. The question is: To what extent do the governance and accountability mechanisms proposed by the HxA framework — or, Michael, your framework of checks and balances — differ from the institutional oversight structures that have already been implemented through diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives?

Jindra: I would say the main distinction is that what we’re looking at here is a very legitimate concern — the quality of scholarship and teaching, based on getting different viewpoints. With DEI initiatives — and I recognize the need for those historically, as a cultural anthropologist — that’s based on a very subjective process, often based on race, which is a questionable category, certainly biologically. It’s good to have diversity of viewpoints. I would focus more on class; I think the academy has a bigger problem with social class, being concentrated in the upper class, than it does with race and gender right now. Affirmative action — while there was a need for it at a certain point — I’d say isn’t really related so much to race and gender anymore. That can be discussed and debated. But with our reforms, we have a focus on intellectual diversity, viewpoint diversity, with a goal toward quality and restoring trust.

McBrayer: Good. Anyone else — comparison between these reform efforts and the DEI reform efforts?

Bromwich: I would hope that the reform efforts Michael was talking about have in view giving enlarged power to people who are in the university, on the faculty — part of, so to speak, the educational part of education. We have a whole other sector: from corporations, people come in to be appointed as spokesmen for the president of the university. I think Yale and Harvard both had more than one of those in recent years. And many of the DEI appointments I know of are people brought in from social justice, social work, and so on, outside the academy, and given jobs inside. There’s a great problem now, because you don’t want to leave people unemployed, but this was an add-on from the years 2015 to 2023, roughly. I assume that the kind of checking and balancing Michael Jindra has in view would involve people who are essentially educational and academic in their background and function.

McBrayer: Good, thanks. Next question — I appreciate this one, because it starts with “in the spirit of Heterodox Academy.” So this is a chance for viewpoint diversity across the panel. After the mention of totalitarianism, would anybody like to present the argument or rationale for legislative intervention in the curriculum, if only for reasons of forensics? Several of you gave examples of legislative overreach or violations of academic freedom, but does anybody want to represent the view that legislatures are right to be concerned, and that there’s at least some level of intervention that would be appropriate? What’s the best argument for that?

Rubin: I’ll take this one. I personally go back and forth on this, so I’m going to present things I’m wrestling with myself. I think the strongest argument for intervention — either from the legislature, which I think is a different issue, because it’s the legislature and not within the university, or from administrators within the university — is this: our fundamental mission in universities is essentially the search for and dissemination of truth. We’re supposed to be focused on knowledge creation and dissemination. If we have faculty, departments, or universities who say they have other goals — especially political goals, and especially if we’re at a public university — then essentially we have taxpayers paying faculty to do their own little political pet projects. That seems potentially very suspect, and that seems to be the way legislatures potentially have an in.

I go back and forth about whether this is a violation of academic freedom. One part of academic freedom, I think, is not just the field-level-norms part — which I’ll come back to — but also that we’re supposed to treat all faculty equally. That’s one of the things my university emphasizes: if you’re going to interfere in somebody’s syllabus, it has to be everyone’s syllabus reviewed by the same criteria. You can’t just pick on one faculty member. So if we say, “Look, across the board, we’re all here for this one mission, and we’re going to see that you’re upholding it,” that’s not necessarily an academic-freedom issue.

But point two goes back to field-level norms, and this is the other way I think academic freedom is really vulnerable right now. If you have field-level norms that are no longer trustworthy — no longer about knowledge, and again about politics — academic freedom disintegrates, because the whole idea of academic freedom is that you evaluate a faculty record or research according to the norms of the field. But if the norms of the field are no longer recognizable, and a random person off the street looks at this and says, “This seems kind of crazy,” then I think we have a real problem. And this gets back to that larger issue of trust, and especially taxpayer dollars. So for me, that’s the strongest argument — and the thing that makes me most nervous, because we do want to protect academic freedom and our autonomy, but at the same time I think we’re on really shaky ground. So it’s a complicated issue.

Bromwich: I think that’s a very dangerous line to cross, and I know you’ve confessed your own ambivalence. I feel, at this moment, much less ambivalent — partly because, for so many years, and it’s really two generations now of scholars in a field like American studies, there has been a politicized — it’s really not an intellectual environment so much as a milieu, but there it is — a whole field that was invented in the Cold War to sell America to the world. Now it’s doing something very different, but it’s almost the price of entry in that field to have a certain politics. I think the best universities and colleges can do is to be aware that the word “indoctrination” is used a lot by right-wing critics of the academy, and I don’t think it quite catches the problem, because there is doctrine, but it’s unconscious in the people who wield it — they don’t see that it’s not the only doctrine. So to punish them for being what they were taught to be seems to me to risk civil liberties and constitutional values; it’s just too much. The best way government can restrain excesses of this kind is, again, to reward universities that are monitoring themselves effectively, and reward much less those that are not.

McBrayer: Yeah, good point. Okay, I’m going to pivot to the next question. Musa al-Gharbi, longtime member and friend of Heterodox Academy, did some excellent analysis on the political leanings of faculty compared to the public generally. But faculty seem to be quite blind to that, among all the different problems that are quite obvious to the general public. So: How do you get faculty to recognize the internal failings of the university, particularly their biases and their composition, given that these biases are seen by the public as one of the causes of a decline in trust, but not really by faculty? How do you get faculty to appreciate how ideologically homogeneous they are, and why that might be a driver of the trust deficit with the American public?

Rubin: Well, let me say what worked for me. I went to the American Sociological Association annual meeting a few years ago, and I realized: oh my god, every single panel I’ve gone to, the research questions and findings are only appealing if you’re not just liberal, but a very specific type of liberal — pretty far to the left. That was a striking realization, and I thought about it at every conference afterward: okay, who is the political group this is for? When I’ve mentioned that to other folks in my field, it’s really not taken seriously — it’s viewed with suspicion.

But the thing that actually worked for me, beyond that, was realizing this isn’t just, “Okay, I’m going to pretend to be a conservative and look at this issue.” First, my stereotype of conservatives is actually really problematic, so that’s not helping. And second, there are all these pieces of data we don’t know, because we’re not studying them, they’re not getting covered. A lot of our canon — the research we read and publish and can be experts in — has huge blind spots. Talking with my husband, who’s a physicist and interested in technology and all these other things, he’ll know more about certain things than what’s being covered in my field. That was really eye-opening — realizing just how bad our blind spots were, and how corrupted our theories are.

So getting people to read works and see, “Oh, actually this is a very different perspective” — I don’t even like calling these viewpoints or perspectives, because it’s more like an approach: looking at data, looking at findings that just aren’t getting promoted, and realizing how much that changes fundamental things we believe in the field and have taken for granted — for me, that was really eye-opening. But I also don’t know how many people, to the extent this is starting to happen in my field, are receptive; it’s mostly being rejected as fringe, right-wing, far-right, et cetera. So I’m a little worried about the extent to which people are actually going to be receptive, even just to looking at other data and findings.

McBrayer: Anyone else — suggestions on how to get through to faculty about just how homogeneous we are as a group, and why that might drive a trust deficit?

Jindra: Just, as Ashley was mentioning, data-based approaches — studies that show bias using keyword searches, analysis of papers, analysis of teaching. Doing that, rather than the Chris Rufo style of cherry-picking really extreme examples and hammering them and saying everyone’s gone woke, everyone’s crazy. You need to do this in the right way.

Bromwich: In giving advice to students, especially graduate students — this is on members of a faculty, one by one, person by person — people should be less…

McBrayer: David, you cut out there for a moment, about 20 seconds ago. Will you redo the last 25 seconds or so of your comment?

Bromwich: Can you hear me now?

McBrayer: Yep.

Bromwich: I was just saying: one should feel free to advise students that the employment of a cliché is a confession of inadequacy. Don’t rely on the words other people have used for things you’ve heard a million times. That in itself would get rid of the word “narrative” almost every time it’s used.

McBrayer: Nice thought. Okay, next question. This one comes from a grad student at Texas A&M, and the core of it is: How do we balance the very real interest that states have in cultivating a particular kind of civic identity with the overarching need to defend academic freedom? On the one hand, this person has dealt with overreach — “you can’t teach Plato in your classes,” and the like. But on the other hand, the point is that you need not be a theocratic conservative to think the state has some interest in inculcating civic virtues. So how do you balance those two needs?

Gutkin: I’m actually quite skeptical that the cultivation of civic virtues should be a primary goal of any education in government or political philosophy. Beyond, I suppose, a kind of service-class function — maybe we need basic civics-literacy courses, because one should know how one’s government works — the idea that cultivating loyalty to one’s country or system of government is the goal of any real course in politics or history is unappealing to me. That kind of feeling should maybe be a secondary effect of a good education at a state university: you might become loyal to your state and its institutions because it provided you with a fine education. But the idea that the inculcation of civic virtue is a primary goal for any course of study, I think, is unwise.

McBrayer: Interesting. So Len’s answer is: we don’t need to try to balance those two, because there’s nothing on one end of the seesaw — there’s nothing to balance that is really one of the main goals or the telos of the university. How about the rest of you? Is anybody sympathetic to the idea that publicly funded universities have a duty or a role in producing civic virtues? And if so, how do you balance that prerogative with letting academics make academic decisions, as required by academic freedom?

Rubin: So there is a— oh, sorry, go ahead.

Bromwich: How about requiring every graduate of 12th grade, to get a high school certificate, to pass the same citizenship test that immigrants to America have to pass? It’s not an easy test.

McBrayer: Yeah, I’ve heard.

Rubin: Yeah, thanks. So there’s a Chronicle of Higher Education piece — an op-ed, I think, a couple of weeks ago — about thinking of universities as basically generating citizenship, getting people to think about universities as forming citizens of the world. I find that an intriguing idea, but at the same time I’ve also gotten into debates with colleagues about whether, in the humanities, you’re supposed to generate a love for good literature or something like that. I personally take the hard stance that that’s not my job. I’m a public-university professor, and I’ve been for my whole career, and I always take a very hard-line view that my job is not to tell students what to think, but to give them critical-thinking skills.

So my answer to this is to tweak the question a little: you don’t have to be hard-right to realize universities have a problem. But I think the way to do it is to ask, “What’s the one thing we can all agree on?” We have a diverse society. The one thing I think we can all agree on is that universities are supposed to be there for education and research — we’re supposed to be knowledge institutions. When we start to add on to that, I think we get into problems. And this is actually a problem that’s true for all organizations: as soon as you start piling on multiple goals, you get conflicting goals, tensions, and things get really tricky. So I’d encourage us to focus on our one goal of disseminating and generating knowledge.

McBrayer: Okay, good. Ashley, I’d love to follow up with you on that, because I know and respect you, and feel like I can probe and pressure you a little.

Rubin: Fair enough.

McBrayer: So universities are knowledge-producing or truth-seeking machines. But still, if the public is funding it, shouldn’t the public have some say as to what kind of knowledge we’re producing, or what intellectual skills we’re inculcating? We could just decide to count blades of grass on the lawn — that’s knowledge, we’ll know more at the end of the day. But is it appropriate for the public to have some shape on what we want citizens to know, what we want citizens to be able to do? Sure, you’re in the business of skills and knowledge, but that’s an infinitely long list. Where do we focus our efforts?

Rubin: Yeah, two things. On the blades of grass — one of my favorite sayings is, let’s say I want to study some bark on some random tree. One of the things about scholarly standards is that we’re supposed to explain why the bark on that random tree in this random forest actually matters, and how it relates to the bark on another tree, or to the ecosystem. There’s a whole process for doing that, and if you don’t do it, you’re not supposed to get published. This is one of the things we’ve lost in recent years — we’ve kind of stopped making that bridge between why my bark matters to somebody else studying ecology, and what the connections are. So I’d say this is part of the erosion of scholarly standards, in a lot of different ways, not just for political reasons, although that’s part of it. So one, we’re not supposed to just randomly count blades of grass.

In terms of citizen input, I have two responses. One: this is where incentives come in, where funding initiatives come in. You can say, “Look, we want to see people studying this stuff.” But also, just for the generation of knowledge, we don’t only want to do what the public wants, because basic research leads to discoveries that can be useful and important for future knowledge. So you really want to balance it: yes, you can have some priorities, but you want basic knowledge to continue.

My other thought about public input — and this is the critique of my own comment — is that when I do talk to normal people, and by normal people I mean non-professors — we are not normal, and this is not a criticism — when I talk to people outside the academy, or to students, a lot of times they want to know what I think about things. And it’s really uncomfortable for me, because for the last two decades I’ve made a habit of not telling people my personal views. If I’m giving a class on capital punishment, my students don’t know whether I oppose or support it, and I try to be pretty consistent about that. So it’s really weird when people want to know. Does that mean the public really does want us to tell them?

My resolution of this is: the public is heterogeneous. Some people want us to tell them — as experts who also have personal opinions, they want us to share those opinions. Others don’t; they just want us to stick to the evidence, and to be able to trust us, and to see that we’re taking steps not to let our personal views cloud our judgment, and that we’re not censoring research because we don’t like the possible political implications of our findings. And so I come back to that: we have to have research integrity.

McBrayer: Nice. I appreciate that. Thank you for letting me press you. Okay — we have time for one last question. “Your blueprint addresses the balance of power between faculty and administration, but where’s the check on administrative power in your model?” This question comes from someone particularly concerned about administrative power or bloat that blocks student success — but you might also think of it as blocking research, Ashley, in the way you were just describing. Where’s the check on administrators? If what was typically faculty work is now being done with faculty asked to sit further back, how do we check administrators and make sure we’re not ending up in the same kinds of violations of academic freedom we’re seeing from some legislative groups?

Jindra: That is a legitimate concern, and in our previous conversations it has come up — especially in the feedback we got over the past year. Some have said administrators have been a worse problem than faculty, and I think we address that in our longer report. Briefly: besides faculty, there are roles for others to check administrators — accrediting agencies, for instance, and other parties involved in academia. Even the press — even Len at the Chronicle, when the Chronicle reports on administrative bloat. This is where you get other civic organizations involved, other people critiquing the academy as a whole. I think there has been recognition of the problem we’ve had with both administrative bloat and administrators who enforced DEI to an excessive extent in the past years, and that has been working itself out.

McBrayer: Anybody else want to chime in on who watches the watchers?

Rubin: I would say one of the solutions I think we undervalue is getting a wide variety of input from people, and increasing our interactions with the public — so, not contradicting my previous statement, at the end of the day we have to have research integrity and knowledge. But I think it’s worthwhile — sorry, David, I’m going to disagree — I think we do need to have more connections with other groups in society. We need to be discussing the university with business leaders, with NGOs, with government actors, with K-12 folks, with different sectors of society, and hearing what people say — because we are this echo chamber. And again, with apologies, I’m not sure the monastic model is right. I totally agree that social media has really exacerbated a lot of the trends, so that’s an issue, and there’s been a big push for people to want to be public intellectuals — and those who say, “Oh, I’m not an activist, I’m a public intellectual,” at the end of the day it’s basically the same thing in practice, and I think that’s become a problem.

But getting a greater set of inputs into the university — like an advisory board, not necessarily with power, but just, “Yes, you guys are doing a good job,” “No, you aren’t,” “Here are some weaknesses, here are some blind spots” — I think would be really helpful in rounding out the echo chamber. Especially if we’re producing basic research, but also useful research, and there’s stuff we’re not studying that society needs to know, I think that’s really important. And again, we can address that with funding, with business cooperation or partnerships. There are a lot of possibilities, but I do think we have to get out of our echo chamber.

Bromwich: Just to clarify my view: when I said less technocratic and more monastic, I didn’t mean we should become religious and take vows of renunciation against consulting. I think the university should be, in a self-conscious and sentient way, more public. But what I see in public attitudes on university websites isn’t always what I would mean by “public.”

Gutkin: Can I add one thing?

McBrayer: Please.

Gutkin: Ashley, I totally agree that, for both tactical and democratic reasons, connections with other spheres are really important. But I think there are lines that have to be drawn. What scholars owe the public most of all is the assurance that they are, among themselves, honest brokers of their own disputes — that they’re not doing things for purely political reasons, and that they’re seeking knowledge, however they define it, earnestly. The risk with too much openness, it seems to me, is that the university puts itself in a position of needing to reproduce the prejudices or biases of the larger society. One of the longest-standing disputes about university teaching — even prior to the establishment of the AAUP — had to do with Darwinian theory in all kinds of little colleges across the country. And no amount of openness can justify saying, “Well, if the people of Tennessee or Oklahoma don’t believe in Darwinian theory, we’ll stop teaching it.” So openness needs to be approached with real caution and self-consciousness.

Rubin: Yeah, thanks. I think that’s a great point. To reiterate: I think outside input can be helpful for pointing out blind spots — that’s probably the most important thing outside people can bring: “You’ve really gone off in this direction, but there’s this whole other world out there.” So I think that’s the strongest argument I’d have in favor of it, and I think it’s consistent with your point. Thank you for that.

McBrayer: Nice. Well, we’re almost out of time. Michael, Ashley, Len, David — so happy to have you here. Thank you for graciously sharing your time and your thoughts about university reform, particularly from a faculty member’s perspective. Would you like to do a 30-second wrap-up? Feel free to drop links in the chat for work you’re doing. Ashley, I put the link in for the report that just came out, but if you’ve got other work in the publication pipeline, books, a Substack, or anything else you want to flag, let’s do that. We’ll go through the panelists and you can have your final sign-off. Michael, let’s start with you, because you’re at the top of my screen.

Jindra: I think I’ve got a few links in there already. In pushing ahead these higher ed reforms, I’d like to find out what more universities and colleges are doing. We’ve got the Yale report, we had a report from Harvard Medical School, and other things going on. So I think what we’re going to do is ramp up a bit of finding out what works and what doesn’t work with reforms, and getting feedback from people. This session is great just for getting comments about the trade-offs and the advantages and disadvantages. There’s no perfect way of doing this — there are going to be disadvantages to any move where you empower a group of people — so this is going to be a long-term process. Governments are going to change, we’re going to have elections. Let’s look internally at what colleges and universities can do in the long run, and figure out how best to do this.

McBrayer: Great, thank you. Ashley?

Rubin: Thanks. I’m going to post my website and my Substack in the chat. Right now my top priority is revising my internal report on sociology for the commission, polishing it and shortening it for public consumption. That’s going to be published next month, and I’ll also be posting about it on my Substack. So that’s what’s next for me.

McBrayer: Great. Len?

Gutkin: Sure. So The Chronicle Review now has a Substack — I’ve posted the link in the chat, and I hope people will subscribe. Every Monday you’ll get a short essay from me, and every Friday a Chronicle Review article from one of our contributors, non-paywalled and available to read. So I hope you’ll sign up.

McBrayer: Fantastic. Thank you. David, you have the final word.

Bromwich: I don’t have a site to post. I’m working on the second volume of an intellectual biography of Edmund Burke — it’s from imperial reform to the French Revolution. Burke is an unclassifiable writer, and there’s wisdom in what he wrote and spoke — so that’s a word we haven’t used yet today. I’ll just throw it in at the very end.

McBrayer: In true, consistent, monastic fashion: no link, just a book. I appreciate that, David. Thank you so much. And thank you to everyone who attended. We appreciate you being here and thinking along with us about how to navigate university reform. Be sure to subscribe to the Heterodox Academy email so you can find out about the next event. Thanks, everyone.

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Jennifer Schubert Aiken: Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back. Thank you for joining us. My name is Jennifer Schubert Aiken. I’m the co-founder and CEO of the Steamboat Institute. We are very grateful to the University of Wyoming and to Heterodox Academy for hosting us here in Laramie tonight for our Campus Liberty Tour debate as part of the Mountain West Regional Conference. We would also like to welcome those who are watching the live stream of our debate, coming up here in just a few minutes. We always have live stream viewers from all over the country, and we’re happy to have them joining us.

Steamboat Institute was founded nearly 20 years ago with the mission of promoting America’s first principles and fostering an appreciation of the freedom we enjoy as Americans. We’ve hosted dozens of debates on college campuses across America over the past eight years, visiting more than 30 campuses, including CU Boulder, where we partner with the Benson Center; CU Colorado Springs; Arizona State; University of Texas at Austin; University of Tennessee; University of Maryland; Harvard; Princeton; Cornell; and many more. With each of our debates, the emphasis is on critical thinking skills — teaching people how to think, not what to think. As our nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the greatest threat to American self-government and liberty is the collapse of civil disagreement. Our republic can’t survive if its citizens no longer know how to disagree without trying to silence one another. Steamboat Institute aims to address this problem with our Campus Liberty Tour.

Our debates feature high-profile experts fearlessly tackling the hottest topics of the day, including, for example, the U.S.–Israel alliance, climate change and energy policy, DEI policies, socialism versus capitalism, transgender athletes in women’s sports, and much more. Our most recent debate, at CU Boulder back in April, featured John Bolton and Susan Rice debating U.S. foreign policy. We’re proud that over all these years, and with all of these contentious debate topics, not a single one of our debates has been shouted down or canceled. With all of our debates, you can watch live from anywhere on Steamboat Institute’s YouTube channel, and we hope you’ll sign up for our email list at steamboatinstitute.org so you can get the viewing links sent directly to your inbox. And, of course, all of our previous debates are available for viewing for free on our YouTube channel.

As a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, Steamboat Institute relies on the support of many generous individuals and foundations to bring programs such as today’s debate to audiences across the country. I would like to extend a special thank you to our major sponsors: the Adolph Coors Foundation, the Diana Davis Spencer Foundation, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the Jack Roth Charitable Foundation, the Anschutz Foundation, the Arthur N. Rupe Foundation, the Tina Snyder Foundation, the Woodford Foundation for Limited Government, and Bruce and Marcy Benson, for their support, which has allowed us to expand this program to dozens of campuses across America.

Today’s debate addresses a question that has become increasingly important in higher education: Should colleges and universities adopt a position of institutional neutrality, or should they take public stances on controversial social and political issues? We invite all of our audience members, including our live stream viewers, to respond with your view on this question. There are QR codes on the cards on the table. The question is this: Is institutional neutrality necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes? Agree, disagree, or undecided? Do this now. If you’re watching the live stream, you’ll see a link in the chat. For those of you here in the room, like I said, there are cards on the table — use that QR code. Then, when the debate is over, we’re going to ask your opinion again to see if opinions have shifted.

And now it’s my great pleasure to introduce our speakers and moderator for this evening. So let’s welcome them to the stage, and I will then introduce each of them while they remain seated. Welcome, speakers and moderator. It’s okay if you want to applaud. Yeah.

Okay, so I will introduce each of them, they will remain seated, and then I will turn it over to our moderator, and opening statements will begin.

Arguing the affirmative on our resolution is Jonathan Turley, a nationally recognized legal scholar who has written extensively in areas ranging from constitutional law to legal theory to tort law. Professor Turley is the J.B. and Maurice C. Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington Law School. Professor Turley is the founder and executive director of the Project for Older Prisoners. He has written more than three dozen academic articles that have appeared in a variety of leading law journals, including those of Cornell, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, and Northwestern, among others. Professor Turley has served as counsel in a variety of national security and terrorism cases, and is a frequent witness before the House and Senate on constitutional and statutory issues. He is a nationally recognized legal commentator and is the second most cited law professor in the country. Professor Turley is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors, where he frequently publishes opinion pieces on constitutional law and civil liberties. He’s the author of The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage, published in 2024, and the just-released Rage in the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution. Please give a warm welcome to Professor Jonathan Turley.

Arguing the negative on our resolution is Todd Wolfson, Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He also serves as president of the American Association of University Professors and as national vice-president of the American Federation of Teachers. Trained as a sociocultural anthropologist, Professor Wolfson’s research focuses on the convergence of new media and social movements. He is the author of Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left, which examines the impact of new media and communication technologies on the spatial, strategic, and organizational fabric of social movements. Professor Wolfson is also a co-founder of the Media Mobilizing Project, which uses media and communications as a core strategy for building a movement of poor and working people in Philadelphia and beyond. The Media Mobilizing Project has been recognized as a national leader both in using media as an organizing tool and in advocating around the intersection of poverty and technology. Please give a warm welcome to Professor Todd Wolfson.

Our moderator for the debate is George Bogden, Senior Counsel for Trade at Continental Strategy, a government relations firm with offices in Washington, D.C., Florida, and Latin America. Dr. Bogden previously served as Executive Director of the Office of Trade Relations at U.S. Customs & Border Protection, where he was the agency’s primary liaison to the international trade community. A writer and commentator, his analysis has appeared in outlets including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. Dr. Bogden is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a David Rockefeller Fellow of the Trilateral Commission, and a Senior Fellow with the Steamboat Institute. He was recently named to Washingtonian magazine’s 2026 list of the 500 Most Influential People Shaping Policy. And now I’ll turn it over to Dr. Bogden to begin our debate.

George Bogden: Thank you so much, Jennifer. It’s such a pleasure to be here today. I have to say that this is an exciting debate, not just because of our extraordinary speakers, but also, I think, because you all have been ruminating and deliberating on many of the subjects we’re going to address. So I ask, make this an opportunity to kind of crystallize and bring to the fore those points of agreement and disagreement you may have had earlier on.

I also want to say that — this is kind of the third debate that I’ve gotten to moderate in this fashion, and I have to say what really makes this fun is audience participation. And so I’m going to give a little demonstration. These cards are key to the debate. I think it’s great that Steamboat looks at folks using their devices as a feature, not a glitch, of a big public event. And so take the opportunity now to express your views on the topic, but also to start thinking through topics for the questions, because it’s my preference to ask your questions rather than the ones that I’ve prepared, and I’ll certainly stick to that.

Beyond that, I think it’s important to take one moment to read out what is a bit of an elaborate resolution. So if you’ll bear with me: This house believes that institutional neutrality is necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry rather than an actor in political disputes. There’s a lot there. So without further ado, I think I’ll hand it over to our opening speaker, Professor Turley.

Jonathan Turley: Thank you very much. And please let me first thank Steamboat Institute, and of course Todd Wolfson, in facilitating what I think is a very timely debate.

The term “institutional neutrality” is often associated with the debate that really began significantly in 1900, continued through the 1950s, and then culminated with a report that you’ll hear a great deal about, called the Kalven Report. But it actually can be traced back centuries, to the basis for universities as institutions, as unique forums for free expression and free thought. Indeed, you can trace it back to the very founding of the concept of an academia. And that term, as I mentioned, I talk about in my book The Indispensable Right, can be traced to a small Athenian grove in ancient Greece where Plato would gather with his students, and famously they would form a circle to create a type of protected space, and they would direct their comments and their thoughts to the center of that circle, and it would symbolize the fact that what they would discuss was protected from pressures and influences outside. Higher education is meant to maintain that protected space. Universities and colleges protect the circle itself, and allow students and faculty to speak freely within it.

It is equally important to emphasize what institutional neutrality is not. It is not a bar on people who want to take public stances or engage in protests. Rather, as stated in the Kalven Report decades ago, the university is the home and sponsor of critics. It is not itself the critic. It also does not mean that the universities cannot speak to defend institutional interests, such as attacks on academic freedom, as many institutions have done in the last couple of years. Institutional neutrality encourages free expression and academic freedom by assuring students and faculty that the school itself takes no position other than supporting their right to speak, debate, write. Faculty can join en masse in protests and petitions, but when they do so, they do so as individuals, not as representatives of the university.

The call by figures against institutional neutrality is not coming from the students. A recent poll found a majority of students oppose institutions taking these public positions. Notably, another poll showed that roughly 60 percent of students said they fear speaking freely in class. An even larger percentage say that they actively self-censor in classes and on campus. That is a particularly distressing and depressing statistic. Many universities have taken the stand to try to reverse that, and they’ve reaffirmed their commitment to institutional neutrality to try to restore diversity of viewpoints. Schools from the University of Chicago to Yale to this institution, the University of Wyoming, have expressly embraced institutional neutrality as a touchstone. But other universities have abandoned that. University and department heads now regularly denounce ICE, condemn conservative speakers, or make other types of public statements on issues of the day. An institutional statement at the University of California, Santa Cruz declared, as an institution, that Gaza is a feminist issue. In the last election, Wesleyan university president Michael Roth called upon universities to reject institutional neutrality, and even called for them to endorse Vice President Harris, to oppose what he analogized as the rise of the Nazis.

The rejection of institutional neutrality is the final goal of many who have turned our higher education into an academic echo chamber. In the last two decades, conservatives and libertarians have been effectively purged from faculty and departments. There are many departments now that don’t have a single conservative or libertarian on the faculty, in a country that has a majority of conservatives and libertarians. With the complete control of faculties, many of these same figures are now pushing to make the academic institutions themselves into advocates. What is striking for some of us is these voices are not new; they’re all too familiar. At one time universities imposed a variety of religious and political viewpoints, including punishing those that undermined Christian values. It’s common for universities to denounce and cancel — but what we are watching is the final breaking of the circle from the Athenian grove. Higher education is now in an existential battle with itself, and we must join to create a new circle to guarantee that this garden, this grove, will allow many ideas to flourish. Thank you.

Todd Wolfson: Hey, everybody. How you doing? Good to see you. Um, I also want to start by thanking Steamboat. And, you know, this is my first time seeing these campus tours. It’s beautiful — a beautiful and important thing — so I really appreciate it.

Um, so we’re going to run into like some crossroads here, because I think there’s a lot we agree on. So I want to start with a concession: universities do issue too many statements. They do. Many are performative, politically convenient, and they’re intellectually hollow. I’ve spent 30 years in higher education, and I’ve watched institutions rush to signal virtue on questions far removed from the core mission. I’m not here to defend that. If the question tonight were “should universities weigh in on every political controversy,” I might be sitting on my opponent’s side of things.

But that’s not the question in front of us. The proposition before us is whether institutional neutrality is necessary to preserve the university as a forum for open inquiry. Necessary is a strong word. It does a lot. That means without neutrality, there is no open inquiry. That is the claim that my opponent — that Jonathan — must prove today, and I’m here to argue that he can’t, because history and experience point to the opposite direction. And so my burden is simple: find one case where non-neutral institutional action preserved open inquiry, and then the proposition fails, because a necessary condition admits no exceptions. So I intend to give you a couple of exceptions tonight, and we can think through from there.

But here is the central point I want to make. Academic freedom is the foundation of open inquiry — academic freedom. Neutrality is merely a strategy that helps us hold open inquiry, but a strategy is not the thing that makes a university free. Tenure, shared governance, faculty speech, independent research — these are the conditions under which genuine inquiry happens. Neutrality is a strategy that sometimes serves those conditions, but it’s not the source of those conditions. Confusing the strategy for the foundation is a central error in the proposition before us. Even the Kalven Report — and Jonathan said as well — even the Kalven Report recognizes that universities must defend the conditions that make inquiry possible.

Think of it this way. If universities were perfectly neutral, but the government abolished tenure, dictated curriculum, and controlled research, would inquiry be free? And that doesn’t matter whether you have a left-wing or right-wing government. In either case, if they dictated a curriculum, would that institution be free? You know, obviously not. In that world, universities would be perfectly neutral; they would also be profoundly unfree, which means neutrality was never the variable that matters most.

And we’re watching this play out in real time. Last October, the federal government sent a document called the Compact for Academic Excellence to nine major universities. The offer was straightforward: accept federal criteria over admissions, your curriculum, and your campus governance, and receive preferential access to federal funding; decline it, and you do not receive access to that federal funding. Seven universities publicly said no — MIT, Brown, Dartmouth, University of Pennsylvania, University of Southern California, Virginia, and Arizona. Each took a public position, a public position: we will not let the government determine what we teach, whom we admit, and how we govern ourselves. Did those non-neutral statements destroy open inquiry at MIT, Brown, and Dartmouth? Did open inquiry suffer, or did they protect open inquiry by making a non-neutral statement?

And this is not a left or right question. One of the most influential defenses of free inquiry in modern higher education is the University of Chicago principles from 2014. Chicago did not remain neutral on free expression. It issued an explicit institutional statement rejecting the suppression of unpopular ideas, and affirming the university must protect the right to express them freely, and also demanding no safe spaces from ideas. More than 100 colleges and universities signed onto those principles. This is not a neutral position. And universities have likewise defended Christian student groups, conservative speakers, and unpopular voices through explicit institutional action.

So even the strongest defenders of institutional neutrality recognize that neutrality has exceptions. Once we admit that universities may speak when the conditions of inquiry are threatened, the debate is no longer about whether universities should ever speak. It becomes a debate about when they should speak — when and how they speak. And that’s a very different proposition.

My opponent will argue that when universities take institutional positions, they chill dissent and compromise their role as forums of open inquiry. Hold that claim against what you just heard. Seven universities publicly refused a government demand to submit their academic programs to political criteria. Some advocates of institutional neutrality would counsel silence, but silence in that moment is not neutrality. Silence is compliance — it’s compliance.

So it’s academic freedom. I’ll just say this one more time, and have us like center this: academic freedom is the central foundation upon which we have open inquiry. Institutional neutrality is a strategy, which sometimes works and sometimes is not necessary to hold and maintain open inquiry in our universities. Thank you.

George Bogden: Thank you so much for those stirring public — or opening — statements. And now we have a really exciting moment in the debate where I get to ask questions, you get to ask questions, and we’ll kind of see where things head. I want to start off by kind of going to the canonical example that Professor Turley opened us with, which really has to do with Athens and its validity as a model for the university. Do you think that that concept of the free and open space creates potential for harms and abuses? I’m thinking of, you know, putting to death of Socrates, or the ascendance of his acolyte Alcibiades. I didn’t mean for much alliteration. But, I mean, what I’m getting at is, is that a formula for people to take advantage and to do negative things and to persuade publics in awful ways?

Jonathan Turley: No, I don’t think it is. In The Indispensable Right, I talk about this growing chorus of academics who are saying that free speech is harmful or dangerous or triggering. And I don’t accept that. I don’t believe that free speech is harmful in the sense that you should be able to regulate it and curtail it to a large extent. But the question is what the baseline is.

