The two agree on more than you might expect: neutrality is there to hold back administrators, not to silence faculty or students. They split on whether it should reach academic departments, on whether professors should hold back outside their expertise, and on how to read the pressure on universities now. More than half the event is audience questions from students, faculty and a retired professor, on divestment, departmental statements, state pressure on Indiana, faculty email, the Johnson Amendment and student protest. A transcript of the conversation follows below.

Tom Ginsburg: Well, thank you all so much for having us here. These are really important topics, and in my experience, they’re not very well understood. The term institutional neutrality, what does that mean? Academic freedom. I can tell you, many of you look like your students, but if you were to ask your professors, most of them have no idea what academic freedom is. It’s something that people only turn to when they are aggrieved, when something is, you know, when their academic freedom is threatened, and then even then it’s not well understood. So I think it’s really important to talk about these things, and what I want to do first in the first couple minutes is just get those terms clear.

So academic freedom in the Western tradition, and we are of course only one intellectual tradition, is usually associated with a German thinker, Wilhelm von Humboldt, from the early 20th century, 19th century, when he set up the Humboldtian University, as we say. And he said that everyone needed freedom to learn and freedom to teach. There were two components. The teacher should be free to organize the class as they wanted to, and they had the freedom to learn, but that also implies, by the way, that students might have some academic freedom interest, freedom to learn somehow.

As it came forward when the German research university was copied here in the United States, including at the University of Chicago, the idea was crystallized in 1915 by the American Association of University Professors, which John has some relation. And they basically said it was three things: freedom of research, freedom of teaching, and this is an interesting addition, condition, freedom of extramural utterance, by which they mean what we would call free speech. And that they did that because the ideas of free speech that we all hold so dear in this country were still very nascent at that time. The first Supreme Court cases upholding freedom of speech didn’t come until after that point.

And so they said, you know, the professor should be able to speak out about issues that they want to, issues of the day, and not suffer academic consequences. So if, as happened at the University of Chicago in the 1890s, a proto-socialist professor said, you know, socialism is the best thing and capitalism is bad. And, you know, when he did that, there was pressure from donors to come: well, what are you doing? You’re teaching godless communism. You have to fire that guy. And the theory of extramural utterances is such a professor cannot suffer an academic punishment for that. You can’t be fired. You can’t be removed from your classes. You get to say what you come to in the pursuit of knowledge as best you see it.

And that turns out to mean that we do have a lot of freedom, academic freedom, freedom to research and teach as we want, but it’s bounded by collectivity. So it’s somewhat of—this is why it’s so complicated. It’s a little bit of an individual right. I have a right against my dean from firing me if I say something, or if I’m teaching law in a way he doesn’t want me to. However, it’s also a collective right. My freedom is bounded by academic disciplines. So my example here is, I can teach constitutional law however I want, but if I went into my class and said I’m teaching the laws of physics every day, I would be fired. I could be fired, because that’s not the subject I was hired to teach. So it’s not a matter of academic freedom. In that case, the university, by firing me, is actually defending academic freedom. The university can be sometimes acting to defend academic freedom by preserving the collectivity, the right of the discipline, if you are, the power of the discipline to bound knowledge.

There’s also an important collective right, which is very relevant here, vis-à-vis politicians. From time immemorial, universities have faced external constraints: the church, politicians, others who say you shouldn’t do this, we want to regulate what you do. And in that case, the university has the duty of protecting academic freedom from such interference. So you can see it’s kind of a complicated idea.

Now, institutional neutrality. Let me get that on the table. It is typically associated with something called the Kalven Report at the University of Chicago, which was adopted in 1967. I think it’s a really great report, but it’s contested, as we’ll see. And what did that report say? Well, first of all, what brought it to life was that there was pressure from students to divest from the war machine in the Vietnam War: this is immoral, we have to remove the university funding from this. And so what the university president did is he appointed a committee, and the committee of faculty members. So that’s an important point. This was adopted by faculty. This wasn’t some top-down legislated imposition. The faculty kind of got together, looked at our own traditions at our university, and discovered that we had a long tradition of what we would call institutional neutrality. And they used that term.

The university itself is not the critic. It is a—the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member. The university is the home and sponsor of critics. It is not itself the critic. So it’s sort of a conception of the university not taking positions on issues of the day, precisely so that every member of the university community can say whatever they want without being chilled by the idea of the center adopting an orthodoxy.

And it turns out that goes back actually to almost the founding of the University of Chicago. The incident I was referring to, with the proto-socialist professor saying, you know, we should all be socialists, and the donor saying, no, no, no, you got to fire that guy. The university president, William Rainey Harper, said, no, the institution—when the individual faculty member speaks, they speak for themselves. The institution does not take positions on the issues of the day. And that’s from the early 20th century or late 19th century he said that. So that’s kind of a conception of the university as just a very thin administrative apparatus. Its only role is to be a place where you get a lot of smart people to debate and discuss.

Now, are there any exceptions? Yes. And this is really important, and this is why I think it’s absolutely clear from my point of view that institutional neutrality both is very important for free speech on campus, but also is really important for academic freedom. What are those exceptions? Well, the most important one, and again, I’ll quote the Kalven Report here, is that from time to time, instances will arise in which the society, or segments of it, threaten the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and values.

Okay, so that’s the main exception which is relevant here. In other words, the university is a very thin apparatus. Individuals debate things however they want. Any question that presents itself, they should be free to debate. But if we are threatened with an attack on the university itself or the free inquiry itself, a law, for example, that was trying to prohibit what you could say in a classroom, well, then it’s not just optional that the universities speak; it must speak. And that’s part of institutional neutrality too. Maybe the most important word here is institutional. We’re defending the institution of higher learning, of exchange, but we are not itself, as a university administration, taking positions on issues of the day.

Now, why is this important? Obviously, it’s important for ensuring free speech, because otherwise, imagine the alternative world, which is what we’ve been living in for about the last decade and a half, where university presidents see themselves as moral leaders who get to speak out on whatever issue they feel enough political pressure from inside the community to speak out about. What does that do when, for example, Harvard’s president, Larry Bacow, flies the Ukrainian flag when Ukraine was invaded? Now, I’m as pro-Ukraine as anybody, but what does it mean when the university—who elected him to tell us that there’s one right answer here in this conflict? When a president does that, it sort of discourages the incentive for each individual to go and apply. And by the way, if there’s some Russians on campus, they might feel pretty uncomfortable. They might start to hide their Russian identity, things like that.

It’s even worse, and this is a really important point. I think a lot of people now agree that the university president should keep their mouth shut about things that don’t affect the university. But what about departments? And here we get into somewhat of a battle, in my view. Many disciplines, which, remember, have a really critical role for ensuring academic freedom because they bound what you can say—what is law professor? What is anthropology? What’s not? Many disciplines have themselves become political entities in recent years, and they feel the need to speak out about all kinds of things.

And I don’t know if there’s any anthropologists in the room. Ethnography is a super important method, but boy, the American Anthropological Association has been ground zero for a lot of really silly stuff, all kinds of foreign policy statements: we, the anthropologists, condemn X and Y. Departments do this too. Oh, you guys are anthropologists? Oh, okay. I thought you were—I thought you were like, yes. You were either objecting or what. That’s great. So, and I won’t belabor the point, but it’s pretty embarrassing if you delve into that, what the association—not the actual anthropology as a field, not the scholars, but the association, the disciplinary association—is doing in terms of pronouncing orthodoxies.

Departments. There’s a question that arises in these discussions. Does institutional neutrality apply just to the university administration, or does it also apply to departments? And in my view, it’s more important that it apply to departments than the university president. Consider yourself a member of, let’s say, the Asian American Studies Department at Northwestern University, which, after the October 7 attack, announced that this was all the Israelis’ fault and got some factual errors in their statement, while also stating that they stood with a certain race of students and not others. That’s what they said.

Now, imagine you’re a graduate student in this department, Asian American Studies, as I said, who knows nothing about this conflict. What is your incentive to actually inquire and learn about what’s going on in the news? Not very much. And if you do inquire and you disagree with what the departmental leaders have voted on by majority vote, well, you’re going to keep your mouth shut. And so in a way, what that does is it sort of pre-decides issues for the most vulnerable members of the community, the graduate students who need the stipend, the junior faculty who need to get tenure.

So departments—it’s very important to me that departments not speak out about things that they don’t know about. And one of the problems with disciplines these days is you have some disciplines which have very expansive and capacious claims about their expertise. We are experts in power, says anthropology; we can talk about basically anything. That’s a problem. The disciplines need to be very humble about these things. And I think it’s very important that we remember that learning really happens at the level of the individual and the group, and scholars talking together and debating multiple positions. The idea that you would have sort of orthodoxies pronounced by university leaders has been a real mistake.

And I’m going to say one last thing, if I have a second. Now, institutional neutrality, which is kind of this University of Chicago thing—I sometimes call myself a Calvinist preacher. I really like the Kalven Report. But it’s spread all around the country, I think including Indiana University. And one of my problems is actually, I think a lot of places are adopting it, but without the sort of sense of the deep cultural structures which are necessary to make it work. And so it’s possible that these principles can be misused, in which case I would answer the question negatively. Institutional neutrality as misused, if it’s used to silence the individual student or the individual faculty member, that’s then bad for free speech and academic freedom.

But in the Kalven framework, I think it’s an unequivocal good, and it rests on this kind of commitment of every member of the university community to a few sort of basic ideas, the core of one of which is: I think this, but I might be wrong. And if I’m wrong, I need to learn from other people. And that just basic thing has been lost in many universities around the country. Thank you very much.

John Wilson: I wanna thank you all for having me here, BridgeUSA and Heterodox Academy. I want to thank Tom for doing all the heavy lifting of trying to describe some of these concepts that are very complicated. I do want to mention, on the issue of free speech in particular, earlier today, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, released its annual free speech rankings. And Indiana University, which last year was ranked 255 out of 257, the third-worst university in the country, has now dramatically increased its ranking to 256 out of 261. You are now the sixth-worst university. Congratulations. The tiniest possible steps really was all the other universities somehow managing to be worse than Indiana.

And I should mention that I wrote a guest column this week in the Indiana Daily Student about the enormous attacks on free speech by the administration at Indiana in the past few years, from censoring art to firing—trying to censor the student newspaper, firing faculty for having a chart in their class about white supremacy—all of these things that are really terrible restrictions. And one of the things I also want to—and so I urge you to go to the Indiana Daily Student, or to my Substack, John K. Wilson, to read that. But I want to talk specifically about some of the dangers involved with the institutional neutrality policy at Indiana University, which I think is particularly terrible.

But I do want to begin by noting that I’m not here to bury institutional neutrality. I’m here to praise it. And so there may be people in the room, I hope there are, in the Q&A, who morally are opposed to institutional neutrality. I’m not one of them. I support the concept. But I want to deeply challenge the way that it is commonly understood, including the way Tom understands it.

And to do that, I want to go back, like Tom did, a little bit to the history, to what I see as the origins of institutional neutrality, which is one of these cases from the 1890s when universities were firing economics professors for being too left-wing. There was a case at the University of Wisconsin in 1894, when a professor named Richard Ely, economics professor, was accused of supporting labor strikes and boycotts and socialism by a state official. And so the Board of Regents at the University of Wisconsin investigated. They found that he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. He was falsely accused of these things. But rather than just dismiss the case, they issued this extraordinary statement. I’m just going to read you the primary paragraph of it. Quote: “As regents of a university with over a hundred instructors supported by nearly two millions of people who hold a vast diversity of views regarding the great questions which at present agitate the human mind, we could not for a moment think of recommending the dismissal or even the criticism of a teacher even if some of his opinions should, in some quarters, be regarded as visionary.” End quote.

And to me, this is really the first statement by a university about institutional neutrality, about academic freedom, even though it doesn’t use those terms. It says the university, because we have all these diverse viewpoints that the state represents, we can’t take a stand on these politics. In particular, we can’t take a stand by firing professors who are deemed to have controversial views. In fact, we can’t even criticize them. We have to stay silent and neutral on these matters and allow people to freely express these views. And this is really an extraordinary kind of statement for the time. It’s extraordinary even today. I don’t think anybody’s ever come up with a better statement than this.

Now, 73 years down the road, you had the Kalven Report at the University of Chicago in 1967, which in my view sort of extends this principle, and it says, well, if you’re not supposed to fire professors for their views or denounce them for their views, maybe you shouldn’t affirmatively express some political views by the university, because that might have the effect of making professors who disagree feel silenced, feel like they don’t have the right to disagree, feel like they might be punished for disagreeing with what the university says. And even though I regard this kind of statement neutrality as very much the lesser part of institutional neutrality—the true lesser neutrality is you don’t fire professors for their political views. You don’t denounce students or professors because of their political views. The whole idea of raising a flag is something, frankly, I don’t care much about, and I don’t see as particularly important compared to those kinds of things.

Now, when universities abuse institutional neutrality to try and silence faculty, staff, and students and compel them to be neutral, they’re actually violating what institutional neutrality really means. They’re trying to impose a political perspective by imposing neutrality. And this is the case with the Board of Trustees at Indiana University and the institutional neutrality policy they adopted in 2024 in response to the State Act 202. And I should note, I think the Board of Trustees really needs to rewrite this entire institutional neutrality—first of all, because it has a spelling mistake, and someone needs to tell the trustees that when you use “its” as a possessive, it is not a contraction and you don’t put an apostrophe in it. So for that reason alone, there needs to be a rewrite of the institutional neutrality policy.

But there are the deeper, I think, political flaws in this kind of policy. One of the things is, it doesn’t actually talk about the institution being neutral. The policy actually says that, well, the Indiana University gets to say what it wants to its students and to the public, as long as it’s not breaking the law, which, of course, no university is doing that by saying—expressing its opinions. The sole focus of the institutional neutrality policy is not on the institution. It’s on the university community members, which includes faculty, staff, alumni, volunteers, and yes, you students. You are part of the problem, according to this policy, and you need to have neutrality imposed on you.

And so one really terrible aspect of this policy is that these kind of limits are placed on university community members. And the policy says that all of you, quote, “should assume that they are representing the university when they conduct official and assigned functions, responsibilities, and duties, including but not limited to communicating in university contexts, using university email accounts, websites, social media channels, public fora, and related channels of communication.” So this is really dangerous: the idea that anybody who’s teaching a class, anybody who’s speaking in a public forum or using a university email account, is automatically presumed to be speaking for the university unless they go through some incredible verbal gymnastics of proving that they’re not speaking for the university.

And so these kind of things—and the university actually says you need to use disclaimers. You need to say you’re not speaking for the university. And this is a problem also I see with the university’s free speech website, which I encourage you to go to and read, which includes an FAQ about institutional neutrality. And one of the things that it says in there, and I’ll read it for you—quote, if the faculty—it says, can faculty talk about their work? And it says, quote, “If the faculty member is expressing their personal views on a social, political, or moral issue, they should identify themselves as an individual.” End quote.

And this makes me wonder, maybe we could all get together and think of a way that we could all identify ourselves as individuals. I’m just spitballing ideas here, but what if we each had personal names and personal email accounts that when you—or if we were individual people, like me—so that when you saw a person or read their name or got an email from them, you would know they were an individual and not the university. For example, my name is John Wilson. I am not a university. In particular, I’m not Indiana University. But that’s true of everybody here.

There is also, you know—I think it’s even clearer when you’re up here speaking. For example, some of you might think, hey, is that Indiana University up there at the podium speaking? What a handsome and brilliant university we have. No, you’re thinking, who is this schlub giving his personal opinions up here? Because you, unlike the trustees, can distinguish between an individual and the institution.

Now, what are the dangers of this disclaimer, beyond the fact that it’s ridiculous, in my view, and a complete waste of everybody’s time to go around saying my ideas are my own, my ideas are your own? Of course your ideas are your own. How could it be any other way? Why would you need to issue disclaimers to say that? But these institutional kind of neutrality policies and requirements of disclaimers actually can get enforced in really terrible ways. There’s a case in 2021 at Collin College, a public college in Texas, where an education professor was fired because she had signed an open letter calling for the removal of Confederate monuments. And because she signed her name with her institutional affiliation of Collin College, they said, you’re trying to speak for the university, and therefore we’re going to fire you. So there are some incredible abuses that come about from badly done institutional neutrality policies.

So what’s the alternative? What else could Indiana University do in replacing its spelling-mistake-prone policy about institutional neutrality? Well, one of the things it could do is adopt what Purdue University did, which is to adopt the Kalven Report, which in my view is much, much better than what Indiana University has come up with. One of the reasons is, I think the Kalven Report has a lot of very good aspects to it that need to be recognized.

One is that the Kalven Report is not enforced by anyone. It doesn’t have an enforcement mechanism. It provides no pathway for people to use it to censor. It says, we persuade people. We have a heavy presumption against the institution speaking. It is an effort to persuade the administration not to speak out on this. In my view, in that sense, it’s not a tool to censor departments, as the University of Chicago has used it to censor websites, ban land acknowledgments, and all of these other things that are not actually, in my view, part of the Kalven Report. The Kalven Report also says that a faculty committee should oversee and interpret what institutional neutrality means, that it shouldn’t just be the administration dictating institutional neutrality to all of us. So I think that’s a great thing that Indiana University should do. There’s also a provision in Ball State University’s institutional neutrality policy which says that individuals are free to express themselves and identify as members of the institution. It just simply takes care of the whole problem. You don’t have to issue disclaimers. You don’t have to worry about who you’re speaking for, because you don’t speak for anyone except yourself.

Now, so why then do I support—and I want to bash neutrality a lot here. As a concept, I think neutrality is a scam. Objectivity doesn’t exist. This kind of whole idea that the university should be neutral is a fiction and a farce, but it’s a useful fiction. In particular, it’s useful because we live under the reign of corporate universities, where the president is the head of this hierarchy that has enormous power over us. And so to me, the question is, why would you want a university president, an overpaid professional fundraiser typically hired by a group of corporate executives and political hacks, to speak for you, to take away your voice and replace it with his own? Why do you imagine that our dear leader will be a better advocate of your values than your own? Why do you want to sort of give up that voice?

And maybe if we had truly democratic universities, there would be an argument for getting rid of institutional neutrality and expressing views. But until we do, I think institutional neutrality as a restraint on the central administration, and not when it’s abused as a tool of censorship—I think that kind of institutional neutrality is a valuable thing. Rather than turning to our corporate leaders, our presidents, to be our moral and intellectual guides, I think we should all speak for ourselves and listen to each other. And I hope we’ll do that today. Thank you.

Organizer: All right, we are now having time for Q&A. So if you would like to ask a question, or you have something for discussion, please raise your hand, and we’ll come to you with the mic.

Audience Member: So you said that the original—

Organizer: Can you introduce yourself?

Audience Member: My name’s Connor. I’m a student at Maurer, the law school. You talked about the original emphasis for the Kalven Report was student protests involving investments that ended up funding the Vietnam War. I’m wondering, then, if you consider investments that fund highly contested causes to fall within this scope of institutional neutrality. I think of examples like apartheid South Africa that were a big deal, where it’s like, does investment funding fit within that neutrality standard?

Tom Ginsburg: Thank you. That’s a great question. So I actually think investments are really distinct context, in which most of the logic I was giving doesn’t actually apply. There’s no neutral investment policy. You’re in Coke or Pepsi. You’re in X or Y, you know. So there’s—but then there’s the question of how pragmatically we go about doing it. Do we hire a bunch of professionals to maximize returns, which arguably nonprofit law might require, or do we use our investment policy to make statements about the world? And as you pointed out, there’s a lot of examples of movements that do so.

And I will say that if I’m a graduate student in East Asian studies and the university divests from fossil fuels or South Africa, that doesn’t really affect my incentive to inquire in the way that it would if my department issued an orthodoxy. So I think it’s quite a distinct context. I myself generally oppose divestment movements, for the following reason: I don’t want to spend all my time arguing with my colleagues about what our investment policy should be. If you want a politicized investment policy, you can choose. You can have higher tuition or lower salaries, or maybe both. But that’s just my personal view. And if the powers that be in the university came up with a different scheme, I wouldn’t really have a strong basis to criticize it, as I do for the other things, the statements.

John Wilson: I would say I also—along with Tom, I opposed divestment of any kind. But I don’t think it’s political to do—and it’s all—divestment policy and all investment policies are political. You’re not more political if you support divestment. Just because I disagree with you doesn’t make you political and me neutral. It’s all a choice that we make for various reasons. The important thing about the Kalven Report is it does have these very broad exceptions for the corporate activities of the university, the things that the university does that it has to take responsibility for, that it has to, in some sense, take a stand.

And so, for me, what—and it’s important to note, in the history of the Kalven Report, what actually was at stake at the University of Chicago were called the rank protests. These were where the Selective Service was demanding that all universities rank their students so they could make the lower half of the ranked students take a test in order to avoid being drafted in Vietnam. And so there were protests, because the University of Chicago did not rank its students. And so the protesters were not demanding divestment from the war. They were saying, just keep the policy the way it is and don’t serve the war machine by ranking students. And the university wanted to help serve the war machine, arguably take a stand, change its policies in order to do that, which it eventually did. And so the idea that the university was neutral and the protesters weren’t is actually the reverse of, in some ways, the way it really was.

These are all positions. And so in any kind of—all these disputes, these arguments about, for example, the universities making statements after George Floyd—in my view, that’s a perfect example of where the Kalven Report has a clear exception that allows for university statements. If you want to make a statement about police violence and racism, well, that kind of makes sense, because if you look at the universities, they actually have armed police forces. And so it’s completely relevant to their corporate activities that you would discuss police violence, for an institution that has an armed police force. And an institution that has an anti-discrimination policy against racism is perfectly entitled to talk about racism as a larger issue, in my view.

