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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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