This sort of goes to what Todd had said. I do not believe that the standard of whether institutional neutrality should exist is whether there’s a single academic somewhere who is showing academic freedom. That’ll be a hell of a test. The Chinese could say, “Yeah, you don’t need free speech; I can name an academic in Beijing who seems to be doing just fine.” The question is what the baseline is. And some of the universities that Todd referenced as opposing the Trump administration policies — and I oppose some of those policies — are signatories on institutional neutrality. The Kalven Report specifically says that universities are allowed to speak publicly about their institutional interests. Now, does that mean that the exception swallows the rule? No. But to come back to your question in terms of Athens: no one is actually being forced to take hemlock. In reality, they don’t need it. Most of the dissenting voices have been eliminated in many departments. And, quite frankly, I’ve always thought it was amazing that this group really wants to get rid of institutional neutrality — they have control of virtually every department in the country. They can sign petitions with overwhelming numbers because there are very few conservatives, Republicans, contrarians, libertarians. They’re largely gone. I’ve been teaching for over 30 years; I’ve watched it happen. So no one’s afraid of hemlock, because they got rid of Socrates years ago. They actually got rid of Plato years ago.

George Bogden: Right, right. And what do you think? Any response to that, or?

Todd Wolfson: Well, I do agree with Jonathan on this. I don’t think that open inquiry — and free, the circle — is the problem. So we do need a university. We might not agree on issues, but there’s no disagreement that we need a robust university that has diverse thought, where we are fighting over ideas, where we are teaching our students how to think. We are training them in multiple different disciplines that help them think. I mean, if that’s the proposition — that like there’s a side that doesn’t believe that’s true — I don’t think there’s actually that side in this world. I don’t see it. And I’m the one that’s the interlocutor on the left that supposedly is walking amongst the folks that are trying to shut everyone down. That is not what I am seeing. That is not the reality of the university I see today. That doesn’t mean there aren’t excesses — and Jonathan, you brought up some good ones about statements that were humorous, like “Gaza being a feminist issue” being one. But I think that there’s a typecast about what’s going on in the university that is not my experience.

Jonathan Turley: Can I follow up on that? Because Todd and I actually do share a lot of values — not surprisingly, we’ve both been teaching so long. And I don’t doubt Todd’s love for academia, but we obviously have some fundamental differences. What Todd just referred to — originally, much of our academic freedom policies came out of the German school, and this idea of sort of the Wissenschaft type of principle of higher education as teaching a way of learning. And the reason that’s important is because you’re not being taught that there is an orthodox set of answers. The idea is that we would teach a way of learning. That requires a very specific environment, that protected environment, and in my view essential to that is for the institution not to take a stand.

And, you know, there was a famous statement by a physicist who said that all great advances in science follow funerals. And what he was saying was that you have to wait for a lot of the orthodox advocates to pass before you can challenge it. And so what I would say to Todd is that when you go to sort of ways of learning, it’s very dangerous when institutions take positions, and it’s not necessary. In the Kalven Report they refer to universities becoming second-rate political organizations. No one really cares that much outside the university what they say, but people in the university — because if you want to go for tenure, if you want to get rehired, and you have a university saying X is the truth, then, if you were even thinking of writing that it’s not the truth, it presents a real barrier. And what I would put forward as examples of that is that during the pandemic we had many academics who were fired and attacked for taking opposing views of COVID. And that includes the Great Barrington letter that was signed. I spoke at the University of Chicago, and many of the signatories were in the front row. And I asked them — most of them were vindicated. They were vindicated on saying those blue masks did not prevent the transmission of the virus. They were vindicated on saying that the six-foot rule did not have a scientific basis. They were vindicated that you didn’t have to shut down schools — our European allies didn’t, and they flourished, while we are still suffering from that. All those voices were silenced because universities adopted positions that said that they were wrong and even racist. So that’s the problem.

George Bogden: Jump in with another kind of historical example here, because I think that oftentimes when we think about universities, and we talk about things like lawfare, we think the present is all there is. But just to give you one very vivid example: during the height of Watergate, one of the president’s men, Mr. Magruder, described then the special prosecutor Archibald Cox as, quote, “high priest of the Kennedy White House in waiting in Cambridge,” end quote. And it’s my understanding that that characterization was used to try to discredit this sort of constitutional process to investigate this question. And I’m using that example to try to put a fine point on: if institutional neutrality is impossible, what separates it from becoming any other political actor in our system? And I think you have the important first point to make on that.

Todd Wolfson: Yeah, and I think that’s the key point that we’re really at right now, is what constitutes a political statement, right? And so let’s go to the Kalven Report, and let’s just understand the moment it was written in. It was written in the ‘60s, during the civil rights movement, during the anti-war movement. And I think that students — not just students, faculty — were militating to get universities to make statements about the Vietnam War, or to make statements, or to divest from the war machine in one way or the other, right? And so in order to insulate the institutions from that, University of Chicago adopted this commission that then developed the Chicago Kalven Report. And they say in the report that we have to give leave for institutions to defend themselves historically, looking back, maybe at McCarthyism, maybe at Germany in the 1930s and ‘40s. But they don’t go into detail about what that means there. There are some statements about it, but there is not an express discussion about exactly what that means. And I think that’s where we are today, and that’s where maybe the disagreement lies, right?

So I think that if you fast forward to 2026, what the problems that the university faces — though some of them are from within, many of them are from without. And they’re demanding that universities sign demand letters from the Trump administration, or sign on to the compact, or do any number of things that limit curriculum, that limit who we hire, who we admit. And so I think the thing about the Kalven Report is that it was meant for the university of the 1960s, and we need to augment it by understanding that we’re in a different moment in 2026, and that it demands a different understanding of what institutional neutrality is, and what political or administrative speech is. And I would argue again that speaking against a president who makes a demand of X, Y, and Z is political speech. You cannot tell me that standing up to the Trump administration, as Dartmouth University or MIT, was a non-political act. It was a political act. And so, again, the choice and decision point we have now is not whether institutional neutrality is necessary, because it’s not. The question we have is what kind of speech, and when that speech is necessary, and we need to come to a place where we’re comfortable setting new boundaries about what speech makes sense.

Jonathan Turley: Yeah, I’d like to respond to that. First of all, when we get to like the death of Socrates — whether we’re having more Socrates and Platos, but the death — it was Socrates that took the hemlock. But I don’t know if Plato would do any better. But I want to go to this idea that this all began with the Kalven Report. That’s simply not true. It’s not what Todd is saying — Todd is saying that really the emphasis is on the Kalven Report, and he’s right about that. But actually, I went to University of Chicago, and I was very proud of this connection. President Harper, who was the first president of Chicago, articulated the first institutional neutrality principle. The first paper was in 1899; his famous speech was in 1900. Then you had a further work from Yale that came out before the Kalven Report. And so there was a great deal of American scholarship identifying institutional neutrality as essential to creating that really unique environment, that almost fleeting environment that produces what is extraordinary, which is intellectual life. You know, it’s probably the most vulnerable and delicate life form there is, is intellectual life. It dies with the smallest temperature changes. It has to exist within that type of circle.

And when Todd refers to standing up to the Trump administration — I criticized the Trump administration for its position with universities, even though I agree with the Trump administration on the lack of diversity and some of these other issues. But when Dartmouth and other schools did that, that’s exactly what Kalven anticipated. He said that you can speak as an institution for the things that are threatening you as an institution. So if there’s a threat to academic freedom, of course the university can speak. But that’s a very bright line, and I don’t think you can go from then say, well, you can protect academic freedom, therefore it’s a bonanza — you know, we can just start to hold forth on these issues. There’s a value to bright lines, and that’s what this gives. If you read the University of Wyoming statement on institutional neutrality, like some of these others — these are not statements when you read them you think, “My god, how limiting!” You would say, “Well, this is pretty common sense.” University saying, you know what, we’re going to protect all of you to talk, all of you to speak, all of your research, and we’re not going to weigh in. We’re leaving it to you. Our job is to make sure you can do that job and fulfill that function.

George Bogden: Those are both very helpful answers. Um, I want to give you a kind of extreme example, right, so really, I think, bring to the fore, you know, kind of examples that we may have seen in everyday life at universities. You know, say I’m a student, very upset with, you know, the position taken by faculty on, you know, a conflict that I have a heritage connection to. And I come to the administration, and I say, you know, I demand that the administration discuss and make a statement on the injustice of one side or another in this conflict that’s taking place. Can you explain for us why or why not the university should take a position on that, and how they would respond to the argument of the student that “I don’t feel safe at the university because these statements are being made in public on the university’s campus, and it’s chilling my ability to be a student or to engage in the speech that I would like to engage too, because I feel threatened”? Is that to me first, or to Todd?

Todd Wolfson: Look, you know, I mean, we all face these situations, right? We’re facing them now on our campus, certainly when it comes to the war in the Middle East, where we have students coming to us from both sides, feeling completely distressed about the — not just the academic life, the social, cultural life of the university — because they feel threatened, because a word they hear, a word that’s spoken, they hear differently than it’s meant to be as a spoken word, etcetera. I, again, I am not here to defend that universities should speak on these issues. I do not think universities should take a stand, for instance, on Israel and Palestine. I do not think, as a faculty member at a university that’s probably got — Rutgers University, it’s probably got one of the largest Jewish faculty and largest Muslim faculty communities in the country — it is not healthy to create an environment where the university itself takes a position on that, even if many members have strongly felt beliefs. So I am not arguing — now, I would not argue that.

Again, what I’m arguing is that the argument for institutional neutrality runs up headlong against the moment we live in now, when universities are forced to take political positions in defense of themselves. And that may be spoken about in the Kalven Report, but in and of itself it forces universities into a different position than they’ve been in, and therefore institutional neutrality cannot be fully, fully protected. Because in the moment that you make that decision, that is a judgment decision by the president or the board of governors of that institution to stand up and defend the institution. And I’ll note that two universities, while they didn’t accept the compact from the Trump administration, they did not speak publicly, right? And they did not publicly reject it. So they made a different decision about what was right for their community. So again, that’s the ground I want us to be on. I am not going to make an argument here today to you that we should be speaking out as institutions about all told number of horrors in the world. I think we, as individuals, should; I don’t think our institution should.

George Bogden: Just to push you a little bit on that point, before we get to you.

Todd Wolfson: Please, go ahead.

George Bogden: I mean, let’s say we have a Jewish university, and a university that identifies with the Jewish tradition and so on. And would you say, under the Kalven criteria, they have a basis to make a statement about the conflict which you’ve raised as an example?

Todd Wolfson: No, because there are also many Jewish people who are not comfortable with the war in the Middle East. So no — there are Jewish people who are not comfortable with... I’m a Jewish faculty member who is not comfortable with the war in the Middle East at this moment. So no, that would not be acceptable.

George Bogden: They would have to accept the premise that that conflict has no threat to their core values. I’m just trying to push you on this one.

Todd Wolfson: No, they would have to accept that there are — all right, so you’re saying, do they have to accept that? You would have to make a case for me, which hasn’t been made, that speaking out about the war in the Middle East, or the war in the Middle East itself, in some way undermines a yeshiva or a Jewish institution in a way that stripping a university of its right to control its own curriculum does to Vanderbilt. I do not see those as apples to apples.

Jonathan Turley: I’d like to respond to your original question, and then come back to Todd’s answer. First of all, at University of Chicago, the answer was clearly stated in the Zimmer letter, which I thought was absolutely brilliant. So some of the students that had been accepted at the University of Chicago received a letter of acceptance, and it congratulated them on being selected. It said that the University of Chicago is excited about their coming. It said, some of you might be concerned that you’re going to face these triggering types of ideas — there’s no, that you’re not going to have a safe space at the University of Chicago, and I’m just writing to make sure you know there are no safe spaces at the University of Chicago. And he said, we will not protect you from ideas, and if that’s really important to you, then this is not the place to go. The Chicago letter has been adopted by many universities. So the answer to your question is no.

I’m sympathetic with people that feel like certain speakers are triggering. They can protest. What they can’t do — and what we can regulate, which is not speech — is conduct. So if you shout down a speaker, that’s conduct. If you’re at Stanford and you’re shouting down a federal judge who wants to talk about his philosophy, that’s conduct, okay? That’s not — you’re preventing free speech. You’re protected to be outside and to state all of those reasons.

But I want to push my friend Todd a little further on this, because I feel the same way about academic institutions as I do about the AAUP. And the AAUP has signed a letter taking a position on the Gaza war. And as an academic who believes strongly in the history of the AAUP and how it has fought for academic freedom, I was very critical of that. I was critical of your pledge, as a president, to make it more of an advocacy organization. You know, I’m not too sure why the same doesn’t apply to an AAUP. I believe that academic institutions, which include the AAUP, should be fighting for the right for people to speak freely, and not take a position on what they are doing, their research, or the issues that are being debated.

Todd Wolfson: I’ll respond to that. And it’s true — AAUP and I have taken many controversial political positions, and I feel very comfortable with that. And I think that it’s a very different beast than a university. And so what I would say to that simply is that, first and foremost, AAUP is a member organization. We have 60,000 members, and we’re a democratic member organization. And so we reflect the thoughts and will of our overall membership. And democratically — which means if 60 or 70 percent feel a certain way, that are engaged in a process of democratic deliberation, then we will take a position on that. And I feel strongly that that’s what organizations that are member-led democratic organizations should do. That, again, is different, because we have a different role than a university, which is meant to, you know, do research, teaching, and service, and of course protect open inquiry. That is not the role of AAUP. AAUP, as a member organization, reflects the will of its members. And, you know, like, we might not all agree on this, but my feeling — it’s important to understand the history of AAUP, which is, it was founded well over a hundred years ago by John Dewey. And for the first 50 years of its lifetime, it was a professional association representing the profession. In that moment, I think Jonathan is right. It would be better off being neutral. The last 50 years, it has pivoted to being mostly a union. The people who pay the dues have collective bargaining rights, and it’s become a union, and unions are political organizations. So we have shifted the organization to reflect that reality. I agree, though: if it was more of a professional association, it would be less appropriate for us to take these sort of political positions.

George Bogden: You can push this a little further. Go for it.

Jonathan Turley: First of all, I don’t agree on the AAUP. I actually think unions should — I have a problem with unions taking a lot of political positions when members are paying dues from different political standpoints. But that’s — I can see Todd’s point, and that’s a legitimate point of disagreement. But the AAUP, through its Committee A, produced a position on institutional neutrality very recently, and you have a very able head of that committee, who is a University of California professor. And, you know, it was a very strong argument against institutional neutrality, but it’s notable that his position includes, for example, saying that universities should issue a statement condemning Charlie Kirk if he spoke on campus — this was before he was assassinated. And it gave an insight into at least what that author thinks about institutional statements, that he thinks that one of those things institutions could legitimately say is to attack a conservative. Not someone like Angela Davis, or someone from the West who are more frequently speakers on campuses, but that Charlie Kirk should have been condemned. And I’m just wondering whether you believe that that’s true — that your view of institutional neutrality means that universities should condemn people like Charlie Kirk.

Todd Wolfson: Well, I think you’re referring to Brian, who is not the chair of Committee A, Rana Jaleel is — she’s also from University of California. There’s a bunch of University of California folks on Committee A. I won’t — it’s not my job to defend Brian’s book.

Jonathan Turley: No, I’m just interested in this — in the point, not his book, but this idea that…

Todd Wolfson: I mean, I think I’ve made my point clear, which is, look, I think that what we really want to — what I really think needs to be explored here is how institutions are responding to a — what I believe is an existential threat from a very aggressive federal government. Again, it could be a leftist federal government. In this case, it’s not. And how it is forced to take political positions, and what that means for the concept of institutional neutrality — because I think it undermines it, even if the Kalven Report made an exception for it. I don’t feel it’s necessary for me to respond to an argument that Brian Soucek made about Charlie Kirk, which actually I’m not even, frankly, you know —

Jonathan Turley: Yeah, I agree, it was sort of an unfair thing, quite frankly. I regret I asked it. But I’m more interested in trying to figure out, sort of grope around, where your line is drawn here. Because for those of us who are big advocates of institutional neutrality, we want a bright line rule. And you make us feel really uncomfortable, because we’re not sure where that line is.

Todd Wolfson: Well, let me give you an example, which I do think is important for us to think about, um, that is outside of the argument I’m making about, um, response to the federal government in this moment. So when I was at Rutgers, Rutgers University wanted to expand its cancer center, and they made a decision, using the power and networks that they have and a very large endowment, to close down the best-performing middle school in New Brunswick and move that middle school — their offered site was a brownfield site. And it’s important to note that the majority of the students were people of color. And so, that they could expand the Cancer Institute, right? Now, that is not something that is dealt with appropriately, I think, in our discussion of institutional neutrality. We talk about statements, but that act by Rutgers University to kick out students who had the best-performing middle school and move them somewhere far away — it took years for them to rebuild that school — I believe is also a political act, and an act that we haven’t appropriately dealt with when we think about our universities and institutions and we talk about institutional neutrality. How do we reckon with that? How do we reckon with that? It’s an honest question. I think institutional neutrality does not effectively reckon with that.

George Bogden: I love this organic exchange, but it is my favorite part of the debate where I get to ask your questions. Before we do, though, I just want to tell the audience my favorite quote from Jimmy Hoffa, given all this talk about unions, which is, you know, “I may have my faults, but being wrong ain’t one of them.” Beyond that, though, there’s a lot of, I think, really interesting kind of ideas coming from the audience, basically around the converse of what I asked you earlier on. So we now have had a discussion about what separates a non-neutral university from any other political actor. So now, Professor Turley, I want to ask you, from our audience: does institutional neutrality require what we might call apathy from all external forces? Or where do you draw the line beyond the Kalven discussion?

Jonathan Turley: Well, it’s a very good question. And the fact is, I am a believer in robust institutional neutrality. The times of where academic freedom is challenged are, thankfully, few, although we’ve seen some with this administration where universities took a position, and, whether you agree with them or not, I think that absolutely that was within their right to do so. But it’s a very slippery slope. And you end up — for example, my university took a position on D.C. statehood. And I understand that they viewed that as the sort of disenfranchisement of a city with a majority of African American voters, and they felt very strongly about that. But that’s a very good example of where this slippery slope can take you. I testified on D.C. statehood repeatedly in Congress and raised, I believe, that the bills that were being put forward were facially unconstitutional — that the Congress could not do what they were thinking of doing, for constitutional reasons. So there’s a myriad of reasons why you would support voting for D.C. residents. In fact, I suggested a way of doing that, but be opposed to D.C. statehood. But the university stepped in and said, no, here’s the answer.

And the question is, how does that make, for example, an assistant professor who just started in the political science department — how does she deal with this subject if it’s within her wheelhouse, and she thinks that no, it’s a bad idea, when the university president is saying this is the position of our university? So the problem with abandoning this bright line rule is that it quickly takes you on there, and we’ve seen institutions lose those bearings. And it gets back to that sort of baseline I mentioned with Todd, of where the baseline should be. And a lot of you — dozens of universities — have said the baseline has to be with institutional neutrality. Now, are there going to be outliers off that baseline? Of course, there always are. I mean, you can’t have a principle where there’s not going to be these tough questions. But the baseline itself has a certain gravitational pull for the institution. It tells professors and students, we’re not here to tell you the right answer; we’re here to help you find a way of learning, and to reach the answers on yourself.

When I went to University of Chicago, there was still a very robust free speech community, and I talk about it in Indispensable Right, that it was like walking into the bar scene in the Star Wars movie. And, you know, we had — I lived in a cooperative, a vegetarian cooperative, and downstairs Trotskyites would meet, and upstairs, like, we had militant vegans, and next door we had crazy libertarians. And I loved every single minute of it. I love meeting people who could see what I was saying and see something so different. That twilight environment, that fragile intellectual environment, requires institutional neutrality, in my view.

Todd Wolfson: Can I — can I, because you pushed me? I’m gonna ask you — you know, turnabout’s fair play. So, all right, so let’s go to Texas, and I think it’s Senate Bill 37. So Senate Bill 37 puts real constraints on how we teach around race and gender. It also abolishes shared governance, but then it asks the different Texas systems to put it into practice, and the different universities put it into practice differently. Texas A&M had review of all syllabi, right? And I think the number is between 200 or 300 classes were found to be teaching race or gender incorrectly, and they were either canceled or moved out of the core curriculum. One of the famous examples, I think we all heard of, is the teacher who was teaching on Plato. And so Texas A&M and the Texas Tech system didn’t abolish shared governance, but they turned faculty senates into faculty councils, something like that. The University of Texas at Austin, the flagship, took a different position: they abolished the university, or faculty senate — I’m not sure which it was; I think it was a faculty senate — but then also, and I was just saying this as we were walking in, they are closing four departments: African and African Diasporic Studies, Women and Gender Studies, Mexican Latino Studies, and American Studies. They’re consolidating them into one mega cultural studies department, and many of the faculty will not be returning, right? And so I guess the question for you: none of the Texas universities spoke out about this or challenged this state law. And so my question for you is, should they be speaking? Should the universities be speaking out about the Texas universities, about SB 37?

Jonathan Turley: Well, I can’t speak to that actual legislation, but I get the gist of it from your description. It sounds like some of that I’ve criticized. I don’t believe that legislators should be telling academics what they can teach in class, like barring anyone from teaching, for example, critical legal studies. I teach a theory class as part of my torts class, and I teach various schools of thought from feminism to economics to critical legal studies, because I want my students to understand all these different perspectives and to come up with their own view of what the law should do. And so I was critical of some of this legislation that dictated you cannot teach these. Now, having said that, I also want to note that the state legislators are in a position now that I believe is a difficult one, and we’ve created it.

The fact is that universities are overwhelmingly hostile today to certain views. That’s what a lot of conservative Republican students report, they have a much higher rate of self-censorship. And, you know, I had this debate at Harvard with a Harvard professor, and I mentioned the majority of judges in this country are Republican appointees or conservatives. Half this country is Republican, and you’ve got like five on your faculty. And Randall — who was a guy I liked a great deal, Randall Kennedy — said, “We’re an elite institution; we don’t have to look like America.” And I said, “Randy, you don’t even look like Massachusetts. I mean, Massachusetts is 35 percent Republican.”

So what these legislators are facing are these universities that have become these hardened silos, and they don’t want to keep on supporting them with public dollars unless they see real reforms. And they have spent decades telling these university presidents and faculty members, you’ve got to have greater diversity, and the faculties will not do it. They have continued down the same path. So I guess my answer is, I agree with Todd on some of this stuff, and I am very critical of some of these laws. But I’m also very sympathetic as to what some of these legislators are trying to do, because the number of applications are dropping. Universities are closing at an unprecedented rate, and we’re like a ship of fools. We’re not even remotely interested in why many people look at higher education now, which is the highest — sorry, the lowest — level of public trust and respect in modern history. And yet we’re fighting about this as we alienate half of this country.

George Bogden: Well, you know, I think Foucault would agree with you about that ship of fools. I don’t know if it’d be negative for him. Nonetheless, you know, I have to get to, before we go to closing statements, what I think is the overwhelming point of the questions that have been submitted, which is the critique that you’ve heard from many different places — I think from folks like Desmond Tutu: if you’re silent in the face of injustice, you’re essentially siding with the unjust party. And I want to push that a little bit further, very quickly. How do you see the difference between silence and neutrality? Or is there one?

Todd Wolfson: I do want to say one quick thing, which is, there’s many reasons why public trust in universities has dropped. Arguably, maybe it’s because the faculty don’t reflect America. I think that there’s some reality to that argument, but there are other things we have to be honest about and look at. And so I am not happy with the Yale report, for instance, because that’s what they focus on, but they miss the fact that for the last 60 years, the federal and state governments have divested away from our institutions, our public institutions. And in divesting, they’ve put the burden of college onto the backs of our students and their families, and created $2 trillion in student debt. And then secondarily, the people who have had the biggest microphones talking about higher ed for the last five to 10 years are people who are using it for political platforms, right? And so while I am sympathetic that there are not enough conservative voices or libertarian voices in higher ed — I think there’s something to be said about that — I think that that’s only a part of the story, and it’s an overused part of the story, because we are not looking at long-term divestment, and we are not looking at who is talking about our universities and how are they talking about them and for what purpose.

But to return to — just really briefly, and I know we’re running out of time — I am very sympathetic to the concept, the Desmond Tutu’s famous quote, that if you do not — if you are silent in the face of oppression, then you are complicit in that oppression. I am. That does not mean, I think, that universities are the way that we respond, necessarily, to that oppression. And I think I heard Jonathan say this as well: there are all sorts of ways to organize. I organized by building a union. And the union — and maybe we disagree about the role of unions, but the union is then meant to respond to those injustices if the members agree with those injustices. So I agree with the quote, but I don’t think that the university making statements is going to be the solution to those problems.

Jonathan Turley: You know, I think the quote is misplaced. I remember one time I had a colleague that was in a fight over his shirts being lost by a laundromat, and this owner said, “I’m going to call my lawyer.” And Eric spun around and said, “I make lawyers.” Putting the bravado aside, what we do as academics is we create thinking — or we perfect thinking — people, where we shouldn’t be trying to get them to understand what they should think. And that means that sometimes, in terms of an institution being silent, it’s because it’s not our role. What we need to do is, if you really want to fight injustice, create a generation of educated and thinking people. That’s how you end injustice, that’s how you end ignorance, and the institution itself can make that happen by protecting that way of learning.

George Bogden: Very excited for us to begin our closing statements. I do want to remind you, after those closing statements, to vote. I want to reiterate that — that it’s really crucial to the integrity of the debate that it’s after you all have heard those final remarks that you vote. But with that, I’ll hand it over.

Todd Wolfson: Hey, y’all. When we began tonight, I made a concession: universities issue too many statements. Some are performative, and some are foolish. Some undoubtedly create pressure to conform rather than encouraging debate. After this discussion, I’m even more convinced that concern needs to be taken seriously. But again, that’s not the proposition before us. The proposition is not whether institutional neutrality is often wise. It is. The proposition is not whether universities should comment on every controversy. They shouldn’t. The proposition is whether institutional neutrality is necessary to preserve the university as a forum of open inquiry. Before you decide how to vote, I think it’s important to be clear about what must be true for that proposition to prevail.

My opponent can’t just show that institutional neutrality is often wise. He can’t show that some statements are misguided. He can’t show that sometimes those statements chill dissent. All of that’s clearly true. To win, he must answer the core argument we’ve discussed tonight. He must show that institutional neutrality is not merely a strategy, but a necessary condition of open inquiry. He must show that academic freedom is not the true foundation of a free university, and he must explain why universities that spoke to defend their own independence and the conditions of inquiry do not count as legitimate exceptions. I do not believe he has, because if even one legitimate exception exists, the proposition fails. And that’s not the legitimate exception of an individual; that’s a legitimate exception of any institution that speaks politically in order to protect open inquiry. A necessary condition admits no exceptions. And after an hour of debate, I do not believe the burden has been met.

I’ve spent 30 years in higher ed. I’ve watched universities face pressure from governments, from donors — a lot, recently — from political movements of every stripe. And what I’ve seen consistently is that institutions that survived those pressures with their integrity intact were not the ones that stayed silent. They were the ones that knew what they stood for, and they defended it.

Throughout this discussion, I’ve asked us to distinguish between the strategy and foundation. Academic freedom is the foundation of open inquiry. Tenure is a foundation. I think shared governance is a foundation. I think the independence of teaching and research from political control is a foundation of open inquiry. I do not think institutional neutrality is a foundation. I think it’s important at times, but not a foundation.

My opponent argued, following the tradition of Kalven Report, that institutional statements can chill dissent, create pressure to conform, and draw universities into political disputes. They’re right to worry about that, and I worry about that too. But even the strongest defenders of institutional neutrality recognize that universities must defend the conditions that make inquiry possible. And once we admit that principle, we already acknowledge that academic freedom is prior to neutrality, because when the two come into conflict, neutrality must yield to academic freedom.

The most important example tonight, from my vantage, are the major universities that said no to the Trump administration. Seven refused publicly, without equivocation, because they understood what the proposition tonight misses: silence in that moment was not neutrality. Silence was compliance, and compliance would have ended the independence that makes inquiry possible. Were they wrong? Did open inquiry become less secure at Dartmouth, Brown, and MIT because the leaders defended institutional independence? Of course not. Those statements did not undermine open inquiry; they protected it, and they were not neutral. The University of Chicago reached the same conclusion when it publicly committed to protecting unpopular speech, including speech this audience might find uncomfortable, or I might find uncomfortable. Non-neutral, but obviously right.

The moment we can identify even one circumstance of a university speaking to defend the conditions of inquiry, the proposition can’t stand. Why? Because necessary is a strong word, and legitimate exceptions defeat it. Now, again, imagine a university that’s perfectly neutral. It never issues a statement. It never takes a public position. It never enters a political controversy. That circle is kept closed. But politicians decide what can be taught. Researchers are told what they may study. Faculty can be punished for unpopular views. Shared governance disappears. The university would be perfectly neutral. It would also be profoundly unfree. What makes a university a forum for open inquiry is not neutrality. Academic freedom is the foundation; neutrality is a strategy. And when that foundation is threatened, the willingness to defend it is not optional — that is a mark of a free university. Thank you.

Jonathan Turley: Thank you very much, Todd. Again, and I want to emphasize a couple of things, but I first like to read you something. I may even have glasses where I can do that.

“While university leaders will make decisions about matters that further UW’s educational mission” — you’ve guessed it, this is the University of Wyoming statement — “they do not, on principle, commit the university in ways that are outside of its core academic purpose. This adherence to impartiality reaffirms the intellectual freedom of all at UW to seek and receive information without restriction, and enjoy unfettered access to all expression of ideas through which any side of a question, cause, or movement may be explored.”

You know something interesting about that statement of this institution? It did not create the dichotomy of my friend Todd. It did not say, well, you pick institutional neutrality, or you pick academic freedom, or you play them against each other. If you take a look at some of the early writings — from the 1899 study, the 1900 statement by Harper, the Yale statement that occurred two decades later — they all talked about pillars, plural, of higher education. One of the most important is in fact academic freedom, as Todd correctly notes, but another one was institutional neutrality.

There’s a lot of factors that go into this hothouse, this extraordinary place that produces the geniuses that this country has brought forth for the whole world. It’s a really fragile hothouse. It requires all the right soil, the temperature, the moisture — all of those are the dynamics of growth, intellectual growth. And that in turn is the growth plate for a nation. We need higher education, not to tell us the answers, but to prepare us as a people. We are going to be facing some terrible challenges. I talk about that in Rage in the Republic. We’ll be facing some of the biggest challenges we’ve ever faced as a democratic system. We need an educated population. We need people who can think for themselves.

And the reason I don’t accept the framing of my colleague, um, as clever as it is, is that I don’t view these as competing principles. I view them as part of a wonderful recipe that produces what we have today in higher education. But you cannot achieve those other things without institutional neutrality, because it’s institutional neutrality that helps guarantee academic freedom. It gives the buffer for free expression and for discussion. And it’s one of the things — I’ve had debates before where they say, well, point to someone who’s not really saying what they want to say. That’s rather an old saw. You know, we have to look at the environment that you’ve created.

Now, I’m going to be very blunt, and maybe a tad too harsh, but I believe this generation of academics is killing higher education. I believe the evidence of that is all around us. They have turned it into an academic echo chamber. I’ve seen it happen. I never thought, when I went into teaching over 30 years ago, we would ever be where we are now. The level of intolerance of viewpoints, the lack of diversity of faculty — I never thought it would happen. But part of that equation is institutional neutrality. It feeds the rest of it.

And I would simply tell my colleagues this — you know, this is a revolution in education. Some of my colleagues have called it that. You know, Rage in the Republic, I start with a statement by probably what’s properly known as the Thomas Paine of his generation. He was one of the great thinkers of the French Revolution, a Jacobin, and he observed after the French Revolution that revolutions, like Saturn, devour their children. I would warn my colleagues this: we are already seeing a lot of the people that said nothing as universities were effectively getting rid of all conservatives and canceling speakers — all of the people that said nothing, and now they are being turned upon, and they are being attacked as well. Revolution swallows its children. And what we could lose here is something that is just absolutely irreplaceable for a nation like ours. We’ll never need higher education more. So we need institutions to be neutral, so we don’t have another COVID situation where we’ve got academics who are fired and marginalized for things that they were later supported on. They’re not back. When I asked all those people in Chicago how many of you were rehired, put back on your associations — it was zero. Some of these people were vindicated, where federal agencies now support what they said. That’s the price when institutions start to abandon neutrality. Thank you very much.

George Bogden: Well, just one more reminder to take that moment to vote on how you think the debate went and where you come out — affirmative, negative, or undecided on the resolution — and, we’ll look at the results in just a moment.

Looks like we have some interesting results coming in — still filtering in. Oh, okay. So before the debate, we had 63 — or, excuse me, 66 percent in agreement, 14 in disagreement, and 21 undecided. Afterwards, we had about 63 in agreement, 13 in disagreement, and 24 undecided. And it still continues to fluctuate. I’m kind of concerned, but, you know, clearly we had some change. But as they say in France, plus ça change. I’m gonna hand it over to our host, and thank you all for participating.

Jennifer Schubert Aiken: Just very briefly, to wrap up: thank you to Professor Turley, Professor Wolfson, and moderator George Bogden. One more round of applause. What a fantastic debate.

If you’re wondering about the poll, it will be posted on our website, and you’ll be able to see this on our YouTube channel too later, so you’ll be able to get the final-final as it continues to shift as all of you vote.

I would also like to thank the University of Wyoming and Heterodox Academy for allowing Steamboat Institute to bring our Campus Liberty Tour debate to you here at the Mountain West Regional Conference. Thanks also, once again, to the Adolph Coors Foundation, and Bruce and Marcy Benson, and all of our wonderful supporters shown on the screen tonight, for making the Campus Liberty Tour possible.

If you enjoyed tonight’s debate, two things. One, we are a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization; we would love to have your tax-deductible support. Two, many of you are with universities — like, most of you are with universities. If you would like us to bring a Campus Liberty Tour debate to your campus, please contact us. We’d love to visit with you. Go to steamboatinstitute.org, or pick up a flyer outside to see our upcoming debates this fall. And, once again, this debate will be available in its entirety on our YouTube channel within 48 hours, for free, for you to share — use it in many ways to get more people to watch this. Thank you again for coming, thank you for the opportunity, thank you again to our speakers. Have a good evening.

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Drawing on her new book, Radical Duke, Allen traces the origins of modern constitutional democracy to a network of radical thinkers in eighteenth-century Britain who fought for free expression, political transparency, and popular sovereignty. Their struggles, she argues, offer important lessons for the challenges facing democratic institutions today.