So the Kalven Report doesn’t solve these problems. It really opens them up, as to the question of what is really appropriate for the university. And that’s why the Kalven Report needs—institutional neutrality needs to be something that is not imposed on universities, that is in particular not imposed on departments or programs, because it is so ambiguous. You need to let people—even if you believe in this heavy presumption against making statements, which I share, you still need to let individuals, individual departments, individual universities, individual circumstances determine when you make those kind of statements.

Audience Member: Hello. My name is Michaela Wolfork. I’m from Detroit, Michigan, and I’m a law and policy major. My question is especially with Professor Wilson. You said that, why do we give our voice away, especially when it comes to neutrality? So my question is, what advice do you give to students who are at institutions where students aren’t being represented by their institution administration—yeah—along with administration who aren’t chosen by the students? How do we get them to act when the students do not want neutrality?

John Wilson: Well, I think that, first of all, I’m not a professor. No university is obviously going to hire a crackpot like me, or a visionary like me, to discuss these things. But I think that what students can do is make their voices heard. You can write for the student newspaper. You can hold events. You can speak out. You can hold protests. You can do all these different kinds of things to communicate with other people without making it a demand of the university, that we demand the university to speak for us. You can speak for yourself. You can have these student organizations and individual students expressing these ideas, communicating through groups like BridgeUSA to debate and argue some of these ideas. And I think that’s the most important thing. It’s not necessarily the idea that we need someone to decide this for us, what a statement is going to be for all of us to agree with. It’s that we need to continue having the conversation and having the argument. And that’s the danger of university statements, is that they can tend to squelch that.

Now, there’s also a danger on the other side, which the dean mentioned in the introduction, that sometimes silence can be a form of repression as well. If the university says, we never speak on these things, that can send a message to everyone else: you’re not supposed to take political stands, and you’re not supposed to speak. So what we need to do is we need to understand that the purpose of institutional neutrality is not to make the university more neutral. It is to allow everyone else at the university to not be neutral, to express their ideas.

Tom Ginsburg: Can I just add one little point, which is, it’s an orthodox idea of academic freedom that academic decisions have to be made by academics. In other words, a political appointee at the center who happens to be running the place can’t decide, and shouldn’t really decide, who’s going to be hired and fired on the basis of their scholarly work. Academia is a profession, and indeed, these ideas we’re talking about emerged at the same time as many of the American professions emerged as well: medicine and law and such, accounting. Academics were self-judging because we had expertise. Now, the modern university has, as was referred to, has become a very big corporate thing. And it’s interesting that most of the governance systems reflect basically boards of trustees who are technically the sort of responsible for the direction, and often picking the leaders without much input, even from the professors, much less the students. So I think there’s better and worse ways to run these processes, but the core idea is that you have to have academics—you have to have the ideas, the people who produce the ideas, represented.

The other point I want to make is that academia, if you think about it, is not something that—we don’t decide which ideas are correct by majority vote. We don’t. We don’t want to have a vote about, you know, I don’t know, what’s a controversial idea, you know, is climate change real or something. It’s important to preserve the ability of dissident scientists in every field, because sometimes those dissidents turn out to be right. An environment of very open communication is what has allowed some major discoveries to happen. And so we have to tolerate the dissident, if you will. And so you can’t be thinking of the university like a democracy, but it certainly needs input from those who are stakeholders, if I could use the term.

Audience Member: I’m from West Lafayette. I intend to study public policy analysis next year. I’m currently a business student. Professor Ginsburg, earlier you mentioned this point where the Harvard president raised the flag of Ukraine during the Russian invasion of the country. Would you say the same thing—would you say that would be also wrong if it was for the raising of the Polish flag during the Nazi invasion of Poland? My question is essentially, where does the line for this neutrality actually get drawn? This is the question that can be extended to Professor Wilson as well.

Tom Ginsburg: Yeah, I sometimes get the question, you’re like, well, shouldn’t the University of Chicago issued a statement about the Holocaust? And my answer is no. What does a statement do? You think—let’s take Netanyahu. You think that Benjamin Netanyahu reads a condemnation from some department somewhere, said, oh my God, you know, now the anthropologists have told me I’m wrong, I’m going to change my mind? We need to—universities need to act in ways that are serious. And what we happened to do at the University of Chicago during the Nazi regime is open up our campus to scholars who were fleeing Nazi Germany. And that’s important. That’s an action, which, by the way, many of the big, East Coast, important universities didn’t do. We did that because that was consistent with the values.

Now, I think your question raises a really important point: the word neutrality. It’s very triggering now for a lot of people. There’s no neutrality. You know, everyone has read their Foucault, and we’re really suspicious of that term. And so I guess—I’m actually thinking a lot about that, because I think, you know, we’re not neutral in our actions. We’re pursuing knowledge, and we can’t be neutral about that. We need to protect our values and such. We have values. I’m now actually experimenting with another term, which I think might be better than institutional neutrality. And the one I’m using, and you guys are the first to hear it, is impartiality. That is, the university should be impartial with regard to external things that don’t affect it.

You wouldn’t want a judge in a case to be flying the Ukrainian flag in the courtroom, right? And you want the judge to be neutral as among the parties, who then present evidence, and the best evidence wins. And that’s kind of like what a university is. We already have values of impartiality in many of our processes. A tenure process is to be decided on the basis of the academic merit, not on external considerations, not on, you know, your politics or something like that. And so I think it’s maybe a better way of getting what we’re doing. What we’re really talking about is institutional statements. And so no, I don’t think we should have flown the flag or issued a statement when Poland was invaded in 1939.

John Wilson: Yeah, I sort of like that idea of impartiality. I’m—again, I think neutrality is not a great thing, but there are things that you can sort of come close to in terms of neutrality. The concepts of academic freedom and these things can approximate a kind of neutrality. You’re never going to achieve a perfect neutrality in assessing, but it is the idea that the university lets all of these ideas be expressed and doesn’t take a stand by trying to suppress those views. So that’s a kind of neutrality. Where it becomes dangerous is when it then becomes used as, well, nobody’s allowed to take positions, should be taking positions about anything; nobody should be expressing views. The point again, as I said, of neutrality as an institution is to try and protect these structures. I wish everybody was focused more on not firing faculty rather than not flying flags. But I hope that people can move on to that and understand that’s the essence of what institutional neutrality should be: that it’s liberating us to express our ideas.

Audience Member: So, yeah, my name is John Summerlot. I work here at the university, adjunct faculty member. I’m also one of the university historians, which would be apparent here in a second. So in 1861, when South Carolina seceded, the South Carolina secession flag flew over the university campus that morning. And the president ripped it down, and the faculty marched downtown. They burned the flag, and they denounced secession, taking what was probably the first political stance of the university, in 1861.

So that being said, moving forward: I came in the early 2000s. There was a lot of anti-military sentiment on campus. On a weekly basis, there was an anti-military, anti-war march that occurred through campus. We had deans and departments all the way up to the provost sending out messages saying that we understand the military is not welcome on campus as recruiters, or the ROTC program, which we also had on campus, but we have to let them because of federal funding. The university remained neutral. President, Board of Trustees took no stance on this. But across campus, including the department I worked in as a veteran, having recently come out of the military, they said, military and veterans aren’t welcome here, because we know how you feel about LGBTQ people because of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell—which was a pretty broad assumption on who I was.

So, but anyway, listening to what you’re saying, I understand the idea that the institution not having an opinion is one thing. When groups of faculty, when groups of students get together through their own free associations, as a student organization, as a student body, as a department, and the tyranny of the majority kicks in, and they say, we don’t want these people in our department anymore, we don’t want these people in our school, we have an opinion about these people—how, to each of you, does that differ from your individual right as a faculty member or student to say, I have this opinion, versus, we have collectively voted as a department or an organization to say we don’t want these people in our organization?

Tom Ginsburg: Yeah, I think the basic principle is the university keeps its mouth shut. Individuals and groups get to contest things. And there will be many illiberal groups in a pluralist society. And so you can’t help a group of students who are intolerant and even coming together. The question I sometimes get is just about statements. What if all the faculty members of the Department of X sign a statement and then put it up? Is that different than the department putting it up? And I do think that formal distinction does matter, because when the formal department puts it up, then you really are endorsing it as an institution, whereas if every faculty member does, not so. You know, the method—the remedy for what you’re talking about is really counterspeech and organizing, in your case groups of veterans, perhaps, that say, no, you guys are treating us unfairly and unjustly.

I will add one other thing here, which is, all of academic freedom and free speech and all the stuff we talk about is constrained, of course, by Title VI and by anti-discrimination law. And the courts have set a very high bar there. You really have to show a persistent and pervasive kind of harassment in order to meet a test for holding the university liable for such a thing. But the kind of ordinary give-and-take, if you will, that you describe, I think, is part of life in a plural society, unfortunately. We should all be tolerant, of course.

John Wilson: Now, I would say that I think there’s some important distinctions to be made between what is a person’s opinion—people can have anti-military opinion. What happens if they use their power to enforce their opinion in a way that violates the rights of others? For example, a professor saying, I don’t allow military cadets in my class to take my classes; I’m going to give them a failing grade if they wear an ROTC uniform to class. These kinds of things are illegitimate, in the sense that they’re taking what might be your personal opinion as a professor and they’re intruding it into your professional work. And that would be kind of the distinction that’s made.

The question is, are statements and that kind of thing a part of the professional work? And I don’t think so, particularly because in this case, I think people were generally objecting to the discriminatory aspects of recruiting, and not to the fact that there are military on campus. Then maybe there are some people who object to that, but I think those were—at least what I know of the protests against Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell in the 1990s, they were about discrimination by the military and the university’s obligation to not allow discrimination on campus, rather than being forms of discrimination against the military by departments. In that—now, you can have dangerous elements where sometimes that can extend over. That’s true of whether it’s anti-military speech or speech about Israel or all these other things, where people can express their views strongly, even views that are hostile or even hate speech in some ways, as long as they’re not implementing those views in a way that discriminates against people in their educational activities.

Audience Member: Hi, my name is Heather Reynolds. I’m in the Department of Biology, and thank you for this conversation. It’s very productive and helpful. My question is, I’ve been trying to figure out where you two disagree, if at all, because it seems like there’s a lot of overlap, productive overlap, between you. And—but I’m wondering if a place you might disagree is in the area of boundedness. Whereas, if I’m hearing you right, John might say a faculty should be able to say whatever they want, whereas Tom might say, no, your expressions need to be bounded by your expertise. So regardless of whether you’re affiliated—if you’re affiliated yourself with the university, well, when you are part of the university, your speech needs to be bounded by your expertise. Is that an area of disagreement? Am I picking up that right? And can you clarify how we should think about this?

Tom Ginsburg: Why don’t you say why we disagree? We used to disagree about departments.

John Wilson: Oh, we still disagree about departments. Now, the issue is departmental—well, I’ll get to boundedness in a second. Departmental academic freedom is what I call it, that departments have the right to express themselves. And so Tom has this idea that departments are covered as part of the administration under the Kalven Report. I argue that institutional neutrality policies in the Kalven Report applies to the central administration alone. It does not apply to all the constituent elements of the university. It is the central administration alone that has the supreme power, and much greater power than departments have. The central administration gets to fire you, gets to ban you from campus. The departments can’t do that. It gets to deny you tenure, even. The administration does that technically, not the department. They just make recommendations. The power in the university is in the hands of the central administration. That’s where the real danger is.

And if you have this concept of departmental neutrality, which I actually would support—I don’t like collective statements. I don’t sign group letters. I don’t like this stuff. So I would prefer departments not to do that. But you need to persuade them to do it, just as the Kalven Report says you need to persuade the central administration to do this. So what becomes dangerous is when the Kalven Report, institutional neutrality, is misused, in my view, by the central administration to control faculty speech. The purpose of the Kalven Report is that the faculty are free to speak. And so that includes collective statements, just as individual freedom of religion includes the right to be part of a church and to express yourselves as part of a church. The right of individuals to speak also includes the right to get together and say things. And while there may be some limits to the departments on what they can do, and while I would urge departments not to speak out so much and not to say so many stupid things, I think the Kalven Report says we have to persuade them to do that, not have the administration control them to do that.

Tom Ginsburg: So, I mean, that’s obviously a point of disagreement. I think the departments exercise much more power, and thus are more suspect, and also the site of disciplinary orthodoxies, which have crystallized. And actually, a lot of our disciplines are in big trouble over some of these things. You know, another area—I don’t know if we disagree about this, but here’s the dirty little secret: professors have more speech rights than anyone in the society, in the following sense. You are perfectly free to say David Reingold is a schmo and the university’s a colonial institution, and attack it very viciously. And that is understood in our tradition as being part of the internal ability to critique for the governance of the university. If you worked at, let’s say, Wendy’s, and you said your boss was, you know, a fool, you could be fired tomorrow. We’re in a country of at-will employment.

And the reason I think this is important is because at this moment—you know, back in 1890, when the socialist professor put something in the newspaper, well, a few people in Chicago read that newspaper. Now, a professor who says something really stupid that has nothing to do with their expertise, that doesn’t just stay in the university. That goes viral globally. And it’s endangering us in some sense, right? And I’m not saying that those professors should have more limited rights at all. I am saying that I think it’s time for us, self-governing professionals, to insist on a little bit of professionalism from our colleagues sometimes. Like, if you’re not an expert in something, maybe you shouldn’t be on Twitter all the time like you’re a 15-year-old living in their parents’ basement.

You know, just—and I think we need to do that because professions are in trouble, not just our profession. Lots of professions are in trouble. They’re under attack. Think about what’s going on with the military as a profession right now, law firms. Professions are very fragile in our polarized country, and I think it’s time for us to return. We can’t survive unless we return to some ideas of, yeah, we have the right to speak and to inquire, and we’re going to insist on that. We’re going to fight you to the death for that right. But it’s also the case of, if you don’t know something about something, maybe you ought to keep your mouth shut. Let the students act like the students.

John Wilson: I disagree with that. I think we shouldn’t be discouraging people from expressing their free speech. And faculty have academic freedom in the sense that they get to speak in the classroom and have this special freedom on the job that maybe a lot of other people don’t necessarily have, that’s essential to their work. But they also have to have the freedom, the same rights as anyone else, to speak out, to exercise their freedom of speech without being punished for their political views, which is what the University of Wisconsin realized back in 1894. Not only do we need to protect the rights of people to speak up, but we also need, as universities, to avoid the danger of intervening to fire controversial faculty, as well as we need to stop criticizing them and telling them to shut up.

I think that whole approach of, well, please shut up on Twitter, is wrong. I think we need to have the perspective, let’s encourage more people to speak up, and let’s try and persuade people to adopt a position of academic freedom and free speech, and start saying, well, if someone says something offends me, maybe I should argue with them rather than try to get them fired. I think that’s the kind of ethical position we should be promoting, rather than the position, you need to shut up and go to work, shut up and teach. I don’t regard that as being the message we need to send to professors. I think we need to, as much as possible, expand the freedom to speak.

Tom Ginsburg: Well, it’s very hard for ordinary Americans. Is Debbie Cohen here? And I grew up in Berkeley, California, and there was a restaurant there called Top Dog—you’ll remember that—on Durant Avenue, a hot dog place that was open all hours of the night. Turns out that there was a guy who worked at the Top Dog who was later—who was in the Charlottesville antisemitic, anti-Black, racist, you know, march, and that person was fired. Now, ordinary employees of Top Dog can be fired for things they say and do. How can such people—first of all, I think that seems appropriate. You’re going to act like a fool and bring embarrassment to your employer? That seems appropriate. I’m not saying that universities should do this. I’m saying that we professors should have a standard of professionalism, that if we’re going to claim the benefits of being a profession, and having academic freedom is grounded in ideas of professionalism, you’ll agree, then we ought to encourage our colleagues to act like it. That’s all. I’m not saying that the administration gets to fire you like the Top Dog boss.

Audience Member: I don’t need a microphone. Okay. Hi, I’m Caroline Smothers. I’m a law and public policy major. Recently, the high school that I attended was put on Facebook for having different inclusivity flags hung, and it was specifically called out by the Attorney General of Indiana. I also want to connect this to—the Indiana trustee board was recently replaced by all people that might be unappointed. How can we as students feel like we can be represented by an institution claiming neutrality whenever opinions are expressed and the government above us suppresses them?

Tom Ginsburg: Yeah, well, I think John said very well that this is a misconstrual of neutrality, that, you know, this isn’t about neutrality at all. It’s about taking one side of political aisle and enforcing its views on everybody else, and there’s nothing neutral about that in any sense of the word. What do you do about it? I don’t—I’d be interested if you have ideas for what people in the room can do in such an environment that is really, you know, one of the most repressive in the United States in this regard. Texas, Indiana, Florida: these are the states in which the legislatures are competing to adopt the most repressive set of rules for academics.

John Wilson: Well, yeah, and it’s important to note that we’re seeing in America the worst attack on academic freedom in the history of American higher education, what you have had from the combination of the Trump administration, state Republican officials in various states trying to repress free speech, as well as universities themselves engaging in amazing amounts of repression. One thing that—so it’s an incredibly difficult environment. One of the things I think we can appeal to, we can try to appeal to, is this idea of a principled academic freedom. Because even though a lot of the Republican officials, a lot of university administrators, have been repressing academic freedom left and right, they still pretend that they support it. And so I think there is a pathway by which you can say, let’s enact real policies that protect academic freedom. Let’s have universities speak out in defense of academic freedom.

You know, the whole issue of institutional neutrality: it’s not that you can never speak out, is that you only should speak out about your values. And so the university presidents, administrators, should be speaking out and saying, we don’t punish professors for their speech. They should be adopting things like the 1894 Wisconsin statement and saying, we don’t dismiss faculty for their political views. We don’t criticize them, even, for their political views. That, I think, is one way in which you can do that.

Another concept I want to bring up is the concept of shared governance, the idea that one thing we need to have at universities is not this hierarchical system where the political hacks run the board of trustees, they order the university administrators to do things, and the administrators order everybody on campus to do this. Not only do you need freedom, but you need a system where students have a voice, where faculty have a voice, where staff have a voice, where they’re involved in making policies. Because if you have faculty and students and staff involved in making an institutional neutrality policy, maybe you wouldn’t have had such a terrible policy enacted by the Board of Trustees. Maybe somebody would have spotted the spelling error, among other things.

So I think that’s one thing that’s essential for the universities, to have those kind of protections, as well as protections like tenure and having explicit policies that say universities protect these values. That, I think, is part of what you can do. Part of it is about changing—about bringing, you know, inviting university leaders to speak to events about these things, so that you can communicate that you want to have these kind of free—to have this free speech, or whatever your other values are, to express that. Try and do that directly to these people. Invite the board of trustees to your events, and invite them to campus to debate these ideas, and challenge them to argue about it rather than to impose it on you.

Audience Member: Hey, I’m Carl Weinberg, ex-professor from History and PACE, happily retired, but glad to be here. Thanks for the conversation. In spring of 2013, a group of IU students staged a protest strike, and they recruited some faculty to do a series of sit-ins about the history of protest activity on campus and things like that. I was one of a bunch of faculty who took part. We communicated about this on the faculty email listserv. And in the middle of that conversation, the dean then of the College of Arts and Sciences, Larry Singell, stepped in and told us we were not allowed to use the faculty listserv to talk about being part of this strike movement. He was wrong. There was no policy against this. A number of us pushed back, and he was then forced to walk back this statement and say, never mind. Although in his email, he said, “I was actually quite heartened by the willingness of faculty to confront what they believed to be an incorrect or unjust application of policy.” I don’t believe really he was heartened. I think he was kind of humiliated and bummed out that we actually stepped forward and asserted our rights.

Now, one of the policies lurking behind this episode, and some of the policy that John very helpfully quoted from IU, hasn’t been mentioned, so I just wanted to throw it into the mix. It’s called the Johnson Amendment, passed by U.S. Congress in 1954. It does say that tax-exempt organizations, including IU, public universities, may not endorse political candidates for office. If they do, they will lose their tax-exempt status if the IRS acts. And basically, I think the former dean was somehow imagining we were doing that, when we weren’t. Although that’s currently the law, from what I’ve read, it’s not being enforced, and even the IRS itself has weighed in in a recent case to basically say, we don’t even believe in this. I don’t know what the future of it is. I think it’s worth knowing about, because it may be invoked by the administration, and any students here, anybody involved in organizing, should know what that legal terrain is, so they can’t be bamboozled. Any comments on this would be welcome.

Tom Ginsburg: Yes. So it’s a classic authoritarian tactic at public universities to kind of get in and say, well, you can’t use your email for this. All of us are using our email to shop on Amazon, and no one seems to be bothered by that. I’m telling you a story just to tell you the stakes. I have a friend named Benny Tai, who was a Hong Kong university professor, who is in jail for the rest of his life. And the charge was using his university email account to help organize the Umbrella protest there in 2014. And so what I would caution—and I think the students probably know this better than you and me—is, if you’re doing stuff in this environment, it’s not bad to be on Signal. It’s not bad to have, like, some group things. Just, why not? Because everything you put in text and did in bytes is always gonna be there.

And at the same time, I wanna respond to one of the earlier points and say, it’s not clear to me that this attack on higher ed is particularly popular. I don’t know if this is really gonna keep going. You know, they tried to cut the NIH budget. It turns out most people like cancer treatment, you know. Even oligarchs might get it. And so I don’t know. It depends, obviously, what happens with politics, but I think a lot of this might just be the overplaying of their hand, in some sense. And that internal organization stuff is just something, you know—is a pragmatic matter. Not bad to be careful. But I can see no principled reason why a university would not allow such things.