The conversation then turns to the modern university, where Allen and Tomasi examine whether universities occupy a unique place in democratic life. They discuss why disagreement is essential to both truth-seeking and self-government, how institutions can create space for productive conflict, and what responsibilities colleges and universities have in preserving the civic capacities on which democracy depends.

Subscribe to Heterodox Out Loud on your preferred podcast platform. A transcript of the episode is below.

John Tomasi: Danielle Allen, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Danielle Allen: Thank you, John. It’s a pleasure to be here. I’m glad to have the chance to have this conversation with you.

John Tomasi: As you and I both know, though you’re here in New York for the podcast and for the panel tomorrow morning, that’s not the only thing that brought you here. It’s also the case that this week is the launch of your exciting new book, Radical Duke. Congratulations.

Danielle Allen: Thank you. It’s exciting — it’s always exciting when a new book comes out, but this one was especially fun.

John Tomasi: We’re all pretty excited about it too. And you and I were saying before we came in that you’re giving a talk this evening at the New York Public Library.

Danielle Allen: Exactly. I’m going to have the pleasure of introducing the Radical Duke to people. This was somebody named Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond. He lived from 1735 to 1806. He was a British politician who was a fervent supporter of the Americans. He was the first member of Parliament to recommend acknowledging American independence. He introduced a bill for universal manhood suffrage in the House of Lords in 1780 —

John Tomasi: A hundred years before.

Danielle Allen: More than that. Britain started widening the suffrage in 1830, based on the kind of reform foundation he had laid. It took until the early 20th century before Britain achieved full universal male suffrage, and then a decade after that, universal suffrage. So yes, he was a visionary, really ahead of his time. And pertinent to our themes: he was part of a network of radical writers who had to write secretly, because dissent was so powerfully suppressed in Britain in the 1760s and 1770s. As they fought to get their views into the public sphere, they also fought for important kinds of openings. For example, at the beginning of the 1760s it was illegal to report on the proceedings of Parliament — to report speeches and so forth.

John Tomasi: It wasn’t just Chatham House rules. It was completely illegal.

Danielle Allen: Exactly. You were not supposed to report anything outside the walls of Parliament. But some members of these radical groups had really excellent memories, and they would go sit in Parliament and listen, and then record almost verbatim transcripts of what had occurred and secretly circulate them. They did this enough, and there was such an appetite for it, that eventually the government could not hold out against the cry for transparency in parliamentary proceedings.

John Tomasi: That’s fascinating. And this Duke brought together in his circle people like Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Say a little bit about that.

Danielle Allen: Yeah. People forget that in the 1760s and 1770s there was this universe of radical Whigs — Whigs because they were associated with the great Whig aristocratic political families. Those families had been dominant in politics throughout the 18th century. They didn’t have a particular ideological flavor through the middle part of the century, but then in the 1760s and 1770s the impact of Enlightenment philosophy really hits. They imbibe the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty and begin to have a theory of politics that counters the standard monarchical view. So working men like Burke, who trained as a lawyer, and Thomas Paine, who was originally a corset maker, were part of the same philosophical conversation. Together these radicals forged modern conceptions of constitutional representative government, popular sovereignty, and ultimately constitutional democracy. It’s not until the French Revolution that you get Burke and Paine parting ways — the one going right, the other going left. So the father of conservatism and the father of liberal radicalism were both radical Whigs in the 1760s.

John Tomasi: Fascinating. I’m at the stage with your book that I describe as the pre-read stage, so I’m reading all the reviews that have come out. I read The New Yorker piece, which was great, and a great piece in The Wall Street Journal that I’m sure you saw. One of the ideas the Wall Street Journal picked up — an overarching idea — is that most of us think those radical revolutions happened at the American founding and at the French Revolution, but there’s a suggestion that the germinating ideas came not from the US alone, not from France alone, but in fact from Britain, in those conversations.

Danielle Allen: Very much so. This is not to say that America didn’t matter, or that France didn’t matter — they did. Adam Gopnik’s description of my book the other day somewhat overstated the argument I actually make. But yes, the radical circles were thinking and arguing and writing in the 1750s and 1760s in England, and they were tightly connected to the Americans. Benjamin Franklin was a particular link in the chain, going back and forth across the Atlantic. Many of the things we associate with the movements toward revolution here in the colonies have their precursors in England. For example, there was the stamp tax and the riots against it — but several years earlier, England had had riots over the cider tax. We think of the Boston Massacre as a critical moment, but several years earlier in London there had been the St. George’s Fields Massacre, when soldiers shot into a crowd gathered to protest ministerial actions and killed some people. So those dynamics were really quite homologous on both sides of the Atlantic.

John Tomasi: It’s fascinating. I want to move to some topics in higher education, and the bridge I’m going to invite you to cross with me is a convocation address by a president at Brown University. Her name is Ruth Simmons, the first Black woman president of an Ivy League university — a woman who, as you may know, had a remarkable personal story, growing up in real poverty and rising to become an extremely idealistic leader, first here at Smith and then at Brown. When she arrived at Brown, it was a time when there had been a lot of racial tension on campus the previous year. There was a discord across the campus of an unhealthy kind — a sense that people could not talk to each other, maybe should not talk to each other, that loyalty was more important than community. Ruth Simmons came in to give a convocation address in 2001, and she said something in it that struck me so much I memorized it. I’ve carried it around in my head all the time, and I invite you to as well, so I’ll just say it. She said that while other types of communities devise covenants so as to avoid conflict, at the university our covenant is rooted in quarrel and in opposition. We freely allow ideas to collide in the service of learning; no idea is out of reach or out of bounds. It’s the first part of that I wanted to invite you to talk with us about. She says the covenant of a university is rooted in quarrel and opposition, unlike other forms of constitutional or political covenants. What do you make of that general idea? How does your work — your most recent book, or your earlier work — bear on that set of ideas?

Danielle Allen: Well, it’s a beautiful formulation, so I can see why you listened, heard it, memorized it, and carried it around. I appreciate the power of it, and I agree with its basic argument that the university is defined by being a space of disagreement. I think Alasdair MacIntyre also spoke eloquently about the university as a place for constrained disagreement. So I appreciate that formulation. And the word “covenant” is, of course, an interesting word — it does suggest a contract, an agreement to come into consensus around something. I wouldn’t want to suggest, though, that the covenant that founds a democracy is about a community coming to a robust agreement. It’s rather a community that’s come to a kind of minimal agreement, and the minimal agreement is to prosecute their disagreements peacefully through institutions, rather than with arms or physical conflict. In that regard, James Madison in Federalist 10 famously said that freedom generates diversity of opinion. So if you’re going to protect freedom, you will have disagreement. A political covenant, from my point of view, depends just as much on recognizing that you’re protecting the space for debate as a university covenant does.

John Tomasi: So you’re saying that free institutions — for example, institutions that allow for freedom of association, church groups, other groups where people can form deep understandings of themselves that are unlike other groups in their community — combined with other liberal freedoms, such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press, generate the materials of friction in an ongoing way.

Danielle Allen: Exactly.

John Tomasi: It’s not just something that happens, so we’re going to try to avoid the conflict through institutions. The institutions themselves perhaps create it.

Danielle Allen: They create it, they support it, they produce a container for it. That’s why MacIntyre’s phrase “constrained disagreement” is so important — it is disagreement within the bounds of peacefulness. You’re committing to put down arms. And we have to remember that liberal democracy is really a creature born from the conflicts of religious wars, when people wanted to find a path to religious toleration and religious freedom. So there is a thing people agree on, and it’s that we have methods for how we’re going to engage in our disputes and disagreements. I think that’s the same between a university and a liberal constitutional democracy.

John Tomasi: You say it’s the same. Let me push there a little, because I love that quotation so much — I’ve been carrying it around for 25 years, and I’ll continue to. But you’re helping me see some limitations to it, and I want to push back on one piece. I think what she’s doing is saying there’s something special about the kind of discourse and the kind of disagreement at a university. You might not agree, but I’ll play it anyway: there’s something about the university’s covenant — and I think she’s using sacramental language intentionally, to say you’re doing something important here — something almost sacramental about the disagreements, because they’re so essential to the search for knowledge and understanding and to personal growth. That separates the disagreements we have at universities from the disagreements we have in, let’s say, well-functioning democratic politics. Is that just confusion on my part? Nostalgia for that day?

Danielle Allen: I think there is a difference in the nature of the disagreements, and also in the terms of the agreement we have for how we debate them, between universities and the political sphere. Let me first say one further thing about the concept of covenant, which is sacramental, as you say. In that regard, perhaps the first distinction President Simmons was trying to direct us toward was between a religious community and the university. A covenant in a religious community surely is an agreement on doctrine — there’s the credo, “I believe,” and here’s the list of things I believe. That’s a powerful distinction. So I would put religious communities in one place, and then universities and liberal democracies in another place. But then, in terms of the parameters and institutional norms for how debate is handled, I would invoke Plato for understanding the difference between universities and the political sphere. The political sphere is often a sphere of judgment under conditions of uncertainty, when action must be taken. It’s a sphere where prudence is the reigning virtue, and the best you can do is make fallible, defeasible judgments. In a democracy, you’ve also decided that the majority will win — so you’re not actually insisting that you’re looking for truth, you’re looking for a stable decision that will carry popular support with it, in order to maintain the legitimacy of institutions over time. That would be anathema to the decision-making basis inside a university, and that is probably partly where our problems come in: in universities, we too often want to port that majoritarian orientation of the political sphere into decision-making. Inside the university, decision-making needs to be guided by norms of truth-seeking — quality of argument, quality of reasoning, quality of evidence, and so forth. So that’s a sterner standard than the one the political sphere uses.

John Tomasi: And yet within the university, as you search for truth within a discipline, I gather we hope there would be some convergence of people’s thinking toward at least broad parameters in some area — otherwise we’d be all over the place. Some people talk about this strange feature of academic freedom: that it has a conservative element and a funky, radical element. The conservative element is that we want our graduate students to learn all the arguments there are, so they can go out to the frontier knowing everything they need to know. And at that point, beyond the conservative memorization, we value the idiosyncratic twist, the next move, the great idea that adds something. So there’s a strange tension there.

Danielle Allen: There is. And there’s also a tension in the notion of “scientific consensus,” which matters to us — what is the scientific consensus about something? We use that phrase, I think, because we acknowledge that it’s when people come to agree with an argument that it gets anchored as one of those building blocks we then want to pass on to our graduate students. So there’s a funny blend in that phrase, “scientific consensus,” of the epistemic principles of truth-seeking individuals and a certain community-oriented, majoritarian element. I think that’s exactly what we have so much difficulty navigating in academic contexts. When heterodox views emerge that are counter to the scientific consensus, we struggle to know precisely when to open up the consensus and when to try to maintain it.

John Tomasi: And one answer is that we open it up so long as the person can present the ideas in ways that follow the methodological requirements of that discipline.

Danielle Allen: Right, exactly.

John Tomasi: So if you’re invoking horology and astronomy, we’re saying that’s not the right kind of argument. But if you can bring us some new, astronomically acceptable arguments, then we’ll listen to you. It doesn’t mean we’ll agree, but we’ll meet you with arguments.

Danielle Allen: And that’s the requirement — to listen. I think that’s so important and distinctive in the context of the university. Coming back to the ancients, because they thought about this intensely: Plato and Socrates were trying to carve out a different kind of space for discourse from the political sphere. One of the ways they captured the difference is that Socrates said, in the Theaetetus, “Don’t ever make me speak to the water clock.” The water clock was the jug that ran out water to tell the time in the courtroom. His point was that politicians are always obliged to speak to a clock — a decision must be made. The defining feature of true academic discourse is that it is not bound by time. If somebody brings an argument meeting methodological standards, then we have an obligation to listen, and even time itself should not limit our patience with hearing those arguments.

John Tomasi: I want to move to a distinction you make that I think is really fertile and extremely interesting — close to the center of a lot of your work — between political science as something descriptive and democratic design as a kind of craft. You were recently on the Democracy Works podcast, in April of this year, and you made a pointed claim about higher education that struck me. As I heard it, you said something like: the future of the university has to involve reviving the science of democratic design. I wonder if you could begin by saying a bit about the distinction between political science as descriptive and democratic design as a craft, and then about reviving that craft in the university. Take it any way you like.

Danielle Allen: Okay. There are many directions to extend from that. I’ve spent a lot of time working on how we might redesign our political institutions here in the United States to escape some of the pathologies that have accrued. For example, we have reduced access to a meaningful vote. Sixty million Americans no longer have a meaningful vote in federal elections — that’s a quarter of the electorate.

John Tomasi: Meaningful because of the way districts are drawn.

Danielle Allen: Exactly — because of gerrymandering and closed primaries and things like that. In some states, the only way you can have a vote in a decisive election is if you participate in a party primary for a party you don’t actually agree with — so, compelled association, under First Amendment considerations. That’s one kind of limitation. In the process of doing all this work, it’s become very clear to me that we don’t actually have the intellectual resources inside universities to assist with it in any particular way. That’s because political science is a descriptive discipline — it focuses on how things work. There is the law school, where you have constitutional lawyers who think about constitutional design, but constitutional design is really just a small layer of the overall set of design questions pertinent to how democratic institutions operate. When you go back and read the Federalist Papers, you realize they were deeply steeped in design thinking about institutions, and they educated themselves for it by reading history and geography and anthropology. Jefferson’s library had books about every kind of system for organizing human society that existed around the globe — not just European formal political systems, but also the different political operating systems in farther-flung parts of the world. The same was true for the radical Duke; he had an equivalent kind of library. They were really thinking like engineers, or like designers who would go to one of our design schools. They wanted to know: how does this work when you do that? If I change this, then what happens? That’s the kind of expertise we just plain don’t capture any longer in our academic disciplines, and don’t teach. So the argument about the university is twofold. One: a democracy needs to preserve its capacity for civil discourse and debate to be healthy, and there are no institutions to steward that capacity other than universities. And second: a democratic society needs to constantly evolve and redesign its institutions, and again, there is no institution able to steward that expertise other than colleges and universities. So inside a democratic society, colleges and universities have this supreme responsibility to steward those two capacities — the one for civil discourse and dialogue and debate, and the other for democratic design. But we’re not really doing either much these days.

John Tomasi: Can I give an example and get your reaction? It starts with an observation I came to very recently. If you think about the design structure of universities and what people hope for when they want to see a university change — let’s say the way HxA wants them to change, to have more open conversations with a wider range of views, seriously looking for truth together as part of a community of imperfect learners — how do you design an institution that way? What most people look for, I think, is the virtuous president. They’re waiting for the next president to arrive who will be virtuous, and then that virtuous person will bring us there. Our founders knew that if you rely on virtue alone to protect the liberty of the many, it’s probably not going to work out too well, for all kinds of reasons — they were very skilled about incentives and other reasons too. So they set themselves the task of design: how do we make this work so that if virtue flagged or wavered, we’d still have a strong country? Is something similar at play at universities? I think we’re still at the stage of hoping for the virtuous leader all the time.

Danielle Allen: Absolutely. I think that’s really well diagnosed.

John Tomasi: What would it look like? How would it begin to change?

Danielle Allen: Well, I think every university has to consider its own design questions. For example, at Harvard, something I’ve been advocating for is that in tenure decisions we should have a formally assigned devil’s advocate inside every departmental meeting around a tenure case. Why? Because I think the way we process tenure decisions is at the heart of the institution’s intellectual standards, choices, and commitments. Over my career — I’m long in the tooth at this point, I’ve been many places and seen a lot of different things — I’ve seen huge variation in the quality of debate that actually unfolds when you’re debating that all-important, basically marriage decision: do we stay with this person for the rest of their life? I think that process would be vastly improved if we had a formally assigned devil’s advocate.

John Tomasi: So the idea is that we might look through various pieces of the university and ask: how could this existing set of practices be redesigned?

Danielle Allen: Exactly.

John Tomasi: Do you have any thoughts about more general governance design questions at Harvard? There’s always this question about how Harvard is governed. Generally speaking, at most universities we have a structure of trustees and presidents. Any other design that’s striking or interesting?

Danielle Allen: I’m deeply involved in governance questions at Harvard. I say to people, democracy renovation starts at home — you can’t really do it far away if you’re not doing it at home. So I’m doing it at Harvard, and I’m doing it in the state of Massachusetts. But again, universities are idiosyncratic in their structure and modes, so one has to ask these questions in place-specific ways. I don’t think anybody can say, “Here’s the answer for all of higher ed.” At Harvard specifically, I’ve been among the groups of faculty working very hard to build a faculty senate. Harvard does not have a university-wide faculty senate. Faculty senates come in many different shapes and flavors; some succeed and some don’t. So if you’re going to make the case that faculty responsibility for governance should be better supported and better integrated into the governance work of the university, you also have to have a clear, design-thinking view about what makes the difference between successful and unsuccessful senates. We’ve done a bunch of work studying senates around the country, and we have some views. The size of the senate matters — it can’t be too big; it needs to be at that sweet spot where it counts as representing a wide swath of the faculty. You need a selection mechanism structured so that you’re really bringing in different sections of the faculty and not getting dominated by any given subset. You need standards for how you organize deliberative procedures, including, for example, rules on the use of time and speaking time — that’s one of the most basic and most important things for high-quality deliberation. We can look at Chicago, Duke, and Stanford; they all have quite high-functioning faculty senates that are a positive asset to university governance.

John Tomasi: I love that. And I wonder if we could — like the American founders, and perhaps the radical Duke and his friends, whom you would know better than I — look to previous examples of people who tried things, even if they didn’t fully succeed. I’ll give one example you probably don’t know about, and I think my listeners might not either. At Brown University, when they founded the university a long time ago, they were very much working in the wake of Roger Williams, and so they had a rule when they created the university and its governing trustee board: that the board had to be pluralistic by religion.

Danielle Allen: Oh, wow, that’s fascinating. They literally required it.

John Tomasi: Over time that changed, but it was an interesting idea. Is there something in that idea about trying to decide what diversity of views we’re going to have on a governing board, on some dimension of diversity? That’s an old one. Here’s a more recent one, which has been experimented with — or at least toyed with — at the University of Austin (UATX) in Austin. I’m not sure they actually put it through, but there was an idea there for a while that really struck me. They were concerned about the virtuous president being the only thing that would keep the university virtuous through time, so they had the idea of something like a bill of rights of academic freedoms — for students, for professors, for teaching, research, writing, and speaking — and then an external judicial body that could hear complaints from any student or professor, complaints presumably against the administration, to adjudicate whether they had a right or not. What interested me about that model — you can see it immediately — is that it’s saying we’re going to have some external body do this, following the founding generation of the US in separating powers. Any thoughts about either of those?

Danielle Allen: It’s a good question, and certainly an interesting experiment. This is where we get to the real challenge of all these questions. Madison famously said — you were alluding to this — that if men were angels, we’d have no need of government, and hence we designed checks and balances and the like. But he carried on in the same set of arguments to make the point that laws can’t guarantee things either; you do still need character. So you need both. You can’t get out of it just through institutional design and incentives. You have to maintain a culture of commitment to free inquiry. And at the end of the day, one could easily imagine an excessively litigious culture that itself blocked and chilled all modes of expression. So that method for UATX might work, but it might also over-bureaucratize and chill through a structure of litigiousness.

John Tomasi: Right. But these are exactly the kinds of questions we’d be asking if we were doing the art of design.

Danielle Allen: Right.

John Tomasi: We’d be thinking that through, proposing it. And there’s a community process that becomes unleashed when you’re doing that, because you’re being asked to say, “Let’s talk together about what we’re trying to achieve here. How do you see it? I’ll learn from you about what I’m wrong about, or what I’m right about.”

Danielle Allen: And to do the design work, it depends on actually starting with some clarity about the design principles — what are you actually trying to achieve? That’s where you get that shared understanding of the mission, of what kind of container for intellectual work you’re trying to build. I think that’s quite important.

John Tomasi: It’d be fascinating to do a project — maybe HxA should do this with our new research and development team — about historical attempts to govern universities well for these virtues. Get a catalog.

Danielle Allen: That would be a great project. I would endorse your doing that.

John Tomasi: Something we might do another year — once your book is out. I thought you might help us with it. But let me go on. Civic education has been central to your work forever — the Democratic Knowledge Project, Educating for American Democracy. I wonder what you make of the wave of civic centers that have been growing across the country. HxA did a report on them recently. We distinguished two big categories: ones based on civic thought, and ones based on something like civic commitment or civic practices — bridge-building, you might say. What do you make of this explosion of civic centers across universities? They’re often arising in the midst of a culture war and are often thought to be part of that culture war. What do you make of their rise?

Danielle Allen: I’m generally pretty excited about it. I think it’s a pretty positive thing. In my observation, there’s a variegated landscape. There are many that are motivated by genuine intellectual concerns and the desire to include questions and bodies of knowledge that have fallen out of favor in recent times. I endorse the idea that ensuring students have a chance to learn about constitutionalism, American political thought, and so forth are very valuable things, so I welcome that return of those themes to the curriculum. There are some that perhaps tend more in an ideological direction, where the ideological impact is the point, and I would warn against that. But there are many very good examples. The University of Tennessee at Knoxville has a very fine center that is doing a good job thinking about the whole campus and integrating its intellectual work with the broader campus — Arizona as well. Where you see the successful ones, you also see bipartisan support for them in the state legislature. That’s an indicator that what they’re succeeding at is reknitting the positive relationship between the university and the broader community.

John Tomasi: I’m sure you know the work of Jenna Storey and Ben Storey on this topic. What I like about their work — they’re very involved in the centers themselves, which I find fascinating — is that they’ve also been making the argument that there is this thing, civic thought, which should be a discipline with disciplinary credentials. They make the argument from an academic perspective about the kind of ideas and standards a set of ideas would need to satisfy to launch itself as a discipline. They’ve been approaching civic thought not just as a matter of creating a center here and there, but as filling in a lacuna similar to the one you described — a lacuna of design, of craft, and of history.

Danielle Allen: Yeah.

John Tomasi: It combines all kinds of interesting pieces of social science and thinking about collecting data, but also straight-up reading Plato again. I want to move on, because our time is short. One of the reasons civic centers have been started in some universities is a concern to increase viewpoint diversity. In some instances, the centers have been containers that could house newly hired faculty, or bring in faculty for joint appointments, as stimulators for diversifying the faculty. Of course, there’s more than one way to increase viewpoint diversity on a campus. You can do it by bringing new people in; you can also do it by adjusting existing practices, encouraging current professors to teach in broader, new ways and helping them find ways to do that. I just wonder if you can say something about viewpoint diversity. HxA exists in large part because a group of professors, about 10 years ago now, became worried about the quality of the research coming out — especially in social psychology, but other areas too. They worried that the lack of different views was bending research experiments before they even got started. What do you make of viewpoint diversity? It’s also caught up in the culture wars, of course. What’s your sense of the state of it? You can talk about Harvard if you like, or just across the academy — whichever you prefer.

Danielle Allen: Sure. Why don’t I start by sharing my definition of viewpoint diversity, and I’d be pleased to know what you think about it and how it connects to yours. I didn’t take the time to go back and check how you define it, but from my point of view, one of the responsibilities of any academic institution is to ensure that, for every discipline or area of inquiry, you are hearing the maximum spread of possible views within the parameters of standards of evidence and methodology. In that regard, one should always be seeking to maximize disagreement — again, within those parameters of excellence — and that’s true across every single discipline. Now, when you come to disciplines that are also very closely connected to human subjects and to contemporary policymaking, then that space of disagreement is also likely to track underlying ideological orientations. So the element of ideology is contingent on the discipline and its proximity to human questions. But the principle of maximizing disagreement should apply to every discipline; and then in some disciplines — like my own, political science, or history, economics, and so forth — when you maximize disagreement, what you’re also getting is ideological spread. That’s how I think about viewpoint diversity, and I think of it as something necessary for a healthy functioning university, and also to fulfill our responsibility to students in the human-touching, social disciplines. I don’t see how we can consider ourselves to be preparing young people to function well in this world if they have no exposure to the actual debates of this world. So I too have found the relative viewpoint homogeneity of college campuses distorting of our educational mission as well as of our research mission. In that regard, I take us all to have a kind of obligation to engage in a corrective project to increase the aperture of disagreement.

John Tomasi: So I hear you saying there’s something like a frontier of positions that could be defended within any discipline according to that discipline’s own methods and standards, and that viewpoint diversity would mean maximizing the range of options kept open.

Danielle Allen: Yep.

John Tomasi: That’s a version of what I argue for too. I think they need to be kept open in what I call a lively way — which doesn’t mean anyone needs to hold the view, or that the view gets a free pass simply because it’s different. They have to be met by arguments.

Danielle Allen: I accept the “lively way” amendment.

John Tomasi: I did a conversation recently with Cass Sunstein on what viewpoint diversity is, and one of the things we worried about with that definition — I worried more than he did, perhaps — is that it seems too disconnected from the society we’re in and the time we’re in.

Danielle Allen: Well, I recognize that. It’s a bit abstract, of course. And this is the challenge, because universities are disconnected from society — even when they have clarity about their social responsibilities, they are necessarily disconnected, precisely because we actually live by a different set of standards than, say, the political realm lives by. So I think that disconnection is necessary. Then you have the second problem: given the disconnection, how do we communicate effectively across the town-gown line? I don’t think the fact that there is a town-gown line means we should give up on the need to describe our work to ourselves in terms aligned with the standards of our context. We can’t give up on that. But what we have to do then is figure out how to make those specific standards — and the reason for articulating them that way — accessible to people who are in fact inhabiting a very different kind of space.

John Tomasi: So — just to make sure I understand — accessibility of the academic findings is a requirement?

Danielle Allen: No, that’s not quite what I mean. I’ll put it this way. I often have conversations with people where they say, “Well, why can’t you people at universities protect the First Amendment?” And my response is to do the very annoying and pedantic thing of explaining the difference between academic freedom and the First Amendment. Usually, honestly, it works out pretty well. They’re like, “Oh, okay, I didn’t really understand that before.” So what I mean is taking the time, in plain-language ways, to make visible, accessible, and understandable the principles that actually organize intellectual and academic life — their justifications — and then where they overlap with, and how they relate to, the plain-language understandings of debate and discourse that we take from the political sphere.

John Tomasi: Can you say very briefly how you see this distinction between the First Amendment and academic freedom?

Danielle Allen: Sure. Basically, the First Amendment is a right we hold against governments. It’s very simple, and therefore it’s a right we formally hold only against public universities, which are public-sector actors. There is no actual First Amendment right in private universities. Private universities can protect First Amendment rights as a matter of noblesse oblige, but that is roughly what it is. At the same time, across both public and private universities, there’s a strong norm of academic freedom, which is built into what it takes for those institutions to succeed at their job of truth-seeking. That is to say, you’ve got to protect the expression of all views within these parameters of excellence — but protecting those views doesn’t mean people get to say anything they want anytime they want, because sometimes they say things that are wrong, and you give them an F on their paper and hope they’ll never say that thing again.

John Tomasi: You give them an F at Harvard?

Danielle Allen: Well, these days — these days, maybe a B minus. All right. And you hope they’ll never say that thing again. That’s not what you do with First Amendment rights. You don’t ever get to give anybody an F, or a B minus, on a First Amendment claim.

John Tomasi: Right. So there’s something with the truth-seeking function that’s really going to be central here.

Danielle Allen: Correct. Academic freedom is as much about making judgments — that conservative element you mentioned — as it is about enabling people to speak. It’s the speaking and the judging together. The First Amendment is just the speaking.

John Tomasi: As we come to the end of this — and that was a lovely definition, a great definition — I just want to return to the radical Duke. I want to ask you: if your radical Duke could see American democracy today, and could see the American university here in 2026, what do you think would alarm him, and what might give him hope? You can do it on the political side, the university side, or some of both — whatever you like.

Danielle Allen: Sure, I’ll do a bit of both. I think he would say, “Gosh, this place is starting to look an awful lot like the 1760s,” in two ways in particular. First, that you’ve allowed yourselves to give up legislative supremacy — you’ve accepted an overreaching executive that’s been building for decades; it’s not just a new phenomenon — and in doing that, you’re actually abandoning freedom and self-government. How can you give up everything that it took centuries to build?

John Tomasi: So that parliamentary element that the Duke was eager to reform — he’d be saying he’s very concerned about that.

Danielle Allen: Exactly. He’d be saying, “You guys have the same problems we had.” And with universities, he would say, “Oh my gosh. When I was a young man, I didn’t go to university — I was not one of those university-educated people, and the university people were so condescending to me. And my gosh, it looks like you’re doing the same to the people who are not university educated. But look — can’t you see what kinds of contributions I was able to make from outside the university? So can’t you now also find the people who are doing fresh thinking who happen not to be inside universities, and find ways to open up your discourse to them?”

John Tomasi: Let me make sure I understand that last point. The Duke was a very privileged person with incredible power, highly educated in a certain kind of way. He didn’t go to what we would call public schools — Oxbridge. He did not, right?

Danielle Allen: No, he did not go to Oxford, which was quite a big deal for him — basically, he flunked out of going to Oxbridge.

John Tomasi: When you say we should be more open at the universities, can you say a little more? What kind of openness do you mean?

Danielle Allen: Just the most basic thing. If you go anywhere outside the Northeast, you’ll find people who very quickly express frustration with a certain kind of condescension that emanates from Northeastern universities. Some of that came up in the debate around Covid, for example — the reliance on data-driven decision-making. There’s a whole lot of decision-making that is actually about choices of values, and you can get all the data in the world and it won’t solve the question for you if you don’t let people debate the question of values. So there’s a way in which we inside universities tend to structure an account of what public decision-making should be like that rules certain ways of engaging out of court from the get-go, and that’s a mistake. I think that’s partly why we see so much social division. It’s why, in my field — political theory and so forth — a lot of academics have ended up having jobs in think tanks, not inside universities. We’ve really allowed people who have great capacity to do good intellectual work and generate important ideas that should be given consideration — we’ve not made space for them inside universities, and they’ve had to build alternative channels of communication and engagement.

John Tomasi: Thank you. It’s been wonderful having you on the show. Great talking with you, as always.

Danielle Allen: Likewise. Thank you so much.

John Tomasi: Thank you so much.

Danielle Allen: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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In this webinar, recorded on June 11th, HxA President John Tomasi joins report co-author Ashley Rubin (University of Hawai'i at Mānoa) and Regina Rini (York University) to critically discuss the report’s conclusions, where it leaves work undone, and what a genuine path toward healthier scholarly norms might look like. A transcript of the discussion, including audience Q&A, is below.

John Tomasi: We’re here to discuss this very exciting report that came out just last week — June 4, as I remember. It was commissioned by Chancellors Diermeier and Martin at Vanderbilt and WashU, and it’s a report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences. The commission was chaired by Paul Boghossian, the eminent philosopher at NYU, along with a committee of scholarly all-stars. HxA members who’ve seen the report and looked at the list of people on the commission will recognize that a number of HxA members are on it. That’s not surprising: there are now HxA members on over a thousand campuses in the US alone, and we’re in close conversation on a lot of these topics with university leaders around the country. But I want to state clearly that HxA had no role in this report — no direct role at all. In fact, I didn’t even read it until one of those leaders sent it to me by email the morning it came out. We were not involved in writing it in any way.

Having said that, I want to tell you how excited my colleagues and I were as we began reading it. The most striking thing we thought was: these people are doing things the way we do things — at least in some aspects, as we’ll see. For example, they vividly describe the common view that the humanities are thoroughly and hopelessly politicized, that they’re lost — and then the report rejects that characterization, at least in its bald form. It says, correctly I believe, that fabulous work is being done in many humanities and social science departments across the country. Indeed, I’d say some seminal work is being done there. But the report then goes on to state, unblinkingly, that many things are not wonderful — that there are things that are extremely worrying about the state of the humanities, if we truly care about them. I’ll quote: “Every field we have studied shows some signs of these pathologies, a deterioration of scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria, and a more general repudiation of longstanding ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

The humanities matter to us because they invite us to ask questions about deep value — what goals are worthy of pursuit, what life is worth living — and the humanistic social sciences invite us to ask those questions about individuals and about social groups as well. These are among the most difficult and important of all scholarly questions, so it’s desperately important that they not be politicized or trivialized by politicization. The report goes on — and I’ll quote again — that “the academic study of social movements is not in service to any particular social movement.” And I would add that it cannot be. As the report says, the task of the humanistic disciplines is “not to manipulate us into following any party line, but to provide each free person with the tools to make their own informed choices.” This is because, the report tells us, the purpose of the humanities is to “prepare us for a free life.” And again, right from the start, they do things the way we do them at HxA. They take on serious questions that insiders see, and they’re not afraid to confront them. The report promises to address the issue of academic freedom head on — it doesn’t use those words, but that’s what it’s doing.

Thus it notes that administrators operate under “a stringent principle of deference to expertise” — and the report affirms this as a principle administrators must respect. But then it goes on: “our commission exists only because even this foundational principle has its limits.” Whole disciplines can go bad. As the report puts it, when astronomy as a field morphs into astrology, we face an unprecedented situation. Somebody ought to do something.

I’ll confess that, reading the start of this report, I had a Walter Mitty moment. Reading the opening pages, I imagined myself in an old-time Western, out by a fire on the prairie with a philosopher-sheriff assembling a posse to round up a band of disciplinary desperadoes and bring them to scholarly justice. We ride at dawn. It made me want to stand up, throw my black coffee onto the fire, and jump onto my horse — let’s ride! But instead, being a nerdy philosopher myself, I quietly read the report, because I wanted to know: in what direction does it ride, and where does it not ride? What topics, what methods, and which forms of evidence does it use, and which does it not? Where does it bring us in the end? What actionable policies, if any, does it recommend? Those are the questions we’re here to discuss.

So let’s do that. Ashley and Regina, thanks so much for joining us. Ashley, I’ll begin with you. You’re a professor at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and you were one of the esteemed scholars on that superstar commission. The main finding of the Vanderbilt–WashU report is that in today’s humanistic disciplines, research is too often distorted by politicization. Could you tell us about that finding and why it’s important?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you so much for that introduction and for having me here. Before I forget, I want to say that I’m going to be speaking for myself and not for the members of the commission, so I’ll distinguish between what the report says and what I think. And I want to encourage people to read the report in its entirety and not rely on summaries of it — by me or anyone else — because it’s a very carefully written report.

Our charge was to evaluate scholarly standards across the humanities and humanistic social sciences, and especially to look at the extent to which internal politicization has compromised them. So we acknowledge external politicization, but we were really looking at the politicization coming from within academia. Based on our analyses, we found a middle-of-the-road finding: things aren’t as bad as critics say, nor are they as good as some defenders say. We see, across disciplines, scholarly standards being replaced to varying degrees with political or ideological considerations — and I want to emphasize that this varies a lot across and within disciplines. There’s a lot of heterogeneity, and, as John said, a lot of really good work being done; in some cases, the majority of the work in a field is still really good.

Specifically, we highlight four ways in which politicization is compromising standards. One is explicit statements — in research, at the level of professional associations, and everything in between — where scholars endorse political goals as the point of the work. Second is a consensus that certain research questions, topics, theories, or findings are off-limits, with varying forms of backlash against those who pursue them. Third is a deep skepticism about the possibility or necessity of objectivity, and really about the knowability of the world, which in turn leads to a rejection of important steps in the research process. And finally — a somewhat funny finding, unfortunately — a lot of bad, dense, jargon-laden prose, which on its face doesn’t seem obviously political but which tends to appear in the more explicitly political works, often in the service of political arguments. That’s actually something I’ve written about. So across these four, we’re seeing the advancement of knowledge and understanding being subordinated to political projects.

As for why this is important — speaking for myself — I think this is an issue of trust. My own frustration with my fields is that I’m getting to the point where I have a hard time trusting the research and believing that scholars are actually advancing knowledge. Research is a collective endeavor; I have to stand on the shoulders of giants. I have to use and cite what other people are producing, and if I don’t trust that work, it becomes really difficult to do my own. My personal goal is doing big theoretical syntheses, stitching together a lot of different work — but if the work you’re stitching together isn’t good, isn’t believable, isn’t robust, it’s really hard to do that kind of synthetic work that gives us the big picture of reality. So I look at this as a big issue of trust — and then, of course, the larger issue of trust not just in research but in universities. How is the public going to trust us — with their kids, with themselves, as producers of knowledge — when we’re increasingly losing that monopoly as experts? For me, this is an issue that traverses multiple layers, from just being able to do the thing I love more than anything else — research — to the future of the university.

John Tomasi: That’s a fabulous summary, and I really appreciate your encouraging our listeners to read the report for themselves, because it’s worth reading more than once. Let me ask you about a couple of things you said. I want to zero in on jargon. There’s a lot of jargon in academia, and a lot of serious — indeed seminal — scholarship that we could describe as jargon-laden. Jargon serves a purpose. I still remember, as an undergraduate, the first time I was assigned John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice — I couldn’t read the thing; I didn’t know what any of it meant. And there’s denser jargon than Rawls. So I wonder what you make of jargon, and why it’s worrying. Let me offer a hypothesis and hear how you respond: my sense is that it’s actually the conjunction of some of these concerns that makes jargon a problem. I’m not sure jargon would be a problem if we didn’t also have, say, politicized goals being announced alongside the work — but I might be wrong. Can you say something about jargon, and about whether our concern about it relies on the other criteria you mentioned?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you for following up on that. To be honest, I love jargon — it makes me feel special and smart, and I think that’s one of the reasons we use it. But it’s also a great shorthand. So it’s not really a dig at jargon per se; it’s more about clunky writing. One of my big pet peeves is when we use these specialty words and then don’t define them. In my field — again, speaking for me and not for the commission — we have the term “the carceral state,” and it means at least four different things, often more, and people don’t define which they mean. It used to refer to the infrastructure and the government actors responsible for determining and meting out punishment. Now it might mean mass incarceration; it might mean the criminal justice system; it sometimes means formal social control — which is itself a jargon term that means policing and punishment together — and sometimes it means informal social control, the interpersonal, private policing of each other’s behavior. So it means all these different things, and the problem is that when we’re trying to have a conversation about, say, what causes the carceral state, and we’re all using it to mean different things, it becomes really hard to theorize — under what conditions does it emerge or grow, and so on. So part of what I’m getting at is using jargon in ways that aren’t useful and that block understanding: not defining terms, or stringing together multisyllabic word after multisyllabic word — these twenty-five-cent words — so that by the end you don’t know what it means. When I used to read this kind of thing, I’d think, “Oh my god, I’m so stupid — why can’t I understand this?” And as I matured, I increasingly realized that in some cases I can’t understand it because it’s just bad writing — it’s not that I’m stupid. So I see that as really problematic for communication. To your hypothesis — that it’s the conjunction of politicization and jargon — I think that’s part of it. In addition to the basic scholarly standard that we need to define our terms and focus on communication, we want to be able to have clear conversations in the scholarship.

That’s one thing. But then there’s the more causal story: why are people doing this, beyond my glib remark that we feel special and smart, and beyond the fact that it’s efficient when we’re talking among experts? The flip side is that increasingly people use certain types of jargon as a kind of shibboleth — a way of showing that you have the appropriate bona fides. We use these words that the public doesn’t understand, but increasingly even those of us in academia don’t quite know what they mean, so they become very clunky — again, bad for communication — but we’re doing it specifically for political purposes. In my work I’ve collected a bunch of statements where people say why they’re using these terms, and they justify it for political reasons. So I think that’s part of the causal story. You can do it the purely scholarly way — this isn’t about communication, you’re not doing what you’re supposed to do — and then there’s the question of why people are doing it, and I think the combination definitely becomes problematic.

John Tomasi: That’s great. Those are super-interesting criteria, and the relationship between them is also worth serious study. Regina, I want to bring you in. You’re a professor at York University — thank you for joining us. I’m going to jump right into the fire with you. You were one of the people who commented almost immediately on the report, and you’ve been a very thoughtful commentator. I’m going to read a fiery thing you wrote on X: “The Boghossian et al. report on the humanities has some good points, but ultimately it is a failure.” On your reading, the report supports there being “some political line beyond which scholarship may be suppressed” — it merely disagrees with the postmodernists about where that line should be drawn. So you’re pointing to a line-drawing problem. Can you tell us more about your concern here?

Regina Rini: Sure, and thanks for having me. I think my role here is to be a friendly critic. Just so the audience understands where I’m coming from: I agree with a lot of the conclusions of the report — maybe we’ll have a chance to talk about those in a bit — but for the moment I’m going to talk about my problem with it, which is the argument: how the report gets to its conclusion. I think the argument doesn’t work, and in fact doesn’t work in a particularly worrisome way. A lot of the report is constructed around taking certain positions in philosophy — in metaphysics and epistemology. It frames itself in opposition to relativism, and it enforces a pretty hard distinction between knowledge and politics as exclusive categories. The problem is that I don’t think that framework is stable.

So let me point to where this happens in the report. This is very close to the end. There’s a very nice sentence near the end that says, once we have conceded there are truths to be known in an area of scholarship, there’s no room for the further thought that scholarship may legitimately suppress or distort those truths, even for the sake of advancing what may be a legitimate moral or social goal. Which sounds very nice. But then there’s a footnote, and in the footnote it says, well, actually this is not absolute — there are times when we can suppress, or even distort, knowledge in the pursuit of social goals. The example it gives has to do with nuclear secrets: a physicist might suppress or even distort nuclear secrets, as in fact was done in the 1930s and ’40s. And this sounds like a harmless concession — wouldn’t we all agree you shouldn’t let out things that might cause a nuclear apocalypse? But once you make that concession, you can’t rely on a very firm, absolute distinction between knowledge and politics, because what you’ve conceded is that there are cases where it’s consistent with knowledge to allow politics or moral concerns to intrude on your information-sharing practices. In other words, there’s no longer such a firm divide. And once you make that concession, it’s open for people to say: where’s the dividing line? Why is it about nuclear secrets and not about racial equality or something else? We can have that argument. I’m not saying there’s a slippery slope and you immediately have to allow everything everybody wants. My point is that the framework of the report is based on there being a very firm, absolute dividing line between knowledge and politics, and as soon as you make those concessions, that’s gone — so it’s owed some further, deeper argument.

My own view is that the conclusions of this report are better supported in a different way — not coming from epistemology and metaphysics, but coming straight from politics. I think there’s a very good argument from the need for pluralism. You mentioned John Rawls a few minutes ago. Rawls famously argued that in public debate we engage in public reason — we set aside our background metaphysical and ethical views and try to find a common, overlapping consensus to argue from. I think scholarship, just as much as politics, has to allow for the fact that we come from different places, and that’s a very good basis for an argument to the conclusions of the report — but you can do all that without getting into fights about relativism and a hard distinction between knowledge and politics. So that’s my criticism.

John Tomasi: That’s great. Can I ask you about the last bit, on the positive side? We could talk about what the report says and the degree to which it relies on rejecting relativism — or on pointing out that there are weak versions of relativism that are relied upon too quickly, which the report sometimes does, I think correctly; but that’s different from rejecting relativism wholesale, which would be a stronger position. I want to ask about what you described as a Rawlsian framework. There are various frameworks within science and social science. For example, Polanyi, in an essay called “The Republic of Science,” talks about academics working on the frontier together, where certain breakthroughs are only available at that frontier. The frontier tells us what’s important, and then there’s a strange combination: on the one hand we value conservative adherence to disciplinary norms and procedures and to the giants of the field, and on the other we value the quirky, interesting new thing coming out at the end — like the green shoot on the end of a branch. That’s one rough, metaphorical view of how scholarship happens in social science and the humanities. Polanyi says this is a model for the sciences but also for the humanities. Is that the kind of thing you have in mind? It seems like you’re trying to get at the need for coherence and agreement on standards, with possibilities for change that are recognizable by those standards. Is that where you are?

Regina Rini: I think what you’re saying is consistent with what I’m getting at; I’m coming at it from a different direction. I’m coming at it partly from politics — the idea that public scholarship, not just the sciences but including the humanities, owes a certain debt to the public that supports it, which means being accessible and being representational, and that includes politics. If you have an entire sector of public political views — which in North America often means conservative views — that are very thinly represented in academia, then there’s a legitimate complaint from the public that they might not trust the way academia works. I can give a more sustained argument for that if you want, but it would take a while.

And then, simultaneously, there’s a separate argument from social epistemology — this one will be familiar to some folks. It goes back to John Stuart Mill in the 1850s, who argues in On Liberty that you can’t actually get truthful reasoning unless you open yourself to all sorts of criticism. You need all different kinds of people in the room, arguing back and forth, and it’s that that does the magic work of sharpening your distinctions and making things better. I think Mill goes a bit too far — he’s a bit too optimistic about how well that process works; it’s not entirely clear he was in enough committee meetings — but the basic idea is right. If you don’t have people from lots of different perspectives in the room, you’re going to be worse off. So those are the arguments for why we need more representation of different views when we’re doing academic work.

John Tomasi: That’s great. I just want to note, for the audience, that on that topic HxA hosted a pop-up a couple of weeks ago with Cass Sunstein, talking about viewpoint diversity. One of the things we discussed a lot was how wide the circle should be — reasonable value pluralism, reasonable epistemic pluralism — and how we define “reasonable.” How does a scholarly community do that? So it’s an extremely interesting line of criticism you’re developing.

I want to keep pushing, because we want to get to audience questions, which is an important part of this event. Ashley, I’m going to come back to you. I’d like to ask you to say a few words about methods. As I mentioned with my Walter Mitty example, I was thinking: what methods do they use, and what methods don’t they use? When I read the report the first time, I was surprised how it went off up into the high hills of philosophy, and when I got to the end I thought, “Wait a minute — where’s the rest of the report?” I felt like I was going to get more social science. I got philosophy — and I love philosophy — but I was like, “Are we going to come down from the hills?” So can you address, any way you like, the general question of methodology? What methods does the report use, what methods does it not use, and what does that mean for the strength of its conclusions?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. I’m going to speak for myself on this one. I actually wrote a Substack a month or two ago on how you evaluate a discipline — the difficulties of doing it, what sorts of data you need, and the limitations. First of all, we all used a combination of systematic and more case-study-based approaches to studying what’s going on in a field. For myself, I was looking at sociology specifically, so I was looking at survey data — of sociologists generally, of sociology chairs, and so on. I was also looking at high-profile events and statements made by American Sociological Association presidents or high-profile members, panels that had been platformed, statements and op-eds that people had written. I should mention that my primary focus was on work that’s already been done studying the state of sociology — of our disciplines, sociology was actually the most studied. My internal report was a hundred pages long; there’s a lot of data on the state of sociology, and a lot of debate. So I was primarily looking at already-published work, and then I was also doing some of my own data collection, some of which is still ongoing — because one of the findings was that there’s difficulty in evaluating some of these issues.

So, going back to your question about types of data: survey data, high-profile events, and I was also interested in forms of censorship that have happened, collecting cases of tenure and promotion denials. That’s a really difficult one, because they tend to be confidential — a lot of times the people going through them don’t get the full story, so we don’t actually know systematically what’s going on with tenure and promotion denials where there’s some sort of bias or discrimination based on the research produced, unless it’s big enough that there’s a lawsuit or it gets written up in, say, the Chronicle of Higher Education. So that’s an area where we desperately need more systematic data. Another is the quality of the research itself. That’s really difficult to do — very time-intensive. You basically have two ways. You can read specific studies and evaluate them against scholarly standards; there’s virtually no incentive to do that, and people look at that work with great skepticism, so there’s a big cost — which makes it understandable that we don’t already have many established studies doing it. The other way is to use LLMs or AI, and we’re increasingly getting studies that do that. There’s a great new study in Theory and Society — of which I should mention I’m now an editorial board member, just to flag a conflict of interest, though this was published before I joined — by James Manzi, who used AI, several AIs, to evaluate different disciplines, looking at their level of political neutrality and then at the politics of the non-neutral studies. There are a number of efforts underway to use AI and LLMs to evaluate research, either individually or at scale, and I think that’s going to be really promising for the next phase of pushing this work further.

Some other work I relied on was really interesting — looking at the blind spots and what I call the “monocropping” of sociology. It’s fairly well known that sociology tends to over-focus on inequality. We used to be a much broader discipline, looking at a lot of different aspects of society, but we tend to focus on inequality and on the negative parts of society, looking away from social progress. There are new published reports focusing on what they call the “negativity bias” in sociology; HxA member Fabio Rojas has a Substack about the lack of sociology looking at progress, which John Iceland and colleagues have also spoken about. So there’s this blind spot — specific topics that sociology doesn’t tend to look at, or, when it does, it does so in a very narrow way: religion, the military and war, certain theories about crime that are more popular in criminology than in sociology — essentially anything that can be seen as conservative. The really big one is biology and evolution; there’s an assumption that if you do that work, you’re conservative and therefore bad. So we have these massive blind spots that hamstring us as a discipline, because we can’t make the broader claims about society — we have this very narrow focus at the field level. There have been some really nice studies looking at dissertation topics and article topics, doing word frequencies, looking at the heterogeneity in the field and where the blind spots are. We also have less systematic data on censorship, so there we have case studies. And then the big empirical question is what the chilling effect of those cases is, because people hear about them — so the question is whether they actually have to be that common to have an effect, and that’s something we don’t know. So, sorry — it’s a mix of data.

John Tomasi: That’s fabulous — absolutely fabulous. That’s a feast, a quick feast, which we really appreciate. I want to call our listeners’ attention to the time: we’ll be moving to Q&A in about ten minutes, so if you have a question, please formulate it and put it in the chat. Regina, I want to go back to you, and pick up directly on Ashley’s line of thought, with a little twist. You used the word “pluralism,” so you’re going to get the viewpoint-diversity question. As you know, at HxA we’re intensely interested in viewpoint diversity. We did a big study of the viewpoint-diversity studies of the professoriate — you’ll find it in the chat in a moment — and it found, broadly, that the studies showing the widest ideological divergence tended to be the weakest methodologically. But if you work through that and dig into the more careful studies, you see a pretty remarkable delta over the last thirty years, from about two-to-one to something like five-to-one. It intensifies geographically if you look more closely, of course, but the big finding is that, especially within the humanities, there’s been this change in the degree of imbalance. The report skates fairly quickly over that terrain. It notes that viewpoint imbalance is not inherently a problem — which is a nice philosophical dodge, perhaps — but I wonder if you want to say anything. Is that change in the composition of the professoriate of interest to you when we think about the importance of pluralism?

Regina Rini: Yeah. You mentioned the report says it’s not inherently a problem. I think it is inherently a problem if you have an increasing skew toward one strand of a partisan split in a democratic society — so I do think there’s a worry there. The tricky bit is disentangling two different historical processes that are correlated, where we don’t really know which way the causation goes. At the same time as the professoriate becomes more left-wing, there’s also an increased amount of attacks on academia coming from the political right — going back to Reagan, back to Nixon, all the way back, really, to William F. Buckley in 1951 with God and Man at Yale, seventy years ago. So you have two political processes playing out at the same time: attacks on academia from the right, and an increasing leftward tilt within the academy — and we don’t know which is causing which. There’s a possibility that the causation actually runs from the attacks on academia to the leftward tilt, in the following way: it might be that for three generations now, young conservative people have been told by intellectual leaders in their community, like Buckley, that academia is not the place for them and they should go somewhere else. I don’t know whether that’s true, but the fact that it’s a possible explanation — alongside more familiar explanations, like left-wing bias within hiring committees — means it’s actually really hard to explain what’s going on. And if you agree with me, as I think probably everybody on this call does, that it’s a problem, then we should care about it — and tackling it is really hard, because we don’t have super-clear data showing which of those things is the cause and which is the effect, or whether it’s some self-reinforcing cycle. So I agree that’s something that needs to be thought about and investigated more deeply.

John Tomasi: Well, let me pause and do a bit more together. There’s probably no natural number or natural ratio for how many Republicans and Democrats should be appropriate across the professoriate as a whole. If we think that one’s political orientation matters for scholarship, it’s probably because we think it goes to deep beliefs about social causation and about the value of the world. So it wouldn’t be surprising if those deep underlying values gave people reasons to join the academy — or not — and so some differentiation wouldn’t be surprising. But the delta seems harder to explain. I remember, years ago at Brown, talking with a group of my dear colleagues about the ideological imbalance, and one of them — a well-known philosopher, one of my best friends — said, “Well, we’re just tracking the truth here, dude. This is a conversation where we’re doing public reason, and it’s coming out one way; that’s how it goes.” We’re always arguing — it’s always a conversation, to some degree, especially in the humanities and social sciences. But it’s interesting to me: how is this happening? What explains the delta? We’re more and more tracking the truth now, whereas before it was more evenly divided? Do you want to say anything about the delta, about the change?

Regina Rini: Yeah. I don’t think I agree with the person you mentioned — I don’t know who it is, and I don’t want to speak for them. But we can try to reconstruct the way people usually make that argument, which is to say: the truth is selective for a certain orientation on the world, and that orientation selects for people who lean politically left. That could be true, for all we know. But I would want to see incredibly strong evidence before accepting it — much stronger than we’d normally demand for an empirical hypothesis — because there’s a lot of confirmation bias: a lot of people who are leftist and academics want it to be true. And if you want something to be true, you need to apply an epistemic deficit to the hypothesis; it has to start off below zero to account for your confirmation bias. So to get to the level of evidential sufficiency, you’d have to have a lot of evidence. Maybe we have some — I don’t know; I don’t think we have a lot. So I think we can leave it as a hypothesis that there’s some sense in which scholarly work selects for people on the left, but unless there’s a ton of evidence to support it, I don’t think we should treat it as affecting our decisions.

John Tomasi: Right — and again, we’d need to explain the change in any case. But that’s well said. I wonder if we could go to some questions from the audience. If you’re in the audience: this is a great report and a great conversation, an extremely important one for us to be having across the academy. I want to say again, if I didn’t say it clearly enough at the beginning, how impressed and delighted we are that the leaders of Vanderbilt and WashU proceeded this way, choosing such an esteemed panel to put this report together. The report is incredibly thoughtful. So if you have questions about it, this is a great time to put them in the chat, and we’ll go through some of them.

Here we go — I’ll read this one out: “In the humanities and social sciences, much of what I’ve seen is deeply skeptical of, and downright antagonistic to, the possibility of objective truth — Nietzschean perspectivalism, relativism, self-interest, false consciousness, Freudian repression. Is there any sense of agreement on basic epistemic standards, and on the possibility of ascertaining, if not objective, then at least intersubjectively applicable truth?” Ashley, do you want to take that one?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. I’m going to put this question under the banner of scholarly standards. To have scholarly standards, you need some understanding of how we know that what we’re saying is correct, how we know it’s convincing in some way. What are the shared standards? One of those is going to be about truth and objectivity. And for me, the biggest problem we’re facing right now is that we just don’t agree on the scholarly standards anymore. I’ll say I was pleasantly surprised, the more I learned about the humanities, that there’s a large group of scholars who really do have standards similar to mine. I’d always thought of the humanities as having very different standards about truth and argument than I had in the social sciences, but a lot of what I’d informally refer to as the scientific method was actually really similar to basic scholarly expectations. To make this concrete: things like looking at counterarguments, looking at counterevidence, thinking through the weaknesses of your arguments or your dataset — that’s just standard good scholarship, and it’s something we’re increasingly not seeing in certain fields, certain subfields, some research that gets published. We’re also seeing resistance to insisting on it, for various reasons that people increasingly put under the banner of political justifications. So I think that’s the big problem.

So, yes — I think there are clear standards. Objectivity is difficult to achieve; there are tricks we’ve developed to get there. I personally believe there’s truth out there, and I think a lot of people do, and that the challenge and the fun of academia is figuring out how to get to it. But there are others — a large group — who don’t believe there’s a single truth out there, or who think we can never actually get there, and that everything we’re doing is basically flawed, irrevocably so. And I think that’s the problem.

John Tomasi: Let me push a little right there — and Regina, you might want to comment too. I’m not sure that an avowal of one’s view about truth is what’s going to drive things here. You said there’s disagreement about scholarly standards, and that seems clearly true; that could be healthy in a variety of ways. But I wonder: is there agreement on the purpose of scholarly standards? One claim about their purpose ties it to the purpose, or telos, of the university. Some people — and HxA members typically are in this group — believe the purpose of scholarly standards is to know more about the world, with humility and intensity. But not everyone agrees about that purpose. Do either of you want to say something about that? Regina, do you want to get in, or, Ashley, do you want to reply?

Ashley Rubin: Sure, thank you. I think that’s the problem — we don’t agree on these things.

John Tomasi: What’s the disagreement, as you see it?

Ashley Rubin: So let me make this concrete. There are certain ways to communicate the scholarly process. When we publish, we publish in particular ways: we’re supposed to motivate our research question, to tie it to what we know and what we don’t know, and to explain why this gap is something that needs to be filled and is worthwhile. Some people disagree that we should even be doing that — that there are some topics so important they don’t need justification, and that if you ask somebody to justify why this research question, why this scholarship, that question is in itself offensive. So that’s the basic disagreement we’re having about scholarly standards: what’s the purpose of research, and what’s the purpose of these norms we’ve developed about publishing our research?

John Tomasi: Thank you. Should we pop up the next question — or, Regina, do you want to get in on this one?

Regina Rini: Yeah, sorry — let me jump in a little. I wanted to think about this question of the connection between politics and truth and knowledge, because the report, as I said, tries to frame those as opposed to each other — but there’s a complication. Imagine the following case. You’re at an academic conference, and people are debating some academic topic; they’re debating propositions — is this true, is this false — and debating the evidence. And then somebody raises their hand and says, “You guys, there’s a problem. I think somebody’s been putting some kind of hallucinogenic chemical in the drinking water. I think we’re all just floating off — we’re all high right now, and we’re not quite getting it.” And imagine the chair says, “No, you can’t talk about that. It might or might not be true, but we’re not doing activism right now; we’re not talking about what’s happening in the world or whether to change the water supply. We’re just doing science right now.” That would be a crazy answer, right? If somebody says there’s a causal process interfering with our ability to do good science, you have to attend to the causal process.

That, I think, is a useful analogue to what a lot of critics of the traditional idea of truth are doing in the academy. They’re saying there’s something — like ideology, or false consciousness, or whatever — that is a causal process interfering with our ability to find the truth. That’s the hallucinogen. They might be wrong about that. But it’s a mistake — a misunderstanding of their view — to say they’re not interested in truth. What they’re saying is, “We’re interested in truth, but we have to do some politics first to remove the hallucinogen from the drinking water, and then we can go back to pursuing the truth in an unconfused way.” And the report just doesn’t track that distinction. There are some people who genuinely don’t believe in truth, but I don’t think there are very many of them. There are a lot more people who have this substantive claim — that ideology is like the hallucinogen in the drinking water, and we have to do some politics — and that’s a more complicated argument that has to be dealt with head on.

John Tomasi: That’s fabulous. I love that example, and you explained its importance so well. Let me give us one minute more on that, if you don’t mind. How does what you said bear on the debate about the telos of the university? Some people — Jon Haidt, for example, argued some years ago, when HxA started — think you face a choice about ultimate ends at universities: something like searching for knowledge versus something like pursuing social justice. Does your distinction throw that into question?

Regina Rini: Well, it shows some complications. If you take the view these people have — and again, I want the audience to be clear that I often disagree with this, but I want to understand their view — their view is that there’s something like the hallucinogen in the water supply, and you can’t pursue the truth without first doing something of what gets called social justice, because you need to correct the hallucinogen before you can have truthful inquiry. So those are not opposed objectives; they sometimes — not always, but sometimes — coincide, according to this view. And that’s what has to be honestly grappled with.

John Tomasi: That’s fabulous. Let’s have another question. Someone says: “I agree with you” — I’ll take that as a collective “we” — “about the crisis of loss of rigor and politicization in some parts of the academy. But don’t you have to acknowledge that it’s possible to do philosophically rigorous work that emphasizes perspectivism, postmodernism, and pluralism without sinking into politicization?” Regina, this sounds right up your alley, but I’m going to give it to Ashley instead. I think it might be a softball for you, Ashley — what do you make of this question?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. This ties into what Regina was talking about a moment ago. I think there are really valuable criticisms that critical scholars, postmodernists, and others have offered that help us think about our research methods and our ability to do what we’re trying to do. The problem I have — and that I think the report is getting at — is with people who just completely reject it. It’s not even a question of how we fix the problem. There’s a problem; it’s pretty well documented; we know we have biases — but we’ve also developed tools to get around them. If those tools are flawed, we need to keep fixing them. There’s a difference between saying, “Let’s keep trying to fix the tools, let’s get as accurate as we can possibly be,” versus, “I’m going to throw up my hands; this isn’t possible at all, so we should basically create a fiction and call it science.” That’s the problem I have. So I don’t think we’re rejecting postmodernism out of hand. And I think the focus on relativism in the report is interesting, because it was very carefully defined, but people are reading a lot into what exactly we mean by it. I don’t think it’s supposed to be a blanket critique of everything; it’s the going-too-far that really starts to interfere with our ability to do our job. So for me that’s the big issue. There are valuable critiques you can raise about our ability to do scholarship, science, and so on — but if you can’t even engage in figuring out how to fix it, and you don’t even want to fix it, you just want to reject it, that’s the problem.

John Tomasi: Regina, do you want to add to this? I said it would be a softball for you — do you want to put a curve on it, or something? Mix my baseball metaphors.

Regina Rini: Sure. I definitely agree with Ashley that it would be a huge mistake to throw up our hands and give up on the pursuit of truth. I also don’t know how many people are really doing that. I think sometimes people exaggerate the extent of the shocking view they hold, because it gets attention — on Twitter, from the media, sometimes from grant review panels — so they’ll exaggerate the extent to which they’re saying, “Oh, I’m just refusing to do things the way academics have always done them; I’m opposed to truth now,” and so on. Sometimes I think that’s what’s happening. There are some sincere people who really have given up on truth, but — and maybe this is one place where quantitative research would actually be helpful, though I don’t know how you’d study it — I don’t know how you cleanly divide the people who are sincere from the ones who are putting on airs to get attention. I would really want to know what percentage of people who talk that way really, truly, deep down mean it — that they don’t believe there’s any such thing as truth, even about how to get to the grocery store — and what percentage are exaggerating their suspicion of existing scholarly machinery for effect.

John Tomasi: That’s great. I’ll point out that Heterodox Academy has a research and development team that’s very interested in these questions. There are so many questions now; the national attention is turning to all these issues about the academy, so there are so many opportunities to do really serious scholarly work to help us understand the state of play better. That’s why we think this report is so important — it points us toward the importance of doing those studies.

Let’s get at least one more question in. We’re being invited to talk about teaching a little. So: As important as the politicization of research is — and research is the main focus of this report — this question is about the politicization of teaching, which is arguably a more egregious deviation from what’s appropriate, and of greater public consequence and concern. I was rereading the AAUP’s 1915 Declaration last night — being a nerd — and, as many of you know, it has these stirring passages about the importance of teaching for freedom, about citizenship and the free individual thinking for themselves, and it hammers down on the responsibility to teach in a way that’s liberatory. The specific question is: will there be a report on the politicization of higher-ed teaching? That might be a question for the Vanderbilt–WashU group — I’m not sure whether they’ll do that — but does anyone want to talk about this issue? Regina, do you want to start?

Regina Rini: Sure. I think this is a really important question, because it’s dangerous on both ends. I agree with the questioner that it’s especially egregious for people to abuse the institutional power of being a professor. I remember being a student in classrooms where professors would just get on their soapbox and talk about their views — sometimes about politics; one time it was about basketball — that had nothing to do with the actual lecture. They were abusing the fact that they had a captive audience with no choice but to listen. That’s an abuse of the job, and you should not be doing it. So in that respect it’s very bad. But we also have to be careful on the other side. Teaching, especially at the collegiate level, is not just about presenting an absolutely neutral point of view about what other people have said. Part of the reason you study with an expert is that they have their own opinions — and their opinions might involve things like the hallucinogen-in-the-drinking-water view I described a few minutes ago. We can’t have some sort of filter that says you can’t express those opinions in a classroom. The worst of all is something happening in the US right now, which is governments trying to prevent people from stating those views — that’s not compatible with a model of expert teachers. So what’s really going on here is a certain sort of discipline that individual educators need to impose on themselves: not to abuse the soapbox they have. But if they do abuse it, we have to be really careful that the remedy isn’t worse than the problem itself.

John Tomasi: Since you mentioned remedies, I’ll take my moderator’s privilege and jump in. I mentioned at the beginning that the report says administrators operate under a “stringent principle of deference to expertise,” but also that even that principle has its limits. We’re curious — and HxA is working with a lot of college leaders on this very question — what’s the role of administrators in encouraging a healthier scholarly environment? One way to think about it is that academic freedom stands as an obstacle to administrators doing that. At HxA, we have the idea that perhaps administrators have a role in helping enrich and enhance the exercise of academic freedom — by providing studies like this one that could help people think more seriously, within their own departments, about what excellence might be. Ashley, you might want to say something about this element of the report. What are the practical implications? What might be done after we ride out into the desert with this posse?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thank you. We were really careful in the report to focus on diagnosing the problem; we weren’t asked to make recommendations. But of course people are going to want to know the next step. One thing we say at the beginning is that nothing in the report suggests you should go out and start closing universities or departments or anything like that. If anything, the very next step, if you have concerns in your own university, is to do a faculty-led self-study — because we’re looking at field-level trends, essentially national and in some cases international trends, and that doesn’t mean your local department has these problems. So if you’re going to figure out whether your local department needs some sort of reform, you need to do a self-study, and it has to involve faculty. That was really important.

More personally, I think incentives are really important — getting to your earlier point about how we saw this massive delta, how the change in faculty politicization went off the rails. A big part of it, I think, is that even at the level of admissions and hiring, we started having increasing cases where the university was funding explicitly political faculty positions, and faculty sitting on admissions committees were bringing in students who say, “I want to be an activist,” instead of, “I just want to learn,” or, “I just want to do research.” Increasingly that’s what people think grad school is about, and I think that’s a big reason for the huge shift. So administrators have a big role to play in incentivizing what I’d consider good behavior — thinking about what they’re funding. I’m not an economist, but I do think economists get a lot right about incentivizing human behavior, and that’s something we see a lot in universities.

John Tomasi: I’ll add that we talk to university presidents a lot, and one of the things we often discuss is how they rationally allocate resources for academic excellence. There was an assumption a few years ago that they could do that by relying on the expert judgment of their own faculty — and they can, and they always will need to, for all the reasons described in the report. But we’re increasingly seeing that’s not the whole story: that there’s academic excellence over here, and some other set of things — the free exchange of ideas, viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement — over there. They’re different things; we think they go together; and if you want to test for academic excellence, you have to find more sophisticated ways to test for things like viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement, and the free exchange of ideas — those elements of the HxA agenda.

We’re coming toward the end. Regina, I want to give you the last word, because you’re such a wonderfully thoughtful critic — a good report deserves great critics, and not all the critics I’ve read have been great; you’ve been remarkable. I’ll give you the last word to say anything you’d like about the report. You can take up that question about application, or any point at all.

Regina Rini: Sure — very nice of you to say. Part of the reason I criticize the report is that I’m sympathetic with the basic intuition, the intuition that there’s a problem. I’ll say this personally: I’m not on the political right, but I find it really unhelpful that when I’m talking to colleagues, I don’t get pushback from the right most of the time. When I go to conferences, I actively seek out the few conservative philosophers I know, because it’s really helpful for me to talk ideas through with them. I’ll mention one — Spencer Case, a philosopher who’s working right now on a book about patriotism, and who’s really fun to talk to about this stuff. It’s really helpful to me; it sharpens my research. So part of my motivation is that I want there to be more people I can talk to who have very different views, whom I can argue with. I’m kind of hopeful — I don’t know how we do this; I’m not an administrator, it’s above my pay grade — but I’m really hopeful that if we start finding ways to encourage more diversity, that’s helpful for all of us and we all get more out of it. So that’s a hopeful note to end on, maybe.

John Tomasi: Thanks, Regina. And I want to thank all of you again for joining this conversation. If you work in a university and you’re not a member of HxA — we’re growing, and we are who we are because of who our members are. So join us; make us who you want us to be. Ashley, Regina — thank you so much for this conversation, and we look forward to more discussions about this great report. Thanks, everyone.