I should say one other thing about protests. Protest is a critical part of democratic governance. We talk a lot about freedom of speech. We don’t talk very much about freedom of assembly, and it’s not very well developed legally. Really, there’s, like, time, place, and manner restrictions are essential to the functioning of an institution. A university can put on time, place, and manner restrictions. But I would always advise, as a matter of policy, to be very generous in recognizing that you want to facilitate student protest and freedom of speech, and not do things like say, you know, there’s no expressive activity between the hours of 12 and 8 in the morning on the quad—something facially illegal, which was the earlier policy. So, you know, it’s a matter of developing policies that facilitate people to have this conversation. That’s the other side. It’s not just a negative thing, that the university has to keep its mouth shut. It has to actively cultivate the ability of all of us to speak. I often say free speech isn’t free. It’s actually really costly to develop such structures and to encourage people to do it and help understand what the principles are. So that’s what I’d like to see our universities turn to in this fraught moment.

John Wilson: Yeah, and I would recommend people look at the University of Chicago Center on Free Inquiry and Expression, which Tom runs, as a model for what you should do at Indiana University. You should create your own, ideally faculty-run, even student-run institution that is devoted to expanding free speech, defending free speech, talking about free speech. And so I think that’s one practical thing, and ideally try and get the university to pay for it. But, you know, a lot of these things, conversations you can have, that are actually not—they don’t require a lot of institutional investment to engage people in argument and debate.

Now, I would say, on the politics of the matter, I am much more cynical. I think a lot of people like censorship. They like repressing the views that they oppose. And so I am not—and it doesn’t really matter, even in terms of the Trump administration, whether it’s popular or not. They’re going to repress free speech no matter what. They don’t care if it’s popular, if they think they’re going to pay a political price. They want to defund and destroy their enemies, and they regard higher education as one of their enemies.

The popularity of it, I think, is important. I think it is important. Some forms of free speech are very unpopular. People use hate speech. It’s very hard to defend a lot of those people. I spend a lot of time defending horrible people who say horrible things, and it doesn’t really make me popular. But I think it is important, and it is important to have these kind of principled stances. I think there are some forms of free speech that are very popular. For example, one of the things I work on is Banned Books Week, which is coming up October 4th through the 10th. I would encourage everybody—because this is one of the most popular aspects of free speech, is opposing the banning of books. And so you should get together and do readings of banned books and speak out and do events that students can do. You can make your voice heard by doing this kind of thing, and you can contribute to that kind of culture of free speech that you really ought to be creating, and not wait for the administration, not wait for some program to give you permission to start speaking out in favor of free speech and organizing. Go to groups like BridgeUSA, create your own groups to do these kind of things. That, I think, is very much a feasible thing.

Tom Ginsburg: By the way, it’s okay to try out ideas you don’t agree with, you know, just for the sake of argument. It’s a kind of—we’re in the social media era. The social media is basically—a lot of it, not all of it, obviously, but a lot of it is just like, you know, let’s mob on someone who said something that was inappropriate, or we think was. And that spread into universities. We had cancel culture in universities that led to more firings before Trump than during the entire McCarthy period. And don’t get into the denominator, boy. That’s a serious thing. That was happening within our own culture, and social media really pushes it. So it requires, like, you guys just get together and talk to people without the phones and try out some ideas and, you know, just see what happens. It’s a little bit—requires some trust, right? But it’s really important.

John Wilson: Yeah, and I think one of the—and this goes back to the listserv and all of that—the danger is that we’re all living under a panopticon. We’re under surveillance now in ways that had never been possible before. Professors are on Zoom getting recorded. Video phones are recording everything you say. You’re on social media. People are spouting this. There’s a lot more information being spread, which is a good thing, contrary to what Tom says. It’s a good thing to express all these ideas, even if they’re stupid. But the danger is, we have a system that sort of was built up on privacy: the idea that professors wouldn’t get fired because nobody could prove what dumb things they said in the classroom. And now they can be proved to have said something dumb in the classroom, and a lot of them are getting fired, or say some dumb thing on Twitter, whereas a private conversation in the past would have never happened like that.

So we need to be much more careful. That applies even to your listservs. I strongly defend the right of people to use university emails to engage in political activism, to endorse political candidates, which is all perfectly legal. But I would encourage you to maybe use private emails, because there are people using the emails of public university professors to spy on organizations like the AAUP, where they will just look for keywords about anything they want to investigate. The Manhattan Institute has been doing this. And they will literally use Freedom of Information Act requests to get all the emails from a professor who would mention a particular topic or have talked about something. And so there is that real danger there, that you’re under constant surveillance. And maybe you want to reserve a personal privacy by using a personal email to engage in these kind of activities.

But what’s more important, I think, is for all of us to try and create a culture where we’re not going after people just because they said something stupid, where we’re not trying to get them fired, we’re not trying to get them punished by the university, we’re not turning them in to the authorities because they said something we don’t like, where instead we should try and educate and counter what they say rather than seek to punish them for it.

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The four cases run from editing embryos with today’s technology, to a world where no one can have children, to cheap and safe “strip mall” genetic engineering, to treating eggs and sperm before conception. After audience members weigh in on each, Vukov and Burns show where they land — including where they agree, but for entirely different reasons. The conversation closes with audience questions. A transcript of the conversation follows below.

Joseph Vukov: All right, good evening everyone. I’m going to be presenting today, as has already been said, on in what cases is it ethically permissible to genetically modify human embryos. So we wanted to start out with just a little bit about ourselves. We represent a couple of different ways of coming at this question. I am a philosopher by training, did a PhD in philosophy, currently work in a lot of ethics of technology, and because this is relevant for the discussion tonight, I am a Catholic who tries to be a pretty by-the-books Catholic and lean a little bit more conservative when it comes to ethical issues like what we’re going to be discussing tonight. And Burns is on the exact same page, right buddy?

Michael Burns: That is absolutely not true my name is Dr. Michael Burns. I am in the biology department and bioinformatics program at Loyola University Chicago. I’m an associate professor there. I’m also the director of the artificial intelligence and human flourishing program — brand new minor program. And it says artificial intelligence, since you must be like, oh, you love data centers. I mentioned there’s a second part of it, which is human flourishing. Okay, so there’s like a part of it we’re like, care about people. Anyway, you have a whole bunch of other titles, don’t you?

Joseph Vukov: I do. So I also am an associate director for, we’ve got this place called the Hank Center for Catholic Intellectual Heritage. So I help direct that center as well.

Michael Burns: The other piece, so you mentioned he’s a Roman Catholic and vaguely conservative. I’d say you’re pretty conservative, Joe.

Joseph Vukov: I’m pretty conservative, yeah.

Michael Burns: I’m an atheist.

Joseph Vukov: I got my best conservative suit on.

Michael Burns: That’s right. Yes. We tried to look the part. We also don’t wear suits very often, by the way. This is all code switching. I’m an atheist. I lack a belief in any gods. And I’m also pretty left-leaning.

Joseph Vukov: You’re very left-leaning.

Michael Burns: I’m basically like your stereotypical, awful, I’m going to indoctrinate you children into being communists professor. That’s me.

Joseph Vukov: Yeah. So we’re going to dive right in. But just one other thing is that so Michael and I, even though we come from very different disciplinary perspectives, very different political and ethical orientations, we go way back in doing collaboration. So in fact, we go way back to day number one. We both started at Loyola University Chicago 10 years ago. Not our births.

Michael Burns: Not our births. We’re not born on the same day.

Joseph Vukov: Although it turns out we both were raised in southern Minnesota, about 30 miles away from each other. So the accents are very similar that you might pick up on. When we go back to day one at Loyola, we actually met at faculty orientation. And from that day forward, started doing first extracurricular stuff. We now teach a class together and end up, we’ve done fellowships, like residential fellowships together at different places. So we’ve ended up hanging out a lot together and traveling the country and doing these kinds of talks. Yes.

Michael Burns: Anyway, take it away, Joe. What’s the proposal?

Joseph Vukov: So here’s the proposal. There are circumstances in which it is morally permissible to design human embryos. And I want to note that we’ve sort of made a few little changes to the initial title of the talk. So one thing is that instead of just talking about genetic engineering, We’re going to widen things up just a little bit. Genetic engineering of human embryos is still going to be our primary focus. We’re also going to gesture to a couple of other ways in which it’s possible to design human embryos. That’s the first thing. The other thing that we want you to get to by the end of the discussion today, and we really do want this to be a discussion. So we’ll have some things to say to you.

We’ll be giving you sort of some lecture content for the next while. But by the end, this is a fair warning, is we want you all talking with each other and with us as well. So we’re going to have some interactive portions to the presentation by the time we get to the end of it. And what we want you to see, among other things, is that when it comes to thinking about ethical issues, especially ethical issues that have to do with emerging technologies, it’s very typically unproductive to think about answering those issues in a yes or no or black and white kind of way.

Instead, what we want to do is to introduce you to the issue of genetically modifying human embryos in such a way that we can identify different kinds of circumstances such that the ethical considerations might be different, the science might be different, and the context might be different that might actually change where you lie on that issue. And we’re going to demonstrate the way in which it changes the place that we lie on that issue. It turns out there are places where Michael and I completely agree with each other, places where we completely disagree, and places where both of us kind of put our hands in the air and are a little bit undecided.

It also explains sort of that nuance that we wanna get to you to, also explains how we’ve structured our discussion with you tonight. So what we wanna do is we want to introduce you, first of all, to the relevant science. So we think it’s really important that to tackle an issue like this, you can’t just go into this as the ethicist. So I’m the ethicist, the humanist guy in the room without knowing about the science. So it’s one reason why Michael and I love presenting together is that he keeps me honest about the science and he’s going to keep us honest about the science.

Michael Burns: Don’t believe anything Joe says about science.

Joseph Vukov: No, you absolutely shouldn’t. You absolutely shouldn’t. And that’s why Burns is here. On the flip side, don’t believe anything Burns tells you about ethics. That’s my job is to tell you about the most relevant ethical considerations that you have to do to make decisions about genetically engineering human embryos. And then only then will we get to actual case studies. So again, what we want to get you to is to see it’s not black and white to say, yes, I’m in favor of genetically engineering embryos. No, I’m not in favor of it. Rather, you need to look at very specific case studies and we have some realistic ones. We have some more science fictional ones.

The idea will be to tease apart your ethical intuitions, your ethical reasons, to see where you land and to see where you differ than me and Michael and where you might be on the same page. So as Michael said, without further ado, you do not want to hear about science from me. So I’m going to turn the clicker over to Dr. Burns.

Michael Burns: All right. Hello, everybody. Just out of curiosity, how many of you are like STEM, biology, biomedical students and/or faculty? Okay, that’s a pretty healthy chunk of you. That’s good. And these people in the house — hey, they exist. Excellent. So what we’re gonna talk about is some of the science. So just as a heads up, this is going to be for a general audience. So for those of you who have most recently are currently taking genetics, I know that you know the difference between non-homologous end joining and homology-directed repair. We’re going to gloss over that for today. Okay, this is going to be important. All right, first off, the genome is a very big place.

And when I say the genome is a very big place, I mean it is a very big place in that when we say the word big, we basically mean the size of it is actually not intuitively understandable to you. Okay? It turns out that human brains are not very good at depicting very large and very small things. So in this context, this is capital B. In order to try to put this in context, a typical human cell will have 46 chromosomes, so just 46 pieces of DNA. And if you took those 46 pieces and you stretched them out and then stitched them all together into one giant piece of DNA and stretched it out, it would be about two meters long, so a little bit taller than me. So all the way from here, all the way down to the floor would be one DNA molecule.

That’s the DNA that you find in one cell. Now it would be incredibly thin because a double helix of DNA cannot be visualized with even light microscopy. Some extra fancy techniques if you want to see it. And then you take all that, you can ball it back up and you stuff it inside the nucleus of a cell, which you probably do need a microscope to see. And that’s going to be relevant in a moment. All right. Again, for those of you who just need a brief refresher on this, What we’re talking about here is a human cell, because we’re focusing on humans tonight. All human cells contain the same DNA in your body, with an asterisk. Okay, there’s a couple asterisks.

One of them to bring up, for instance, is that one of the most common types of cells, I think the most common cell type in your body, are your erythrocytes, which are red blood cells. Red blood cells don’t have any DNA. There’s no DNA in red blood cells, which is always funny because you watch like a true crime show and they see a blood stain, like, ah, we got to swab the blood stain and we’re going to figure out who it is. All the red blood stuff that’s in there, that’s just a contaminant. You have to work to get rid of it because you’re actually going to focus on the cells that actually have DNA in there, which are going to be mostly immune cells. Immune cells have them. All right. So red blood cells don’t, but all the rest of your cells do.

There’s the cell. There’s a thing in the middle called the nucleus. The nucleus contains all the chromosomes and there’s little regions of the DNA in the genome that are the genes which do stuff. So here’s the central dogma of biology, which I’m sure you’ve all been exposed to before, but we have DNA. It encodes the genes in a series of A’s and C’s and T’s and G’s. These are the alphabet of DNA. It can be transcribed into messenger RNA and other types of RNA. Messenger RNA gets translated into protein. And proteins are the little nanomachines that get stuff done. Okay? So proteins are the things that get stuff done in a cell and, therefore, in your body.

If you care about changing the function of your body or your cells, like, well, we need to change what these little nanomachines do. And how are we going to do that? You don’t want to just target the protein. You’re going to go all the way back here. You’re going to identify a gene. You change the gene. You change the RNA that gets made from it. And you change the protein. Okay? This is just setting the stage for everything that we’re going to talk about here. All right. So how can we alter it? How can we do it? Well, it turns out that human cells spend a lot of effort maintaining their genomes. Okay, we’re going to anthropomorphize them and say that they care very much about keeping their genomes intact.

And I also highlighted that each individual cell contains an actually a huge amount of DNA, right? Again, this big, huge, long string of DNA. And your cells want to keep that in. They don’t want it to get cut. They don’t want it to get tangled up. They don’t want to lose track of it. They don’t want to make more copies of it than they need. So they spend a lot of energy surveilling it and making sure everything’s hunky-dory with it. And it turns out that these two ladies, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuel Charpentier, discovered that there are ways that you can hijack it. So they’re the pioneers of the CRISPR-Cas9 technology, which some of you may have heard of. They won the Nobel Prize in 2020 for that work.

If you’re interested in scientific soap operas, you can dig into this particular story. The good news is that these two actually did discover this. They got the Nobel Prize for it. But I believe there are still lingering court cases related to the patents because a bunch of dude bros at the Broad attempted to sort of steal valor from these two by sneaking the patent out from underneath them. Anyway, CRISPR-Cas9. So what we can basically do is we’re going to take the cell’s energy while it’s trying to maintain the genome and hijack that effort to change it. All right. So we’re going to start with something simple. Here’s a piece of DNA, double-stranded DNA. These little lines in the middle here indicate A’s and C’s and T’s and G’s. Those are some DNA.

And we’re going to have another piece that we put in here. This is something that you can make in the laboratory. It’s called a guide RNA. It’s a short piece of RNA. We talked about RNA before. It’s different than DNA, but it’s also made up of letters. And this guide RNA, when you make it synthetically in the laboratory, you get to pick what the letters are that you put in here. And what you’re going to try to do is if you say, I want to target a gene that’s got a sequence of A’s and C’s and T’s and G’s. All you have to do is make a guide RNA that is complementary. It basically has the same sort of sequence that’s going to match there. You also introduce a Cas9 protein. Again, a protein that’s a little nanomachine that does something.

In this case, the protein binds to this guide RNA and will sort of follow it around in the cell. If there’s a region of the DNA that your guide RNA matches with, Because again, you’re hoping that this is going to match here. What happens is the Cas9 that it brought along for the ride is going to make a cut right at that spot. It’s going to cut the DNA at that spot. And then bing, bang, boom, you have a cut in the DNA. Who cares? What does this have to do with editing the genome? It turns out, remember, cells are paying very close attention to what’s going on with the DNA because there’s so much of it needs to make sure that it’s nice and intact. What ends up happening is three different possible outcomes.

Once the DNA is cut, the first thing that can happen is the cell just repairs that cut correctly. But CRISPR, the CRISPR guide RNA and the Cas9 haven’t gone anywhere. So they’re just going to cut it again. And then the cell will repair it. And then it’ll just get cut again. And then your cell will repair it and it’ll just get cut again. It’ll just keep going back and forth. That’s how that works. And that’s really boring. The interesting stuff starts happening is when the cell makes a mistake.

So if the cell tries to fix it, but can’t quite fix it, and it changes the sequence, it changes the letters that are here, the A’s and C’s and T’s and G’s don’t quite work out, this one no longer matches to your guide RNA, which means that the cutting cycle stops, and you have introduced a mutation into the cell. There’s another even fancier, kind of harder way to do this, where in addition to your guide RNA and your Cas9 nuclease, which is just an enzyme that cuts DNA, you can actually introduce some DNA that’s like a new gene, for instance, that you want, that you would like to incorporate into the genome, and the cell can at some level introduce this as a type of mutation.

So you’ve actually introduced a new function into this part of the genome using this technology, and because this region now no longer has the sequence of the guide RNA, this also will stop the cycle. So these are three different outcomes that you can get from a CRISPR-Cas9 event. And this also explains why it’s so efficient, because if it doesn’t do it the first time, it’s gonna just keep going over and over again until there’s a change. This is groundbreaking. This is the reason, there’s a reason they won the Nobel Prize. When I was in graduate school, I actually made transgenic animals, but it was before the CRISPR era, which means I did it the old fashioned way, and it sucked. It took forever. It was incredibly tough to do.

I would have been much faster if I had access to the CRISPR technology. All right. Now that we have this, it turns out this is actually pretty cheap, pretty straightforward, pretty easy to do. Again, there’s a reason they won the Nobel Prize. It turns out that one of the hard parts is actually how do you get all this crap inside cells? How do you get this Cas protein and the guide RNA and then maybe some extra DNA into a cell? How do you deliver it? Here are a couple different ways. There are more ways than this. Is just a couple. One of them is using an approach called ex vivo manipulation. So ex vivo just means outside of the organism. So if you’re talking about humans, maybe there’s a human who has some sort of an immune disorder that’s genetic.

So you’re going to take some immune cells out of the person. You’ll pull their blood out. You’ll filter out the immune cells. And then you can manipulate them in cell culture, which is much easier to do than in the context of doing it inside their body. So you can manipulate them there. You can use a viral vector. So in this case, a viral vector is just using a virus to carry something. That’s what the vector is. You may have heard, like, there’s all sorts of interesting science articles and pop-sci news things where they’re like, scientists cure brain cancer using herpes virus. And you’re like, that doesn’t sound right. I don’t know what’s going on with that one. They’re not actually using literal herpes virus.

What they’ve done is it turns out that viruses infect specific cell types. And that means that they probably have like a spike protein or a surface protein that will only infect, for instance, neurons. It’s not going to infect any other cell type; it’ll infect neurons. And scientists are likely going to steal that piece of the virus, and then the other pieces of the virus they’re going to replace with stuff that they want. Okay, so that’s an example of a viral vector. In this case, you could make a virus — for instance, like, you could steal the surface protein from hepatitis virus, for instance, that infects liver cells, and then have it deliver whatever you want.

And the thing that maybe you want to deliver is a CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit to a bunch of liver cells. And therefore you’re using a virus to carry that into your body. There are problems with this one, which we might talk about later. The other one is direct embryo injection. All right, so this is where you literally just say, there’s one cell that amounts to roughly what’s going to turn into a whole human being. Let’s just inject that, okay? Turns out this one’s the easiest. And here’s an example. Here’s a video. So this is a fertilized egg. This is an embryo. It’s being held by a pipette. So there’s a little vacuum here that’s sort of grabbing it.

And then there’s a little itty bitty glass needle that they’re using and they’re injecting it straight in there. It goes. Baby’s first vaccine. It’s not a vaccine. We’re just delivering it directly to where it needs to go. And then now 100% of the cells that are formed from this particular embryo will have that genetic change carried forward. Easy peasy, right? In other words, it’s easier to manipulate just one big cell because it turns out that human egg cells are actually pretty big. You can actually see them with the naked eye if you were to find one. That’s the hard part. Versus the 30 trillion or so cells that make up a human body. Okay. An adult human is literally roughly 30 trillion cells if you’re just counting the human cells.

If you start including bacteria and all the other stuff, it gets up to 60, 70 trillion. So one cell versus several trillion cells, which brings us to an ethics break.

Joseph Vukov: A quick ethics break, folks, brought to you by the philosopher. Sorry, there you go. So the distinction Michael just introduced between these two methods of doing genetic modifications, right? So on the one hand, you have modifying either a group of cells or a targeted tissue, and the other one you’re modifying an embryo directly. It turns out for reasons that will become apparent as we continue talking, but that’s one of the most crucial distinctions not only for the science, but also for the ethics of doing genetic modifications to human cells. Because it turns out that when we are doing modifications to groups of cells or to targeted tissues, sometimes called somatic genetic modification in contrast to embryonic or germline modification.

Michael Burns: Somatic just means body cells. And germ cells are? This is a pop quiz. No, it’s sperm and eggs. Sperm and eggs and then fertilized together will make germ cells. Yeah.

Joseph Vukov: Yeah, so it turns out that modifying tissues or modifying collections of cells is almost universally agreed upon to be ethically permissible as long as you meet certain conditions. We’re gonna work through these more as we go, but number one, it’s permissible as long as, again, it’s somatic. You’re doing it to clusters of cells, to tissues, not to human embryos. Number two, it’s therapeutic. So you’re doing it to try and fix some genetic disorder or to solve some disease, and you’re not doing it for the sake of increasing height or making somebody more intelligent. We’re gonna get to that as well. Something you could totally do, but people will say, well, no, that’s a little bit dicier.