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Steven Brint: Our panel is going to focus on a very interesting paper that Jon Shields and two colleagues wrote. Some of you may have read it already, about the closed classroom, how controversial issues are taught in American classrooms. Jon is going to present for about 15 minutes or so. Then we have commentary from two distinguished folks. I should say Jon is a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College. Our commentators are Will Fithian, an associate professor of statistics here at Berkeley, and Brian Soucek, who’s a Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of Law at UC Davis. They will talk for about seven minutes, and then Jon will have an opportunity to respond for five minutes or so, and then we’ll open to Q&A. So, Jon, please.

Jon Shields: Well, thanks to Heterodox Academy for organizing this and having me out. It’s a pleasure to be here. I honestly didn’t know if I’d make it. I got really sick this week, but I’ve been popping pills all week, and I think I’ve turned a corner, so I’m real happy to be here. So today I’m going to just briefly summarize some research that I did with Yuval Avnur and Stephanie Muravchik, both at the Claremont Colleges. And this work really grows out of the belief that education in free democratic societies has some responsibility for forming citizens. And citizens need some fluency with ideas and intellectual traditions that are contending for dominance in a democracy. And they need to acquire some ability to critically assess them. And that raises a sort of question for us in the university, you know, which is how well are we introducing students to the moral and political controversies that shape our democratic life?

And surprisingly, there isn’t a lot of research on this question. We know a lot about the politics of professors, thanks to a lot of good empirical work on this subject. We have surveys, in fact, on professors’ politics going back to the 1950s. But we really don’t know very much about how the politics of professors shapes how they teach. The education historian Jon Zimmerman has pointed out that kind of paradox about college teaching. He notes, “college teaching is a highly public act that has remained mostly private.” And Jon, when he makes this point, always illustrates this with a good anecdote. He’s an excellent teacher, and so some years ago he received NYU’s teaching award and he was invited to a big ceremony that honored him, and the provost introduced Jon Zimmerman, and as he introduced him he read a long list of all of Professor Zimmerman’s publications, right? Because that’s what was most visible, right, about him, and not his teaching.

So we found a way to get a glimpse, at least, into college classrooms, thanks to a large, publicly available database called Open Syllabus. It’s amassed millions of syllabi, primarily by scraping them from websites. The data go as far back as the 1990s, though most of it has been collected in the last 10 years or so. The database doesn’t provide scholars with the raw data, but it provides a sort of searchable database with some useful analytical tools that can help us assess the data. And so for example, it allows us to see how frequently texts are assigned. And importantly, it allows us to see what they’re assigned with.

So we use this database to look at three controversies. And we’re really interested in, you know, actually we began by just sort of asking, like what are some of the most polarizing controversies? Right. And so we looked at three. We looked at racism in the criminal justice system. We looked at the ethics of abortion, and we looked at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. All three issues, I think, have been uniquely polarizing sources of division in our democracy. Two have been uniquely polarizing on American college campuses over the last decade or so. And in each case, we were interested to explore the extent to which the scholarly debate around these issues is taught to students. So we were not interested in whether demagogues like Tucker Carlson are assigned to students. Rather, we were interested in whether students are exposed to a spectrum of the most reputable and informed thinkers. And we were guided primarily by our own familiarity with the academic literatures in each of the issues we looked at, as well as citation counts. We used that knowledge to first identify some of the most influential texts on each issue. And then we assess the extent to which those texts are taught in conversation with either critical texts or texts that broadly align with their point of view.

So I’ll give you an example, a few examples of what this looks like. So we look, for example, at Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, which inspired a political and moral reckoning over our criminal justice system. You can see its extraordinary influence, right? It’s been cited over 19,000 times since 2010. It was on the New York Times bestseller list for five years. Kendi rightly said, I think, it was one of the sparks that lit the fire of the Black Lives Matter movement. And it became a very popular text in university courses, as it should have. In the database, it appears in over 5,000 syllabi, which places it among the most assigned texts in the database. It appears more often than Shakespeare’s Hamlet or Paradise Lost. And if for some reason you’re not familiar with the book, the core of the book claims that mass incarceration is essentially Jim Crow 2.0, right? It’s a system that was intentionally designed to subjugate and control black Americans, except in some ways it’s more sinister because it seems neutral and colorblind on the surface, right? So it’s more perverse in some ways. So it was a bold and provocative thesis, the kind that tends to stir academic controversy, which it did almost immediately. Enter James Forman Jr. Professor Forman is a Yale law professor. He’s notably also the son of the famous civil rights leader, James Forman Sr. And so not surprisingly, he had a deep interest in the claim that Jim Crow, a system his father helped defeat, had suddenly been resurrected. This is a topic that he found, of course, significant both personally and politically. And so he began developing a powerful rebuttal, first as a working paper in 2011 that then became a law review article a year later. And it was pretty critical, right? I mean, in fact, he essentially argued that nearly all of Alexander’s empirical claims were wrong. And not just wrong, but really demonstratively wrong, right? Deeply wrong. And his work culminated a few years later with the publication of Locking Up Our Own, which argued that there was no racist conspiracy at the heart of mass incarceration. Instead, he said the origins of mass incarceration were simply just much more tragic. He argued that black mayors and police chiefs first rose to power at a moment when violent crime was surging, and they responded to that pressing challenge with tough-on-crime policies. The book was a great success. It won the Pulitzer. It was listed by the New York Times as among the 10 best books of the year. And other books soon followed, I’ve highlighted a few here that in various ways also pressed against Alexander’s thesis. Again, all by prominent scholars.

Now to our central question, right, which is to what extent are any of these critical texts assigned with Alexander’s? And if you haven’t seen this data, you might just take a moment and just, you know, guess in your mind how often these texts are assigned with Alexander. And so I’ll show you the data here. You can see that almost never is the answer, right? Really, really very rarely. Forman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book is assigned about 3.5% of the time. A lot of the other texts, much less. Honestly, these numbers really shocked me, truly did. I thought they would be considerably higher than they were. Still, we wondered, maybe we’re missing something, right? Maybe there’s some other universe of courses that doesn’t teach Alexander, but teaches a kind of anti-Alexander orthodoxy, right? Some smaller universe of courses. So we essentially just flipped the analysis. And instead of starting with Alexander’s classic text, we started with the critics and then asked, okay, what are the critics assigned with? So I’ll show you that data here. And you can see the numbers look really, really different. So at the top there, this is Forman’s working paper or law review article, right? You can see that when that is assigned, Alexander is included about 82% of the time, right? And even Sharkey at the bottom — Sharkey’s, you know, when Sharkey’s taught, Alexander’s included 26% of the time, which is much lower, but actually a lot of other, he’s often paired with other voices in sort of Alexander’s ideological space, right? I think what this suggests, though, is that there’s a minority of professors who really do teach this controversy, right? There’s some division, right? And if there’s a silver lining in this work, that’s it.

Okay, so then the question is who is assigned with Alexander if not her most important critics? Who do professors assign with her? These are the top three titles. By the way, I think all great books to teach, I’ve taught a couple of them, but clearly books that are not going to generate a lot of tension with Alexander. And in fact, you can look at the next hundred most commonly assigned texts, and you’ll find a lot of books more or less in this same ideological space. They’re not works that are deeply in tension with her argument. And it’s not just this controversy. We also looked at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. There we find the same broad pattern. Voices that are sharply critical of Israel are frequently assigned. Those that are more pro-Zionist in their orientation are rarely taught.

But I want to, in the interest of time, I want to look at our third case on the ethics of abortion, partly because it’s different than the other two. And I think the variation is interesting here. The three cases we looked at, the ethics of abortion was sort of the least unbalanced. It was the topic that was most liberally taught. And we really didn’t expect that going in. And so I’ll offer some reflections as to why that might be the case. So in the case of the ethics of abortion, it’s clear that there’s no work that’s been more influential than an essay by Judith Jarvis Thomson called “A Defense of Abortion.” It was published in the early ‘70s prior to Roe. It’s also a great essay to teach, one I’ve taught many times. And she made this classic case for the pro-choice position. She says, you know, regardless of what the moral status of the embryo is, women don’t have a moral obligation to carry these embryos, right? And she came to this conclusion by way of a now-famous thought experiment that’s familiar to generations of college students. She says, imagine you’ve been kidnapped and attached to a violinist who’s quite sick, and not just any violinist, but a really famous one. And you’re told you just need to stay connected to this violinist for nine months, after which the violinist will be cured, he can go on his way, and you can as well. And she asked, would it be unjust to disconnect yourself from the violinist? She said, no, of course it wouldn’t be. You don’t have an obligation to support bodily the life of this other person. It was a really creative, inventive argument. It invited a lot of criticism, particularly by pro-life philosophers.

And so I want to quickly get to the data here. So these are the top titles assigned with “A Defense of Abortion.” You can see what’s interesting here is that the most assigned work, by Don Marquis, is a pro-life essay, right? So historically different, I would say, from the way race in the criminal justice system is taught. And so here you’ve got a substantial minority of professors who are really teaching the controversy. If we flip the analysis again and start with, say, Don Marquis rather than Thomson, we see again the same kind of pattern. So these are the most commonly assigned titles with Marquis’s pro-life essay. Judith Jarvis Thomson is number one, 75% of the time. Mary Anne Warren — that’s also a pro-choice argument. So here again, when the critic is taught, the pro-life critic is taught, in nearly every case there’s a pro-choice perspective that’s assigned with it.

And so I think these findings raise a sort of interesting question, which is why is the ethics of abortion taught in a broader way than, say, racism in the criminal justice system or Israel-Palestine? It’s not as if professors are especially sympathetic to pro-life points of view, right? And it is sort of surprising that professors are more willing to make room for a conservative position on abortion than a center-left one on race in the criminal justice system, right? And so part of the explanation we theorize here might be just disciplinary. These are the fields that are most likely to assign Thomson’s essay. You can see that it’s almost taught by philosophers, presumably by analytical philosophers. And of course, you know, philosophers are a sort of famously disagreeable lot. They have a, you know, they’re sort of open to contending positions, arguments, et cetera. And so there might be a greater commitment to liberal education in that field. By way of contrast, these are the disciplines that teach The New Jim Crow. And you can see there’s, first of all, there’s quite a range. And so some of these fields might not have a lot of expertise, first of all, in the criminal justice system. And additionally, some of them are perhaps more politicized than the field of philosophy is. I was struck, for example, that it’s sort of striking that English literature professors seem to teach it more often than political scientists do.

I want to close here by asking a kind of more normative question, which is to think about why this matters, right, or why it might matter. One reason sectarian education might be a problem is that it might be alienating more conservative and moderate students. And I think there’s lots of good evidence that’s true. I’m happy to talk about it. But I think the populist right tends to emphasize indoctrination, which may be the wrong emphasis. Instead, maybe there should just be more emphasis on alienation. It sort of pushes lots of students away who don’t find this kind of education on the serious, or alienating. So just as Americans are sorting into red and blue communities, college students may be doing the same thing on campus, right? Where more conservative, moderate students are picking less politicized majors, classes, etc. It also might be alienating the public. Lots of Americans are worried that higher ed has become too sectarian. And it’s not just Republicans, interestingly. It’s lots of independents. And it’s a minority of Democrats, too — a sizable minority of Democrats worry about this. It also might matter because of some of the civic reasons that have been discussed already, right? Students need some civic knowledge. There’s often so much emphasis on, like, civic discourse and civility, but they also just need knowledge, right? And I think, I fear that if we present controversies as if they’re orthodoxies, we’re really not preparing them to think seriously about these issues, right? Instead, we’re signaling that the nation’s most polarizing issues shouldn’t be polarizing at all. The lesson is they’re not very complicated, or they shouldn’t be complicated, and they shouldn’t be divisive. And then finally, I think civic skills. Students just need to develop the habits of mind to become good citizens. Things like curiosity, skepticism, intellectual humility. And also perhaps maybe something that doesn’t get emphasized enough is we need to elevate just the authority of reason in young people’s minds, right? Such that they’re willing to change their mind in the face of powerful evidence and arguments. Thank you.

Will Fithian: Thanks very much, Jon, for your presentation and for the work that you’re doing. I’ll start by saying I’m very sympathetic to the core thesis of the paper, that we’re failing to encourage students to think critically about dominant progressive narratives or to remain open-minded to competing narratives. There’s no question that there’s widespread fear in academia that seeming to challenge those narratives can draw professional sanctions or angry and disruptive crowds. There are plenty of examples from the University of California one can point to over the last several years to justify these fears for the issues you studied.

At UC Berkeley, we have a recurring problem of angry crowds besieging events on Israel, as Daniel Sargent alluded to. And at UCLA, a prospective hire in the psychology department was canceled when it came to light that that candidate had questioned on a podcast whether it was wise for universities to require diversity statements. Faculty fears unquestionably reach into the classroom. I’ve been told by more than one Berkeley law professor that they’d be afraid to teach a criminal law class because they’d be afraid to teach established criminal law doctrines around consent and self-defense, fearing that some of the students might be so enraged just to learn what the law is. So it would be surprising to me to learn if faculty weren’t flinching from presenting works on the criminal justice system that challenge the progressive frame. Fortunately, the kind of headline-grabbing events faculty fear are still comparatively rare, and what I think is worse than the attacks and what enables them is a kind of tacit community norm that certain narratives just aren’t supposed to be challenged. Most faculty do know how to hold calm, reasoned discussions about contentious issues, and making a conscious effort to lead by example and expose students to divergent perspectives on controversial issues is one of the most effective things faculty can do to establish better norms.

To move toward better practices, it helps to measure them, and your analysis paints a nuanced picture of the three case studies you consider. Having said that, I don’t think I’d be earning my keep as the statistician on the panel if I didn’t find something to attack about your methodology. One thing I’d like to have seen is a control group. So your three examples had two variables in common. First, that there were broadly two different perspectives or clusters of perspectives. One that currently occupies a more dominant position in the academy and another that pushes back and offers a competing narrative in response. And second, that the dominant narrative has a more progressive political valence in contemporary American politics, while the competing narrative, if not explicitly conservative, is at least less far to the left than the dominant one. In all three cases, you show that works presenting the progressive narrative are assigned more often than the works presenting the competing, less progressive narrative, and you attribute this difference to the political valence. But I’m not sure I have a good intuition for what the numbers would have looked like if the political valence were absent. So I think the numbers would make a more compelling case if you compared them to analogous data for other academic controversies where the debate between the dominant frame and the main alternatives either has little left-right political valence, or where the polarity is reversed. As an example of the first, it might be interesting to compare the literature of more dominant cognitive behavioral approaches in psychology with more sort of dissenting psychoanalytical approaches. And as an example where the usual valence is reversed, we might consider a comparison of neoclassical economics to less market-positive strains like Marxist or Keynesian approaches. If you see similar patterns in those cases, you might be identifying something broader about university pedagogy rather than something that’s specifically driven by left-leaning bias.

The second point about your methodology: one great strength of your work is your focus on the kinds of works that we would expect to see on college syllabi, influential works by well-respected scholars. But in a way, I think it is also a limitation that you use academic metrics of influence to identify works that are neglected in academic instruction. Using that inclusion criterion, we can’t detect well-evidenced perspectives that have been more comprehensively excluded from academic syllabi because they couldn’t get a fair hearing in academic discourse in the first place. Of course, the danger of broadening the lens to include such perspectives is that we might fall into what we might call the flat-earther trap. I think we all agree that the fact that a third of Americans believe in ESP doesn’t mean it should be taught in psychology classes, but it could be very interesting to look for perspectives that have been influential among expert authorities outside of academia, such as federal judges or regulatory bodies. As an example of the second, we might think about the Cass report that’s been very influential among medical regulators in the area of youth gender medicine. If this report and other works like it are still being excluded from syllabi for relevant courses in gender studies or medical schools, even after winning the argument among many regulatory experts, that could raise questions without falling into the flat-earther trap.

Finally, I want to make a broader point that I think sometimes gets lost in discussions about viewpoint diversity. One of my favorite things this paper does is that it advocates for making better use of the viewpoint diversity that already exists in academia. When we talk about how to import more diverse voices into our community, I think we sometimes forget how much we can accomplish by finding ways to give voice to the many students and faculty who are already members of our community, who have been drawn to institutions of higher education because they’re curious and they enjoy critical thinking, but who have been intimidated into silence by feeling like they’re alone or feeling like they would be violating institutional norms by vocalizing their criticisms of certain viewpoints. Exposing our students to the diversity that already exists in the academy is one of the highest-leverage actions we can take to show our students that there’s more dissent among academics than they might realize, even on hot-button issues.

Brian Soucek: Jon’s paper is so wonderfully provocative, and I’m going to put off until the end of my comments what exactly I am hopeful that it will provoke. But I worry about Jon’s claim that there is a reluctance — he says this on page 48 — a reluctance to teach academic controversies in full. Because I don’t think Jon knows, or I know, or any of us knows what “in full” means in that sentence, outside of our own discipline. So let’s take a look, for example, at the philosophy example, at Thomson’s canonical article on abortion. My PhD is in philosophy. I don’t think that philosophers have better marks here because we’re somehow innately more open-minded or anything like that. I think philosophers at their worst can be as doctrinaire as anyone. It’s certainly the most sex-imbalanced and probably sexist department in the university. At philosophers’ best, there’s an emphasis on virtues like the principle of charity, where we are trying to give the best version of our opponent’s arguments. And in fact, that might be a reason why sometimes we need more time on a particular article as opposed to teaching it alongside its opponent, because in a survey class like the sort that Thomson’s article is generally taught in, you need that time in order to have the students draw out the very best of what she’s saying.

I asked a philosophy colleague on the way here this morning why he thought his colleagues in his department might not teach other articles alongside Thomson’s. And there’s a variety of answers. One is, her article is so perfectly written, it’s so funny, that almost anything you would assign next to it is just going to pale in comparison and seem like an unfair fight. As I said, you might need the time, especially in a busy survey course, to do charitable readings of a number of canonical articles. But most of all, I think the most important fact is something about Thomson’s article itself, which gets under-emphasized, I would say, in Jon’s article, which is to say the structure of the argument, of Judith’s argument, is to, at the outset, grant her opponents — grant the pro-life faction its principal claim — which is to say the personhood of the fetus. So this is not a case where the normal political debate, as we encounter it in American political life, where we need to pair Thomson against someone else, someone who thinks that a fetus is a collection of cells or something versus someone who thinks a fetus is a person with a soul. That is not the debate here, because Thomson grants as her opening move, this fetus is a person. And yet the bearer of that person doesn’t have the responsibilities, for the reason she goes on to say using the violinist example. So Thomson’s article is a particularly interesting one in how it crosses the polarization of the usual debate as it exists in American political life.

And I think that’s actually quite common when we don’t operate at a 35,000-foot view of controversies, but delve down into actually how they play out within particular disciplines. I would parenthetically be very interested to learn more about why 13.5 percent of the people assigning Alexander’s New Jim Crow are in English departments. I tried calling a few English professor friends last night to get — they had no insight for me, but I have to imagine that the reason it’s being assigned so often in an English lit curriculum is, if we looked and figured out why she’s being assigned there, I wonder whether the precise kinds of controversies that, say, Forman has with Alexander might just prove irrelevant to the purpose that that book is serving within that particular discipline.

I can say in my real discipline now, law, these kinds of things play out in different ways, mostly because of the overwhelming predominance of the case method within law. So one unusual factor there, which might be interesting for study, is so many of our at least most controversial cases, the ones we spend the most time on, are cases in which there’s both a majority opinion and a dissent. So we have two sides of the issue built in to the very thing we’re teaching. And then of course there would be an open question of how often are law professors assigning both the majority opinion and the dissent. I get asked every single year near the start of class why it is that I assign so many dissents. After all, the students are there to learn — think that they’re there to learn the law, and learning the law doesn’t come from the dissent. Doctrine is based on the holding, which of course requires five votes at the Supreme Court, which means the majority. So they say, why are we even reading this? And of course, we all know the answer. Everybody here knows why you want to hear the other side of an argument.

I think it would be completely irresponsible to teach the Harvard, North Carolina affirmative action majority opinions, in order to tell my students what current doctrine actually is in my equal protection class, without also teaching the dissents by Justice Sotomayor and Justice Jackson. Similarly, on the flip side, I think it would be completely irresponsible, professional malpractice, to teach Justice Kennedy’s opinions in the gay marriage cases, Windsor and Obergefell, without teaching at least Justice Scalia’s dissents in those cases. But even that wouldn’t be good enough, because to really get anything close to teaching the controversy in full, I would need to also be teaching the critical race perspective on the affirmative action cases, which is neither conservative nor liberal. In fact, the closest person on the court to the critical race perspective is actually Justice Thomas, in saying, you know what, we wouldn’t need affirmative action in the first place if universities weren’t so focused on their rankings, being driven by their elite status, and so concerned about legacy admissions and athletic admissions and admission preferences for donors. It’s blowing up the whole system. Same with Obergefell. We wouldn’t just teach the conservative and liberal approach, but also a critical queer approach, which wants to blow up the institution of marriage as a whole, seen as a patriarchal sexist institution.

So you need to delve down into each particular discipline in order to have any idea what amount of the controversy is being taught and whether that amount is appropriate or not. And that talk of disciplinarity then necessarily gets me to what I think is the key point in all of this, which is academic freedom. Certainly it’s the key point in any thought of what do we do about the insights of Jon’s article. But I don’t mean this just in the sense of, academic freedom, there’s nothing to do because academic freedom means I get to teach whatever I want and design my own syllabus. That is not my point. I want to emphasize instead the responsibilities that are inherent in academic freedom. So at the University of California, for example, we of course support our academic freedom in teaching in the same way we do relatedly to the way we do in terms of research. It is left to the individual scholar to decide how best to pursue their research and bring that research into the classroom. But there is a more profound basis for our protection of academic freedom in teaching here at UC, and it’s explicit in our policies. It’s to say that the goal of education at the university level — when you’re not a seminary, you’re not a high school or grade school, you are a true university — is to instill in our students a mature independence of mind. And that requires not just this kind of giving them the materials to have a mature independence of mind, showing them the dissent as well as the majority, as well as those positions that aren’t even represented on the current court at all. Those things are needed, but so too we have to model for the students that kind of mature independence of mind, what it would mean to be open-minded. We need to model the kinds of virtues that I think are at the core of academic freedom, a kind of modesty, which I think we need more of in terms of judging the English department, for example. Let’s actually ask what English is doing with these kinds of texts. Modesty, open-mindedness, an openness to revisiting your conclusions, a resistance to indoctrination. Those are the kinds of virtues that I think academic freedom depends on if it’s to achieve its aims in the classroom.

And so the last thing I would say, just because academic freedom is at heart a virtue doesn’t mean we can’t do things institutionally to try to instill or reaffirm those virtues. I myself, in part because of the provocation of Jon’s article, would be very open to asking professors when they write their teaching reports, for hiring, for tenure, for promotion, ask them to say, what have you done to instill a mature independence of mind in your students? One thing I think that would do, which is one of the great virtues of Jon’s article, where I think the provocation really lies, is to make all of us think, what have I done to instill that kind of mature independence of mind? What have I done in my syllabus? Whether or not statistically Jon’s article holds up, one thing it does do is force me to ask, well, does it hold up in my own practice? Am I giving the kinds of diversity of readings that are necessary to achieve the ends that we’re trying to instill?

Now, of course, what I’ve just described is exactly the same thing that I’ve long described — many of you have heard me describe — in terms of diversity statements. I think diversity statements done the right way would be asking the exact same question. What have you done to fill any gaps within your discipline, within your classes, in terms of diversity, equity, inclusion? And the value there, too, I hope saying that doesn’t make you just disregard my former proposal, because what I would rather you see is that in both cases, if it’s done well, what it does is to, one, prompt a discussion among disciplinary communities about what they could be doing better, including in their assignments. But also, and more importantly, it’s less in how you get judged based on those statements and more on what those statements, much like Jon’s article, force you to think about — your own practice and your own virtues in these areas. Thanks.

Jon Shields: Thanks, gentlemen. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate particularly some of the critical engagement with it, some of which I agree with. So, I mean, Will makes the point that it would be interesting to look at other issues that aren’t quite so hot-button, right, and I basically agree with that. I think that would be interesting. You know, he also suggests, I think, that there’s a lot of professors — you know, if you just read the paper, you might get a misimpression of the professoriate as a whole. There’s lots of more moderate professors out there who are less activist in their orientation, who might be afraid to teach some of these topics, perhaps. And I think really one of the keys to reforming the university is persuading some of the professors that Steve Teles calls liberal institutionalists. These are folks who tend to be left of center, but really believe in liberal science and liberal education, to actually teach some of these topics. I think one of the reasons the findings are so stark is because those professors with the strongest incentive to teach some of these courses tend to be the most activist in their orientation. And so again, I think one of the keys to broadening the curriculum is just getting lots of kind of more normie professors to teach some of these topics. And once they do that, it really creates a political mark, a kind of different kind of marketplace for students too, right? They don’t have to choose, like, either a very one-sided course on Israel-Palestine, for example. They can choose something more interesting.

Teaching controversies in full. I mean, I agree with it in part, right? Like, I guess, and maybe I wouldn’t have used quite that — I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, because I don’t know that, I think I kind of agree that, it’s not as if I think professors need to teach every relevant sort of perspective on a given issue. I think really what we’re trying to capture, though, is that courses can be relatively closed or they can be much broader, and capture some of the deep disagreement that really does surround these issues.

Is Thomson perfect? You know, I mean, what’s sort of interesting about this is, actually, a lot of the Thomsonites that followed her would say no. You know, they spent their careers trying to fix the problems they saw in Thomson’s classic essay. I mean, thinking of people like David Boonin. But I also would just call for some humility here, too. I think when there’s a scholarly controversy, we’re, of course, going to have different perspectives on the merits of various scholarly positions. I mean, just speaking for myself, I mean, I’ve taught The New Jim Crow a number of times. I think it’s a bad book, you know, if I’m just being frank, mostly, right? Like, I think it’s kind of conspiracy theory with footnotes. But lots of people who are smarter than me think it’s a great book, right? And it’s at the center of the scholarly controversy, and so I teach it. And so I think, you know, we all have some responsibility to doubt our own judgment in these matters.

I also don’t think — actually I think Thomson’s essay does fit very neatly with the broader political polarization. I think pro-choice organizations basically took a version of her argument. You know, they said, you know, we can’t really know about the status of the fetus. That’s a question that’s hard to answer. But what we can know for certain is that women should have a right to control their own bodies.

I guess I would just ask, too, a kind of general question, like, if these findings, you know, aren’t concerning, my question is, what would we have found that would have been concerning, right? Like, what would have been the finding that — at least maybe for Brian, right — that would have raised some real concern about, you know, like, would lead you to believe that, oh, actually, yeah, higher education is becoming too sectarian, at least in some of these questions.

Steven Brint: We have a little time for questions, so please raise your hands for questions.

Audience member: I love that point about the normie professors, and how — because, like, a conversation that we’ve had, that I’ll just make public then, is that, like, one of the things that’s interesting when you look at the data is if you look at the share of classes, of all the syllabi, like, where Michelle Alexander, for instance, or Foucault or Marx or anyone is assigned. So, like, Foucault is the most cited person, but he’s only cited in, like, 2% of all syllabi or something like that. And so this point that you made about how, like, one of the big problems — I thought it was just a really insightful point — but how one of the big problems actually is that it’s not the case that in most college classes, students are, like, being pushed Michelle, you know, New Jim Crow on them, and then nothing in between. I think a bigger problem is that there’s actually a space in a lot more classes to have kind of more normie people who are not activists in orientation talk about these topics. I thought that was just a really beautiful point. So I just wanted to double-click that.

Jon Shields: Yeah, I mean, I will, on the point of exposure, right? I mean, I do think it depends a little too on the kind of university we’re talking about, right? I think it’s, some of the selective institutions, for example, exposure to, say, Michelle Alexander is much higher, right? I mean, I was just at Amherst College, for example, and just asked the students in the room to raise their hand if they had read the book, and nearly all raised their hand, right? So I think with some of the ideas, right, it’d be good to have better data on this, of course, but my sense is the exposure to some of these political intellectuals is pretty broad. But actually, I think one of the arguments that maybe we don’t make well enough and we need to do more with is just — I mean, actually, I think some of these contentious issues need to be taught a lot more than they are, right? And as students are underexposed to some of these controversies, take Israel-Palestine. I mean, the vast majority of students just don’t know anything about it, like, even just the rudimentary, like the real basics. And so I’d like to see some of these topics taught a lot more than they are, for sure.

Audience member: Hi. I have a little bit more of a broader methodological question. Will, your point of there not being a control group, per se — I think that is an important one. And I’m curious, I’m not as familiar with the Open Syllabus database in terms of how it can be used, but is there a way to use it as more of an exploratory measure to kind of see what potential areas that we’re not prescribing of, like, kind of these hot-button controversial issues? Is there a way to use it in a more exploratory way to see where there is potentially asymmetry in various topics? And to Brian’s point of how these things vary across fields — I know you presented some data of how those vary across fields, but as Brian mentioned, the use case may be different depending on the discipline and type of course. I’m curious of just how this can be used to see how there may be asymmetry in teaching of topics that aren’t necessarily these hot-button issues, and what we could learn from that.

Jon Shields: Yeah, I mean, sure. I mean, you can — I mean, it’s very good at, as I said, I mean, you know, it’s, like, very good at, you know, getting a sense of what texts are taught and then what are they taught with. And I think, so I think the method can be applied to, like, a whole range of disciplines, topics, et cetera. And I certainly hope that other professors do some adjacent sorts of studies. I mean, we picked some of these controversies, again, probably ‘cause we thought they were important, also because we were just familiar with them. And so, some of the — I think, to Will’s good suggestions, it’d be interesting to get scholars who have other concentrations and expertise to really sort of explore it. The one thing I’d say is, it would be — look, it would be troubling if — maybe this is a more normative point, right — it’d be troubling if we saw the same pattern across a whole range of scholarly controversies, not just the ones that are most polarizing. However, I think there’s something particularly upsetting, like, or concerning, if we’re not teaching the most politically polarizing controversies, right? And to me, that’s partly because it goes to the heart of the public trust problem that we’re dealing with. And so I think it’s especially important those controversies are taught well.

Audience member: Hi. I was curious if you had — my senses of those three issues you pointed out, Israel and race and the abortion. If, because most of us, at least speaking for myself, I know someone or probably have experience with abortion, in my senses. But professors probably have more experience with that issue, and even students do, compared to those other two issues you brought up. And so does that, you know, closeness to the issue perhaps lead professors, or perhaps force them, to consider a broader perspective? I’m just trying to understand the question.

Jon Shields: You mean because people, because young people get abortions, and—

Audience member: Yeah, young people do. Professors do. All of us know probably someone who’s had one. Anyway, so does that level of experience lead to a greater, you know, broadening of perspectives in the classroom compared to the other two issues where there’s less experience, perhaps less direct experience.

Jon Shields: You mean, do you get a wider variety of student voices and perspectives because it’s familiar?

Audience member: Yeah, well, and the professors themselves teach perhaps both topics, both sides of it.

Jon Shields: I guess going into this, we actually expected — I mean, without knowing anything about what we’d find, I thought abortion might be the most one-sided in some ways, just because, I mean, the one thing that surveys consistently show is that the social liberalism of professors is really high, right? And so there aren’t — there doesn’t — right, there aren’t many professors with pro-life sympathies, whereas, you know, views on things like Israel and Palestine, the professoriate is much more divided. And so, or you take a radical perspective like Alexander’s on the criminal justice system — and again, on those issues, I would have expected just a greater range of voices because professors themselves are more divided on them.

Audience member: Hi. I’m sort of kind of a sociologist and sort of kind of not, but since there are two sociologists on the panel, I just thought I’d throw out a theory here. And that is, it seems to me that what makes abortion different from Israel-Palestine or questions about race and criminality is, in my opinion, we misconceive gender as a driving variable as opposed to a subordinate variable. And I think about the work of somebody like Maurice Bloch, which shows that in a crisis, people very often — women — tend to subordinate gender over to things like clan identity or group identity. So what it seems to me is that race and questions of Israel and Palestine automatically activate a different type of identity commitment. And in spite of all the magical thinking that people want to see with gender solidarity, I honestly don’t think of the idea of womanhood being actually a sufficiently stable identity to create the types of campus opposition that we see with these other issues.

Jon Shields: Maybe. I would just observe, if you look at, like, a text like Judith Butler — you know, she’s not, I mean, she tends to be taught with other kind of like-minded critical theorists. So there might be something — so I’m not sure the issue of gender in general is taught in a—

Audience member: I’m not talking about the talk. I’m talking about facts on the ground, in that gender doesn’t create actual coalitions that are affected in the same way as Palestine or Black Lives Matter or something. We want to see gender as an activating variable that at the end of the day is nowhere near as powerful as other types of social identity.

Will Fithian: Well, that may be true in a sense, and I’m not a sociologist, but I don’t have as much disciplinary humility as what’s being called for sometimes. But I guess I would say it hasn’t stopped people from being extremely fearful of openly discussing gender issues in the classroom, I think, for sure.

Audience member: Hi there. Thanks for your presentation. Two questions, one for Brian, one for Jon. Brian, I’m curious, as I’m hearing the arguments and critiques that you’re leveraging, they seem to be rooted a lot in what’s ideal or what’s theoretical about teaching. But I’m wondering if, when you consider the results from Jon and his colleagues, if you still would consider that to be a signal that something has gone awry or something’s amiss. We can’t know what’s being taught in every class — and if we did, then we’d have strong evidence. But if you still think it stands as a signal. And then, Jon, maybe there’s detail in the paper, but I’m curious, have you looked at your results over time to see if the pairings, or the mismatch between how frequently things are or aren’t taught on both sides of the argument, have changed over time? So is it that back in the 2020s there’s a big mismatch, but then now, here in more recent years, that mismatch has disappeared a bit?