Michael Burns: Some of those things you can actually do.

Joseph Vukov: Some, yeah, it’s a little iffy whether it actually works, but people promise that they can do that. They do. And then finally, if it is in fact well-regulated. So it turns out that when it comes to therapies, we have very good mechanisms already in place by which to approve certain therapies. Think here just about FDA regulation and approval process. And most ethicists will say, look, as long as you are just targeting tissues, as long as you are doing it for therapeutic and not enhancement reasons, and as long as it’s properly regulated, totally fine ethically. Again, ethicists are a weird bunch. You could probably find somebody who’s against it, but for the most part, all the humanists—

Michael Burns: You guys are the worst

Joseph Vukov: Exactly. Everyone lines up on one side of the room and says, yeah, we’re fine with that. And it’s a good thing, too, because it turns out that the therapeutic cases of somatic genetic modification are absolutely not just a hypothetical thing, not a thing that we could do that ethicists are saying, oh, that’s okay, we should do that. It’s actually something that’s going on right now. And Michael’s going to introduce you to one application here that is currently FDA approved.

Michael Burns: Yeah, so this is one that’s FDA approved. There are several other that are currently in trials for FDA approval, but this is using CRISPR-Cas9 technology to treat a disorder. Okay. This is the website for the pharmaceutical, which is apparently normal. It’s called exagamaglaginatotimil. I can’t say it. Doesn’t matter. That’s the brand name. It’s totally fine. It’s a CRISPR-Cas9 approach. Okay. It’s treating sickle cell disorders. So sickle cell disorders are like people, for instance, that end up with sickle cell anemia will often have a mutation in a gene that is responsible for the shape and function of red blood cells. We remember red blood cells from before, right? It turns out that red blood cells don’t have DNA.

So this becomes tricky, because you’re like, how in the heck are you gonna treat red blood cells with CRISPR-Cas9 if red blood cells don’t have DNA? The trick is they’re not going to. What they’re going to do is they’re gonna go back a couple steps, and they’re going to apply an ex vivo approach and target stem cells. So they’re gonna target the progenitor cells or the cells that themselves are not red blood cells, but as they grow and divide and mature, they turn into red blood cells. So for patients with this disorder, what they do is they’re going to stimulate the release of a bunch of these hematopoietic stem cells into the bloodstream. They’ll collect them by filtering them out of their blood.

Once they have enough of them, they will genetically modify them with the CRISPR technology outside of the patient’s body. While that’s happening, they’re going to take the patient and treat them with a chemotherapy drug not because they have cancer, but they’re going to treat them with a chemotherapy drug to basically kill off any of the remaining hematopoietic stem cells. So they’re going to clear out the compartment that these cells live in to make a nice home so that when they transplant the engineered cells back in, that the transplanted cells engraft, and then when they make new red blood cells, they’re able to function slightly better. This is not a cure because it’s not a cure.

They’re not actually specifically targeting the mutation that’s found in the red blood cells. They’re targeting a regulatory switch that makes it so that these patients have a higher quality of life. And all for the low cost of $2.2 million. It is an incredibly expensive therapy. The chemotherapy is also no joke. It is very unpleasant. But it is an option. And it is an FDA-approved therapy for these sickle cell diseases.

Joseph Vukov: All right. So another ethics pause. If on the one hand, interventions like that are largely thought to be ethically problematic by most ethicists, again, I’m sure you could find a naysayer, but most ethicists would say, look, it’s FDA approved, it’s a therapy, we’re improving somebody’s quality of life, seems a-okay. On the other end of the spectrum, again, for reasons that will become more apparent as we go through this, when it comes to modifying germline cells, when it comes to modifying human embryos, nearly everyone stands opposed to it. So it doesn’t matter if you’re progressive or conservative or libertarian or take your pick of ethical or political orientation.

Basically, everyone right now thinks that going in, and like Michael showed you the video, is using genetic modifying techniques directly on human embryos is an ethical no-go. We’re going to get to some of the reasons why this is the case and why most cellulose synthesis are totally fine with tissue modification, with somatic modification, and why they’re totally not okay with embryonic modification. The good news is that no one, right Burns, has attempted to modify human embryos yet.

Michael Burns: Except for this guy, Joe. Yeah. This guy. This guy actually - Anyone seen this guy before? Yeah. He Jiankui, I’m probably saying his name wrong, genetically modified a couple human embryos. And he didn’t hide it. He actually released a YouTube video in the year of our Lord 2018 he’s like you should watch the video that’s great kind of

Joseph Vukov: See the smug smile there you can tell the dude thought I am getting a Nobel Prize like yesterday yeah that’s the way it turned out right Burns

Michael Burns: Very strange. Yeah, so he had a YouTube video, he presented at some conferences, and basically he almost squeaked by. Okay, it’s one of those things where I believe at the time there was not, like, this strict— like, there wasn’t a law that said that, you know, you can’t modify— well, it was the point where there—

Joseph Vukov: Was such consensus that no one thought you needed laws or actual moratoriums because everyone thought it was a horrible idea until this guy did it like

Michael Burns: Why would you do it? So he basically almost squeaked by on, like, the Air Bud version of science, for like, there’s no rule that says that dogs can’t play basketball, so therefore a dog can play basketball. That’s a very dated reference, sorry. Anyway, but it turns out that he did go to prison for three years. But he went to prison not specifically because he genetically engineered a human embryo, or two, or three. It’s because he committed a whole bunch of ethics violations, where he didn’t fill out the appropriate ethics paperwork. He lied, either directly or by omission, to the donors and the parents of these children, which is a no-no. Yeah. He spends three years in jail, is a huge fine, etc. We’ll circle back around to this guy.

It turns out that even though that was the state of the field, again, about eight years ago, the field is still moving quickly. So there are still researchers who are really interested in improving the technology — not that, of course, we would ever use it on embryos, but they are interested in looking at this technology. This paper came out yesterday, although there was a preprint, for those of you who know what a preprint is, that have been on for several months. But what this research group ended up doing was an advanced version of CRISPR in human embryos. But this is a special type of embryo that’s not able to be re-implanted and form a person. They’re just using it as a model system to demonstrate proof of principle.

And what they ended up doing was taking that little molecular machine that is the Cas9 protein, again, the thing that’s the scissors, and what they did was they took the part of it that actually is the cutting part, took that off and threw it in the garbage, and they replaced it with something that instead of cutting the DNA into two pieces, all it does is it chemically modifies the letters at that specific site. So it will change an A to a T or a C to a G. So it actually doesn’t cut the DNA. It just changes what the letter is. And it turns out that’s actually much less dangerous for a cell because it’s not as catastrophic as actually breaking the DNA. And they demonstrated that it actually works and seems to be somewhat safer.

There’s fewer off target effects as they call them with that new technology. So the field is moving forward. This is done by academics, but don’t worry. Industry is to the rescue. Industry is paving the way forward. There’s a company called Preventative, which was formed last year. This one is interesting because one of the co-founders of this is Jennifer Doudna, the aforementioned 2020 Nobel Laureate for discovering the CRISPR-Cas technology. She actually has been very vocal in her skepticism toward using this in human embryos. She’s very like, there’s obviously ethical challenges here. We’ve got to slow roll this. So it’s interesting that she’s involved in this industry effort. But I think that could be a good sign.

You have people who seem to be thinking clearly about this also working in the space with industry groups to work on that. In contrast, we also have two groups. This one’s called Bootstrap Bio. This one started in 2024. They openly claimed that they were aiming at enhancing intelligence and strength in embryos. So this is not therapeutic. This is just boutique stuff.

Joseph Vukov: Not doing it, to be clear.

Michael Burns: Not doing it, of course. They’re just aiming at hypothetically making a product that would do this, which is why the FDA shut them down this year. And then Manhattan Genomics, which was originally named the Manhattan Project.

Joseph Vukov: I love how they did not consult with their marketing team before branding that project.

Michael Burns: I think they do. I think tech bros for some reason haven’t quite figured out that when you name your company, you don’t want to name it after something catastrophic. Palantir, right?

Joseph Vukov: I mean, that was a great name.

Michael Burns: Palantir. Meta, for any of you who have read Neal Stephenson’s book Snow Crash. Yeah, anyway, they basically named themselves after the bad guys for some reason. Anyway, this is funded by a Peter Thiel fellow. Again, this was around for a very short period of time. Basically doing the same thing. Interesting. So, good thing there’s no problematic designer babies that are on the market, right, Joe? Except for these ones. Okay. So, there’s other designer babies that are out here. These are just three examples of companies. One’s called Orchid. One’s called Nucleus. One’s called Herisite. There are others, I’m sure, that are out there. These ones are not doing genetic modification. They’re not going to use CRISPR. They’re not going to do anything.

They’re gonna do, like— I just— as a big loop around to try to get a byproduct that they want. So, for instance, if you’re like, “I would like to have a kid, and I want my kid to be really tall, I want to make sure that we get rid of all autism in the field” — like, let’s do that, let’s figure this out. There’s a couple things I want to highlight. These are claims that are being made. Some of these guarantees are really far fetched. The likelihood that they will be able to do this is questionable. Even though Herisite, for instance, I believe they have like a I don’t know if it’s a money back guarantee or something. So don’t quote me on this.

But I believe they in some of their documents, they’re like, we guarantee that if you select intelligence as a product, your child will have a nine IQ point higher difference than what? I don’t know. Maybe they have you have twins and then you’ve got to figure out which one is the smart one? I don’t know. Anyway, how do they do it? So what they end up doing is when you normally end up having in vitro fertilization, which is what all these companies rely on, they will collect sperm, which is a pretty trivial process. And you can collect a lot of them. That’s fine. Collecting the eggs is substantially more involved.

It involves getting hormone treatments and then having eggs drop and then getting a saline flush of the uterus, et cetera, so that they can collect a whole bunch. So they’re not just going to collect one. They’re going to get a whole bunch of eggs. What these companies will do is do in vitro fertilization, not for just one egg with one sperm. They will do a panel. So they’ll do a whole bunch of eggs and a whole bunch of sperm. And then once they have a whole bunch of these embryos, they’ll allow them to divide once, twice, not very many times. They want to keep them still in the embryonic stage, but they will harvest one or two cells from them and then do single cell whole genome sequencing.

One from each one of the different embryos that they have, and then they will use the genome information there to try to figure out which traits are correlated with which one of these embryos. So they’re doing, it’s called a polygenic score because you’re not just looking at one gene, you’re looking at all of the different genes that you’ve sequenced at the same time. And then as a parent, you get to go to a web form and make your pull-down menu of whatever you want, and then that one gets implanted. It. I believe Elon Musk, for instance, had several children using the Orchid company for doing this stuff.

So again, not genetic engineering, but is an interesting way to get designer babies without having to deal with the monkeying around with the genome.

Joseph Vukov: All right. So now that Michael has introduced you to the science of all this, I want to run through not all of the ethical considerations in the same way that Michael didn’t give you all the scientific background you might need to do to answer some of these questions, but rather kind of give you an ethics 101 crash course in what you need to know to start deciding where you land in the genetic engineering of human embryos. And I’ve divided up these comments. I’m going to give you four ethical considerations. The first two are what I’m going to call practical objections to genetic engineering of human embryos.

And these are practical in that, as you’re going to see, they are real ethical considerations, because they have real-world effects of some of the things being proposed. Yet at the same time, they are things that ultimately could be practically solved. So we’re going to see what we mean in just a second. But there are things that have to do, for instance, with the risks of the procedure, such that if we were to mitigate those risks, then the ethical objection would go away with it. So that’s really the first one, is this idea that germline gene editing, so again, the gene editing of human embryos, carries significant individual level and population level risks. So where do these come from?

Michael’s already introduced you to where these risks come from. So remember that when we go in and modify a cell, whether it’s a tissue cell or whether it’s an embryo, there’s the off chance that rather than affecting the change that you were trying to affect, you instead end up with a random mutation in that cell. Remember that slide where he showed you? At the individual level, that’s a real risk. I might go in and try and modify an embryo that’s characterized by Huntington’s disease or something like that, and I’m trying to fix it. And I do that, I get the genes out, but in the process, I introduce a novel mutation that in fact is way worse than Huntington’s would have been. So that’s an individual level risk.

What’s even more important in these conversations, though, are the population-level risks of this kind of procedure. Why? Well, think about it. So if you’re merely modifying tissue, those modifications could have adverse effects for the individual, but they stay with the individual because it’s only a localized tissue that’s been modified. If you go in and modify embryos, every cell in that organism is going to have that modified DNA, which means that their gametes are going to have that modified DNA, which means that if that child eventually grows up and reproduces, and if that child had genetic mutations that were problematic, all of a sudden, all of those mutations enter into the gene pool.

Now, multiply that by several generations and even, like, a couple of hundred genetically modified babies. All the sudden, you could have hundreds of genetic mutations into the gene pool, and you’ve got a real problem on your hands on the population level. So if there is no other reason against genetic engineering human embryos, this is the reason near everyone points to and says, that’s way too risky. Whenever we do new research, we always do some form of cost-benefit analysis, and nearly everyone, again, except for our buddy, Dr. John Cui, has pointed to this and been like, you do the cost-benefit analysis.

If this goes south even a little bit, and all of a sudden, all these genetically modified babies start reproducing, and they pass along these mutations, we could have species-wide chaos in the gene pool. Better not to start down that path until we get things perfected. So that’s one significant objection. In some ways, the most significant, because it’s the reason why we’ve seen such consensus in the ethical community against genetic modification of human embryos is the huge risk at the population level. There’s also though a different kind of risk at the population level. And it’s one that’s illustrated well by this picture. Now you might look at this picture and wonder why are Joe and Michael showing us a whole bunch of people in their underwear?

Anyone know what this picture is of or any guesses? You might not recognize any of these people, but what might you guess these individuals have in common? That wasn’t just rhetorical, any guesses? Yes. Exactly. Not only are they athletes, they are in fact Olympians. And Michael and I were talking before this, we don’t know which year team it is, but it’s one of, there’s a javelin thrower in here. So it’s a summer Olympic team. I don’t know which year it was. Maybe you recognize some of the Olympians. And as you look at these people, what stands out very quickly is that this is a genetically diverse group of people, right?

We have very large people, very small people, very tall people, very short people with very long torsos and very long legs and sort of all over the place, right? As you know, every time you watch the Olympics, part of the reasons people that succeed in the Olympics at that high of a level is genetically determined. So like Michael and I were not destined to be gymnasts.

Michael Burns: I mean, I was in gymnastics for several years when I was very young. Okay. But it did not take, it did not take, and it wasn’t meant to be. I was only in there because my older sister was there and my mom didn’t want to drive me anywhere else.

Joseph Vukov: As a parent of four children, it’s a classic parenting move. You just, you sign all the kids up for one activity

Michael Burns: And I was the only boy in the class yeah I got very flexible though it was nice

Joseph Vukov: There you go. You had a future, Burns. So what this goes to show is that genetic diversity plays into human achievement, right? If we start modifying human embryos, there’s inevitably going to be a kind of leveling effect in which certain traits are selected for over others, and certainly certain genetically outliers are not even considered. Well, what’s a group of Olympians, but a group of genetic outliers in many ways? And this generalizes beyond athletics, right? Many times it’s precisely genetic outliers in different ways, whether it’s IQ or ability or nurturing, but there’s sort of all these different ways where you could look. And it’s often genetic outliers that for our species, really great benefits across the species.

It’s sort of what human achievement looks like a lot of the time. So there’s also this risk at the population level that if we go down the road of modifying human embryos, we end up eliminating a lot of the benefits that come from genetic diversity. There’s also a purely evolutionary reason to think that genetic diversity in a population is good. Suppose, for instance, that a superbug comes into this population that selects precisely for really tall people. Tall people are fine. Cataclysm. Yeah. Or selects for really short people. Right? You could pick your trait, but everyone gets wiped out except for one genetic outlier.

This is precisely why genetic diversity is really important for selective fitness at the population level, is it turns out — for those of you who have done some evolutionary theory, you know that the more genetic diversity you enjoy in a population, the more that you’re able to resist selective pressures. So it actually turns out that modifying embryos would have this leveling effect that, at the population level, would have these risks, both associated with introduced mutations, but would also be risky in that it would make our species as a whole more susceptible to outside dangers and selective pressures.

So all this goes to show, right, is that there’s these really significant individual, but even more importantly, population level risks of modifying human embryos. They are risks that could be overcome. So there’s ways that we could figure out to advance the technology and overcome the problems with random mutation. There’s ways we could try and ensure the right amount of genetic diversity in a population, but there are risks that so far have been significant enough that have basically led everyone with the exception of a few people to say, not a good idea to go down that road. Here’s a different kind of what I’m thinking about as practical objections to genetically modifying embryos.

And that’s this problem of the fact that genetic modification of human embryos will inevitably be very unfairly and unjustly distributed. Michael mentioned the therapy that is approved and has the $2.2 million price tag. I guarantee you that if we go down the road of starting to do genetic modification on embryos, it’s not your average person in the street that’s going to have access to designer baby technology. It’s going to be the billionaire class, the Silicon Valley class, and the rest of us are left with just our regular old ways of reproducing, which isn’t actually that bad. But it’s a technology though that clearly, if it’s made available, is going to be made available in an unjust and unfair way.

We’ve all seen the Netflix mini series about the society in which all the resources and new biological technology are given to one class and everyone else is left down in the streets to scrap whatever they can have. Now, this is a really important ethical consideration. I also, when I teach this to my students, I always emphasize that it’s not a knockdown argument against genetic engineering. Why? Basically, any technological or medical intervention, sometimes forever, but almost always at its inception, is unjustly and unfairly distributed. When we first had organ transplantation, did everyone get an organ? Of course not. Novel chemotherapies. Do particularly vulnerable populations get them?

No, it’s people with really good health insurance that are getting those. Yet we think that it’s good to develop new chemotherapies. We think that organ transplantation is good and so on and so forth. So this is a really important ethical consideration, but it’s also one that I really would encourage you to think is not a knockdown one just because there’s going to be injustice in distribution. It’s obviously something we should be concerned about. It’s also something that is true of almost any new intervention, any new technology, any new breakthrough. It winds up being distributed in unfair ways. All right, so those are the first two objections, considerations I want you to think about when it comes to editing human embryos.

They are also both solvable objections. If we’re able to mitigate the risks at the individual and population level that come with genetically modifying embryos, and if we’re able to figure out just patterns of distribution, both of those two objections largely go out the window. So that’s call purely moral objections to genetically modifying human embryos. So these are concerns that apply even if we were able to mitigate all the risks, even if we were able to figure out ways of justly distributing the technology that still apply nevertheless. They’re sort of internal to the process itself. Here’s the first one.

Is that when we think about the sorts of paradigms and value systems that would inform a society in which we are genetically modifying human embryos, it can get very dark very quickly and very eugenics seeming very quickly. Michael already showed you the slide in which people are selecting for things like intelligence and height. And you could sort of add, right, what other things might people try to select for? Athletic ability, IQ. Maybe people are selecting for things like race and hair color and sort of these other things. And what you end up is this view of human flourishing and view of what you want for your children that ends up being a very reductive and very limited view of what it looks like to have a good human life.

Potentially winds up being a racist and sexist and ableist view of what it turns out to be a good human life. But it for sure winds up being something very thin and limiting from the sidelines of what might count as a flourishing human life. I actually think this for sure applies to sort of the enhanced designer baby conversation, right? Because, again, the things that won’t come up in those conversations — we want athletes who have really high IQs and look in a particular way that’s a standard of beauty right now — and that really smacks of eugenics right away. I actually think though that this also applies in therapeutic contexts. What if we start genetically modifying embryos at a large scale and start eliminating things like Down syndrome?

We start eliminating ADHD, autism, sort of you can go down the list. What does that wind up with? Well, in some ways we’ve cured some disorders, but we also have this very flat society and a flat way of understanding human flourishing. If you know anyone with Down syndrome, you know that people with Down syndrome are capable of a flourishing life. It’s maybe a life that looks different from people who don’t have Down syndrome, but it’s absolutely still a flourishing life. Think about people with autism who are capable of making great contributions and flourishing as well. So even in therapeutic contexts, I do worry about sort of this flattening effect of modifying embryos that ends up saying, that’s what we mean by a flourishing human life.

And all these other kinds of human life, we don’t want that. And that’s deeply problematic. Here’s the last one, and this is probably the most controversial one, so it’s one I’m going to spend just a few minutes on. I want to run an objection for you to modifying human embryos that suggests that modifying human embryos genetically is always morally problematic because what it winds up doing is treating human beings as a product or commodity rather than as a bearer of dignity. When we genetically modify human embryos, we quite literally make babies.

And in doing that, we’re treating a human being as something to be produced, to be bought and sold on the market, which is something that undermines our status as beings that bear infinite and inherent dignity. So this idea is coming out of my own Catholic tradition and way of approaching ethical issues, but I wanna motivate it for you in just two different ways that might land if you’re part of that tradition, but also if you’re outside of it. So the first one comes from our previous Pope Francis, talked a lot about what he called - Not from Chicago. Not the Chicago Pope, in case you’re wondering. We never cease to tire of reminding people. Chicago Catholics especially, that— yeah, he’s— he’s our Pope, right?

Pope Francis, so the previous Pope, talked a lot about the technocratic paradigm, and the technocratic paradigm he thought was a bad thing. It’s a way of understanding our relationship to technology in the world that we live in that he thought was pervasive in modern culture, and ultimately a very bad part of modern culture. At the heart of the technocratic paradigm is the understanding of ourselves as primarily manipulators of matter. Like what we do as humans is manipulate the world around us, and the world as nothing more than matter to be manipulated. And Pope Francis thought that understanding of ourselves and the world around us is what was at heart of the environmental crisis.

He also thought it was at the heart of sort of a diminished understanding of ourselves. We ruin the environment because we think it’s just our thing to manipulate and play with, but we also degrade ourselves because we understand ourselves as merely the people who sort of mess with nature and do what we want with it. I propose that genetically modifying human embryos is the absolute pinnacle of the technocratic paradigm because with genetically modifying human embryos, we both are the manipulator and the matter to be manipulated. We reduce ourselves to nothing more than just matter and genes to be played around with. And in doing so, we turn ourselves into products and commodities and that fundamentally undermines our status as dignified human beings.

One other analogy, and it is an analogy, it’s not a perfect one, but I think it’s one that might get you to think a little bit about this idea that genetically modifying human embryos is always wrong in any case. And that’s an analogy that we can draw with human slavery. So I think all of us can agree that human slavery is morally horrible, and is so for a number of ways. One of the ways that it’s horrible is the fact that we think it’s just simply wrong for one human to be a product or something that can be bought and sold, that’s a fundamental undermining of our dignity as a human being. Now, suppose, though, that we could imagine someone in a pro-slavery camp. I don’t even know. That is still a thing, unfortunately, right?

But you could imagine someone who says something like, but what if, what if I could prove to you that in these conditions, you could be a slave and also live a perfectly happy life? We’re going to do a whole bunch of psychological measures and prove to you this person is genuinely happy. Moreover, what if this person’s owners were loving and caring and nurturing? You would, I hope, look at that and say, okay, I guess it’s better to be happy than not happy, and it’s good to have loving relationships. Yeah, but that’s not the problem. The problem here is one person owning another person. That’s the problem. The problem doesn’t have to do with psychological flourishing. The problem has to do with treating a person as a commodity or as a product.

I think you can run a similar argument when it comes to genetically modifying human embryos, right? Because you might run the argument and say, well, what if I could prove to you that a genetically modified child could grow up to have a perfectly happy and flourishing life? What if I could prove to you that we’re only going to allow parents who are going to love that child and nurture that child and be kind to that child to undergo this process. What I would argue is that’s a similar kind of argument to the happy slave argument. So, yeah, of course it would be good for someone to be genetically modified and live a happy life and have good parents and all, but that’s not the point.

The point is that the process itself treats that person as a product, as a commodity to be bought and sold. So from the very beginning, the process implicitly builds in a demeaning of human dignity and an undermining of human dignity. All right. That is the ethics that we wanted to introduce you to. It is not all the ethical considerations of modifying human embryos, but it’s enough to get us started. We have now reached the point in our presentation where things get more interactive. So look at the people sitting next to you. You’re about ready to start chatting with them a little bit. Condolences. Yeah. What we have for you is a series of case studies that start out more realistic and get progressively maybe a little bit weirder.

What we hope that they do is that they’re able to both tease out where Michael and I are on the same page as each other and differ from each other. Because it turns out, again, kind of go back to the framing, we not only come from different disciplines but very different political and ethical orientations. We don’t agree with each other on a lot of these cases. But also, just as importantly, for you to tease out where you think you lie to see, oh, I agree with those two guys, or I disagree with both of them, or I agree with one, I’m team Joe or team Michael. So we really want you to discern where you lie on some of these cases as well. We’re going to start out with an easy one and one in which you do not have to discuss.

And that’s this case, which is in some ways, maybe the case you thought you were going to come here to hear about, which is right now, as in given current technology, we should start tomorrow, like over at the hospital, we’re going to do this. We’re going to do this tomorrow. And right, we’ve got the tech. We absolutely could do it. It’s been done before. We’re going to start modifying human embryos right this second. The reason that we’re not giving you this as an actual case study is that, here we have some pictorial depictions of Michael and I and our buddy, Dr. He Jiankui, is that when it comes to this question, for reasons that you now understand, basically everyone except Dr. He is against it.

Michael Burns: By the way, he’s back. I mentioned that he got out of prison. He’s out of prison and then he almost immediately sort of got his hands on about $10 million in dark money.

Joseph Vukov: So somebody is into this and is giving him money, but we don’t know who these people are.

Michael Burns: Either he’s crowdsourcing this and there’s a whole bunch of people giving him five bucks, or there’s like one or two tech billionaires that are just funding development of this tech. He’s made, I think, three announcements in the last several years about starting a laboratory. No new baby announcements. But nothing’s really actually materialized.

Joseph Vukov: Although he’s learned what happens when he makes the baby announcement is it’s not a good outcome for him. So he might be keeping it under wraps.

Michael Burns: No more YouTube videos for him.

Joseph Vukov: Yeah. So this is, again, maybe the question you thought you were coming here to discuss, but hopefully what we’ve said so far is enough to show you that basically everyone agrees that this is just not a good idea right now. And Michael and I, for reasons that we’ve gone over, if nothing else, for the reason of the tremendous population level risk that this would cause, are against it. And we don’t even need you to discuss this one, because we assume that, based on what we’ve done so far— I don’t know, if you’re really for it, we’d love to talk to you— but we assume that you will stand with, like, 99% of the world’s population and say, seems like a really bad idea to do that right now. Yeah.

Michael Burns: One other point to put on this is that Joe just finished up the ethics discussion, which is very convincing, Joseph. I do disagree with him on a bunch of that stuff. Even in the cases where we agree, we’re hoping that what we’re going to get across to you is that even when we agree, oftentimes we agree but for totally different reasons. And this is actually one of them.

Joseph Vukov: So actually, the risk thing I obviously think is important, but the train already left the station, because I think it’s just always wrong, and Burns thinks that it’s sometimes okay, maybe. As we’re gonna see, there’s gonna be some cases that tease us apart a little bit. Okay, so that’s case number one. We’re just gonna skip over the rest of it. Case number two: the reason Michael and I are in the middle is not that we’re wishy-washy, it’s that we want you to discuss where you lie before we do the grand reveal and show you where we are at. Yeah.

Michael Burns: So this one — has anybody ever seen the movie Children of Men? It’s about 10 years old now. It’s a really good movie.

Joseph Vukov: All of our cultural references—

Michael Burns: We’re getting too old. I apologize. They need to splice it up into a whole bunch of little teeny TikToks or YouTube Shorts, and then you can watch it. That’s a ding against your generation. Anyway, in the movie Children of Men — spoiler — the population has hit a catastrophe, and the catastrophe is that no one is having babies anymore, not because they don’t want to, but because everyone, for some mysterious, serious reason, is suddenly sterile. Like they just can’t have babies. They can’t figure it out. The population is aging, but like no one’s having any babies. Okay. This is a population level threat as in like humanity is going to go extinct because at some point, if you don’t have kids, there’s no replacement. Suppose this is us. Yeah.

Suppose this is us. And then hypothetically, if you’re a biological scientist, you’re like, we have the technology. We could probably fix this. We can do all sorts of, we actually skipped over some of the more wacky stuff that we can do. For instance, they’ve made, they’ve had mice where they actually have had mice that have had two mothers, which is an interesting thing to think about. And they do that by doing all sorts of interesting swapping of nuclei and genetic material and so forth. So we can do all sorts of cool stuff. We just don’t because of the cost benefit analysis in terms of risk. Let’s say that hypothetically some scientists figured out a way to make babies happen by genetically modifying embryos. Bing, bang, boom, problem solved.

What we would like for you to do is turn to the person next to you and sort of chat and see do you think that is a good idea? We should do that to save the population. You don’t know or absolutely not. This is a terrible idea.

Joseph Vukov: And one thing to emphasize here is this is given current technology. So all the risks remain the same. All the stuff remains the same that we just talked about. It’s just that if we don’t do it in this case, the species is likely toast. Yeah.

Michael Burns: All right. Chat with your neighbors. You might want to say hello. What’s your name, et cetera. Yeah. All right. We’re going to come back together and we’re going to figure out what the actual true correct answer is for this one.

Joseph Vukov: Do we have any volunteers? We’ll tell you what Michael and I think, but we want to hear from at least one or two people first. We want to hear from you folks to see if you get it right.

Michael Burns: Any hands. This is the important thing. Yes.

Joseph Vukov: Yeah, whatever you talk about.

Michael Burns: And again, I’m being sarcastic about saying what’s right or wrong. A lot of this is just sort of like, what did your group think and maybe why? Where did you folks land?

Audience Member: Okay, so there was four of us and we’re split 50-50.

Michael Burns: Perfect.

Audience Member: So I said against just because that argument you made at the end where in general, like if you could, obviously this is a very grim circumstance and no one would want the human race to end. But if you employ that technology and actually use it just to make us happier and to feel better about the human race continuing, you are still at the end of the day, treating other humans like a commodity and making them to fulfill your own pleasure. And yeah, I think that just undermines inherent dignity. So I would say against even though that would suck

Joseph Vukov: Good. So you also layered in, sort of, you’re making very important decisions for somebody else based on your own, like, “I want to see my species continue.” Good. Did we have anyone that either disagreed on the total opposite or had a different take? Yes, there’s a microphone back there

Audience Member: So we discussed the sociological impacts of an entire our species going extinct. So you kind of see this in populations where they have an aging population and no new generation to replace the workforce. So what would the sociological impacts be if we all knew we were going extinct? Would there be new resource wars? Would there be an extreme—

Michael Burns: You should watch the movie.

Audience Member: I think I’ve seen it. Oh, you have? Hugh Jackman?

Michael Burns: It is somebody that is the same flavor of actor, yeah. Okay.

Joseph Vukov: Same kind of era too.

Audience Member: Yeah, but what kind of hedonism might happen? We can be very self-destructive. We’re destroying the Earth right now. If we all knew we were going to go extinct, what would happen to the rest of the planet?

Joseph Vukov: Yeah, good. And I think too, sort of the sociological angle is one that we didn’t touch on here. The sociology of having, in this case, a whole generation of designed children, but even sort of injecting some design children into society — it is sort of— I think you could argue either direction, potentially, but there’s definitely going to be sociological changes if all of a sudden new generations are relating to previous generations in a way that they know they were designed by them, right? Very strange stuff. Do we want to do the reveal, Burns?

Michael Burns: Sure, let’s see.

Joseph Vukov: This might not be that surprising. Yeah. Ah, and we were very careful about exactly where we put our floating heads here. So again, I’m against it, for reasons that should already be clear. I just think there’s— there’s basically no justification for it, and this is even population-level extinction. I think we can never justify the end by saying— we can never justify the means by point looking to the end. And if the end here is some sort of violation of human dignity, we shouldn’t go there. Burns, why are you where you’re at?

Michael Burns: I would argue that it is acceptable but not required. So I’d say if people are like, yes, we should do it, that’s fine. And the reason that I would bring this up is because people aren’t doing it for boutique reasons. They’re not doing it for design reasons. It’s for survival of the species, which is literally already why people oftentimes will end up having kids, is that they would like to have offspring. They would like the continuation to happen, which makes, in this context, making it a fancy version of reproduction and not the same type of thing that you would see if you were doing other types of in vitro fertilization coupled with genetic engineering. That’s my argument anyway.

Joseph Vukov: New case study. So in this case, we are going to fast forward. We’re not worried about Children of Men. So we’re going to sideline that one. We are no longer facing a species-level extinction event. This is just plain old us. And we’re going to fast forward two or three decades, to the point— to, our number one, we have mitigated the risks. So it’s probably not CRISPR-Cas9 anymore; we’ve figured out a better technology that doesn’t have the same individual or population-level risks. We also have sort of controlled for genetic diversity, so we make sure that we’re not going to have sort of a very, you know, just one kind of person, and we’re going to make sure we’re safe at the population level.

And we’ve also developed a technology far enough that it is wildly inexpensive. So the idea, I think, Michael and I had here coming up with this scenario: this is like the strip mall genetic engineering, where you go to your local strip mall and you pop into Chipotle, you get your burrito, then you pop into the next store. Is there a Hot Topic? I don’t know if Hot Topic— it was a big thing when I was in high school. You’re going to Hot Topic, and then you go to the next door, and somebody gives you an iPad when you walk in. It says, oh, you want a baby? Here you go. You get to select your features, and you can select, yeah, medium height, strong, that sounds good. And, oh, we get some, like, bonus options: I want my kid to have some feathers. Yeah.

Pick whatever you want, right? You basically can select your kid from an iPad. It’s wildly inexpensive. And however many months later, there the kid shows up on your door from your new Amazon delivery guy. So this is the next scenario. Wildly inexpensive, wildly accessible. And we’ve solved the basic risk kind of problems. Are you OK with this one or not? I’m going to give you, again, just like two or three minutes. You can just turn to the same group and chat about what you would do with this one.

Michael Burns: All right. Let’s come on back together. And we’re going to, again, figure out what the justifications for or against this might be.

Joseph Vukov: We need a couple more volunteers. Anyone have a hot take? Or even if you don’t want to share your take, what somebody else in your group said that you thought was particularly insightful.

Michael Burns: Yeah, if somebody next to you said something funny, you should do it. Yeah, there you go.

Audience Member: So when I was thinking about this question, I think of a lot of modern technological advancements and the fact that they do happen. So if I am in favor for it or against it, that’s not really a huge consideration. What I think of more is that a society’s values. You were talking about the idea of, I forget the exact term, but the idea that we are manipulating matter. If we’re in, you know, a couple of decades out, we’re in a society that views, you know, ourselves as like we’re imposing our will and manipulating matter, then no, I would be against this sort of technology.

But if we’re able to develop as a society to have something more, maybe, empathy-based, where it’s, let’s design the baby based on empathy for its future experiences and how it’s going to live, I feel like in that sort of society I would be very much in favor of it.

Michael Burns: So are you saying— and I’m just going to echo back to you what I think I heard you say— which is, if the technology is here and there are people using it, could be that the underlying motivations and how it’s implemented, like the rationale for it, might really color where you’re— you’re going to land on this. Yeah.

Audience Member: Cause if you have like Hollywood type, make everyone look hot and that’s not hot. Exactly. But if you have an idea where it’s, you know, certain conditions like sickle cell anemia, that’s never going to improve someone’s life. It’s only ever going to really—

Michael Burns: Giant asterisk. Good. There’s— yeah. Good.

Joseph Vukov: Good. So, I mean, we, again, we can imagine the Netflix series of both those directions, right? The one where it’s like, this is sort of with a super dark gloss and there’s this sort of eugenics-tinged kind of strip mall genetic engineering. But you can imagine the one that’s maybe not as fun to watch, but the one that you’d be more willing to embrace. The one that’s like, no, everyone’s got benevolence and we want to get pass on as good of traits as we can to the next generation. And we’ve defined those good traits in a way that’s empathetic and not sort of smacking of all the bad sort of stuff.

Michael Burns: By the way, this is actually epitomized by the contrast between Brave New World and 1984. If any of you are science fiction nerds. Yeah. Any other volunteers? We’ll get one more. Another one over here. Hey, there we go. Easy peasy.

Audience Member: So I was thinking, like, to me, this question kind of boiled down to natural selection versus artificial selection, which I think helps me figure out my overall view on the topic. But to me, when I think of like, natural selection, and if I compared that to like the type of artificial selection that’s in this situation, I would think like nature is so much wiser because nature chooses based on survival, whereas, you know, artificial selection or sexual selection is, you know, more prone to features that are not necessarily going to benefit us as a species. And so for that reason, that makes me think that we should try to preserve natural selection over artificial selection.

Joseph Vukov: Good. Yeah. And it turns out that the science bears this out. This is, don’t take my word with science, but I love that I have Burns here to correct me if I’m getting it wrong. Don’t worry, I’ll tell you when you’re wrong. Yeah, good. But it turns out that a lot of traits that you might think were selectively advantageous or desirable turn out not to be. So being very tall turns out to have bad effects on like your hips it actually kind of sucks

Michael Burns: I mean I say that I actually like being tall but my back hurts all the time but

Joseph Vukov: Yeah, it turns out that— it also turns out that one hypothesis of why Homo sapiens beat out Neanderthals is that Neanderthals had too much muscle and that they took more caloric intake. Is this true?

Michael Burns: There are hypotheses that Homo— well, there’s a couple— oh my god, how do I not go off on a wild tangent here? Neanderthals were way more muscular and higher bone density, which means they would require a higher caloric intake, which means they were at a slight disadvantage in one of the more recent ice ages, when it was harder to get calories. Okay.

Joseph Vukov: So all I have to say is that like being taller and super ripped might be something that people would want to choose, but I think this is the point that you were making, right? Where nature is actually wiser and says, actually those two traits have some advantages, but they also carry disadvantages as well.

Michael Burns: Maybe you need short svelte people with low muscle mass because you’re easy to maintain. Your back probably doesn’t hurt.

Joseph Vukov: So where do we lie Burns? Here’s where we’re at. It turns out we’re basically, we’re more aligned on this one. So again, my reasons are pretty boring. I just think it’s always bad. Burns, why are you over in my camp for this one?

Michael Burns: Mostly, I think probably related to some of the stuff that you were saying and a little of the stuff that you were saying. So we hit on both of these. The big one I think has to do with what it looks like for the population. One of the arguments I have against it that I don’t like is because it’s— it’s, on its surface, it’s just kind of superficially gross, and it would look gross. Because you know how there’s this weird thing where people talk about, like, Boomers and Millennials and Gen Z? Imagine if— what that would look like when you’re ordering boutique babies as a generation. Like, the generations would literally be physically, genetically distinct.

Joseph Vukov: Yes when you called somebody a millennial or because they had like giant eyebrows or something because that was in for a couple there would be some weird

Michael Burns: Thing that popped up, which is probably going to be a strange thing for society. That is a kind of a trivial superficial thing. I think the bigger one is that it’s the same reason why the eugenicists are wrong and have been wrong forever. The reason the eugenicists are wrong is because they’re presuming that they know what the optimal human being looks like. And the piece that they’re leaving out is the optimal human being under what circumstances in which environment. And if you may have heard like evolution has stopped or the idiocracy theory where like evolution has stopped because every human being, no matter how bad your vision is or whatever weird thing is going on with you, they’re just in the population now, evolution’s not doing its job.

And that is completely backward. Evolution is absolutely doing its job, which is when there are not selective pressures, when like you don’t have half the population dying at childbirth. The thing that evolution does is it diversifies. You diversify the population as much as possible. You want every kind of weirdo you can get in the population because you don’t know what the next selective pressure is going to be. If we do this type of stuff, we’re probably going to be introducing some weird artificial selections to reduce the diversity of the population, which means as a society, as a species, we’re probably setting ourselves up for failure.

Joseph Vukov: And here’s where I actually agree with Michael on the overall conclusion, and even agree sort of with the framing, but maybe disagree with the reasons. So I’m less concerned about selective pressure, even though I think that’s a real thing. I am more concerned with the idea of the flattening of accounts of human flourishing to just certain kinds of lives and certain kinds of individuals. So even if the selective pressure thing wasn’t there, I would still say I think you can flourish as someone who might be selected out of this kind of framework, right? Again, somebody with Down syndrome, or somebody with autism, or something. I would say, no, there’s multiple kinds of human flourishing.

And the danger here is that we have one particular kind of human flourishing that we’re selecting for and then eliminating all the diversity of human flourishing from the picture. Okay.

Michael Burns: I just want to, before we move on, just one thing. I want to make this very clear. When people talk about diversity in modern society right now, especially in the news, oftentimes they use the term diversity derisively, like, oh, stupid diversity, blah. What they don’t understand is that from a functional perspective, diversity is actually a superpower for biological organisms. The fact that we have diverse populations is the reason that we’re able to even exist in the first place. That’s it. You want case study foreburns? Sure. All right, we’re going to fast forward again. We can genetically engineer gametes with a therapeutic cocktail.

So when prospective parents reproduce naturally, so there’s no in vitro fertilization here, there’s no monkey in with stuff in a petri dish, they pass these protections on to their offspring. So a couple pieces. It’s therapeutic only. So we’re not going to do any boutique stuff. And then the second thing is when we say engineer gametes, that means that I would go to the doctor and say, fix my boy parts so that when I have babies, the babies now have repaired whatever the hell is wrong with me. And same thing for ladies. You go in, get your ovaries fixed so that all of the eggs that you have now have that so that when you have babies, again, you have fixed that in the population.

Joseph Vukov: Yeah, so this is a bit of a twist because we’re no longer modifying embryos, we’re modifying gametes, and we’re no longer doing anything enhancing. We’re just, you know, we’re gonna go in, no more Huntington’s, we can kind of eliminate all these things that are nasty genetic diseases. And maybe like, you know, include some like immunity to the flu and COVID and stuff too, why not? All right, what do you think about this one? Take another three minutes. Chat away. Yes, question.

Organizer: We’ve got five minutes left.

Michael Burns: All right, we’re going to go real quick here because the last one’s a doozy. We got this one and then one more. Does anybody have any strong opinions about this one? Yes, no, yay, nay? One volunteer. This fella over here.

Audience Member: Okay, I think for me this was one of the easier ones to say yes to, or even come up with a position in the first place, because I think the restriction that it’s strictly therapeutic, with none of the boutique stuff, is really, like, narrows down the problems I would have with this. So I am fairly in favor of this, because I imagine this as, like, if it’s like kind of genetic counseling plus steps. You know how a lot of people, before having kids, have like a marriage genetic counseling to figure out if there’s a risk that their kids might have some genetic disease or the other? So this is like, oh, they might have this, but you can, like, get this injection, get fixed before you have kids, so that they don’t have this genetic disease.

Michael Burns: True.

Joseph Vukov: Good. Yeah, and actually, I think maybe for this reason, this is the one where I am maybe okay with this one. It strikes me like, in this case, you’re primarily treating parents rather than creating children. So I have to think about this one more. Burns and I were kind of coming up with these scenarios, but this is the only one where I thought, maybe I’d be okay with that. Yeah.