Brian Soucek: So I hope I didn’t communicate in any way that I wasn’t troubled by Jon’s paper. That’s the whole provocative point. I’m deeply troubled. I think every single one of us should individually be deeply troubled. And I think that the next step to that should be thinking very hard about our own syllabus and those of our colleagues, because those are the only ones that I have any position from which to judge. So that even this last comment, talking about Judith Butler and a bunch of similar things — Jon, I don’t think you’re in a position to say within gender studies what counts as a similar position. Gender studies is one of the most — I stay far away from it because it’s so fraught. It’s a terrifying place to venture, not because as an outsider coming to it, but within it. I mean, I’ve organized amicus briefs with, you know, leading, you know, with Catharine MacKinnon and people like this. And it is just terrifying. And I will not beg the question that there is less diversity there, less contestation, than there is in the typical economics department. And I can’t answer whether that’s true because I’m not in either of those departments. And so that’s my concern, that this needs to be a matter of disciplinary discussion. So I would love to see — to answer what would make me happy — to see this being done on the level of a discipline, you know, where we could really be thinking through, with co-authors that know that discipline, you know, that are in it and that kind of thing. And maybe the law idea is one, although there is the problematic part of that that I mentioned, which is there’s a reason why people aren’t always teaching dissents the same, you know, because it’s not law. But seeing whether there’s a political difference would be very interesting there.

And so, that I’m not overly ideal — I’ll just add one other thing into this, which is what is driving, what is doubtless driving some of this, is not just closed-mindedness of professors. Because what we see, and what Will said about so many law professors in Crim not teaching rape law — that’s because of their student evaluations. They know they are going to be raked over the coals in their student teaching evaluations, which are — because they are outsourcing to definitionally non-experts in the field — a per se violation of academic freedom. And that’s something that we should be thinking about as well. We have studies that say that we all get punished for deviating too far from the political views of our students in either direction. And so that’s a real constraining force, then, on what people are teaching, and one that has to be acknowledged.

Jon Shields: Yeah, so the question about, do we look at this over time — the answer is no, for a couple reasons. One, it’s just sort of hard to do the kind of analysis we did given the constraints of the website. But the other — additionally, most of the syllabi are fairly recent, from the last 10 years or so. One thing we really wanted to do but couldn’t do is look at the age of the professors. I mean, our working hypothesis is, it may be that there’s — that that’s relevant, that older professors tend to be, you know, somewhat less in the activist-scholar mold. And so you might have found, for example, that they’re better at teaching, you know, the broader controversy than younger professors. But again, we weren’t able to do that.

Steven Brint: So we’re gonna have to end it there. Let’s thank Jon, Will, and Brian.

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John Tomasi: Cass Sunstein, welcome to this special edition of Heterodox Out Loud and Heterodox Academy. So thanks for being here.

Cass Sunstein: A pleasure and an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.

Tomasi: So let’s just jump into this. You know, the sequence of events that led us to this conversation was this beautiful Substack piece you posted on April 22nd, which a bunch of us read immediately and with great interest. It was called “Viewpoint Diversity,” which caught our attention, of course, at Heterodox Academy. And you did two things that really struck me. One, you said early on in that piece that this is an issue in which you admitted, with your normal, classic humility, in which you see through the glass only darkly. And yet you also wanted to tell a love story, as you described it, about something you experienced as a professor at the University of Chicago in the 1980s. Something that may illuminate our thinking about what viewpoint diversity is. Would you mind for our audience just saying a bit about the love story, about what it was you saw at Chicago in those days before we dive into the more conceptual questions?

Sunstein: Sure. So as a young, you know, Harvard grad, I went to Chicago and there was Richard Posner, who was awe-inspiring and definitely right of center, and a law and economics kind of guy who was skeptical about rent control and maximum hour laws and didn’t much like an active Supreme Court. Left-of-center shibboleths were to him, you know, embarrassing and kind of thin. Then there was Richard Epstein, who was like a volcano. And he was a libertarian. He was as quick a mind as I had ever encountered. He was funny. He was full of life. He thought Posner was completely wrong in his embrace of utilitarianism, or maybe fundamentally but not completely wrong, because he had a rights-oriented view of how to think about things.

Shortly after I joined Chicago, Michael McConnell, who was and is a social conservative, joined the faculty, who believed, you know, Burke was on the right track on many things. And the Supreme Court on religious issues in particular had gone off the rails in a way that was unfaithful to our constitutional tradition and in some ways contemptuous of religion. And I’m just referring to three. There was also, by the way, Antonin Scalia and David Currie, and they were writing a casebook together. People know the name Scalia. Currie is in my eyes a giant, and they were both originalists. And Scalia thought the Constitution should be understood to mean what the public meaning was at the time of ratification. And Currie thought the same thing. Now, Currie in his politics was kind of a Democrat, and Scalia in his politics was more than kind of a Republican, but they shared originalism.

And for me, these were just sunbursts. You know, the libertarian view of life, to encounter it on the part of someone who was, you know, full of intellectual fire, that was new to me, at least at that degree of proximity as an adult. To see someone who was an economics-oriented utilitarian, that was new. And originalism hadn’t been on my view screen, though I’d clerked for the Supreme Court of the United States and graduated from Harvard Law School. And it was just like, you know, a celebration in a way that was hard but thrilling, of thinking. And I almost said a word like combat, but it’s not right because everyone was trying to figure out what was true. So it wasn’t like trying to win, though of course people with different views would try to win. But figuring out, you know, was Posner right about the minimum wage law? That was really interesting. And is Epstein right? He developed thoughts about property rights. You know, I tended to think not, but I was keenly interested and learned a ton from his view of property rights.

Tomasi: That’s all fascinating. There’s so many pieces in there of interest. One that just struck me in the way you described it just now is, you used the word proximity. That there’s something about you as an adult being in proximity to these diverse thinkers that struck you. But, you know, an outsider would probably say that in the 1980s at Chicago, well, certainly in the economics department, there was something like a Chicago School, which in many people’s minds represents the idea that to some degree of conformity, at least about methods or baseline assumptions, can help advance scholarship in intensified ways. And one view of viewpoint diversity is that having pockets of intensity is all we need, as long as there are many different pockets. But what you’re describing is a kind of ecosystem that itself, because of proximity, had what you called a love song. Do you want to say anything about that?

Sunstein: Yeah, completely. Thank you for that. And this is a fantastic point that the Chicago School, which was amazing, had proximate people who had a great overlap in their views. So we wouldn’t say that the Chicago School of Economics was defined by viewpoint diversity, though it certainly added a ton of viewpoint diversity to the stock of knowledge. At Chicago, at the time, there was proximity among members of the Chicago School, and people at Chicago, who thought the Chicago School was fundamentally wrong. So I got interested in behavioral economics, and Richard Thaler came to, guess where, Chicago. And both of us thought the rationality assumption wasn’t right. I certainly, and I’m sure Thaler would say the same, had untold admiration for the Chicago School and learned a lot, but thought that they were, on important matters, wrong. And engaging with them was essential to what’s good in behavioral economics. And Gary Becker, who was maybe the mind with the greatest integrity I’ve ever met, he was just so curious and he wanted to know what’s the evidence. And he with some mildness but ferocity too, said in response to anything, what’s the evidence? And that kind of got under my skin.

Tomasi: Interesting.

Sunstein: In a good way. And so Becker was maybe defining in some ways of the Chicago School, but in response to anything, he would not say, you’re wrong. He’d say, what’s your evidence? And then there’d be a discussion. So we can think of Becker as incarnating openness to the force of argument, even as he was part of a school which he wasn’t at all ambivalent about.

Tomasi: Interesting. So maybe we could say, and that’s extremely interesting, maybe we could say, just as a marker for now, there’s some questions about the units within which we want to see viewpoint diversity, or the universe or perhaps the units across which we want to see viewpoint diversity, that we haven’t yet settled and may not in this conversation. But if we’re going to develop a clearer understanding of VPD, we’d want to know things about Chicago School styles pushing through together. Different departments doing the same things perhaps at one university. But there’s something about that proximity point that you made that seems really striking, I think, to me certainly, in the face of that need to push through with a methodological group. So let’s just maybe we just mark that as something maybe we’ll come back to in this conversation.

I’d like to move to, I want to move to kind of, as it were, the big questions. And this is like the big stone that I think once you push it over, things start to roll. And that’s what I sometimes call the great fact. And the great fact is just about the viewpoint diversity, the change in viewpoint diversity among the professoriate over the past thirty and forty years. So the great fact can be stated in different ways, but the fact says something like this. In the ‘80s, when you were at Chicago, the ratio of left to right leaning professors across the country was about two to one. By the 2010s, that ratio of left to right was about five to one, six to one. Currently it’s even steeper than that. And if you break out into certain subfields or some areas like humanities and social sciences, we find greater imbalances.

Sam Abrams has done, I think, some just really seminal work showing us that, making that data point a little more sophisticated because he points out that geography matters a lot. So it turns out, according to Sam’s data, that if you focus on New England, you find that the ratio is always, even in the ‘80s, about 26 to 1. Sorry, was about five to one, forgive me, about five to one in the 1980s in New England. And now it’s about 30 to 1. So there’s going to be geographic things that are going to make the great fact more complicated.

But I mentioned the great fact, I’m playing as some of you probably know on Deirdre McCloskey’s idea that the great fact in economic history is the fact of the hockey stick theory of growth. This GDP change happened, and that change requires an explanation. And so my question finally to you is some kind of change, significant change, in the breadth of the ideological orientations of the professoriate has occurred over the past 30 years. We can describe that fact in different ways, of course. But that great fact, that delta, that change seems to require some kind of explanation, as it does in economics. Do you want to give us your first thoughts about that? When you see that fact or hear that fact, the great fact in this area, what do you think? What’s your first reaction?

Sunstein: Well, it’s alarming. That’s a normative point. On the empirics, I want to know whether people who are interested in academic life have become disproportionately left of center recently compared to the ‘70s. So I want to ask: are the people who are right of center and amazing thinking that academic life isn’t for them and why would that be? Or are people coming in as assistant professors or graduate students moving to the left? And is that because of faculty inclinations or something? Or is it because of some more general split among super-educated people and the rest of the country, which has an ideological component?

So I would wonder about hypotheses. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you took a pool of people who want to be academics in, let’s say, 2018 and compared them with those in say 1978. And it turned out that those in 2018 are just much more left-leaning. I’d be keenly interested to see whether that’s the case. Now that would itself need explanation. Is it that people who are right of center are thinking, you know, the educational life is boring, or it’s not dynamic enough, or the economic options are not promising. These are the things I’d wonder about.

Tomasi: Yeah, thank you. So there’s a report that we’ll put in the chat that HxA has done looking at all the reports and analyzing the strength and weaknesses of them, and although there’s been so many reports through the years about this question about the ideological orientation and how you define what the ideologies are and more. And one of our most general findings in our report is that studies that show the greatest imbalances are often the least methodologically sophisticated. But nonetheless, those that are sophisticated show a very significant delta from the ‘80s, say, till now.

And as you say, I put it a little bit differently but I like the way you put it. I would say it this way, that about the two to one ratio in the ‘80s, you know, there’s no obvious answer as to what the correct ratio should be in a free society. People choose different kinds of professions, being priests, being plumbers, being stockbrokers, being artists, being politicians, maybe being professors for all different kinds of reasons. And if we think the ideological differences are important, it’s probably because those ideologies reflect deep understandings of values that we want to see reflected. But those deep values might very well steer some people towards this profession and other people away from them. It’s almost like it’s a circle, right? We can’t fully escape from that. But there’s a big delta there. I love the way you ask those questions. That’s a whole bunch of social scientific research problems that our members in the audience and other people in the audience should be considering and perhaps undertaking.

I want to just continue with another question, if I may. Some people, when they hear the great fact, or some variation of the great fact, they react with alarm and they think that something like proportional political representation should be appropriate. There’s a simplified version of that that I think I’ve already said enough to throw some doubt on. But there are more sophisticated versions of the proportional political representation. This is a normative claim about what the ratio should be, they should be roughly proportional or something like that. And a more sophisticated version of that says something like, well, whatever the natural number might be, just whatever the natural distribution might be, in a free democratic society, where there’s public funding for universities, there’s some kind of matter of fairness, like democratic fairness, that universities have some kind of correct balance on representation. And the idea is that universities have a special role to play in educating citizens, and not just citizens, but the more power people like to be more powerful citizens in our democracy, people with greater voice. So that’s a more sophisticated version of the political representation view. Do you have any first thoughts about that? Can you make it stronger or weaker? Or what do you think of that?

Sunstein: I’m not excited about any version of proportional representation. So if a math department turned out to be, you know, 90% Republican and 10% Democrat, I wouldn’t be worried at all. If there’s a physics department that is, you know, without anyone who voted for a Democrat, that wouldn’t offhand be troubling in the least. I’d wonder more what’s actually happening in the classroom. So, let’s say in a Democratic-dominated biology department, they’re talking about how great Biden and Obama are, and how Bush was terrible and Reagan was terrible, that would be very troubling, mostly because they shouldn’t be talking about that in their course, given what their course is. Right.

So the proportional representation stuff, I think is a, it’s a first cut at something real. If you had a humanities department where the courses are all celebrating Marx, let’s say, and that we need to understand Shakespeare and Milton as either about class conflict or capitalist terribleness, that would be, I think, very bad for a number of reasons. Now, as an English major, I hope I’m not overstepping.

Tomasi: I didn’t know.

Sunstein: That isn’t a good thing to teach Shakespeare or Milton. But, you know, political indoctrination isn’t good and skewing isn’t good. So there are about five things not good about that. If at a law school people are saying that the Democratic appointees are just great and the Republican appointees are terrible, that’s not good teaching. So that’s a terrible disservice to the students. And I guess people are more likely to like the judges who align with their views. So a law school would be one where not proportional representation, but diversity of an ideological sort, I think, is essential. And that wouldn’t be true in a physics department. So it would be true with respect to physics, but a physics department needn’t have some people who voted for Sanders and some people who wish Ted Cruz were president. That wouldn’t be so important in the physics department. So I’m thinking that what’s actually happening in the classroom is what matters, and proportional, you know, political whatever is related to that, but isn’t that.

Tomasi: Nice. So I hear us putting another marker down. There’s a question: where does viewpoint diversity matter and where might it not matter? Or more we might say where does it matter most directly or most proximately and where might it not matter?

Sunstein: And with respect to what? So physics, there are forms of viewpoint diversity that are crucial, but they probably aren’t about whether the War Powers Resolution is constitutional.

Tomasi: No, I love that point. And I have dinner regularly with some professor friends who are computer scientists at Brown. And they say, yeah, viewpoint diversity, we’re really for that. You’re really right. Then they go off on these things I can barely understand when they explain the paradigms they want. But I think there’s another dimension now we’re adding, another marker, VPD of what? Because I describe the great fact because it’s such a, that’s the politicized fact, the politically charged fact about viewpoint diversity.

But the other great fact, I think, the same 50, 60 years of our universities have seen a tremendous increase in diversity in terms of identity diversity, gender and sex diversity particularly, but not only that. So there’s been a remarked increase. And we’ve seen some areas, some fields where the presence of African American voices, the presence of Palestinian and Arab voices, the open discussion, the open, we hope, conversations from Israeli voices, improves conversations. So again, there’s this question about where it matters, and there’s also a question again floating in the background, what exactly is it? I’m using the great fact to refer to ideological diversity because that’s so politically charged. Do you want to say anything about that?

Sunstein: So this is great. So one thing that Chicago in the ‘80s did was to put in doubt left-of-center shibboleths on the part of everyone, including left-of-center students and faculty. And that was good for many reasons. One reason is the left-of-center shibboleths might be wrong. Another is that lots of people don’t believe them, and it’s good to see other people who don’t believe them, so you understand what’s going on in your society. And a third is that the shibboleths, and this is John Stuart Mill’s point, become not a dead, like, you know, yeah, it’s not like the body snatchers, it’s like a living, and so that’s very good. And it could be that in some fields, you know, the belief that...

Tomasi: Yeah, dogma.

Sunstein: The New Deal was great and Johnson’s Great Society was great. Those are taken as like “dropped objects fall” and, “you kind of need oxygen,” but in my view they aren’t that. I tend to like the New Deal and the Great Society personally, but it’s not like dropped objects fall. And so intellectual diversity, viewpoint diversity is essential for those things. But in a psychology department, if people think Roosevelt was fantastic or Roosevelt was a demon, it probably wouldn’t matter unless they’re teaching that. And then they wouldn’t be teaching psychology.

Tomasi: Right. As you know, Bernard Schweizer and I have a new book that just came out on viewpoint diversity called Viewpoint Diversity. And we have some great contributors in there. It’s an edited volume of people puzzling about these issues, including some of your colleagues like Danielle Allen, other people, Yascha Mounk and others who think about these things. I wrote the first essay where I try to distinguish, I try to open up the stage, for the conversation by distinguishing two responses to the great fact. One, which I just mentioned, and I’ve already mentioned this, the idea that that’s a very worrying fact, and someone ought to do something about it. There ought to be a law, whatever it might be, proportional political representation or whatever. But the other approach that I described is what I call scholarly sanctification. And what I’m reaching for there is some idea of some way to understand the role of academic freedom in all of this.

And as you’ll know better than I, in the Sweezy v. New Hampshire case and some other cases, and not just cases, also in AAUP documents, is even more clear. There’s a principle about academic freedom that involves something like academic self-governance. And it’s based on the idea, I think, that whatever the ratio should be, or it should be determined by experts who have the specialized knowledge to know what excellence is. Therefore the professors should have some special powers to make their own choices one by one of what they count as excellence. And if the overall pattern emerges through time, turns out to lean one way rather than another way on some dimension of diversity, let’s say ideology, well, that’s just a consequence, the outcome is sanctified by the process because it’s scholarly. Do you have any thoughts about that view? I don’t know if that’s familiar to you. What do you think of the idea of academic freedom being able to override the proportionality people and dominate the decision about what ought to be right here?

Sunstein: I think a pox on both houses. I love your essay and I think you have that view, but I’ll say what I think. And the special powers idea makes me think of Spider-Noir, which is a new TV series, which I recommend, with Spider-Man and special powers, of course, as all Spider-Men do. Spider-Women also.

Two ideas. One is that the profession gets to set the right level of viewpoint diversity given its expertise. I think that’s too stark. You could have a profession that is in the grip of a view. You know, take your pick that capitalism is great and perfect and anything that intrudes on it is part of the road to serfdom. Let’s say this is Hayek University. And I’m a great admirer of Hayek, but that would be a disservice to students. Now if everyone thinks that, that’s very different from everyone both thinking that and proselytizing it.

So we could think that some places are now left and they’re like a mirror image of Hayek University, and the fact that they are specialists wouldn’t immunize them from external objection. So the professional sanctification view seems to me a little like Narcissus looking in the river and saying how beautiful.

A more technical thing, which is to say there’s academic freedom, which is either a legal thing, or whether or not legally protected is an ideal that we should observe so that even if institutions are screwy, they deserve to govern themselves. I don’t agree with that either. So there are some forms, some conceptions of academic freedom which are legitimate inferences from the First Amendment. So they do have a constitutional status. But the notion of academic freedom, as used in the discussion you’re pointing to, outruns the legal idea of academic freedom. So this is just a way of saying if there’s an institution that is very proud of its own standards and its standards are subject to an external objection, it’s the duty of the institution to defend its own standards against those objections. And what happens if the external authority, let’s say, has power, either because it’s wealthy or it’s the government. You know, it’s not clear what should happen. And the idea that the academic institution can claim academic freedom and just win by virtue of that is too simple.

Tomasi: And I’m interested that you just now in your final sentence used the word whether the institution can rely on academic freedom, which is one of the formulations in Sweezy, of course. But we also see departments wielding academic freedom and making choices that maybe led to this bigger delta, the great fact and the big delta dimensions. And those departments have some kind of claim to disciplinary authority. I think we both agree with that. They are the experts in that university about these things. I just wonder if we can say a little bit more about this idea about expertise and why it matters.

It seems to me that, well, I’d like to get your take. Universities have a truth-seeking mission, and administrators, or at least trustees, are fiduciaries to keep the university on whatever its defined institutional mission is. It often involves knowledge-seeking as a primary or the primary purpose, let’s say. But they have other purposes too, obviously. But is there a role for administrators who are not experts in disciplines to correct the trajectory of departments that, I’m not sure what the right word is here, have gone astray on viewpoint diversity? They’re not experts themselves, they’re administrators. But they do have this thing in view, the idea of the mission, I think, which may be different, the departments aren’t necessarily thinking mission, they’re thinking academic expertise. Can you do anything with that at all? I’m not putting this question very sharply, but it seems as though departments have disciplinary expertise and that gives them a claim to decide for themselves. What’s the role for administrators in all of this?

Sunstein: Okay, so I’ll tell you an analogy. When I was in the White House, I oversaw government regulation. And I had a team that was amazing and not partisan, and I learned a lot from them and from my experience. And then the president appointed a group of outside advisors who were concerned about over-regulation, and they didn’t have any legal authority, but they were kind of getting in our business. And our initial reaction, including mine, was: really? But then after some engagement, it was clear that the non-expert outsiders knew some things and had a perspective and a set of questions that was extremely valuable for the insiders to hear.

So if there’s an administrator, let’s say, who thinks that a political science department is disturbing its students and truth-seeking because it lacks viewpoint diversity, that’s a completely legitimate question for it to ask. And for the administrator to say, you know, we’re going to push hard in the direction of viewpoint diversity, whether it’s more rational actor models, whether it’s more people who are Burkean and traditionalists, whether it’s more people who are celebratory of traditions, that’s not an objectionable intrusion on academic freedom.

So I think we should be very cautious in all domains when people wield a large ideal in a way that is protecting their longstanding practices and their self-interest. It may be that the ideal is properly invoked for those purposes, but raised eyebrow. And here it’s hard to give a conception of the university such that the department would have immunity from external scrutiny on the part of those who run the university. Now we want a discussion here. So if the people who run the university are clueless and don’t understand the field, and saying in physics we need people who know that Newton had it right, and what followed Newton was completely wrong. So we need Newtonians. It’s going to be very hard to find them. Then the physicist can rightly say why it’s hard to find them because there aren’t any, and that’s because we know better than Newton did. And then the administrators should be inclined to back off. But these are fair discussions.

If in a history department it’s urged that, you know, they’re kind of Marxist and Foucauldian position people here and that’s not all of what history should be by any means. And we need people like, I’m going to mention two, maybe they won’t be familiar, Gordon Wood and Bernard Bailyn, who are very careful historians of the American Constitution and Revolution. We need more people like that. Then how a history department would have a convincing answer to that is, at least for this non-historian, mysterious.

Tomasi: Struck by your example of the physicists thinking about looking for Newtonians, and you said it may be hard to find them. As we know that people often make a parallel argument or claim about conservatives in the academy, it’s hard to find them. Maybe not for the same set of reasons, maybe for some other sets of reasons, but it does seem to be a parallel claim at least. And I just noticed something that you were doing, I think I was detecting this. And I do the same thing, so I’m with you on this, but I’m still not quite sure where it comes from exactly. I think there should be wider viewpoint diversity within the academy, within the fields where it matters, let’s say, on the ideological dimension. And I think it should more closely represent something like missing views on the right. But where does that directionality come from? Why do we think that? Is it the son of the proportional representation view coming back to haunt us? There’s something there, even though I don’t like that view, but there’s something.

Sunstein: This is a completely great question. So you could imagine a parallel world in which two people are having exactly the conversation you and I are having, and maybe they look exactly like us (this is science fictional), in which the impetus is for more viewpoint diversity on the left that we don’t have, and this is true in American law schools, people who think that, you know, communist China basically has it right, and people who think that Lenin is a hero and that Stalin was great, we don’t have anyone like that. And that’s a problem.

Tomasi: Right.

Sunstein: Yes, and people aren’t saying that. So, and there are people I’ve seen in the law school world, not a lot, but who emphasize that far-left views, let’s say, you know, critical race theory and feminism of a quite radical sort isn’t adequately represented. And you know, these are fair things to discuss for sure, but we’re not seeing in our world impetus for viewpoint diversity in the form of much more in the way of critical race theory and in the way of much more people who follow Andrea Dworkin, let’s say.

Tomasi: That’s nice.

Sunstein: So the people who are urging viewpoint diversity, at least in Washington, aren’t saying, where are the Andrea Dworkins? And why aren’t you talking more about intersectionality? I can say that I haven’t heard a student in my entire career, I don’t think, refer to intersectionality. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that. And I’ve hardly ever heard, not never, a faculty member refer to intersectionality, though it’s a very prominent idea by a very prominent professor. So is that a problem?

I think the only way to think about this, you can’t avoid something either about the distribution of views that are out there or something normative about what is a reasonable distribution of views. So I’m thinking in my own field, law, I’m in favor, at various institutions that are to the left, of getting more conservatives. And that’s not hard, by the way. There are amazing conservatives in high numbers in law. Why I’m in favor of that? I think a combination of two things. One is if you don’t have people who think kind of along the lines of the majority of the current Supreme Court, that’s a big problem for the academic institutions, not students. And the other thing I think is that the American conservatives in law schools, they have a lot that’s either correct or productive to discuss. And the first points to something in the direction of the proportional, but it has more pragmatism that even if the majority of the Supreme Court were full of complete nonsense, lawyers need to have people who sympathetically engage with that, and one needs to.

Tomasi: Thank you. We’re going to go to the Q&A. So this is a question about your work on the effects of the internet and social media. Do you have any thoughts about how social media’s changed academic life? And take the question as you like.

Sunstein: I’m going to be very narrow here, meaning just the little slice of academic life that I see, not a whole lot. So social media has changed life, but not a whole lot of academic life, at least in the mostly law school world that I occupy.

Tomasi: I can’t resist adding to that that I was at a dinner recently at Vanderbilt and I was sitting with some faculty members there, and I was stunned to hear a German intellectual historian make the claim, to me startling claim, that AI is at the point where it’s doing German intellectual history at a level that’s close to what he and his colleagues do. I’m just mentioning that as a possibly interesting fact or take it for what it is.

Do you have another question for us? If you haven’t put one in, this is your chance. So another question: is there evidence (thank you for asking an evidence question), that in order to expose students to a sufficient variety of views, the faculty must truly hold that variety of viewpoints? This is a classic, difficult question. One can at least imagine that a great teacher can teach multiple viewpoints, even ones differing radically from their own. And I’ll add that the AAUP in the 1915 statement talks about the responsibilities we have to teach in ways that allow people to be liberated rather than controlled. But this person’s asking, is there something about, do faculty need to truly hold the views? Have you ever thought about that?

Sunstein: Well, John Stuart Mill thought that the person really needs to hold the view. But it’s an empirical question, as the audience member suggests. And you need a randomized controlled trial, and we need to know who are the actors in the randomized controlled trial. It’s easily imaginable that if you have a faculty member who, let’s say, is left of center, but is fairly and sincerely putting right-of-center views in their best light, that could be better than a right-of-center faculty member who’s just a poor teacher or not that articulate. So we need to know what exactly we’re holding constant.

The great fact, as you mentioned, I myself do find alarming, but I think it’s only like a first-order entry into the problem. Because if you have a bunch of people who are in an ideologically inflected, let’s say, classroom, but they don’t teach it in an ideologically inflected way, it might be just fine.

Tomasi: Yeah, it might be, and if we pushed on that “might,” I’m really struck by some work by one of our colleagues at HxA, Musa al-Gharbi. And Musa looks at just this, the fact that we’re human in these really deep ways and that biases are part of our nature. Your colleague, Steve Pinker, makes this point really, really eloquently as well. And so I wonder in response to this question, and it’s the Mill point to some degree, that even if we do our best to try to see the other views differently, there’s a reason why we hold the views we do. There’s a reason why, in some all-things-considered I hope way, we come to the conclusions we have. And that might give us certain blind spots despite ourselves. Steve Pinker talks about scholarship being an unnatural practice. And I kind of think that’s right. It’s easy to say we’re open-minded, but to actually be open-minded, I don’t know. I wish we could do that. I’m just not sure humans can.

Sunstein: It’s an empirical question. But I agree with that. For someone who, let’s say, thinks that Justice Kagan is right and Justice Thomas is always wrong or almost always wrong, to teach Justice Thomas in a sympathetic way that would convey the best version of what Justice Thomas thinks, that would be much harder than someone who actually agrees with Justice Thomas. So I agree with you, but it’s a really great empirical question.

Tomasi: Yeah, and this is a great question. I just want to say one more thing about it. Perhaps there’s a test in something about the efficacy of our research taking by its own standards. So people talk about the replication crisis in social science. And some people think the replication crisis is perhaps partially caused by something having gone wrong with our framing and with our inability to be sufficiently self-critical of ourselves. By ourselves, I mean social science of the last 30 years. So maybe there’s some external test in the quality of research that comes out that might bear on this empirical question too, though I’m not quite sure how we get to that.

Here’s another issue. Cass, you said in your piece a couple of weeks ago that started this whole conversation that we were looking through a glass darkly. Here we go again. How do we ascertain what people’s views actually are? Is it possible for a spiral of silence to be at play across many departments where people are reluctant to voice views that are in opposition to the majority? And you’ve had some colleagues at Harvard and there are others, all of us who are professors have had this experience at universities, I think, in recent years where some people say things quietly, but they won’t say them out loud. And that obviously is not what a university should be. Do you want to say anything about this idea of a spiral of silence, either from your experience or theoretically as you like?

Sunstein: Yeah. So we know that people self-silence because of perceived convictions on the part of others. We have a lot of data on that, that in Saudi Arabia, young men are reluctant to say that they’re fine with their wives working outside of the home unless they’re informed that other young men think that, in which case they say, well, me too. And then you see more women working outside of the home because young men know that other young men think it’s fine. And interesting: there’s a whole literature on preference falsification, and what undoes it completely.

I think DEI is something that many faculty members have been ambivalent about, at least in certain forms. They’re certainly in favor of hiring people who are demographically diverse, but the emphasis on DEI or the incarnation of DEI is something that many faculty members have been more skeptical of than they’ve been willing to say. And that’s an example.

So I think the numbers, John, that you gave about people being more left than right and the proportions growing, it would be surprising if that were a product of people right of center giving a false answer to an interviewer. But there’s undoubtedly much more sympathy with, let’s say, unpopular views of various sorts than is visible because people don’t want to make other people think less of them.

Tomasi: Let’s pause on that DEI point you just made a moment more, because it goes to this question about what the role of administrators might be or should be. And with DEI, when DEI came in at Brown, I happened to be chairing a search committee with the philosophy department where we were looking at some candidates as we always had done in the past. It was a joint search between my unit, a center, and the philosophy department. And I remember we were all sort of surprised when we were now finding that we faculty members, that there was this other committee somewhere, an administrative body, screening through our applicant decisions. And we were quite alarmed for our academic freedom.

But I’m just wondering if I could push on this now a little bit with Harvard. Harvard’s been in the news, a great deal, in the Crimson recently, that a lot of us have been talking about. I want to ask, I won’t ask you about the details of the piece, but the general idea is that Harvard’s administration is making some push in perhaps the viewpoint diversity direction, perhaps creating an initiative to advance free inquiry which may involve faculty positions. There’s some, that article talks about the government department having two searches despite the hiring freeze across the university, where the searches are encouraged to find people who broaden the intellectual range in the government department. Do you have any thoughts about the administration getting involved in increasing viewpoint diversity? Is it like DEI?

Sunstein: This is such a great question. So I once asked a faculty member at Chicago, and I’m not going to out him, very, very conservative, what he thought of affirmative action. And he said, a little. He wants a little. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, a little. It was a great exchange.

And his view, which I think is approximately right, I mean, in principle, let’s say you can’t do it under the law, because we’re colorblind under this recent decision. But in principle, the view that he was stating was, you know, if you have a female or African American applicant, you notice that. That’s not a negative, something like that. Now you’re not going to have your standards lowered, but you understand it and you’re for it. Now that’s illicit now. And there we are. So race neutrality is the law of the land, and everyone should follow the law of the land. Exclamation point.

With respect to, I’ll just tell you my own view about law schools, which is if you have a left-of-center law school, it’s appropriate to search for people if it’s disproportionately, let’s say you don’t have anyone who thinks that, you know, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas is admirable substantively as well as admirable because of other things. You should try to get people who are conservative. I think that’s completely right. So I’m for that, both for the department and for the administration to urge it. Now you don’t want to hire someone who’s, you know, a terrible teacher or a terrible scholar, but there are many people who admire and agree with Scalia and Thomas who are amazing teachers and scholars.

Tomasi: In the case of, can I just note in the case of law schools, there again seems to be something like proportional representation at play because there’s some external standard that we look to to think what excellence in legal education might be.

Sunstein: Kind of with your article here, so the Scalia view of law, let’s just describe it crudely as textualism and original public meaning, that’s within the range of reasonable views. And there’s some people who don’t agree with that. I think the view that it’s not within the range of reasonable views is very hard to defend. And so then we’re golden. If it’s not within the range of reasonable views, then, and this is to your point, I’m still for it, on the ground that it’s a foundational part of our legal culture. And if people don’t see people who hold that view, then the educational enterprise is compromised. Now that’s not about just seeing what’s the range of views in America and tracking them.

It’s a little bit like let’s say there’s a practice of medicine, which is thought by people at a relevant medical school to be not state of the art, but it’s what everyone’s doing. You need to teach your students what it is and why they’re doing it, even if the instructor, because they want to save lives, reflects his or her own judgment, that’s not the way to go. With humility.

Tomasi: And that’s, and you and I both know, I’m attracted to a line like that, as you know. The challenge to it, I’m afraid, is something though that universities are aiming at knowledge, not public opinion polls. We try to, we hope for there being some consensus. We shouldn’t be surprised if there was consensus on some topics. So it’s an interesting twist that we’re faced in it within the academy.

Sunstein: Much more comfortable on the Scalia and Thomas view, saying both that the view is not unreasonable, even if it’s wrong, and that lawyers have to know it because it’s represented on the Supreme Court. If you only have the second and not the first, it gets harder. And it might be distinctive to the area of law that lawyers have to know what the Supreme Court thinks in a way that is attentive to the most sympathetic version of it. And I don’t know what the parallels are in history or physics or biology.

Tomasi: And there might not be parallels, but that’s part of the puzzle, perhaps. I wonder if we could take one more question. I know there’s so many questions from the audience. Thank you for these great points. So Cass, this is a question directly to you. You’ve long pointed to the dynamic of polarization to explain consensus in judicial decisions. Do you think that group polarization can explain the relatively extreme version of identity politics that dominates contemporary university campuses? Do you want to apply some of your previous thinking to this?

Sunstein: I want to, yes, I will, but with your indulgence, I’ll say that the educational institutions I know are not dominated by identity politics. So I was just at Duke and it wasn’t dominated by identity politics. Harvard Law School isn’t dominated by identity politics. I’m not seeing a domination by identity politics. It’s not like it’s Voldemort or Harry Potter and it’s taken. Maybe it’s the Jedi, maybe it’s this, I’m not seeing it. Chicago certainly not. So I think the availability heuristic, which is we think things are more probable if they readily come to mind, is behind the widespread judgment that identity politics is dominating contemporary university campuses. But it might be I just don’t know enough about university campuses and I’ve got my facts wrong.

Notwithstanding that, group polarization is really important, where if people go to an extreme view, let’s say identity politics or, you know, Chicago School economics or whatever, group polarization is typically a factor where if John, you and I and five other people are talking about something we tend to agree on, let’s say the amazingness of Olivia Rodrigo, and I hope you agree on that.

Tomasi: Of course.

Sunstein: She’s even more amazing even than I thought seconds ago, because you think it. And now we’re a group polarization machine. She’s even better than Bob Dylan. But she isn’t.

Tomasi: We have only a couple minutes left. I want to share with the audience that when you and I were talking before we came on this conversation to say that one of our hopes for this conversation is that we can open up some questions that people in the audience will pursue. We think as a democratic matter, we need to have a better understanding of viewpoint diversity than we do currently. Would you care to have the last word, Cass, and say a few things about what you think the stakes are in this conversation and how it might move forward?

Sunstein: Okay, really high. Thank you for that. So one thing I love about the topic and this discussion is that, reading you and reading others, I think some things are clear. Which is that the view that existing institutions get to define the right level of viewpoint diversity, that’s very hard to sustain. The view that we should mimic the distribution of views, let’s say within the relevant geographic area, that’s also very hard to defend. The view that an institution that’s dominated by, let’s say, left-of-center, right-of-center views as a problem and there’s explaining to do there’s explaining to do? That’s clear. There’s urgency in knowing what’s not a good practice. And I think we’ve made a lot of progress, that is, you have, and our country has in the last 10 years in understanding what’s not a good practice. And there’s also urgency in getting the right conception of viewpoint discrimination out there. I don’t have it in my own mind yet.

Still, to know what is a problem that needs improvement is essential for our students and our country’s well-being. Because take your preferred field, whether it’s philosophy or history or law or biology, we’re not going to progress enough and we’re not going to serve our citizenry unless we have a range of views that are productive of better knowledge.

Tomasi: Cass, thank you so much for taking this time to come on the show this afternoon. To all of you in the audience, thank you for joining us. Go to HxA if you’re not a member, if you’re a professor or work in an academy or not a member, please look at our materials, consider joining us. Our members direct what we do, they help us decide what we think because we’re a thinking organization. We need more smart people to join us. We’re always looking for more people. So please join us, help us, improve us, make us better, make us your own. Thanks again, Cass, and thanks to all of you for coming.

Sunstein: Thanks, everybody.

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What I want to do with this time that I have is make the argument that it would be a good thing to have a conservative sociology. And ultimately, this is a sociology of knowledge argument that if the problem we have is progressive skew that is hindering insight in sociology, then a conservative sociology would be the most direct way to address that skew to enhance insight and ultimately strengthen the discipline. And I realize this could be an unpalatable conclusion to many people in no small part because it may sound as if I’m advocating more politics and more ideology in sociology when in fact what we need is less. That’s ultimately not my position and I hope that is clear in this presentation. But the way that I want to proceed is by laying out four premises from which I think my conclusion about a conservative sociology will follow quite naturally.

The first premise I want to offer is that values irreducibly shape research and this isn’t something that can be avoided. Values cannot be purged. Now to be clear, they don’t determine conclusions but they do shape them in various ways. And this will be true even if we rigorously adhere to scientific standards and follow theory and method. Values still enter in at various places.

First and maybe most importantly, values shape what kinds of questions that we ask in the first place. And social reality is infinite and complex. There’s literally an infinity of questions we could ask, phenomena we could explore. And when we choose to study something, we’re doing that to the exclusion of everything else that we might have examined. And this I think is irreducibly a value judgment that this thing is more important than all the other things. And some really brief examples of this. A very large literature, especially after 2016, asking why did people vote for Donald Trump? There was not a comparably large literature asking why did people vote for Hillary Clinton? I think this would be an example of a value kind of encoded in sociology. Or there’s a dearth of study of military sociology, despite the military being a major social institution of a lot of consequence. We could come up with many other examples.

Values further shape how we develop our concepts, label them, relate them to each other. And again, a minor example, if you take the General Social Survey questions about gender roles and Likert scales about the statement that most men are better suited emotionally for politics than women, or a preschool child is likely to suffer if his or her mother works. This is often rolled into a scale. And I’ve seen this scale sometimes labeled the sexism scale, sometimes labeled a gender traditionalism scale. Exact same empirical reference, but the way you choose to label it reflects a value commitment and will do some kind of theoretical work.

Within the research process, there are a number of decisions that we make that are not clearly determined by theory and method. I would use quantitative examples based on my training. So how do you code things? How do you categorize? What do you control for? Often this reduces to a judgment you have to make as a researcher. Qualitative research will have different decision points, but a similar underlying principle.

And finally, maybe second most importantly after the question we choose to ask is how do we interpret our results? And this is a philosophy of science point that any given empirical pattern could be explained by multiple theories, could support multiple conclusions plausibly. So whichever conclusion we choose to privilege will ultimately reflect some kind of value judgment. And again, an example, if you have a finding of a racial disparity of out-of-school suspension rates, do you explain that in terms of bias and discrimination, or do you explain it in terms of cultural or behavioral differences that correlate with racial identity? Whichever conclusion you privilege, that also will be a value judgment.

And so values enter the research process in various ways, and in this sense we should view them as partially constitutive of the research process, only partially, but they are part of it. We shouldn’t think of them as contaminants, but rather something that’s making up part of our conclusions. And people are suspicious of values, but if I say research involves a lot of acts of judgment or of research or creativity, we would tend to accept this, and I would argue values operate in a similar space.

The values that operate, there may be overlap between the values that inform our scholarship and our politics. That wouldn’t be that surprising, particularly in a discipline like sociology where there’s built-in content overlap. And values operate not just at the individual level to us as researchers, but also for the collective level.

Now, lest you suspect me of advocating for some kind of postmodernism here, let the stern visage of Max Weber put that idea to rest. I’m certainly not suggesting that everything is political, that there is no truth, that we should not be constrained by logic and empirics or anything to that effect. It’s a matter of recognizing where values fit in and what they do with our research. I think what I’m arguing is perfectly consistent with Weber’s concept of value neutrality. And the key distinction that needs to be drawn here I think is not between science and values but rather between science and politics, which we should view as fundamentally different activities with different goals and different rules. And this premise is important just to establish that you could have a conservative sociology that does not cross the line from scholarship into politics.

My second premise here is that values can undermine science when they get encoded into a closed paradigm. And it’s easiest to make this point maybe by contrasting it with its ideal. So ideally you might have a community of social scientists that has a shared commitment to rigor, shared standards of theory and evidence, but you have diverse people with different values and different perspectives they bring to a topic. So if researcher A conducts a study, and maybe quite a rigorous study, at various decision points, then they made decisions that were reflective of one set of values. Researcher B might have similar social scientific commitments, but a different set of values, and so they may then critique researcher A saying, I think they shouldn’t have made all these decisions. I’m going to conduct my own study where I make these decisions differently, and then afterwards you can compare the results, hopefully arrive at some kind of synthesis. And this is what’s supposed to happen. This is how science ultimately advances. And this is basically articulating the Mertonian norms of communality and organized skepticism needed for effective science.

Now the opposite of that is a situation where values become so deeply encoded in a research program that they systematically push our conclusions in one direction when other directions may have been equally available and possible. And ultimately their influence becomes standard, tacit, and maybe unrecognized or uncontestable. So questions about a phenomenon are always framed in the same direction. Internal research decisions always push us toward one conclusion rather than another. In any given empirical pattern, some conclusions are consistently favored even when others would be equally consistent with the data. And this builds on itself to the point where you don’t even know how to conceptualize how it could be otherwise. And this becomes what I call a closed research paradigm where inquiry is systematically narrowed or distorted in certain ways.

And this could take a couple of different forms. I’ll just give some examples. So you can get systematic distortions in bodies of knowledge because you examine one part of a phenomenon and ignore the other parts. I think research on white evangelicals in the past 10 years or so would be an example of this. There’s a tremendous amount of research focusing on authoritarianism or patriarchy or ethnocentrism among white evangelicals, and a dearth of research on aspects of white evangelical culture that might foster social cohesion or well-functioning families or more positive aspects. And so the overall picture you would get of the phenomenon is quite distorted even if maybe most of the individual studies might be reasonably sound, but the body of knowledge is not.

Another form of closed paradigm to take is when, and this is perhaps even more serious, when your theoretical framework is set up in a way that you’re consistently steered toward one conclusion and diverted from the others, or maybe others are foreclosed at the outset. And a very good example of this that has been addressed effectively by some heterodox members, John Iceland, Eric Silver, Ilana Redstone have all written about this, is the theory of structural racism. And so you have the phenomenon and you ask, why do we have racial disparities on various outcomes? And the answer we’re given is structural racism. You ask, what is structural racism? It’s like, well, it’s the processes that perpetuate the disparities in different outcomes. And so you have a fundamentally circular explanation that doesn’t really explain anything. It just kind of steers you back to the same focus while cutting out other possible explanations. And so this has been explored, as I said, quite effectively in other work and would apply to other research areas as well.

These closed research paradigms are maintained through various processes. There’s just moral enforcement. I think we’ve seen especially in the past few years where people just get angry at you if you question the existing paradigms. There can be an appeal to precedent where people say, you can’t make that argument because the existing literature doesn’t support it, notwithstanding the existing literature being the problem you want to address. And so in various ways, then these get perpetuated. And importantly, once a set of values is encoded under a research paradigm, it exists independently of the researchers themselves. So for example, even researchers without a progressive value system may keep using a survey scale that encodes those values just because it’s standard within their area of research. And so this is when we can have a problem.

Premise three, I won’t spend a great deal of time on because we’re largely aware of it, whether or not you accept the claim, you at least have heard it, and it’s common within Heterodox Academy, but that sociology currently operates under a closed progressive paradigm. And I recognize that’s a very broad statement. We could qualify it and say it applies more to some subfields than others or some journals or some departments, et cetera. And I would certainly agree with that. But we do see it in a great many subfields and arguably we also see evidence of this in the mainstream of the discipline. And this is what Chris Smith in The Sacred Project of American Sociology argues. This is something that’s come up in critiques of the conference themes in ASA in recent years. So this does seem to be a fairly pervasive phenomenon, even if it’s not an absolute phenomenon.

Now premise four here and my final premise is that the way you challenge a closed paradigm is to try and open it up via challenges from a competing paradigm. And this competing paradigm has to reflect an opposing set of values from whatever the dominant one is. I’ll break this down into two pieces as they’re both important, the opposing values and the competing paradigm.

So first of all, why the need for opposing values? If you want to challenge the existing paradigm, you have to have the perspective to be able to see what’s wrong with it. And this is also a philosophy of science point. I’ve been influenced by Helen Longino here. You have to have the perspective to be able to see the problems and articulate what they are, which can be difficult once they are deeply embedded and just kind of tacit within a program. So to go back to my earlier example of a white evangelical, supposing you come from a white evangelical background and you might be very familiar with that subculture. And then you enter sociology and you read the research literature on it and you think, this literature is really not describing my observation and experience with this phenomenon. And I find it objectionable in various ways. It’s like, well, you have a perspective, a body of knowledge that might allow you to articulate and challenge what the problem is and say, we need to look at these other explanations. We need to work in this body of evidence that has been neglected, etc.

Secondly, you need a value commitment at the level of motivation. You know, challenging a reigning paradigm is a difficult thing to do. It takes a lot of scholarly labor, theoretical and empirical work to be able to mount the challenge. It can be professionally risky. Doors may close on you. It’s really much easier to operate within an existing paradigm and then find your niche within that. And so it likely requires some kind of value-based motivation to want to make the sacrifice and take the risk to be able to mount a challenge.

However, it is not sufficient merely to have an opposing set of values or even to be able to see the problems with the existing paradigm. You ultimately have to be able to provide an alternative to truly challenge it. It might be fine if based on your white evangelical background, you can see problems with the literature, but unless you can articulate those in a social scientific language and framework and a pathway, then it’s just going to fall on deaf ears. And by their nature, paradigms don’t easily allow for critique. And just critiquing a paradigm, my observation is that it often proves to be ineffective. You can write a critique of a research program or a research agenda and explain everything that’s wrong with it. But even if your critique is quite effective and people accept it as being effective, it often tends to fall on deaf ears unless you can tell people, well, here’s what you should be doing instead. And so you have to be able to offer new lines of inquiry, theories, practices, evidence to pay attention to, introduce new solvable problems that will actually make your critique actionable. And if it’s both actionable and compelling, then maybe you can actually change the direction of the research. I won’t get into the details of the example, but you may be familiar with the debate on the psychology of morality between Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan from, I think the ‘80s, when this happened. This is a good example to me of a case where you have a clash of paradigms that ultimately proved to be fruitful in advancing explanation.

So these are my four premises, and having laid these out, I think it follows very naturally to my original conclusion that sociology would benefit from a conservative paradigm, one that observes Merton’s norms and Weber’s principle of value neutrality. And this establishment would help us explicitly identify and challenge progressive assumptions, open up new avenues of inquiry, create a fuller picture of social reality. And ultimately the purpose wouldn’t be to destroy or replace a progressive paradigm, which I don’t think would be possible anyway, but perhaps to sharpen it, balance it out, and in the long term achieve some kind of synthetic insights.

So I thank you all. If you want to consult a fuller version of this argument, then you can look at my article in Theory and Society from a few months back. Thank you again, and I look forward to the ensuing conversation from this event.

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What I want to talk about a little bit is the issue that really got me involved with Heterodox Academy in the first place. So one of the things that I became known for a little bit in my research is that during the 2016 election, I was kind of disturbed by the fact that pretty much all scholars and analysts and pundits were uniformly convinced basically that Trump would never win the Republican nomination. And then after he won the nomination, there was like two seconds where people were like, huh, I feel like we should learn something from this. But then the second that Hillary Clinton won the nomination, it was right back to, oh, it’s going to be a landslide, the Republicans are going to be destroyed for a generation, it’s a bloodbath, and so on. And then once again, we had one of the largest collective predictive failures in modern political history.

But rather than learning anything from that, what scholars often tried to do, the kind of vast preponderance of academic research that I encountered was basically scholars and journalists trying to pathologize the voters, to try to explain the electoral result by some kind of deficit or pathology that held among people who voted for Donald Trump. So almost nothing was learned from this. Rather than asking, well, what did we get wrong, what are we missing, what did we fail to understand, what’s wrong with some of our institutions, the kind of dominant question that researchers were asking, especially in my field and a lot of other adjacent fields, is basically, what’s wrong with normie Americans?

Okay, so before I get into the meat of the lecture, I want to start with a quick pop quiz. So here on the screen behind me, you see two lines. And you can see at this point in the series, they’re close together. And at this point in the time series, they’re further apart. If you had to explain to me which of these two lines shifted more to the left or the right, like which one is driving the growing gap between A and B, which one would you say?

Okay, great, great, great. So same thing again. So you have two lines that are further apart. They grow further apart over time. Which one’s responsible?

See, so the thing is, when you have the lines like this, in black and white with generic labels like A and B, no one has any problem at all understanding what’s going on in these graphs. But then this funny thing happens. When you start to color the lines red and blue, and you attach labels to them like Democrat and Republican, then all of a sudden, the thing that’s super obvious to anyone who just looks at the lines becomes almost impossible for a lot of people to see.

So that first chart that I showed you was from a political scientist, from an article called “What Happened to America’s Political Center of Gravity?” Now, what the chart visualizes is the Democrat and Republican Party platforms from 2000 to 2016. And so you can see that around the time Barack Obama was elected, the Democrat and Republican Party platforms were not actually very far apart. By 2016, they were very far apart. Well, what you can see when you look at the lines is, in the red line, there was kind of a mild polarization in 2012 before the party moderated under Donald Trump in 2016. And the reason that the lines are further apart was because starting in 2012, the Democratic Party shifted radically to the left, and they continued on that same trajectory through 2016. And so the lines are further apart than ever.

But of course, if you read this article called “What Happened to America’s Political Center of Gravity,” that is not the impression you’ll get. The impression you’ll get is that what happened to America’s political center of gravity is that Republicans went crazy.

One thing that’s critical to note is that this kind of wild shift that you see in the Democratic Party platform, in the words of Kamala Harris, “it didn’t fall out of a coconut tree.” Instead, what you see when you look at public opinion is that the Democratic Party was responding to changes in the Democratic base. So the Democratic base, starting in 2012, started shifting radically in a way that put them not just out of step with Republicans but also with independents. So the Democrats grew further apart from the median voter. So this is not a case where you have kind of regular Republicans and regular Democrats going radically apart from each other in kind of roughly equal ways. This is a case where you see a kind of radical shift on the blue line, a uniquely asymmetrical shift. And in fact, when you interrogate what’s going on with this blue line, it turns out that this isn’t just Democrats in general who shifted, but a very specific subset of Democrats who shifted even more extreme than that looks, to the point where they’re shifting the whole curve. But we’ll talk about that more soon.

So the second chart was from an article by another political scientist, Tom Wood, called “Racism Motivated Trump Voters More Than Authoritarianism.” Now before I get into the substance of the chart, I’ll just note that that’s a really interesting way of designing the study. So there’s this whole genre of studies that are structured this way where it’s like, basically, which negative trait best explains why someone voted for Donald Trump? Is it that they’re more racist or sexist or authoritarian? More on that in a moment.

So what the chart visualizes is it looks at Democrats’ and Republicans’ embrace of symbolically racist attitudes from 1988 to 2016. Symbolic racism, quick nutshell, is the idea, it used to be the case in polls and surveys, social scientists just asked Americans, do you like black people? Do you want black people to live in your neighborhood? Would you feel comfortable with someone in your family marrying a black person? And they would just say no. And then increasingly, people stopped saying no. And so the question was, is this a progress story, Americans becoming less racist? Or is it the case that people have just become less comfortable expressing racist attitudes, but the baseline levels of racism remain roughly the same, they’ve just become better at concealing their racist attitudes?

Most social scientists just largely assume that the latter is true, that in America there has been very little progress in terms of actual racism, that the main thing that’s happening is that people are just less likely to express their racism in a direct way. And so scales like this one are designed to try to measure this kind of latent hidden racism. Now there’s a bunch of problems with these scales, but let’s just set that to the side. Let’s just pretend like this chart measures racism.

Okay, so what you can see in this chart is that in 2016, when Trump was running, the gap between Democrats and Republicans on these racial attitude measures was bigger than any previous year. And on this basis, Wood argues, race must have played a bigger role in the 2016 election than in other cycles. So far, very reasonable inference. The problem is the next assumption he made. He said, so if race played a bigger role in this cycle than in previous elections, it must be that Trump voters are driven primarily by racism.

The problem with that narrative is that his own chart — he created this chart, I did not create this chart, this is his chart — what you can see is that on each and every one of these measures of symbolic racism, the red line is going down from 2012 to 2016. Which is to say his own chart shows that Romney voters were more racist than Trump voters. Trump voters are less racist than previous cohorts of Republicans. His own chart shows that. The reason why the gap is bigger is because starting between 2012 and 2016, there was this massive shift in the blue line. Democrats shifted radically. The Republican trend was towards convergence. So again, moderation — the reason the gap grew was because of these radical shifts in the blue line.

Democrats became less likely to endorse these symbolically racist attitudes in 2016 than in any previous year on record, less than when there was a black candidate from their own party, America’s first black president, Barack Obama. In fact, one thing I’ll just note parenthetically, for the years that Obama was on the ballot, Democrat endorsement of symbolic racism actually went up by a lot of those measures, which is really interesting, completely unanalyzed in the literature though, because we don’t actually analyze the blue line, we’re focused on the red line.

So one of the things that’s really interesting about the structure of this, like “which negative trait,” is that we don’t really analyze why people vote for Democrats at all, actually, much at all. It’s not even an interesting research question for most social scientists. Why would someone vote? It just seems to us obvious why someone would vote for Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, they’re the better candidate. But if someone did design a study asking, well, why would someone vote for Hillary Clinton, and the structure of the design was competing between a bunch of negatively valenced traits, like, why would someone vote for Hillary Clinton? Is it that they’re more communist, that they’re atheist, that they hate America? If you designed a study like that, by the way, you would absolutely 100% find, for instance, that if you reverse coded patriotism, it would be associated with votes for Democrats. You could absolutely design a study like this and find these kinds of things. But if anyone tried to do that, which negative trait explains why someone votes for Democrats, and tried to get that published in a peer-reviewed journal, it would be universally rejected, and for good reason. It’s a prejudicial study design. When you do things like this studying Trump, it’s just taken for granted as normal. There’s literally a whole genre, as I’ve shown in some of my other works.

Now, in fact, one of the exceptions, Julie Wronski and colleagues, looked at how authoritarianism, they studied authoritarian impulses looking at Democratic primary voters. So did supporters of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, were they more likely to be authoritarian? She found really interesting results. But this is an exception. As lots of other research shows, we just don’t really ask about Democrats very much. We don’t design a whole bunch of studies asking why people vote for Democrats. This is not a research question we ask.

More disturbing, even when we have. Like for instance, there are a whole bunch of studies that show a strong empirical association that goes back, that you see in almost all data sets, as far back as the empirical record goes, in every country that you study, that subjective well-being, feeling happy, fulfilled, content in life, is associated with conservative political leanings and religiosity. And there’s this whole genre of studies whose literal point is to pathologize wellness basically because conservatives come up higher on subjective well-being. We design whole studies that basically argue, well sure, conservatives are happier, but that’s just because they suck. Like if they were decent people who actually knew stuff about the world and cared about other people the way we care about other people, then they’d be miserable too. The idea that you would design a study pathologizing wellness is not a thing you would see if the data went the other direction. If it turned out that liberals rated higher on subjective well-being than conservatives, you can 100% bet that there would not be a vast literature trying to attribute this finding to some kind of pathology. Instead, the narrative would be, it’s just further proof that the left is correct. Not only is it correct, it’s good for you. And you see this in measure after measure.

One thing that you see a lot, as Christine Reyna demonstrated in this study, is that if you look at things like social dominance orientation, or almost any political scale that you want to imagine, what often ends up happening is that the gap between Democrats and Republicans is actually pretty narrow. The objective gap between them is actually pretty narrow. So you could create a 10-point scale on social dominance, and you can see that Democrats come in at 3.42, while Republicans come in at 3.75. Since both of them come in well below the midpoint of the scale, probably the most appropriate way of interpreting that finding is to say that both Democrats and Republicans are broadly egalitarian. And you can even argue that Democrats are marginally more egalitarian than Republicans. Is that the way it’s described in the literature? No. The way it’s usually described in the literature is that Republicans are motivated by dominance orientation, that they’re dominance-oriented, and that this explains why they vote for Donald Trump. And that’s wild, because to take the average 3.75 on a 10-point dominance scale and describe them as dominance-oriented because they’re just very marginally different from Democrats is a wild thing to do, but it’s also a very common thing to do, as Christine Reyna and others have shown.

There are other literatures. There’s a vast literature in sociology and political science on racial dog whistles. Racial dog whistles are formally race-neutral statements that are supposed to, in a wink-and-a-nod way, suggest some kind of affiliation with white supremacy or hatred of non-whites or immigrants. So it’s stuff that’s not explicitly about race, but kind of winks and nods towards your racist leanings. Now the problem with this field is twofold. First, the way that a lot of people have come up with examples of racial dog whistles is it’s a bunch of white liberal scholars who sit around thinking, if I was a racist, what kind of message would appeal to me? And then they come up with these and then they test them. And if Republicans say that they like these messages, then they go, aha, it’s proof that these statements must be racist. What they don’t do, implicit in the racial dog whistle narrative, is that these are narratives that appeal uniquely to whites, because again, they’re signaling, winking and nodding towards white supremacy. But they don’t actually usually test non-whites’ receptivity. They just only test white people.

One exception to this rule is one of the pioneers of this framework, Ian Haney López, who, to his credit, decided to actually investigate non-whites’ receptivity to racial dog whistles. So he took canonical examples of racial dog whistles from Donald Trump, but didn’t say they were from Trump, and presented them to black, white, and Hispanic voters on law and order, immigration, things like this. What he found was that these messages actually resonated the most with Hispanics, and then African Americans, and they resonated the least with whites. Now this is a major problem for a framework that’s predicated on the idea that these are messages that resonate uniquely with whites, and they actually resonate the least with whites. That’s a big issue.

But scholars have largely insulated themselves from having to deal with that problem by largely ignoring the views of non-white voters, including and especially in ostensibly anti-racist literature. They just ignore the views of non-whites because they’re inconvenient. I suspect one of the major reasons why they just focus on whites is because of an intuitive understanding, not tested. Because again, if they do test it, you have to deal with this kind of problem. So they just don’t even test non-white public opinion much. And there’s all sorts of research looking at how this is a really vast problem in public attitudes about race and racism, that there’s just all these big claims that are made about unique views of whites and racism and so on, and they just ignore non-white voters because they have inconvenient views. And when you do test them, you get inconvenient views for the narrative that they’re trying to spin.

In fact, one of the things I’ve shown in my own work as it relates to Trump is that a lot of the narrative about why Trump won is that he won because of racism. But actually what you see, as I’ve shown over and over again for like a decade now, whose vote shifted the most between 2012 and 2016?

White turnout was stagnant between 2012 and 2016. Trump got a smaller share of the white vote than Mitt Romney. The reason he won in 2016 was because he got a larger vote share with black people, Hispanic people, Asian people. And in every single midterm and general election since 2016, Democrats have continued to see attrition with non-white voters.

But again, this has been very tough. And in 2020, the reason Joe Biden won was because of shifts among whites towards the Democratic Party, specifically white men. Joe Biden won in 2020 because of white men. Now, this is the thing that, again, within the dominant frameworks of a lot of these disciplines, it’s just really hard for them to even see, let alone process and talk about these findings, even though they’re kind of blindingly obvious.

Last example I’ll give, you see the same kind of thing in gender. So if you’re doing political analysis for why an election went the way it did, here’s a pro tip. Look at women. Women are a larger share of the baseline adult population. They’re also registered to vote at higher levels than men, and this has been the case for decades now. And among registered voters, they turn out to vote at higher levels than men, which is what this chart visualizes. So the total adult population is already skewed towards women. The electorate is even more skewed towards women. What this means is, if you want to understand any electoral outcome, women’s votes matter more than men’s.

But when you look at what you would think, for instance, in this last election, when you had a female candidate who stood to be America’s first female president on the ballot, you might think especially in this kind of a race, like in 2016 or 2024, it would be important to look at how women exercise their agency. That is not, for the most part, what people who study politics decided to do. Instead, the narratives are all about men and misogyny and so on, even though, again, Trump didn’t perform exceptionally well with men, but Kamala did perform really poorly with women. The only Democrat who got a worse vote share than Kamala Harris with women, you’d have to go back decades to go to John Kerry in 2004. Incidentally, the first person I ever voted for, ugh. A really ill-fated campaign.

But the reason Kamala lost was because she did poorly with women. Her vote share with men was actually comparable to a lot of other Democratic nominees. She didn’t do poorly with men. The reason she lost was because she did do poorly with women. But even a lot of ostensibly feminist scholarship declines to look at how women exercise their agency. And this is especially true if they’re trying to explain something they think of as bad. So most scholars think that Trump’s election was bad. We think that women are good, so we just don’t design studies that look at how good people created bad things, how women could have been responsible for Trump’s election.

We can see all of these trends simultaneously in this chart. So the study is restricted explicitly to whites. So when he’s looking at differences between Democrats and Republicans and this endorsement of symbolic racism, it’s just white voters he’s analyzing. He just conveniently ignores non-white voters. Even though both partisans, both Democrats and Republicans, it’s a five-point scale of symbolic racism, you would be hard pressed to know that because he truncated the Y-axis, which makes the lines look bigger than they are. In reality, for the whole time series, both Democrats and Republicans are both above the midpoint of this five-point scale. Which is to say, a way of understanding this data would be that both Democrats and Republicans are motivated by racism. If you wanted to have this kind of unfavorable, uncharitable analysis of the trend lines here, since both of them are above the midpoint of the racism scale, you could argue, hey, Democrats and Republicans are both motivated by racism, but Democrats in 2016 were moderately less motivated by racism and certainly less than they have been in the past, or something like that.

In any event, so you have this truncated Y-axis which creates the illusion of more difference between the parties than there actually is. And the data is analyzed as if the red line and the blue line people just have radically different motives. The red line people are motivated by racism, the blue line people are presumably, well, we don’t actually get into their motives, but the assumption is they’re motivated by good things, they know about the issues, they care about America or whatever. And this is just kind of a broad pattern you see.

One thing I’ll just note, if you continue this time series through 2024, it gets pretty interesting. So Republicans continue, you continue to see these declines in racist attitudes among Republicans, which is to say the whole time Trump’s been in office, in fact, the whole time Trump’s been part of public life, Republicans have been growing less and less racist. It’s not the news that you would get. But since 2020, the gaps between the Democrats and Republicans have begun to shrink. So the distance between them has grown smaller. This is for two reasons. It’s both because the Republicans continue to grow less racist, but the blue line is also converging again, back to this moderating. So if you were going to analyze this chart in the uncharitable way that the initial chart was analyzed, how you would analyze this is that Democrats have become more racist in recent years. So Democrats grew more racist between 2020 and 2024 with Kamala on the ballot. But that is absolutely not the way that they would interpret that coefficient.

You can see this kind of thing in chart after chart after chart about polarization. So Leonardo Soares and Baekkwan Park had this great study in the Journal of Politics where they looked at issues where Democrats and Republicans have grown further apart over the years. What they find is that in most issues where Democrats and Republicans have grown further apart, Democrats have been the one driving the change. They’ve shifted more. Pew, similarly, looked at all the issues where Democrats and Republicans have grown further apart from 2003 to 2023 and who shifted more. What you can see is that on the vast majority of issues upon which Democrats and Republicans have grown further apart, the reason they’ve grown further apart is because Democrats shifted significantly, with a small number of exceptions. But again, the vast majority of discourse that you’ll see in journalism or academia about growing polarization is focused on Republicans and starts from the premise that Republicans have lost their ever-loving minds.

More to the point of what we’re doing here in higher ed, if you look at public trust in the scientific community. So this is a famous study in one of the top sociology journals by Gordon Gauchat. What he’s trying to answer in this study is, if you look at the beginning of this time series, this line, conservatives, this kind of square line, conservatives are technically the most trusting of the scientific community at the beginning of the time series. It’s actually a statistically insignificant difference between the progressives and conservatives, but whatever. Let’s just say they’re the most supportive, and by the end of the time series, they’re the least supportive. And so he’s trying to understand why that is. Fine thing to study. But one thing that’s interesting is that if you look at the whole time series, at the beginning, conservatives and liberals are kind of pretty close together. Conservatives continue on this same trajectory of consistent declines that they were on over the course of the whole time series. But starting in the mid-90s, Democrats go from trending with conservatives to just abruptly shifting the other way and becoming more and more trusting of the scientific community, to the point where at the end of the time series, they’re just floating off in space.

It’s not the case that conservatives are here and the rest of the independents are somewhere in the middle and progressives are over here. The objectively weird line when you look at this chart is actually the liberal line. It’s just floating off in space. Conservatives and moderates are actually very close together and trending in much the same direction since the mid-90s. But you have this really unusual divergence, both a divergence from their previous trend and a divergence relative to everyone else in America, not just conservatives. But we don’t design studies going, “Why are liberals so credulous about the scientific community?” In fact, when we design studies, we just grant it that Americans should trust the scientific community, that if anything, the levels of trust should be somewhere way above the chart, and that anything below 100% acceptance is some kind of pathology that needs to be explained. And so we don’t even really design studies asking why are liberals so extremely credulous about the scientific community? But if we want to understand polarization around science, who it is that’s diverging the most from the rest of America, again, not just from the out party, but even from moderates or middle people, it’s actually this line. This is the weird line on the chart.

And you see the same thing, liberals, moderates, conservatives, if you switch it to analyzing Democrats, Republicans, independents, you see the exact same trend. In fact, this time series continues it. That one ends in 2010. This continues it to 2020. You can see that Democrats and Republicans are even further apart in their trust in the scientific community. But again, who’s driving the polarization? What you can see is that the blue line started polarizing first and way more, such that the gap between the Democrats and Republicans is certainly bigger than it’s ever been before, but it’s being driven largely by this shift in the blue line. And to the point where the Democrats are very far apart from independents, much further from independents than Republicans are. And you see the same trend, Republicans consistent line, Democrats starting in the mid-90s, this abrupt positive shift that then goes like into the stratosphere.

If you look at what is this chart trying to explain, what is the article that this is from trying to explain: why being anti-science is the new part of many rural Americans, read Republicans’, identity. So you have this kind of extreme hockey stick on the blue line, and it’s just unanalyzed. We just don’t go, well, why are Democrats so extremely trusting of the scientific community? It’s just not a thing that we really analyze that much. And the thing about that that’s so weird to me is that mistrust of experts is actually kind of easy to explain. As my colleague Gil Eyal in his book The Crisis of Expertise, it’s actually not a really tough puzzle about why people might be skeptical of experts. Experts make claims that you can’t verify. They’re wrong about stuff a lot, and when they’re wrong, they rarely pay the cost. Other people pay the cost for their errors. Experts are often very sociologically distant from the people that they’re making demands of. So they’re telling you to close your schools and keep your kids home, but they’re people who are not like you. They don’t live in your communities. They don’t share your demographic characteristics. They don’t share your class background. They don’t share your worldviews and life experiences. So there’s these distant people that are making demands of you. They often behave in ways that other people view as untrustworthy or weird, and they often have a different understanding of what your best interests are than you do. So when you have that kind of a situation, it’s really not a puzzle to figure out, well, why would people be skeptical of experts? It’s actually not that big of a puzzle.