Michael Burns: This is a tough one. Yeah. Let’s do one more and then see what you... Oh, sure. What’s the question?

Audience Member: Yeah. I was just thinking about that as this... I do have a little bit of an issue. I think if this was done in a widespread way, you would eradicate certain disabilities, which might be various ways of human flourish. So I do take a little bit of pause on this one.

Michael Burns: My suspicion would be that there would be an awful lot of ethical wrangling by ethics boards in the same way that there were for the somatic CRISPR cell therapies that are already available. So for instance, sickle cell disease might be something that they target with this type of thing. I don’t know a lot of people are gonna be like, no, it’s vitally important that we keep this disease. In the population. And there are probably a short list of diseases that fall within that category, but the stuff that’s at the gray area where we might not quite know whether or not it’s a good idea to get rid of would be where there’s a lot of argument.

Audience Member: That seems right.

Joseph Vukov: Okay, do we wanna do the last one or do a couple questions, Burns? We’re basically at time. So we had one more that’s really fun, but we’re gonna save it. If anyone’s really interested, we can tell you about it.

Michael Burns: We’ll have a real juicy one if you stick around afterwards.

Joseph Vukov: But if anyone has a question or two, we’re also gonna hang out. We’re from Chicago and are not spending the night in Chicago tonight so we can stick around and chat with anyone who wants to stay

Michael Burns: All night long because our flight is at 6 o’clock in the morning it’s gonna be great strategy there just don’t go to bed. Also we both woke up at 4 o’clock this morning.

Joseph Vukov: All right any one or two questions we have time for officially but unofficially we will linger afterwards. Yes.

Audience Member: Well I thought your position in favor of this case study was quite interesting because I would, I guess the Catholic Church says that is against the domination of technology over the creation of human life. So if any tinkering happens with that creation process, regardless of whether it is, for example, IVF, which includes two gametes coming together, they would be opposed to that. So I’m just trying to hear your rationale for being in favor of this proposition as a Catholic.

Joseph Vukov: Yeah, thank you. So this is where I think I would have to wrestle with it more.

Michael Burns: Defend thyself.

Joseph Vukov: Yeah, no, I think my initial take is that you are not actually, you are more like vaccinating gametes than you are interfering with reproduction in ways that the Catholic Church is opposed to. I don’t know. So I don’t know if Catholic ethicists have weighed in on this to see like, is this actually permissible given the framework that’s been defined so far? And I try to be as faithful as I can to those teachings. I just, this strikes me as more of a case of treating parents and then allowing them to naturally reproduce in ways that the Catholic Church hasn’t explicitly taught against.

Michael Burns: Well, the next time the Pope’s in town, you can ask him.

Joseph Vukov: I can ask him. Yeah, everyone in Chicago knows each other, so we’re buddies. But it actually does go to the comment in the back is my worry here is less about those teachings almost and more about the respect for human dignity across the board that might sort of be implicitly rejected by certain of these applications. So if we sort of, again, level the genetic pool, I think the church would have things to say about why that would be possible.

Michael Burns: That’s a tricky one. Last question, then we’re gonna have to call it quits formally.

Audience Member: So this goes off of a question and then that dialogue you had about where you draw the line with certain conditions like autism and Down syndrome. And it got me thinking, and this is more just a question because I’m curious where you both stand on this, but the difference when the mind is introduced to the question where it’s like if you have something that affects them on like dementia, Alzheimer’s, I mean you could go like ALS, Parkinson’s, that sort of route where it’s still technically the mind. Do you think that sort of deserves its own question compared to more non-mental diseases and conditions?

Michael Burns: Yeah, that’s a great question and I think what you brought up is something that is actually a pretty striking difference between Joe and I from our ethical frameworks. You are a, how do you, deontologist? I don’t know what I want. He’s more of a deontologist for those of you who are nerds, which he believes that there are rules and we follow the rules for the rules sake and you’re not, and that’s basically it. They’re good rules though, they’re good rules. Right, I fall more along the utilitarian perspective, which means that I would be more concerned about like, what is the level of suffering that you are either causing or reducing as a function of these technologies. And those inform how we think about these things.

Joseph Vukov: I mean, I would also say in response to that is when it comes to specifically mental disorders or disabilities, I think this isn’t like a perfect test, but there are certain things where you would say, when I got the treatment, I’m more fully myself, right? So you would think that like, you know, I had depression or whatever, and then I went to medication and I felt like for the first time in years, I was back to being fully myself. I think it’s a nice test versus other kinds of things that might affect mental life. So again, something like Down syndrome affects your psychological life, but you’re altering who the person is, right? It’s not like they become more fully themselves by getting rid of that. I don’t know.

It’s not a perfect test case, but I would say that’s one of the things I ask: is the treatment making them more fully who they are, or is it changing them into somebody else? And I’m more okay with when it’s restoring personhood and less okay when it’s undermining that.

Michael Burns: We are at time, so we’re going to formally call it. But like I said, we’re not leaving — we’re not leaving, so we’re gonna stick around. If you have questions and stuff, feel free to check — thank you very much for coming.

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He finds widespread support for impartiality in principle. But when respondents judged specific acts of political favoritism, that principle bent: partisans rated identical conduct significantly more harshly when the beneficiaries were opposing partisans rather than their own side. Torres discusses what that double standard means for research, policy, and classroom practice — and where his data cannot yet go. A transcript of Torres’s talk follows below.

Eric Torres: So today I’m going to be talking about how the American public thinks about political impartiality in educational contexts. I’m going to present the results of a couple of survey studies that I did over the last year or so that I think shed some interesting light on what to me, what I think is a really important and pressing question in the politics of education. So to provide a little bit of background, as I’m sure everybody attending this talk is well aware, there’s been much furor in American politics about the politicization of education.

And by that, I mean the intrusion of the inappropriate intrusion of political considerations into what should be politics free domains. So a couple of examples of this recently, last year, Donald Trump, the Trump administration issued an executive order accusing K through 12 schools throughout the country of being rife with radical intent to indoctrinate students into left-wing worldviews, PEN America and many and others replied that in fact, the administration’s ostensible, project to undo indoctrination is itself imposing, political ideology on educational processes.

We see similar dynamics in the context of higher education, where critics both inside and outside the university have argued that the well-documented, ideological imbalances in faculty and controversies around policies in higher ed are turning these institutions into political indoctrination centers. On the other hand, initiatives to increase ideological diversity in the academy have themselves been called acts of political interference. And so we have a situation where partisans in America are accusing one another of politicizing education. This raises or rests on the premise that political intrusion in education is a bad thing.

But somewhat surprisingly, there’s very little research on whether or not the public agrees with that premise and how the public thinks about the relationship between political considerations and education more generally. Much of the recent work on this subject has focused on how American partisans think about controversial issues in education, so how issues of race and gender should be thought. But there remains quite a bit that we don’t know and that hasn’t been studied, such as whether the public wants schools to be politically impartial in principle, and whether they apply their standards of political impartiality even-handedly to making judgments about cases that involve their own team and the other guys.

And even though, to just say a little bit more about that first question, whether the public wants schools to be politically impartial. Although I think for many of us that might seem obvious, there is some evidence, especially coming from the field of political psychology, that as the country has polarized and as partisans increasingly see the stakes of education or of political conflicts as existential, that we might expect a sort of abandonment of principles of impartiality or expectations of norms or impartiality on the grounds that these conflicts are so important that we have to use schools to culture students into our way of thinking about things, or simultaneously, because our way of thinking about things is just obviously correct.

Liberal worldviews are right. So of course, it’s okay to promote liberal worldviews in schools. Conservative worldviews are right. Of course, it’s okay to use schools to promote conservative worldviews. And so figuring out the degree to which, where the public falls on these questions, I think, is quite important. So today’s research, I’ll be describing two surveys, first a pilot and then a follow-up study that I’m just now getting into the thick of analyzing that are aimed at helping us understand how Americans are thinking about these things. The first survey is a pilot study looking at support for impartiality in both K through 12, or I’m sorry, just in the K through 12 context.

I won’t spend as much time there because I think the HxA audience is probably more concerned with higher ed. The follow-up study, which is larger, better powered, and it involves hypotheses that I pre-registered looks at these issues in the context of both K-12 and higher ed. So first, very quickly, this first study comes from an opportunity that I had when I was a grad student. So I did my PhD here at Harvard as well, and I was an affiliate of the Center for American Political Studies. I was able to get a couple of items onto a poll in 2024, the Capps-Harris poll, which is a nationally representative sample or a nationally representative poll that’s run monthly in conjunction with Harris polling.

And these responses were collected on March of that should say 2024, not 2025. So they’re a little they’re a little old now. But I was able to get a handful of items on this one of these polls that were distributed to a random sub sample of 528 respondents. It. So not too many and not too many items, but it gave me an opportunity to probe some questions that I had and to see if they were worthy of follow-up. So I’ll just quickly show you what those items are and then describe the results and then jump into the second study, which I think will be more substantively interesting.

So first, I just asked people straightforwardly to select which of the following statements they agreed with most, that schools should promote liberal views, schools should promote conservative views, schools should not promote any specific political views, or I don’t care if schools promote specific political views. These are non-exhaustive, obviously, but they give us sort of a coarse sense of how the American public is thinking about the relationship between political socialization and schooling and whether or not they are, you know, the degree to which they’re comfortable with schools being used explicitly as vessels for what we might think of as either indoctrination or acculturation into a political community.

Second, I asked a question that sought to get at the relationship between what they wanted and what they perceived to actually be happening. So I asked whether they believe public schools in their area were promoting liberal views, whether they believe they’re promoting conservative views, whether they believe they were not promoting any particular political views or whether they didn’t know. And then I also gave them an option in the first two cases to indicate whether or not they thought that was a good or a bad thing, just both as a sort of consistency check and as a way to see if there are differences between abstract principles and principles applied to the local context. And finally, I gave them a, and there was, I included a survey experiment.

So I gave all the participants a vignette in which a teacher tells students in his 10th grade government class who he supported for president in the last election. I chose this because this is an issue about which people disagree. I don’t think there’s necessarily a right answer about whether or not teachers should, in the context of teaching, be able to disclose their own political views. But there were three versions of this scenario, one in which he expressed support for Trump, one for Harris and one for an ambiguous and unnamed candidate.

And these were randomly assigned to participants so that we could look at the effect of matching between their own political ideology and the expressed support in the vignette and see if that affected whether how they evaluated the appropriateness of that behavior, whether they said it was wrong for the teacher to tell the students, whether they said it was fine for the teacher to tell the students, or whether they said they didn’t have enough information. And so here’s what I found. First of all, I saw that a majority of Americans across groups, about 50% preferred that K-12 schools refrained from promoting liberal or conservative worldviews.

I next saw that a plurality of people were unsure about what schools were actually doing this sort of makes sense. Most of us don’t have a lot of insight into our local schools. But unfortunately, twice as many, more than twice as many, believed that schools were involved in some form of ideological promotion, either of liberal or conservative worldviews, mostly of liberal worldviews. And only 17% believed that they were not. And perhaps most importantly, I found that Democrats and Republicans alike were about one and a half times more likely to judge teachers’ political disclosures as inappropriate when they supported the opposing party. So this is suggestive, but this is a small sample.

And so I wanted to rerun this study and dig a little bit deeper in order to understand some of these issues better. I wanted to figure out for one, what it means to promote liberal or conservative worldviews. And I thought I might be able to do that by asking about more discrete practices in I read and K through 12 schools. I wanted to know whether Americans had similar sorts of attitudes about impartiality in K through 12 and higher education. And I wanted to see whether we observed these effects of what we might think of as bias and judgments of others politicized behavior across a variety of scenarios rather than just a single one in which we’re asking about the relatively unique case of telling students who you happen to support politically.

So this second study I carried out in the spring of this last year, not very long ago. This study was funded by my fellowship at the Siegel Center for Academic Pluralism, and the hypotheses and design were pre-registered with the Open Science Foundation. I contracted with Verasight, the survey firm Verasight. They composed a hybrid probability, non-probability sample of around 1,500 Americans. There’s some prior work on their sampling strategy is found to perform similarly well to other probability-based samples, although we should be cautious about inferring exactly what the American public in general thinks from samples like these.

The results that I’ll present of the descriptive items are weighted for representativeness, and these items were collected actually just a month ago. So this is fresh data. Instead of three items, this time I had an opportunity to put together a full survey. So there’s 75 items on attitudes about impartiality in higher ed and K-12 education, including how people define impartiality, perceptions of what’s actually happening, like in the pilot. I asked about their trust in these different institutions and again ran a series of experiments assessing their consistency of judgments about various policies and practices.

Today because I only have so much time I’m going to focus just on a quick overview of their normative attitudes about impartiality in higher ed as well as to review the results of the experiments. The subjects that I explored in the higher Ed context included the deliberate value cultivation. So again, should schools be attempting to promote liberal or conservative worldviews? Should they attempt to promote tolerance for multiple perspectives or a commitment to advocating for one’s own worldview? View. I looked at whether how the public felt about selection, political selection criteria for both students and faculty. Should admissions take students’ politics into account? Should hiring committees take candidates’ political leanings into account?

I looked at attitudes about viewpoint diversity in the faculty, how important it was for students to be exposed to a range of views versus to get an education from faculty who all hold similar views, similar questions about syllabi. I looked at norms of social inclusion and exclusion on campus, how important people thought it was for schools to be places socially where if you’re liberal or conservative or neither. You felt like a member of that community. And I looked at treatment of controversial speakers as well. So here’s just a snapshot of some of those items. And these are pretty reflective of the patterns that I saw. So first, I’ll show you this one.

I asked respondents how colleges and universities should try to influence students’ political views. I gave them the options where that they should encourage students to adopt liberal or left-wing views, moderate or moderate views, conservative or right wing views to develop their own independent views, or if they should not try to influence students political views at all. And here’s what we saw. I’ve disaggregated these. I’ll just presenting the results only among people who identified as either Democrats or leaning Democratic and Republican or leaning Republican, just to kind of be concise here. And you see basically no appetite for at least the explicit promotion of any particular ideological or political worldview.

But we do see some differences here in support for whether schools should be helping students develop their own political views or whether schools should be trying to stay out of the politics game entirely. With Republicans being pretty evenly split between those two sort of North Stars and Democrats being more in favor of schools attempting to help students develop their own views. Next, here’s an item looking at just a binary choice, asking whether the public thinks that colleges should teach students to understand multiple political perspectives or teach students to advocate for their political beliefs. And here we have a really striking finding where Democrats and Republicans are in remarkable agreement.

About 80% prefer that schools attempt to promote students’ ability to understand diverse views, whereas only around 20% of both Democrats and Republicans want schools to be teaching students to advocate for their own views as a priority. I also asked whether colleges and universities should take applicants political views into consideration, whether they should give preferences to students with some political set of political views, whether they should try to generate a mix of political views in the student body, whether they should not take political views into consideration at all. Here again, we see a really remarkable consistency between Democrats and Republicans.

It’s a little bit cut off on the left there, but you see again very little appetite for giving preferences to students on the basis of their politics. And surprisingly, against my expectations, very little appetite for attempting to create a deliberate mix of views on campus. Instead, at least in the context of admissions, Americans seem to think that political views shouldn’t factor in at all. I asked the same question about faculty hiring and got a slightly different result, where here there’s more enthusiasm for deliberate attempts to create a mixed faculty on campus. But again, majorities of both Democrats and Republicans are saying that they prefer that political views didn’t factor into hiring at all.

And finally, here’s a handful of items on how issues that cover politically controversial subjects should be taught. So I asked about what readings should be on the curriculum, whether students should read mostly liberal, moderate, or conservative perspectives, whether they should read a mix of different perspectives, or whether they should read the best work regardless of perspective.

And here again we see a little variation, but again, that the general patterns are of consistency where most the a majority in fact of both democrats and republicans would prefer that students be exposed to a mix of perspectives and some amount number of democrats republicans around hovering around 40 percent feel that you know if the best work is all of one ideological camp so be it as long as they’re we’re teaching the best work. Here, a similar item assessing how people think how much how important they think it is to learn from faculty members with different political views. And this one again I just gave them sort of a binary choice.

Is it possible to have a good education from faculty who all the same views, or students must study with from faculty with a mix of political views to get a good education. Here we see a little bit more significant difference between Democrats and Republicans, but the trends very similar. Both Democrats and Republicans largely agree that a good education, at least on subjects that involve these controversial issues, requires faculty political diversity. Potentially at odds with their opposition to deliberately cultivating a mix of faculty perspectives in hiring, but an important finding, I think, nonetheless. Now I’ll just quickly gloss over these handful of experimental items.

So here I gave them a scenario following a similar approach as I did in the pilot. I gave there were these scenarios in which some content, the politically valence, the political valence of the scenario was randomly altered. So there was a control scenario in which the politics of the actor in question are ambiguous. And then there’s one in which the actor in question is sort of has a right wing affinity or a left wing affinity. Here we have a faculty member in the philosophy department saying that they are not going to hire a new candidate despite him being very qualified because of his political views. And again, we now the option categories here are sort of a five point Likert type right to wrong plus a I don’t have enough information to decide.

I’ll talk a little bit, talk a little bit about how I analyze this in a moment. What we see here. So here I’m presenting the results of exclude excluding those who say I don’t have enough information to decide. I actually have a separate analysis to see whether partisan alignment affects that. The likelihood of indicating that you don’t have enough information. But just looking at those who felt like they did have enough information. We see something very similar to what we saw in the pilot, which is that when the actor is aligned with their own political leanings.

So when a Democrat is exposed to a liberal actor, in this case, a faculty member excluding a conservative on the basis of his views, or a Republican is exposed to the version of the vignette in which a conservative actor excludes a liberal on the basis of their views, they rate that as about one point on the five point scale more acceptable. So like less severely bad. In this case, we see the movement between approximately 1.4 and 2.2, which corresponds to the shift between saying that was a little bad and that was quite bad. And the control sits right in the middle. A second scenario here. We’ve got the college Republicans, the college Democrats, or an unnamed campus group inviting a speaker to campus.

And there we find out that activists of opposing persuasion are planning to disrupt the event. We ask whether how much they approve or disapprove of that disruption. We see again a pretty striking pattern here where those exposed to aligned versions of the vignette are much more likely to endorse the activist disruption. And here a scenario in which a state legislature is passing a law that requires teaching a particular course with a particular leaning on social justice. Here we look at whether or not they approve this law mandate. End date. And again, we see more or less the same pattern, although in this case, there’s the control behaves very similarly to the condition in which they’re exposed to the opposing group, right?

I pooled the results of these three as well as the scenarios in K through 12. So I had three similar survey experiment vignettes in the K through 12 context that I didn’t show you. And As I had predicted in the pre-registration and as we saw in the pilot study, the effects of partisan alignment on judgments about the appropriateness of these various sort of politically inflected behaviors in higher ed are pretty straightforward. This is also actually a pretty large effect that we’re observing here. So again, it’s about one scale point on that five point scale. And when we pool these results, what we see is that the movement is from essentially ambivalence in the case of scenarios in which you are aligned with the actors in question.

So you say, if it’s someone in your team doing the thing, we say, well, it’s neither right nor wrong. But when it’s somebody else, the average response becomes it was wrong. That’s an important qualitative shift in addition to just a shift of magnitude. I should say too, I don’t think I mentioned this is a multi-level mixed effects model here. So we controlled for the content of the vignettes and included a participant level random effect since each participant was exposed to a random assortment of these vignettes. So let me wrap this up quickly here. First, by saying, what are some of the things that this research does not tell us?

So for one, I don’t have any evidence of how, I’m sorry, why the public endorses impartiality in principle on these items and how they’re thinking about the trade-off between using schools as organs for advancing ideological interests versus as organs for education. I don’t know whether they are motivated by pragmatic or principled concerns, for example, whether opposition to schools teaching liberal conservative views comes from a belief that is inherently wrong or because they think it’s politically intractable to do that. If you were to pursue that policy, it would generate a backlash.

We don’t know whether the motivation is primarily a concern with fairness or a belief that a marketplace of ideas is better for student learning or for the country in some way. I don’t really know if these attitudes that we see, this is a survey study. What people say on surveys may, for one, be driven in part by research or demand effects. They might look at this and say, well, of course, the right thing for me to say is that I oppose, you know, politicization of education in these different ways. Whether or not the discrepancies that we picked up in the experimental section translate into differences in behavior, I think warrants further study.

I do have some unanalyzed items that I will be looking at that instead of outcomes asking about moral judgments about the appropriateness of these acts. They are asked to endorse punishments of varying severity. So that maybe provides us a little bit of interesting texture to see if this is just like a right wrong thing or if this also translates into support for more severe punishment for out groups when they do the same thing. What can we make of these results? I think the evidence of shared values is worth taking seriously. At the very least, we see opposition to bald politicization across basically all of the policies and procedures that I inquired about here.

Like I said, it’s not impossible to imagine a world where polarization has become severe enough that people would say, no, in fact, I do want my schools to be promoting my particular worldview. But that’s not what we’re observing. And I also do think this evidence of double standards is meaningful. So these experiments do suggest that partisans are more likely to call foul on politicization when it’s done by the other team. And then that might have really important implications for designing policies that can protect academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, and the rigorous and pursuit of knowledge in a divided America.

So I think there’s more to be asked about here, but it’s my hope that this helps us, those of us who care about this issue, to get a better feel of how the public is making sense of these controversial issues. So with that, I’ll pause. I’ll just say thank you, everybody who’s here for listening. I look forward to talking with you. Thank you to HxA, the Siegel Center, my colleagues here, both for funding this research and for this opportunity. So with that, I will stop presenting and turn it back over to my colleagues.