What’s really interesting is that despite all of this, people often do follow expert advice. Most people vaccinate their children, for instance. And this is actually a more interesting sociological puzzle, that’s why despite all of this, people actually do defer largely to expert advice. But again, we don’t actually study that side of the equation as much, because a lot of us start from the premise that people should trust experts, and then try to explain why they don’t, usually by appeal to some kind of deficit or pathology. They’re brainwashed, they’re ignorant, and so on.

One thing that’s critical to note about those charts, by the way, is that what they’re measuring, both of those, we’re looking at trust in the scientific community, which is very different from public perceptions about science per se. In terms of science per se, you actually see almost no change in public attitudes about science per se from decades ago to the present. So this chart visualizes whether or not Americans think that the benefits of science outweigh the risks and costs. You can see a pretty static line from 1979 through 2018, basically no change in the green line. It’s a pretty overwhelming majority that believes that the benefits outweigh the costs. If you look at trust in American institutions, trust in science per se, basically a flat line, even as a lot of other institutions have seen a decline. So where you see a decline in these previous charts isn’t people who don’t trust science, but people who don’t trust the scientific community, which is the people speaking on behalf of what the science says, the experts. And that’s an important distinction to draw. A lot of us don’t attend to that distinction very much. And so we look at charts that show declining trust in scientists and interpret that as declining trust in science, which is a convenient conflation for us to make, because then it makes it easier for us to portray people who are skeptical of things we’re claiming as being rooted in some kind of irrationality, ignorance, and other pathologies. But that’s actually not what you see in public opinion trends. What you don’t see is growing distrust about science per se. It’s trust in scientists.

And part of the reason why trust in scientists might have declined is because scientists were engaging in a lot of behaviors that people found strange. So one of the things I’ve shown in my own research, analyzing tens of millions of academic research papers, starting after 2010, there was a rapid change in how scientists went about their business, like the themes that they wanted to study, how they talked about social issues. Institutions that host scientists, universities are the main place where scientists are hosted today, were riven by all sorts of wild conflicts. So if you look at cancel culture incidents after 2020, you see this kind of rapid spike and then eventually a peak. And as I’ve argued in other places, we seem to have passed kind of a peak woke, the kind of peak period of this contestation. A lot of scientific organizations explicitly oriented themselves towards politics and morality. Quick example: shortly after Trump was elected, there was a March for Science, and the literal structure of it was that a bunch of scientists, often wearing white coats and stuff, basically declaring that we have science over here, Trump over here, and you have to choose which one do you support. And so if you’re a conservative or a Republican, the implicit choice given to you is, you want to basically abandon all of your moral and political commitments in order to embrace science, or you’re going to be more skeptical of scientists and keep your moral and political commitments. If that’s the choice that people are faced with, how that resolves itself should be pretty clear.

In fact, if it’s not clear, a political scientist, Matt Motta, did a great study looking at the effects of the March for Science. Given that people broadly trust science, and before a lot of these kinds of attitudes and behaviors in universities really took off, people also trusted scientists broadly. What he was curious about is, since scientists and science are so popular, and Trump, on the other hand, was a polarizing and unpopular figure, maybe the March for Science would make people like Trump less, like scientists more. What was the effect? What he found is that the main effect of the March for Science is that it caused people to trust scientists less. And this was not without consequence, because scientists engaged in this highly polarizing set of activities right before the onset of a major global pandemic, where trust in science was actually important and highly consequential. Another way of saying this is that there might be people who are dead today who would have been alive if scientists hadn’t engaged in this kind of highly polarizing activity. If we think the work that we do is important, if we think the work that we do matters, then how we conduct ourselves matters.

The press, last thing I’ll say about this, you see a similar kind of trend. So I’m a journalism professor, so I got to talk about the press. But you see the same kind of thing you see for trust in science. If you look at the red line, a very consistent kind of path, nothing really changes in the overall trajectory. Independents, which broadly trend with Republicans for most of the time series. Starting in the mid-90s, Democrats are trending with everyone else, and then starting in the mid-90s, they shift in the other direction in a way that puts them increasingly out of step with everyone else. And then again, after 2016, such that the blue line is just floating off in space, much further from independents than Republicans are. But again, we don’t ask, well, why are Democrats so extremely credulous about mainstream media? Why is it that they’re so unusually, wildly trusting of the press? Because again, we just start from the assumption that actually it should be 100% of the people who trust the press, and any divergence from what we think people should be doing, we explain in terms of deficits and pathologies. And we just focus on the red line and the declines and appeal to things like misinformation, the Koch brothers, Trump and whatever. But if we actually want to understand polarization in the media, it’s actually important to attend to both sides of the line, especially the line that’s shifting more.

And again, if we want to understand why it is that people have started to gain suspicion about the media, this is actually not that hard to explain. So as I’ve shown in my research, analyzing tens of millions of articles in the New York Times and looking at TV coverage of different presidents, for instance, what you can see is that the way that the media covered Trump even before he was president was radically unlike any other political figure in modern history. They talked about him way more than America’s first black president, than any other president who’s ever been considered. Almost all of this coverage was extremely negative. And even after Trump was out of office, into 2022 when Joe Biden was president, they still talked about Trump more than the sitting president. And then TV news, same thing. For most presidents, what you see is when they run for president, they get a spike in coverage, and then when they’re the sitting president, it goes down, but not as much as before they were the candidate. For Trump, not only was his objective level of coverage much higher than any other president on record, but it just stayed high. We basically have four straight years of campaign-level intensity television coverage of Trump to a degree that I think would surprise a lot of people. So in the New York Times, for instance, in that year, 2018, Trump was the number three most used word in the whole New York Times, if you exclude words like “but,” if you just look at substantive terms.

On average, every single — I had a corpus that included everything published by the New York Times: sports, foreign affairs, weather, arts, culture, anything that the New York Times published was in this corpus. And on average, anything published by the New York Times in 2018 directly mentioned Trump about three times, and then indirectly, Commander in Chief, White House, POTUS, another couple of times. Trump became the lens through which the New York Times interpreted reality. Almost any story that they talked about was talked about through the lens of Trump. Now this kind of behavior would again maybe cause a lot of people to go, huh, seems like something is weird with the New York Times.

And it’s not just with respect to Trump. So my colleague and I analyzed 27 million news articles from 47 media outlets over the last 50 years. And what we found is that starting after 2010, there was this rapid spike in discussion about prejudice and discrimination, all forms of prejudice and discrimination: racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, antisemitism, just hockey sticks all at once in a way that didn’t seem to correspond with anything that was happening in the world with respect to those issues. It predated Black Lives Matter, it predated Me Too, and so on, and in fact might help explain why those movements were able to take off. All to say, the media was behaving in a genuinely unusual way, and that’s maybe reflected in public interpretations of journalists. And you see this kind of pattern, as I show in my book, this kind of pattern that you see in academia and media of this kind of rapid shift in how they operate. You see this in most other knowledge and culture industries: finance, human resources, and so on. You see similar kinds of trends.

In fact, I looked at identities, voting behavior, protests, outputs by companies, a whole bunch of other metrics. And you see over and over and over again this kind of hockey stick that’s driven by knowledge and culture professionals. That shift that we saw on the blue line, it wasn’t like most, like black Democrats, Democrats without degrees, they haven’t shifted much at all. The reason the hockey stick looks like that is because highly educated, relatively affluent urban and suburban white people, especially people tied to the knowledge and culture industries, just changed really, really, really rapidly. If you want to know why they did this, you should read my book.

But one thing that I’ll just note about the way that we analyze these trends is that a big problem for people figuring out what’s been going on is that the people who were undergoing these radical shifts were the same people who are producing almost all of the mainstream narratives about those shifts. As an example, for an essay I did for Heterodox Academy, I showed that if you look at the professoriate, professors are highly unrepresentative of the public at large along most dimensions, in terms of their class backgrounds, in terms of their religious leanings, in terms of their political leanings, in terms of their ethnic composition, in terms of their sexuality. They’re just wildly unrepresentative of the American public. This is a problem for a couple of reasons, but you have this kind of narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society that’s undergoing this rapid change and that notices a growing gap between them and other people. But how they interpret that gap is colored by who’s doing the narrative.

So you see the same thing with journalism. Journalists, like academics, are concentrated in very particular geographic regions. In terms of ethnicity, you see a lot more diversification in journalists, which is to say that now 18% of journalists are non-white. In terms of partisan affiliation, journalists went from being broadly representative of America as a whole to being 10 to 1 Democrat. And in fact, even a lot of people who self-identify as independent, if you actually analyze their voting behavior and their political lean, almost all of those people are also Democrat-voting liberals. In terms of class composition, in the 70s, most journalists had college degrees, but they had college degrees from a lot of different institutions and from a lot of different majors, and people entered journalism from a lot of different walks of life. Today, almost all journalists have college degrees, almost exclusively in journalism and communication. And as more and more people have had college degrees, where you get your degree from matters more and more in journalism, such that the New York Times has a higher concentration of Ivy League graduates than the US Senate and the Forbes 500 list. And this has important implications for how we tell stories. If we’re supposed to be holding the powerful to account, and the powerful people we’re supposed to be holding to account are our buddies from Columbia and our parents and our wives, we just cover the story a lot differently.

And so journalists and academics and other knowledge and culture professionals, we correctly perceive that the gap between us and huge swaths of the rest of America is growing. We mistakenly assume that the reason the gap is growing is because those people must be getting more radical, even to the point where we can produce work that clearly illustrates that we’re the ones who shifted, but we can just not see, we can literally not see our own data. So again, these very sophisticated, good social scientists produce charts that clearly, unmistakably show that the blue line shifted more and is driving polarization, and they couldn’t see the trend in their own data, and instead put forward articles arguing that the red line people are going crazy.

But it’s not just these individual scholars who missed it. That to me is not what’s most interesting. Any of us can have a brain fart. What’s interesting to me is that the peer reviewers couldn’t see obvious errors, and the editors couldn’t see this obvious problem. And the often data-sophisticated journalists who looked at these charts and circulated them and wrote articles praising them also couldn’t see the obvious problem. And the other scholars citing these studies couldn’t see the obvious problem. It’s right in front of people’s faces. And once you point it out, you can’t unsee it. I can’t show you that chart again and you not see that the blue line is driving the polarization. But until someone points it out, it’s really hard.

And this is not a problem, for the most part, of mustache-twirling villains who are willfully engaging in activist social science and misinformation. The problem is that institutions like higher ed and journalism are designed on the idea that we all have partial and situated knowledge, that we all have biases, we all have blind spots, we all are prone to error, we all have limits to our comprehension and our empathy and so on. But if you create institutions and processes that pull together people with different interests, different backgrounds, different values, then we can collectively correct each other’s errors and produce something that looks like reliable, objective, comprehensive truth. But these systems only work, systems like peer review, committee decision-making, they only work as intended when you actually do have people with diverse views and values and life experiences taking part in the scientific enterprise. When institutions are dominated by a narrow and idiosyncratic slice of society that largely shares a lot of interests, values, life experiences, risk exposures, and so on, then these same processes that are supposed to help correct our biases can reinforce them instead. It can make it harder for new ideas to break through, harder for dissent to occur, harder for innovation to occur. You can get reinforced groupthink. You can have misinformation cascades.

So this is not a problem of individual scholars who have some kind of deficit or pathology. I’m not just reversing the sign and pathologizing scholars. This is a structural issue and a collective action issue. So my next book, which is slated for publication with Princeton University Press, will explore the causes and the consequences of this growing social distance between us, professionals in the knowledge and culture industries, and huge swaths of the rest of society. What are the causes of this growing distance, what are the consequences of this growing distance? How does this distance interfere with our ability to understand other people and their attitudes and behaviors, and often lead people to misunderstand us and our institutions and communities as well?

Thank you for your time.

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I was asked to give a keynote to kind of start us off together. And I thought what I wanted to do is really to give you a little bit of a sense for how I see the whole landscape, how all these different things hang together. And then we have a little bit of time for discussion afterwards as well.

So, I’d like to focus on three perspectives on the current state of free speech, viewpoint diversity, and open inquiry on campus. I want to first talk about progress. I want to talk about principle, and then I want to talk about politics.

So, let me start with progress. I know that many of us are here because we have been at this for a long time, and it can sometimes be a lonely and frustrating task. But we should not forget the progress that has been made.

Before I was at Vanderbilt, I was a provost at University of Chicago. And before that, I was dean. So I have been in this business of university leadership now since 2014. And I have to say that, when you look back, there’s a lot of things that have been accomplished. And so I’m going to tell the story in a couple of chapters.

The first chapter that I would say was really the free speech crisis on campuses. So those were the days when speakers were shouted down. Those were the days of — you remember the Halloween costume controversy at Yale? Those were the times of speech codes and so forth, of disinviting speakers. And when you look at that one aspect, I think we’re in better shape. I think it is difficult to argue that there hasn’t been progress in this area. There used to be times — and you remember this, I remember this — when all it took was kind of like a letter by students that objected to a particular speaker, and the speaker was disinvited. That is not the case right now.

And I think the model that proved successful there was a clear statement of principles. And my old employer, the University of Chicago, I think played a very important role in that with the Chicago Principles, the Stone Report. And then also some pressure. And I think the pressure came with you, Heterodox Academy, but also FIRE, I think, played a very important role on that, to just kind of emphasize the importance of these principles and then to call strikes a strike, and balls, balls, and that created, I think, a momentum towards what I think now is a better free speech culture on campus, at least when we’re thinking about this specific aspect. And the fundamental controversy was over bringing controversial speakers on campus, but there was a whole variety of other things like that, but my sense is overall, there was progress. There has been progress, and we should not forget that.

Second progress, institutional neutrality. So this is something that I have been a vocal proponent for over the last four years. Institutional neutrality, of course, is the principle that universities should not take positions on issues that do not directly and materially affect the core purpose of the university. When I started talking about this, this was about four and a half years ago, there were like a handful of universities that had committed to institutional neutrality. University of Chicago was one of them. Vanderbilt had it actually since the 60s. A few more. Now we have over 140 universities that have subscribed to that. Now, not always exactly how I would do it, and not always all the way. But again, I would look at that as progress.

And then I think this is a bigger debate, and I’m just going to kind of talk about it in passing. But there’s a whole, of course, discussion about DEI. We’ve had a variety of things that I think were very problematic. For our friends at Stanford, remember the speech codes? We couldn’t call a master server a master server anymore. There were the whole things on microaggressions, end, end, end. Again, I would say we’re in better shape here. Now, this is a complicated issue because there are legal issues. There’s, of course, the Harvard decision. There’s all sorts of legal actions by the federal government right now, which is worth a whole other conference. But again, I would say that there has been progress.

So on these areas, we look back, things have moved in the right direction. Now, to me, the underlying challenge there, or the underlying principle, is really a principle of politicization of the university. That’s the way I think about it, is that we’ve moved away from the core purpose of the university and that this politicization of the university has manifested itself in these different ways, in attacks on free speech, in the desire for universities to take positions on political and policy issues that had nothing to do with the university, and then also, of course, with respect to the kind of more radical variants of DEI.

Now, we like to say that at Vanderbilt we call this proud but not satisfied. So we should not forget the progress. But now we’re adding and we’re going into a new chapter, which is going to require even more thought. And this is really about — it goes to the very core of what university is all about. And the question now is what happens in the classrooms and what happens in the research enterprise? What type of — how are curricula structured? What do students learn? And then how do we think about certain fields? How do we think about the questions that are asked? How do we talk about publication? How do we talk about funding? How do we talk about tenure and promotion and so forth? I will have a lot to say on that.

But of course, what makes this so tricky and complicated is that this touches, in contrast to some of the other issues before, on core questions of academic freedom. So it was easy to have when the debate was about which speakers could come to campus, or even institutional neutrality. Now we’re talking about what happens in the classroom, how do we think about research, how do we think about research standards. And that is a different level of challenges. But we need to, I think, together and as a community of scholars, tackle those issues as well with the same level of courage and clarity that we’ve tackled the other ones.

So that’s part one, progress.

Number two, principles. All these things, at the end of the day, have to be rooted in a clear understanding of what is the purpose of the university. And in some way or another, every one of these three or four chapters are really intimately connected with that question. And people have different points of view on that.

My point of view is — I’ve said this many times, and I think it’s very important to be clear about that — the purpose of the university for me is pathbreaking research and transformative education. Full stop. So universities are not political parties, and they are not members of political movements. Their goal is the production of knowledge, seeking truth and insights, and then conveying them to publications and teaching. That’s what we do.

Once you believe that, a lot of things follow. And we can have debates exactly what follows and how. But if we don’t agree on that, it’s difficult to have discussions really about what should happen in the classroom, because then we just have a completely different point of view of what university should be. There should be no mistake about it that many faculty and students and some administrators do not agree with that. They agree that they would argue that the university has a particular social purpose or political purpose and that that particular purpose needs to be advanced in a particular way.

So my premise is that’s the purpose. That’s what we’re doing. And everything that we should do needs to be tightly connected to the purpose of pathbreaking research or transformative education.

So now let’s talk about a couple of principles that I think sometimes get kind of muddled up. So number one is the principle of free speech. Of course, that was clearly expressed in the Chicago principles. And it is usually understood either as a direct manifestation of the First Amendment in public universities, like Berkeley, or private universities are basically saying, we’re guided by the First Amendment. We’re going to follow the normative structure of the First Amendment to the extent that we can as private universities. But I think what’s not so clear is why is that? So it’s a little bit like people take these constraints as a given because we kind of have to. But why is it really critical to be consistent and abide by the First Amendment? I’m going to put this aside for a second because it’s really important to come back to that and to be crystal clear about this. Because it is a different concept than academic freedom. And I think these things sometimes get muddled up. But they shouldn’t be muddled up. We need to be clear about this.

The concept of academic freedom, of course, for those of you that have looked into this in a little bit more detail, originates with the great German research university, with Wilhelm von Humboldt and the creation of the University of Berlin in 1810. And the German concept of academic freedom that really is rooted in an Enlightenment philosophy, if you will, and by the way, now I’m on this tangent, right? It’s very much worthwhile to read Immanuel Kant’s wonderful essay, What is Enlightenment? The German word is Aufklärung, which is even better. It’s making things clear. Making things clear, like in a wonderful way to think about it. And the last line that he says, it said, “What should be the motto of the Enlightenment? Have the courage to use reason, your reason.” And then he says, therefore, sapere aude, dare to think, should be the motto of the Enlightenment.

So thinking for ourselves was then translated into two principles, or pillars, if you will, what the Germans call Lehrfreiheit, the freedom to teach and to do research, and Lernfreiheit, which was the freedom to learn. So there was one for faculty and one for students. Now, that was the key concept of academic freedom in the German university. And what’s so remarkable and amazing is that this thrived, and the German universities became the model for the American research university, of course, within an authoritarian structure. So this was like the Prussian and then later the German Empire, authoritarian state, but the universities had these privileges. They then moved over to the United States. But the teaching, the student side, the kind of freedom to learn, played no role. And they were translated into a more kind of philosophical context of pragmatism. John Dewey played a really important role in defining the modern American concept of academic freedom. But there were, if you will, there were echoes or influences from the German model, but it’s not the same.

The fundamental or the foundational document of that, of course, is the AAUP 1915 Declaration of Academic Freedom. And philosophically, it grounds academic freedom in the social purpose of the universities, meaning that path-breaking research, discovery, insights, innovations are very useful for society, both for technological progress, but also to have a more enlightened public discourse. Therefore, we need to give faculty the autonomy to do research as they see fit and to teach as they see fit. That’s the fundamental.

So notice the grounding of academic freedom in specialized knowledge, in scholarly expertise. This is critical. It became, of course, foundational for the American research university, but it is not the same thing as free speech. So academic freedom is a privilege that faculty have. It is explicitly defined as something that distinguishes faculty from everybody else. And it comes with the responsibility, and it’s grounded in a specific purpose.

So to give you an example, let’s say you have two graduates from an economics department. They both get a PhD. One of them works for Goldman Sachs. The other one goes to work for Berkeley’s economics department. If that person works for Goldman Sachs, the supervisor will say something like this: “Slide five on your slide deck has to go, and I want you to work on this project and not that one.” That would be a violation of academic freedom in every university. So it’s not a universal right, like free speech protection, but it is something that is a privilege that is given to faculty grounded in the idea of scholarly expertise. So that’s a very important thing to keep in mind as we’re thinking about what the challenges are and how viewpoint diversity kind of connects with them.

Third principle, institutional neutrality. I talked about it. A surprisingly difficult concept for people to grasp. It gets confused all the time. It doesn’t mean the university is value neutral. I just told you what the values and the purpose of the university is. But they are not values that are about political position taking on issues that are not directly connected to the purpose. So put it differently, at Vanderbilt, where we have been committed to the principle of institutional neutrality, we will not take positions on foreign policy issues, but we will take positions on research funding or financial aid for students or any aspect that is critical for the research university to thrive. So it’s a question about domains. Are you in? Are you out? And of course, there will be boundary cases. But for every concept, there are boundary cases. And that’s why we have law schools. It’s not the only reason we have law schools, but that’s what we do in law schools. We try to figure out exactly does this principle apply or not.

So that’s institutional neutrality; let me talk a little bit about viewpoint diversity. So, I am super sympathetic about everything we can do to sharpen and strengthen the purpose of the university. I am not 100% sure, and I need to be convinced, that the concept of viewpoint diversity is exactly the right cure. And the reason why is that — and you know this from critics of viewpoint diversity — is that, well, what is that? What do you mean? You want to have people that support Phlogiston’s theory in chemistry now as part of viewpoint diversity. So viewpoint diversity, I think, if that’s what we’re going to bet on, needs to be sharpened a little bit, needs to be clarified a little bit. It’s not just about a pluralism of opinion, another concept I think that’s overused a little bit.

And of course, we all know where this comes from. It comes from the areas of the university where the university is engaged in the business of society reflecting upon itself. Those are things like the humanities, qualitative social sciences, law schools, where we have different intellectual traditions, and these intellectual traditions are fundamental and foundational to the field. But how exactly does this work when we’re thinking about social work or clinical psychology or places like that? It doesn’t travel so easily.

So my sense is that the deeper problem is really something else. And that problem manifests itself in a lack of viewpoint diversity in certain fields. From my point of view, the fundamental problem is the erosion or subordination of scholarly standards under a political agenda or ideology. That’s not the same.

So what I mean by that is that we are seeing now in a variety of different fields where faculty, scholars, are arguing and acting in a way that the fundamental scholarly standards that we have taken for granted should be subordinated to political or social goals. That, to me, is the fundamental problem. And then that can show up in a suppression of viewpoint diversity, but it shows up in many, in a variety of other ways as well.

So what’s the evidence for that? Where do we see this? I think you have John Shields on a panel tomorrow, so I’m sure he’s going to talk about his paper on undergraduate syllabi. So I’m not going to kind of steal his thunder there. But the one way in which this can show up is that you have a field where there are, within the scholarly literature, completely legitimate different positions. But one of them is taught, the other one is not. In undergraduate, for example, in undergraduate syllabus. Now, that is not doing your job as a teacher, as an educator. Because if these positions are relevant to grasp the material, they need to be in the syllabus. And if they’re not in the syllabus because they’re not in alignment with a preferred political position, that faculty member is not doing his or her job.

There are other aspects of this. There are real worrisome tendencies in multiple fields where there is basically a suppression of questions being asked, that certain questions cannot be asked, that their papers cannot be published, that book contracts are revoked, that papers are rejected not because they are not methodologically sound, but because we don’t like the outcomes or the conclusions. Prizes are given not to the best work, but because it’s in alignment with a particular point of view. That’s what I mean by the erosion of scholarly standards or the subordination of scholarly standards on a particular ideology or social or political set of goals.

We always kind of had a sense that this was happening in fields. Many of us had experienced this personally. Now of course what we have with the advent of large language models, we now have the opportunity to look at this systematically. And the numbers and the data that we see and just the examples that we see are pretty striking. I’m going to just give you like three examples of that. One very specific, the other one more general.

Example number one is the emergence of calls to change our citation or publication practice. So some of you may remain familiar with the calls for advocacy of what’s called citation justice. So citation justice is now part of a variety of journals, and not only in the humanities, but in the sciences as well, that says in order to submit a paper, you need to cite a particular percentage, say 20% of your citations need to be by underrepresented scholars. Now citations, that’s kind of our currency, right? I mean, that’s how we look at which papers have impact or not, at least in a quantitative way. So that, to me, is an erosion of scholarly standards, because we’re now saying the job of citation is not necessarily to represent the relevant work, but to advance a particular group. Now that may be a fine goal, but it is not the way we typically think about, commonly think about scholarly standards.

The same is true about positioning statements. The positioning statement is the idea that the closer you are in your own identity to a particular set of questions, the more legitimacy or the more credibility your point of view should have. So they went, like, how proximate are you when you’re talking, for example, and describing in your work or having a point of view or doing research on a particular group? Again, clear violation of how we typically think about scholarly standards.

And then a particularly striking example was recently identified by Alex Byrne. Alex Byrne is a distinguished analytical philosopher at MIT, and he got interested in concepts related to gender. He wrote a book on that, and he made the following observation in a recent article. It came out last year. The observation was basically the following. He said, look, every year we have a thousand papers in philosophy on abortion, pro or con. It is a vibrant and well-established field of ethics or bioethics or medical ethics or applied ethics, however you want to think about it. There are hardly any papers, philosophical papers, on trans. Now, it’s full of great philosophical questions, moral questions, right? Particularly if you think about care for transgender youth, gender-affirming care and so forth, a big debate on that. There was a big debate in the UK, the CASS report and all of that. What’s the philosophy, what’s the philosophical question of that? How do we think about benefits or costs or risks? Great question. Mind-body problem? Great question. Questions of identity of concepts. And no papers.

And then he points out, kind of painstakingly, it’s like the way particular questions now in philosophy are being suppressed. And the way it works is just by asking a question, you’re being attacked, you’re being called names, students are being discouraged, papers are being — there’s lists of people saying, “Oh my God, you can’t publish this, you can’t publish that.” Those questions are not being asked. And they’re not being asked not because there’s something wrong methodologically or from a scholarly standards point of view, but because they touch a raw nerve with respect to a particular point of view, again, that point of view may be very justified, but it is non-epistemic. So the problem is basically is we’re bringing non-epistemic reasons in there to criticize, suppress, or prevent a particular dialogue from happening, and that’s the problem.

So in certain fields that manifest itself as viewpoint diversity issues, especially in the social sciences or in certain parts of the humanities or law schools, but the problem I think is much deeper, and it is not confined just to the humanities, it’s not confined just to the social sciences. You’ll see it now, particularly in publication practices in fields like medicine, public health, the sciences as well.

So that’s the question of principles. So I think what we are called up to do now is to do the hard work of having debates about that, naming these things, putting them on the agenda, and then asking ourselves, how do we deal with these issues and with these manifestations while staying within the framework of academic freedom? That’s the question. That’s a hard problem, but it’s a very important problem, a very important process that we have to engage in.

And just from a pragmatic point of view, which brings me to my last part of my triad, which is politics, is what you’re seeing right now in some of the policies that are being passed in red state public universities, like Texas or Texas A&M. Particularly Texas A&M probably had the most dramatic examples of that, most controversial ones. You now see state legislatures directly interfering with what happens in the classroom. So we are now in a battle about how do we think about the politicization of disciplines or scholarship inside the classroom or inside the research practice. And we better have a clear, well-reasoned point of view on that and a clear idea about what we’re going to do about it within the context of how we typically think about academic freedom, which is a foundational principle, of course, of the modern research university.

Politics. I think it is a little bit of a temptation of scholars, because that’s what scholarly life is, is to focus exclusively on getting the argument right. That’s what we do every day. We write a great paper and the world is different. But when you look a little bit in how these things changed over time, going back to my four chapters, getting the principles right was number one. That is essential. Without having clarity on free speech or academic freedom or institutional neutrality, you cannot really have progress. As a matter of fact, it’s even problematic because we may then be led to policy solutions that are not working, may even make things worse. So getting that clarifier and doing the hard conceptual work of being really clear about this is really important. And I’ve been a big proponent of institutional neutrality, and it bothers me how that concept is often misunderstood or misused for interfering directly with academic freedom, which really has absolutely nothing to do with it.

So getting the concepts right is number one. It’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. Every time we’ve really seen significant change, in addition to getting the concepts right, there was the need to organize and put some pressure. I mentioned FIRE, I mentioned Heterodox Academy. Of course, in the case of institutional neutrality, it was the aftermath of October 7th, the outrage that we’ve seen by many board members, by the public, by alums and so forth, that pressured universities and university presidents to take action accordingly. And they did.

Now, why is that important? When you’re a president or chancellor, you have to remember that most chancellors or most presidents have a particular idea on what they want to do with their presidency. They may be engineers by background, and their goal may be to build a local innovation center or to advance their standing at quantum or AI or whatever it is. Whatever academic goals they have are often driven by the academic needs and academic agenda of the specific university. Most of them have no interest and really no expertise of dealing with the whole politicization of the university. So when they get pressured by faculty members, often their instinct is, how do I kind of get through this? Because I really want to get back to what I’m doing most of the time. So we have to understand a little bit, what’s the political economy of the university to understand how change can happen effectively?

So this is my own very non-scientific assessment of that. It may create some controversy. We’ll see. My sense is that 85% of our faculty are people that want to do their work. And if you’re a biochemist, what you want to do is you want to be in the lab 14 hours a day and be left alone. That is what most faculty want, to do their work, in the area that they’re excited about and where their scholarship is located. They may, when you look at politically where they’re standing, they may be drifting to the left. And there’s plenty of evidence for that. But whether they vote for Clinton or they vote for Trump is not essential to their identity. Their identity is their scholars. They want to be biochemists, they want to be mechanical engineers, they want to be physicists. And when they go out as citizens, they do whatever they do. But their number one commitment is to the science, is to their academic mission.

And then there’s a smaller group, and it varies by university to university. At Vanderbilt, it’s pretty small. At Columbia, it’s bigger. Of scholars, of faculty, for whom their political commitments are essential to who they are as scholars and as educators. And that group tends to be overrepresented. They’re almost all of them on the left. And their point of view is that the university and any other institution in society, democracy, rule of law, markets, firms, whatever it is, are nothing else but manifestations of an underlying power structure characterized by an oppressor or oppressed scheme. And then there are different points of view who occupies that scheme. Is it based on class? Is it based on race? Is it based on gender? And now, of course, decolonization plays an important role in that. Their point of view is that society as we see it is fundamentally structured in an unjust fashion and needs to be transformed. And very importantly, it’s not only the typical ways in which we think about power and oppression, but the subtle ways, imagination, knowledge production. That’s an important thing, of course, that when you look back to places like the Frankfurt School, or Gramsci, and then later Foucault, that play an important role of that. It’s not only the direct ways that power manifests itself, but power is pervasive and hidden.

So as a consequence of that, that group of faculty have looked at their scholarship and their education as a manifestation of a political agenda. And they’re not shy of talking about it. They say it openly. They say it directly. They’re kind of like exhibit number one. It’s like anthropology, or the American Anthropological Association, which has on their website a statement that it is the professional standard for every anthropologist to put their research and teaching in service of dismantling the institution of colonization. That’s a political position. And putting your research and teaching in service of this goal is not the way we typically think about the mission of the university.

That group tends to be organized, motivated, and utterly critical to their identities as scholars is this particular project. And that’s fine unless it undermines scholarly standards, when questions are not asked, when research is suppressed, or when our teaching is not reflecting the real questions in the discipline.

So on the right, or on the kind of conservative right, or people that are more kind of classic liberals like John Stuart Mill types, there are some, but they tend to be isolated. They’re like a couple in the law school and three in the business school and one in economics and then there’s always a lonely historian. And they’re not organized. The group on the left is organized. They have often been able to take control of professional associations. So you hear the voices, the isolated voices on the right, but they’re not organized.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a president. The president wants to advance their agenda. Maybe that’s setting up an innovation center locally or being a leader in quantum, as I said before. And now every week you have to deal with another petition that’s coming from the kind of, I’m going to call it, the radical left. So what do people do? They muddle through. Because it’s painful to engage. It’s painful to push back. It will create controversy. I’ve done this many years, and I’ve had police protection, I’ve had people screaming at me. I’ve had complaints to the audit committee that I had a secret consulting agreement with Exxon. I’ve had complaints to the attorney general, and members of my board, the Jewish members of my board, being identified by name, where their kids go to school, what classes they take, and what their synagogues’ schedules are and where students were encouraged to say hello.

So that’s the reality if you push back as a leader or as a board member. So most people don’t do it. And so as a consequence of that, the universities are drifting. And it’s a little bit like a sailboat without a keel.

So when we see faculty getting together, getting organized, and providing a counterbalance to that, things change. Because now we have, as I said, we need the principles named, and we need to be able to be organized and have a clear point of view that is alternative to people that are already organized on the radical left. Without that, it won’t happen.

So the need for faculty like you to get involved, to get organized, to have clear principles, and to advocate them courageously is essential. Without that, it won’t happen.

So we’ve made great progress. We’ve made great progress on free speech, we’ve made great progress on free speech neutrality. Now we have to tackle the hardest problem of them all, which is the hard question of how do we think about the erosion of scholarly standards in parts of the academy. That’s the battle. That’s the question. That’s how we have to get engaged.

I’ve been personally involved with many of these gatherings. And we have a whole group of like 70 faculty that are really interested in this question. We just had our first meeting of this group in Nashville a few weeks ago. And it’s extremely encouraging to see that we now see faculty being energized and wanting to participate in that. So I am very optimistic. I have not seen that much energy, that much momentum, as we see right now.

But it’s really critical that, number one, we get the principles right, and that then we are organized as faculty in order to push. That’s critical, because without that, presidents and boards will not act. That’s the third dimension, and that’s something we should never forget.

So I thank you, all of you here, for being here today. I know many of you have been at this for a long time, at great personal risk. And the courage that it takes to take on these challenges in a principled way, is what we need to move forward. So I’m really here to support you. I’m here to thank you for all the work that you’re doing. It’s great to be part of this gathering. I hope you’re going to have great discussions over the next day and a half, and now I’m open for questions.

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