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Cullen tests whether that convergence is real persuasion or just measurement noise, and shows why the noise explanation doesn’t hold. Partisans on the left and right both rated the AI facilitator even-handed — so uniformly that the team inserted bias into transcripts to check whether people were paying attention. Everyone caught it. His argument: the right role for AI in higher education is facilitative, not generative. Not a tool that thinks for students, but one that pushes them to think better. A transcript of Cullen’s talk follows below.

Dylan Selterman: Welcome, everyone. Greetings. I want to welcome everyone to today’s event as part of the Heterodox Academy Research Colloquium Series. My name is Dylan Selterman. I’m the Director of Research and Resource Development here at Heterodox Academy. Simon is the co-founder and president of Disagree Wisely. He developed the award-winning Dangerous Ideas in Science and Society course at Carnegie Mellon, a course that helps students explore diverse viewpoints on polarizing topics by teaching them the art of constructive disagreement. Sway is that course’s approach, built so that instructors anywhere can give their students the same experience, whatever their resources.

His research combines philosophy, cognitive science, and educational technology to improve reasoning and communication across moral and political divides. In addition to his work with Sway, Simon is also a senior fellow at Heterodox Academy’s Segal Center for Academic Pluralism, and a visiting research professor of civil discourse and artificial intelligence in the School of Civic Life and Leadership at UNC Chapel Hill. Without further ado, I’ll hand things off to Simon.

Simon Cullen: Thanks so much, Dylan. And thanks everyone for coming out today. Or rather logging in today. So I’ve got so much that I want to tell you about. So I’m going to move somewhat quickly and there’ll be lots that I can’t get to, but hopefully more of it will come up in the Q&A because we’re going to leave a lot of time for that. So for anyone who doesn’t know, Sway is a chat platform. It’s the sort of familiar thing from WhatsApp or iMessage, but it’s built to be used in courses. So students who disagree with each other are paired for one-on-one private text-based chats on topics that are written by their instructors.

And over the next roughly half an hour, I’m going to tell you about what we’ve been learning from this platform over the last two years, because it’s just extraordinarily surprising. So let me start by just giving anyone who’s not familiar a sense of what the platform is so you can understand the shape of the data that come out of it. So this is the instructor interface. This is where instructors create discussion assignments. So every assignment is going to have a number of topics that the instructor will write, and we require at least three because that helps us make better matches. The aim is to pair as many students who genuinely disagree as possible. They then provide the topic statements.

These are the statements that the students are going to discuss, and the first thing the students will do is rate them on a seven-point scale. They’ll provide at least three of them. Then they’ll tell us what they want the minimum duration to be. Now, it’s not measured in minutes and seconds because the discussions can unfold asynchronously over days. So it’s computed from patterns in the data itself, and it’s gated on the slower of the two students. So a very eager student can’t carry through a student who’s just coasting. That’s really it. Then they provide us with three deadlines. When the assignment launches and students can get started, when they have to get their opinions in, and when they have to finish chatting.

That gives you a sense of the shape of the data that we get, that the students will then fill in. So from the student perspective, this is what it looks like. When they come in, we invite all of them to participate in our IRB-regulated research program. They don’t have to, but happily about 75% of them do. And so any data that I have today which involves transcripts is from de-identified transcripts where both of the students volunteered to participate in research.

We ask students for their preferred first name and we tell them it doesn’t have to be your name but it should be a real name so most of them do choose to chat under their real names just judging by the correspondence between the email addresses and then we tell the students what we’ll share with their partners what their stance on the topic is their preferred first names and their pictures if they upload one so what happens is the student will then go in and they’ll complete the opinion survey these are the three statements that the instructor has chosen for this particular assignment they put their ratings in and then off they go. So this is the way matching works, and this is an important point for understanding the data that’s going to come.

So prior to that opinion deadline, students can initiate a match, and you can see here the list of topics. A green topic is one where we’ve already found someone right now who’s waiting to chat about this topic and who disagrees with you. And if there are multiple people, we’re going to select the one who’s furthest away from you to promote as much viewpoint diversity as we can. If you don’t do this, then you’ll get matched automatically at the opinion deadline. But almost all students initiate the chat like this. So we drop them into a chat, the facilitator introduces the topic, and then the students chat away with the facilitator occasionally intervening when it thinks that it can deepen or otherwise improve the discussion.

I’ll show you what that looks like much more. At the very end, this is another data point that we get. We give each student an understanding quiz. These are generated from the transcript at the end of every conversation, and they quiz each student about their partner’s reasoning. So they’ll ask them questions like, when you argued that once someone has served their time, they’ve already paid for what they did, how did Levi use that claim to support restoring voter rights? And we’ll ask the other student, Brooke, sorry, we’ll ask Levi about Brooke. At the beginning of the discussion, Brooke asserted criminals should be denied voting rights. What was the main reason? So this is a five-item quiz. It’s a mastery learning style of assessment.

We’re not trying to make fine-grained discriminations, but we’re just trying to get a measure of whether the students were paying attention and remembering in detail the logic of the arguments that their participants that their partners were making after they complete that the quiz they do a quick post chat survey so we ask them for their opinion again on the statement that they just chatted about and we remind them don’t don’t worry your responses are private and will not be shown to your instructor actually there’s a little bit of text here there’s also missing in the real ux there’s something which says it’s equally informative to us whether you move towards agree, disagree, or stay put.

So we’re trying to help reduce any social desirability bias that they might detect, although it’s unclear exactly what it would be. Then we sample from a larger bank, five questions for each student, and they respond to them. And one, we give, you know, I’m gonna show you the results to some of these in a moment. Students can then provide written feedback, and they often do, and then we can plot how their opinions changed. Okay, so. There we go. So how does this whole thing land? We’ve now worked with classes in over 100 institutions. Now actually over 1,400 chat topics that have been discussed on the platform, it’s closer to 1,500. You can see, just remember this is homework that students are being coerced into doing with the threat of bad grades.

This is mandatory coursework and 80 percent of them come out saying it was awesome or good. They did not go in expecting to enjoy it. I have to remind myself when I look at these data. Many students endorse using the platform in other classes. It’s extremely hard to find students endorsing anything that they should do more of in classes. So this is also a really positive signal. We try to pay careful attention to self-censorship on the platform. And really the design has been informed from the ground up to minimize that. And that’s why we focus on these one-on-one, low run stakes text based conversations. And the basic finding there is that we can solve self-censorship if we cut the audience.

It’s when the audience is there that students are really uncomfortable. So on Sway, despite the fact that they’re talking about some of the most potentially toxic subjects you can imagine, over 90% of them say they were comfortable. And I think it’s 1% or 2% who say they weren’t. Yeah, and here you go. Something like, actually a very substantial majority of them are saying that Sway helped them articulate their thoughts and feelings better. So we can break those down, in particular self-censorship, by topic areas. And when we do, we can look at, this is across roughly 17 or so subjects that we can classify discussions into. And when we look at that, we see self-censorship is very stable and very low across all of the topics.

So it’s not like they’re just comfortable when they’re talking about whether a hot dog is a sandwich. They’re comfortable when they’re talking about Israel, when they’re talking about abortion, race, policing, and all the rest. So this is really powerful evidence, and I think it was very surprising to a lot of people. We also try to see whether or not they’re really appreciating, understanding the value of engaging with opposing views. And happily, we find that they are. So overwhelmingly, they report that their partners were respectful, they were not offended, and that they found it valuable, positively valuable, to talk to someone who didn’t share their perspective.

And overwhelmingly, they say that their partners were actually trying to understand them. And the understanding quiz results back that up. The most common score is a perfect five out of five. When we look at what they find coming into the discussion, many of them, and close to half come in and they’re surprised by the quality of the argument or the reasons that they find on the other side. And I actually think just recognizing that is an act of a certain kind of humility. Many of them report that the discussion actually improved their perceptions of their partners. Remember when they’re going in to talk about a very polarizing topic, they might be imagining the person they’re going to talk to is the scum of the earth.

And then they discover, actually, this is a very interesting and thoughtful person who taught me something, And I taught them something. Many students do report changing their mind. We can go way beyond the self-report, of course, because we actually measure it both in the survey responses and in the transcripts themselves. And overwhelmingly, students report believing that these skills are going to transfer into other domains. That is, of course, an empirical claim, and it’s one that we’re testing in a four-year study that I hope I’m going to get time to describe to you at the end of this talk. So we ask about the facilitator, the AI facilitator that joins every discussion, the guide on the side as we like to call it.

Overwhelmingly, students say it treated them and their partners with equal respect. I think it’s only 3% who disagree. And they overwhelmingly attribute some of the success of the conversation to the facilitator. I want to give you just a little bit of feedback because we offer them that opportunity to give us written feedback. So one of them: Guide is very firm and direct and all knowing like my mum. Guide’s approach felt like an ideal classroom discussion. They asked thoughtful follow-up questions, encouraged nuance, challenged assumptions, and helped me reflect on my biases. I felt very confident in my argument, and I didn’t feel the need to shy away or hide my opinion because I felt like it was a safe space, even though we disagreed. Sway actually boosted my confidence. Going back and forth allowed me to clarify my own reasoning, anticipate counterarguments, and respond more calmly and clearly. It showed me I can stay respectful and focused on ideas, not just opinions, which makes me feel much more capable of handling debates on tough topics. I didn’t completely change my position, but I reconsidered how restitution and parole completion fit into the idea of serving sentence. I realized that finishing all legal obligations, not just prison time, matters more than I initially emphasized. My position became more qualified and nuanced after discussion with someone of the opposite original stance. We had Guide to help probe us and make us think deeper. It is easy to fall into groupthink, but Guide helped challenge us and helped us to see different aspects of the conversation than we ever would have thought of on our own, and you don’t get that in a classroom setting. Guide’s approach felt like an ideal classroom discussion. They asked thoughtful follow-up questions, encouraged nuance, challenged assumptions, and helped me reflect on my biases. It wasn’t about getting the right answer, but about thinking critically and thoroughly exploring the topic. Sway lets me take my time. In real life, I feel like I blank out a lot. I have so much to say, yet in person I forget it all. With classroom discussions, I can feel anxious and worried I might mess up. But with Sway, I’m able to concentrate and say what I need to say in a calm, timely manner.

So I’ve picked these quotes because they illustrate recurring themes in student feedback. All of that, a lot of that feedback is collected on our website. And I really encourage anyone who’s interested. I think a lot of them have some real insight. So we’ve been doing this now for two years roughly, and we’ve collected quite a lot of data.

And these are what I’m going to be talking to you about today. So we’ve now run almost 14,000 conversations, nearly half a million messages, 18 million words of transcripts, which includes five and a half million words of the facilitator, and nearly 12,000 students now. And I’m expecting that to double this semester at least. We’ve built 15,000 quizzes, given 21,000 post-chat surveys, operated 737 classroom assignments in 278 classes. So that’s where all of the data are going to come from. Now, what are the statements that instructors are putting onto this platform? Because we don’t control that in any way. It’s completely content neutral and you can use it for anything you want. So a decent number of them concern cultural issues.

These are immigration, trans rights, race and policing, other sort of common issues. Then there are the sort of partisan policy issues that are not quite culture war. That would be things like legalizing marijuana that’s codable on a left right spectrum, but it’s not exactly part of the culture war. Then we have these sort of contested issues that are not particularly related to anything partisan. Those might be in STEM disciplines. They might be in literature. They could be about really anything. And then only a very small number of instructors ever choose to give students those low stakes hot dog and sandwich things happily because the platform works so much better when the students have skin in the game. So let’s have a look.

This is how the subjects that have been run on the platform break down. The biggest subject has been crime and justice, followed by health and medicine, education, gender, tech, and AI. Those are really the bread and butter. We also see a lot of animal ethics, which is always fascinating. Religion and philosophy, quite common. And then teams and workplaces was a surprising one that we never anticipated, but that’s instructors who have students that get into terrible problems with group work, and they want the students before they do the group work to think it through really carefully. So just in the interest of time, I’m not going to say everything I could say here. I’m going to just push on there. And I will do the same thing right here.

So now I want to look at how students’ attitudes change after talking on Sway. And what I’m going to be doing here is just looking at the immediate changes measured after the discussion. So we have to caveat we don’t know how durable they are. Presumably you require repeated exposures to start to get something like the formation of dispositions that might transfer into other settings. And we can’t speak to that today, unfortunately. So here’s what we see. This is the seven point opinion scale. And I’m gonna plot how students change their views conditioned on where they land on that scale. So looking at the extremes of the scale, of course they can’t move any more extreme.

So a little bit of regression to the mean might be going on here, but more than half of them are moderating their views. If we come in there and look at the moderately agrees, they kind of split. Quite a lot of them are moderating, but some of them are actually strengthening. And then when we look at those who really don’t have much of a view, overwhelmingly they’re developing their views. And when we look at those who are at the middle of the scale, of course, they can’t move any closer to the center, so they have to be all on the right. But impressively, 72% of them actually develop a view, move somewhere out to one of the other points on the scale. Now there’s two different accounts which might predict what’s going on here.

This is the figure I want to show everyone. So you can see we’ve got 14% of pairs who get further apart after chatting, but 67, two-thirds of them get closer together. So something is drawing them closer together. And the net effect is that they start off an average of 3.6 points apart on that seven-point scale. And after roughly 30 minutes of chatting, that is reduced by nearly 40%. Now, what are we to make of that?

Like I said, we’re selecting people on the basis of their strongly disagreeing. We’re trying to promote viewpoint diversity in the class and in the groups. There’s a number of things which might predict this. What we’re going to do is we’re going to capture when we take that first snapshot, potentially some errors. Maybe you were actually uncertain or you had shaky hands and you meant to click moderately agree, but you actually click strongly agree. And that made us pair you with someone else who clicked strongly disagree. So now we’ve got this error, you know, the real difference plus the error in that measurement. And when we measure you again later, it wouldn’t be surprising if the error was reduced.

So there’s one explanation of why students are changing their views, which is that they’re being persuaded by the arguments of their partners. And another explanation is that what we have effectively is a measurement artifact. And it’s certainly there to some extent because, like I said, we’re selecting on disagreement and that’s going to magnify momentary errors that push people further apart. Okay, so these two accounts predict different things. The time between the two ratings can vary quite a lot. It can vary from a couple of minutes or an hour all the way to weeks or even a month. And then we can also look at the number of messages students exchanged. So here’s the prediction.

If it’s a measurement artifact, we actually expect that those two students to grow closer together the longer there’s left between those two measurements. So we expect more convergence there. We don’t really expect there to be any effect of the number of messages that students have exchanged if what we’re measuring is a measurement artifact. On the other hand, if what we’re measuring is persuasion, then we wouldn’t really make any predictions about how long went between those two measurements, or at least no strong predictions. But we would certainly predict that more messages would presumably associate with more persuasion because that’s more opportunities to make an argument. So what we actually find is that the gap doesn’t narrow at all over time.

So we can look at the students who did those two ratings in under three hours, and we see that 1.6 point convergence. Three to 24 hours is, again, no different. One to three days, three to seven, and over seven days. We’re just seeing the dance of the 95% CIs there. There’s really nothing going on. So that is some evidence against the idea that what we’ve got here is a pure measurement artifact. The second prediction, of course, was that the amount that students say, if what we’re measuring is persuasion, should predict how much their views change. And indeed that’s what we see.

When we just break all of the students who waited at least three days into a group and then we split them into three tertiles on the bottom third of the number of exchanges, so five exchanges, eight exchanges or 11, we see a consistent growth in the convergence rate. So such that the difference between the top and bottom tertile is a fifth of a point. So you can see here where we estimate it’s around 0.4 points per exchange that we get in convergence. Okay, great. Oh, here’s my slide that was in the wrong order. Okay, well, I’ve already told you all about this one, so I’ll just skip it on. Now, I want to show you how students do in the understanding quiz because it’s really surprising, or it was to me.

Before I show you these numbers, let me just tell you, whenever I review a transcript, I try to do the understanding quiz not knowing the answers myself. And I’m doing it immediately after reading it, and I do not always get a perfect score, even when I try my best. These students are often chatting over days and then doing a quiz with no, it’s not an open book quiz. This is going to completely turn on their memory. So what we find is almost none of them flunk it. We get into three out of five, about 10 percent, four out of five, about one third and five out of five over half of the students making the most common score. So students really are understanding and able to reproduce the logic of the opposing view.

And they can do that often regardless of whether they heard it a day ago or an hour ago. These quizzes are all, of course, AI generated. And so we do try to evaluate them. This is a study which is based on AI judgments, although we have run one study to compare human coding to AI coding and found that AI coding to actually be more reliable when compared to expert humans as opposed to research assistants. But what we found is that the, at least according to AI judges, which agree very highly, the keys, the answers, the credited responses are very accurate. Just an interest of going quickly, I’m sorry. So what we find is that a single measurement, of course, it’s not designed to try and make fine-grained discriminations between students.

It’s really more of a sort of mastery learning style assessment. Did they do what we wanted them to do in this particular chat? But as we measure them multiple times over the course of a semester, at around seven or eight measurements, we start to get to the conventional floor for Cronbach’s alpha there, where we can actually start to make meaningful discriminations between students. Okay. I just saw how much time I’ve spent, and I’m going to just make an executive decision here. Great. Okay. Okay, great. So in one of our early empirical studies, we pre-post tested statements like, I feel like I can understand people who disagree with me about this topic. We found the same thing we see with students.

Substantial moves compared from before to after the conversation, here an effect size of something, yeah, Cohen’s d of 0.4 on that statement. We also test statements like, people who disagree with me have well thought out reasons. Again, this is just with people recruited on the Internet, not students. And we see the same pre-post change with Cohen’s d around one third of a standard deviation there. One of the most surprising things when I tried, when I was first teaching more controversial material in class, you know, my colleagues were kind of just sitting around waiting for the whole thing to go up in flames. And many people sort of expect the same thing to happen on Sway. But in fact, it really doesn’t. It not just really doesn’t, and it doesn’t.

I can count on one hand the number of times a student has written complaining about any sort of hostility. And when we’ve actually investigated them, it’s usually just a strongly worded opposition. Like “I think that’s completely incorrect.” Some people find that hostile. We actually scan every message before transmitting it to try and find out whether it’s unproductive, whether it could stand to be improved. And our study of nearly a quarter of a million messages has found under half a percent of flagged as even potentially unconstructive. So the basic finding is students are being extremely respectful. I’m going to again push on with, we’ll get to nuance in Q&A.

The last thing I want to talk about here, or second last thing I want to talk about here, is the AI facilitator and how we’ve tried to study bias in the facilitator. So the first thing we do is we just do a spot check after every discussion and we ask one of the students this question, Guide treated me and my partner with equal respect. And we find here overwhelming agreement, only 3% of students disagree. This can be traced to the fact that Guide isn’t there to offer opinions. It’s not playing the traditional role of a generative AI, an oracle. We prefer to call it a facilitative AI. It’s not there to do thinking for you. It’s there to push you to think better.

We also have run a study involving just regular partisans who we recruit off the internet, and then we give them real Sway transcripts, and we ask them to evaluate whether or not the facilitator was biased. In this case, we screen the participants to find out what they feel most strongly about, where are they most polarized. We then give them Sway transcripts on those topics. And then we ask them to judge for each transcript. Was the facilitator biased against the liberal or was it neutral or was it biased against the conservative? And then we also get a magnitude, how biased. We ask them to explain in their own words why they thought it was biased. And then we also ask them to guess whether it was an AI.

So what we find when we do this is that people regard this as overwhelmingly even handed. And it doesn’t matter whether they’re on the left or the right, which is kind of extraordinary. We were finding that people were saying that this was so even handed that we started to suspect maybe they’re not even reading the thing, maybe they just open the page and go away for a while. So we started to experimentally insert bias into the transcripts.

And the moment we did, everyone spotted it regardless of whether or not it lined up with their own political identities okay I’m gonna skip this little argument and let’s skip a few more things here this is interesting enough to reflect on so apart from the ways that we manipulate the bias in the transcripts and we can also ask people what they thought led them to think it was biased and overwhelmingly what we find is that it’s procedural fairness that really matters for the facilitator moderator, it’s totally fine. Nobody minds if it’s hitting your side with extremely hard questions, as long as it’s hitting the other side with equally hard questions. That sort of procedural fairness is basically what seems to determine something like 90% of the variance in how people rate this moderator. So that’s probably good advice for AIs and human moderators.

All right. I’m going to now show you two last things. One last thing. This is one of the most interesting data points I’ve got. It’s also the least rigorous because I haven’t been able to reproduce it yet, although I’m hoping this semester we’ll get an opportunity to test it. But one of the things we’ve tried to do in designing Sway is to make an AI that can actually shut up. And as anyone who’s used ChatGPT or Claude or anything else knows, they cannot shut up. You can write to them and say, do not respond to this message, remain silent. And it will write back, gotcha, I’ll remain silent. So what we have to do is teach it how to remain silent, we teach it to say a code word.

The final gate before the facilitator decides whether to intervene is actually up to the facilitator. And it can output a word null if it says, no, I don’t want to say anything. These students are having a fantastic discussion. I don’t want to get in the way. We never display that little code word null to the students. So it just looks like the facilitator is silent. But here’s what we actually see when we look at the null rate across our deepest implementation. This was in a political science course over 13 weeks, 13 chats. And we can plot how the null rate changed across the semester.

So think about what we’re going to look at. This is a measure of the AI’s judgment about when the students were having a self-sustaining, productive conversation. Here’s what we see. A remarkably consistent growth over the course of semester. Now, this is the deepest implementation we’ve had yet. I think we’re going to have another few in this league this semester. So I’m very much hoping to be able to come back and tell you this result replicates. But even if it doesn’t, it certainly points to a very interesting measurement paradigm that I think this sort of notion of facilitative AI starts to help with. Now, I can say I’ve already done five minutes over what I was meant to do. I’m sorry about that. I’m going to cut myself off. Even though I have so much, I’d love to keep telling you.

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Justin McBrayer: Good to see many of you. Thank you for joining us for the faculty value viewpoint diversity, but how can we make it the norm on campus discussion? There’s an awful lot to say here. We’re joined by some experts in the field. We’re going to have a really great discussion. So let me welcome you and tell you a little bit about Heterodox Academy events and what we do. As you know, Heterodox Academy hosts live events at conferences and events on campus, but we also do an awful lot virtually. We’ve got nearly 9000 members across the English speaking world. And so we’re engaging with members weekly in virtual ways, in addition to our newsletters and our reports. And for today’s discussion, I want to remind everyone to follow the HxA way.

We deeply value the norms of serious intellectual engagement, and we encourage everyone engaged in this discussion to make your case with evidence, to be intellectually charitable with those you disagree with, to be humble, to be constructive, but at root bottom to also be yourself. I encourage everyone who’s going to be asking questions and for our panelists too, not to self-censor, tell us what you really think and try to do so in a careful evidence-based way. Furthermore, we are a membership organization. We would love for you to be part of our circle. If you are a graduate student, if you’re a faculty member, if you’re staff at a university, please join HxA if you’re not currently a member. It’s free to join.

We’re a group that advocates for open inquiry in higher education, and I think you’ll really find a sense of community and collegiality across the HxA members. Also join our Substack or our newsletter if you’re not subscribed there. We have some cool events coming up. Let me tell you about one virtual and one in person. Tomorrow we have a virtual member discussion about heterodox assessments in the classroom. You need to register to have access to that discussion. There’s a QR code on the screen. Grab that if you can join us tomorrow for this virtual conversation. and then the denouement of our work this year is going to be our national conference in April.

We’re really excited about the work that we’re putting together there and we’re going to have a great main stage feature for you. If you’re interested in being part of that conference, I encourage you to register. If you’re interested in being on stage or offering you a workshop as part of that national conference, grab the QR code that you see on your screen now. The abstracts are open for a couple more weeks. Okay, with that said, I’m Justin McBrayer. I’m director of university partnerships here at Heterodox Academy. Delighted to welcome all of you to our conversation. Let me quickly introduce our panelists and then we’ll get right to the show. We’re joined first by Shiri Spitz Siddiqi. Shiri is one of my colleagues at Heterodox Academy.

She’s an experimental social psychologist specializing in moral and political psychology. She joined HxA because she views its principled, nonpartisan approach as crucial for the fulfillment of the university’s purpose. Informed by her deep familiarity with several psychological literatures, Shiri develops original research analyses around HxA’s core mission and values. She enjoys writing about psychological science for a broad audience, and contributes regularly to our HxA Substack, Free the Inquiry. I can also say she’s a fantastic colleague who gives insightful comments on pieces that I’ve put together for HxA, so I’m very grateful to have her join our conversation today. We’re also joined by Ashley Rubin.

If you’ve been in higher ed reform conversations over the last six months or so, You surely know Ashley Rubin. She’s an HxA member and a professor of sociology at the University of Hawai‘I at Mānoa, as you could probably tell by looking at her background here on Zoom. She’s an interdisciplinary social scientist studying the history and sociology of prisons and other criminal punishments, drawing on organizational theory, law and society, and punishment and society scholarship to explain how penal practices change and persist across United States history. She’s the author of The Deviant Prison from Cambridge University Press and Rocking Qualitative Social Science from Stanford.

She holds a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy from the University of California at Berkeley. And finally, we’re joined by Jesse Smith. Jesse’s a sociologist and assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at The Ohio State University. His work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Marriage and Family, Sociology of Religion, and Socius, as well as popular outlets such as Public Discourse and Law & Liberty. He has published research on topics such as the heterogeneity of religious nationalism, moral socialization of young adults, and transmission of religious belief and practice between generations.

His current focus is on the ways that dominant paradigms in academic research lead to systematic errors and blind spots in bodies of social scientific knowledge. So Jesse, Shiri, Ashley, thank you for joining us. Here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to pose a few questions to our panelists to get our conversation started. Then we’ll pivot into Q&A with our audience. So we have a Q&A function built into chat. If you have a question at any point in time, go place it in the Q&A chat. Members will be able to upvote the questions that they most want the panelists to address, and I’ll pivot to pulling out some of those questions towards the back half of our time together will end at about 25 minutes past the next hour. So that’s our run of show.

Okay, we’re together to talk about a report that Heterodox Academy recently released on faculty attitudes about the value and impact of diversity in higher ed. So just to be clear, this was not a report about whether faculty are in fact diverse religiously, socioeconomically, politically or the like. So this was not about the diversity of faculty. It was about how faculty think about diversity and in particular, whether they value it and if so, which kinds of diversity they value and the like. Marisa will put a link to the full report in our chat if you haven’t had a chance to get to it yet. But Shiri, since you were one of the researchers knee deep in this project, can we just start with kind of the background?

What made Heterodox Academy interested in this set of issues? Why did we take the time to put this together? Just give us some of the genesis of this project.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah, I would say I was eye-deep in this report. But yeah, so as you mentioned, this was not a report looking at, you know, the reality, the actual distribution of faculty political views or religious views, demographic, anything like that. There already exists a good amount of work on that. But what we noticed is that there wasn’t a lot of work that actually looked at how faculty themselves think about diversity in different ways in their work. And because faculty are just so heavily and directly implicated in any kind of reform we might want to pursue related to viewpoint diversity, and also because the conversation around viewpoint diversity has become so polarized and the heat has just turned so way up on this topic.

We thought that maybe our intuitive perception of the distribution of views is not true to the way the land actually lays and faculty’s private views about this issue. So that’s why we wanted to study faculty’s actual views about viewpoint diversity.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, nice. It seems like we suffer from a kind of availability bias, where when you sort of self-reflect on whether or not your colleagues, your faculty at large, value diversity, you think of the most, you know, the last few interactions you had, or you think of the loudest voice in the faculty senate room or the like. So to take the time to get outside of our individual limited view and do a systematic survey seems like a really good idea to figure out what faculty really think rather than what we think they think about diversity. Can you give us like an executive summary? What’s the main shape of the findings? What do faculty value diversity? If so, what kinds? Give us some of the main findings from the report.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Sure. So we sort of throughout the report, we were interested in eight dimensions of diversity that we landed on. And these were a mix of demographic forms of diversity as well as intellectual ones. So I have the list here. We asked about theoretical slash methodological diversity, socioeconomic background, race and ethnicity, disability status, gender identity, sexual orientation, political perspectives, and religious views. And for each of these, we randomly assigned people to answer whether they valued these in their in research or in teaching. But the patterns were virtually identical. So we really just collapsed across that.

But we asked people, do you think that each of these makes inquiry in your field better or doesn’t have an effect or it undermines inquiry in your discipline? And what we found was that the number one most widely endorsed form of diversity across disciplines was theories and methods. So over 80 percent of people answered that they think that that form of diversity improves inquiry in their discipline. You know, number two and number three were class and race and ethnicity. Although really every form of diversity was valued by at least 50% of the sample. And that includes religious views that had 53% of respondents saying it improves inquiry. But that’s really like the range of it.

53% to 84% for any given form of diversity, people said it improves their field.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, interesting. So it is interesting that, you know, one of the takeaways is that faculty, by and large, think that diversity in a wide range of ways of understanding diversity is valuable for what they do, either in the classroom, you know, or for their research. And it’s also interesting, Shiri, that the report asks not just about demographic diversity, which I think sometimes when people just say the word diversity, they automatically hear demographic features, right? But you’re also asking about these intellectual features and trying to see how those two compare.

One finding that I wanted to ask you about in particular that I found striking and somewhat troubling, you asked faculty to indicate how many scholars they regularly interface with who disagree with them. On important disciplinary issues. You know, like, are you hanging out with other scholars who don’t think just like you do about particular issues? And you found that nearly 30% of faculty say they don’t regularly interface with people who disagree with them. And then that number was highest among adjuncts, contingent faculty, you know, faculty who may be teaching less humanistic fields like stem. Tell me something about that number, about what you found and why that unevenness in terms of interfacing with people who disagree with you matters.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah. So being HxA, we think everybody should share this value, but what we believe that disagreement is like a superpower for inquiry. It helps us catch bad ideas and it helps us refine and sharpen good ideas. And so we see it as like a good that everybody should have if they’re invested in doing rigorous inquiry and teaching. So it would just be concerning to find that a lot of people somehow aren’t having this experience. They don’t benefit from these conditions that could really improve their inquiry. And we found that almost, you know, three in 10 don’t exist in those conditions. And then on top of that, to find that this good isn’t distributed equally is another layer of concern.

Because it’s not that disagreement is like less valuable just because you’re in STEM. There’s valuable disagreements to be had no matter what area of inquiry you’re in. And then I think we also found that generally the more disagreement people were reporting, more frequent disagreements were related to valuing all kinds of diversity more, but in particular political diversity.

And so if those, if valuing disagreement is in any way related to the way that you teach and like let’s say adjuncts are in this they’re particularly likely to be in this situation of not encountering disagreement very often then we might they might be at risk for having their teaching not be as broad or exposing their students to the true breadth of perspectives and meanwhile most students are taught by adjuncts And so there’s lots of potential problems that this could cause.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, interesting. Jesse and Ashley, I’d like to hear from you, especially given your expertise as social scientists. Can you say something about how diversity of different sorts, whether we’re talking methodological, socioeconomic, political, and the like, how that diversity is actually valuable when it comes to teaching or research? Like, tell us something about the mechanisms or processes that explain how diversity sharpens what we do or improves what we do either in the classroom or in our research.

Ashley Rubin: I can go ahead and start for us. So I would say every perspective, and so that comes from, you know, like your positionality as a person with different demographics, experiences, and so on, as well as every methodology, every theory has both its contributions and its limitations. So they’re going to help us to kind of see certain variables or kind of think about different ways of getting to an answer that other kind of perspectives won’t necessarily have. But they’ll also have their blind spots. So to get to some version of the truth, we’ll be better off if we have this kind of kaleidoscope of perspectives where we can basically see what combination helps us get as close as possible to the actual truth.

To say that a little bit more concretely, you know, if you have scholars who use different methods or subscribe to different theories, that’s going to help us to stress test the claims that we make because they might say, you know, well, from my perspective, I would look at like this variable. So why aren’t you talking about this variable? Or you know, my understanding of methodology is, you know, you need to do if you’re going to do causal inference, you need an experiment. So here are the problems with your non-experimental design. Or conversely, you know, here’s what observational data can tell us that an experiment can’t do.

So kind of putting all of that together is going to help us get to some closer version of the truth and kind of identify the limitations of what we think is the truth.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. I just want to say, in particular, your mention of a kaleidoscope, like that’s a metaphor I’ve not heard before, but it’s such a neat idea to think about, you know, pivoting the kaleidoscope and recombining the same bits of material to yield a different pattern or a different, like, that’s a really nice way of thinking about how diversity, you know, helps us see things that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Jesse, what do you think? What are the mechanisms that make diversity valuable?

Jesse Smith: Yeah, it’s a great question. And my response would overlap quite a lot with Ashley’s. But I think for social science in particular, this could apply to other disciplines to different degrees. But social science, you’re dealing with the social world, you know, politics or culture or religion in or the economy or things that I think virtually everybody has some kind of stake in, some kind of knowledge of, and that virtually everybody cares about and has some kind of interesting perspective on, but very complex phenomena. So we’re trying to make claims about those things. And what these different kinds of diversity give us is a way to stress test our claims.

You know, we bring certain assumptions, we bring a certain angle or perspective to whatever we’re saying about these different things and we don’t necessarily know what our biases or blind spots are we don’t always know what the strongest counter arguments are and so I think that diversity of perspectives really brings that and as far as mechanisms in a way we already have a mechanism because we have things like peer review and workshops and that sort of thing but if you don’t have diversity among the people who are doing that then you’re not getting the a full benefit of it because you don’t have a group of people that’s actually maybe able to adequately stress test each other’s arguments. And so this is where I think the diversity contributes.

Justin McBrayer: That’s a nice framing too, that I’ve not, I’ve not heard before stress test. I mean, that’s what happens when you defend your dissertation in front of your colleagues, right? I mean, my advisor and the other colleagues, you know, that were on that committee, they stress rest tested my ideas. And it was stressful to go before them, right? And pitch your ideas and have them, you know, lean on particular assumptions and arguments and the like. But I think you’re exactly right, Jesse. That’s what we need if we’re going to try to figure out what the world is really like rather than what we, you know, naively assume the world is like.

So let’s pivot our discussion less from, you know, what faculty think to more about the title of this webinar, You know, like, how do we make this the norm on campus? And Shuri, I want to double back to you quickly because I think one of the report’s more striking findings is that it revealed this gap between what faculty personally believe and what they think their colleagues believe. So, you know, faculty support political and religious diversity in the sense that they think it’s valuable, but they also assume that their peers see it as less valuable than they do.

There’s like almost this silent majority kind of thing so tell us about that finding like what does it reveal about how politicized this conversation has become what does it reveal about how difficult it might be to make this kind of conversation the norm on campus

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah so with this finding I think it’s it’s helpful to compare the gap on like political and religious diversity to the gap that we didn’t see on other forms of diversity, like race and gender and sexuality. So when we asked about, you know, how much do you, how much do you value these demographic forms of diversity? And how much do you think your colleagues value them? People basically said, I value them. And I also think my colleagues do as well. But when we asked them about political and religious diversity, they were still likely to say, yep, I value these, but they were less sure that their colleagues share that view.

And so what my guess would be that there are some very loud critics of viewpoint diversity and or they also carry more social cachet than the proponents of viewpoint diversity. And this kind of creates a dynamic where people who do have positive views of these kinds of diversity, they don’t express them. And we get what’s called a spiral of silence, where we have this majority that isn’t being as open or forthcoming with their positive views as they privately feel. And then that distorts the information that’s available to everybody who’s trying to form an impression of like, okay, what views are prevalent among my peers?

And so once we take, you know, these kind of like normie moderate views out of the equation, all we’re left with is the vocal people on the extremes. And so, yeah, I think this is a problem that needs addressing. But I think there kind of have to be two, I don’t know, crucial ingredients to that response. I think one of them has to be, we need to make viewpoint diversity more visible by showing people positive examples of how they can do this. I think HxA makes a big point out of highlighting these positive examples.

You know, things like Sway, I’m thinking of Abigail Saguy’s gender course, positive examples of how you can do this and how it can go well, coupled with support from administration faculty need to trust that if they’re going to go out on a limb and do this thing that’s still a little bit risky, that might draw some backlash, they need to trust that they’re going to have the support of peers and the people in power.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah so I you know at the on the one hand the finding is distressing because our perceptions of others don’t match the reality we think that other faculty don’t value this thing when it turns out actually they do so that’s the distressing part but the silver lining part is in fact there’s wide agreement across faculty that this stuff really does matter so there’s a the good news is that there’s a majority the bad news is that it’s the silent majority so let’s think about how to connect with that silent majority and make some moves that would matter on campus Ashley you’ve thought about this cluster of issues you know more than most and you’ve got all kind of ideas for concrete things that we can be doing on campus and in fact one thing that you’ve written about is this idea that institutions can declare support for like other forms of diversity intellectual diversity or ideological diversity or the like without really doing anything on the ground, without changing anything.

It’s just sort of a virtue signal and then they move on. But if Shiri is right that the faculty support is there, what is it that departments and institutions can be doing? What can they be building? Or what should they quit doing if there are things they should quit doing? What are some concrete things we can do on campus to harness the fact that the experts themselves think that diversity matters?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thanks for the question. So I think part of the problem that we face is that viewpoint diversity means so many different things to different people. And as Shiri was saying, it’s kind of a right-coded concept at this point, which is also leading to these problems. But as part of the kind of ambiguities relating to viewpoint diversity and its different names, intellectual diversity and so on. I think we have to think about viewpoint diversity as a practice and not just as a value. So obviously viewpoint diversity is a really important value and to say like we support viewpoint diversity, I think that’s essential, but we can’t think that that’s the only thing that we’re doing. We also have to actually practice viewpoint diversity.

And the really key point here is that viewpoint diversity as a practice is something we’re just supposed to do as researchers, as scholars. We’re supposed to engage in this. This is just kind of fundamental to how we’re supposed to do scholarship. We’re supposed to engage and explore a range of explanations and, you know, look at the data, you know, seriously from those different perspectives. We’re supposed to say things or we’re supposed to ask questions like, you know, what do I expect to see if my hunch or my pet explanation is right? And what do I expect to see if it’s wrong? What if, you know, these other typical explanations people offer, what would I expect to see? Like, let me steel man them and see if they’re consistent with the data.

And this is something that we’ve kind of institutionalized kind of in the writing process, because we are supposed to discuss alternative explanations, contradictory data, and that’s kind of just supposed to be in our write-ups when we’re doing this, not just in the research practice, but we’re also supposed to show people that we considered these considerations. And if we don’t do this ourselves, editors and reviewers are supposed to point that out. So I would say, you know, we need to encourage people to practice this kind of pluralistic approach in our research, in our teaching, and even in our engagement with others.

And so I would say a statement from a university or organization just kind of supporting viewpoint diversity as a value, I don’t think that’s going to do that. Instead, I think we have to create structures and incentives that are actually designed to check that we’re doing that and kind of putting some sort of backstop in place when we’re not.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. So I like this idea of living. What does it mean to live viewpoint diversity in your teaching, in your research? Yeah, that sounds right. Jesse, speaking of what it would mean to live viewpoint diversity, in your work, you’ve made the case that the magic happens, the real gains come from actual exposure to disagreements and not, you know, like kind of pretend disagreements or statements. Commitments or the like. Can you tell us more about that? Like, what happens to us when we’re exposed to disagreement or viewpoint diversity, you know, in some of the senses that we were thinking about in this report? Thank you. And as much as I wish I could take credit for that insight, I think John Stuart Mill beat me there by a little bit.

Jesse Smith: So he, I know people are fans of him around Heterodox Academy. So he talks about in On Liberty, the importance of having actual disagreement. And one point he makes that I think is really, it’s vital, but it’s not always intuitive, is he says it’s not good enough to have an argument presented by a teacher or an instructor. It needs to be presented by an advocate, someone who really believes it, because they’re going to, I think his phrasing is, they’re going to do their very utmost for the argument, force people to know them in their most plausible and persuasive form, and feel their whole force. And so I think what he’s really getting at, which I think is vital here, is the importance of engagement.

You know, in academia, we’re dealing with ideas all day long because what we do, so we’re reading things and scanning and mapping and kind of pulling what we can use for our projects. But we’re not necessarily engaging ideas all the time.

We mostly, in terms of like, Thinking through their implications, seriously thinking about how they apply to our subject matter and what all would follow from their arguments we really only do that for a select few ideas that we care about the most but I think that’s the most fruitful part of intellectual life is when we’re really engaging things and so I think what real disagreement does whether engaging a debate or whether you’re watching a debate and kind of feeling some of the drama of it promotes a more serious engagement with the different ideas and perspectives, which then leads them to yield the strongest benefits toward inquiry.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. And you’re exactly right. John Stewart Mill has this line about, it’s not just, you know, interacting with ideas, but seeing the ideas in the flesh, right? People who actually hold those ideas. And there’s something powerful about that. I, in fact, just ran across a paper that offers some empirical support to this million hypothesis. I’m It’s a it’s an old it’s 25 year old paper, but it compares people the effects of people who play devil’s advocate with coming face to face with someone who really believes it and how those two, you know, the devil’s advocate is sort of better than nothing. But it doesn’t have some of the real benefits, Jesse, that you were just talking about, you know, interacting with someone who truly believes something.

Thing. You know, I don’t know if that’s because when you meet someone who truly believes that it gives you some social permission to believe it too, or maybe they’re just more serious about their evidence or their arguments. But I think, you know, that there are studies that have borne out what John Stuart Mill, you know, advocated for many years ago. Let me ask one more question, then we’ll pivot to Q&A. Those of you who are watching, if you have questions, I encourage you to go down to the Q&A module at the bottom of your screen, drop in a question, go in and check out the questions that are there and upvote the ones that you want me to pitch to the panelists, and we’ll do that shortly.

So one final question then before we turn to Q&A for all of you. The report found that faculty who regularly engage with people who disagree with them, so people, you know, Shiri, who are not in that 30% of, I never meet scholars who disagree with People who regularly interface with other scholars who disagree with them. Those people are far more likely to value political diversity in particular. Given that, what would it look like to mobilize faculty to do more of that kind of engagement? I would love to hear an idea from each of you, like a real intervention, not just an aspiration. You’re like, I really want to push you here.

Like, what is one concrete thing you can do as a faculty member, as a department chair, as a dean, as a member of a faculty senate? Like, give me one idea that will move this, you know, move from valuing viewpoint diversity to actually embodying it or living it on campus. Shiri, can we just start with you and then we’ll just go kind of go round Robin?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Sure. Well, I think incentives can go a long way. So maybe if you’re a dean or chair, you can offer some funding for faculty to put together maybe a debate or a panel convening scholars who disagree, or maybe fund them to go to a conference.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. Okay. Ashley, why don’t we do you next and then we’ll do Jesse.

Ashley Rubin: Sure, thanks. So I agree funding for colloquia, you know, speaker series that puts different viewpoints in conversation, or at least that features speakers from different perspectives over the course of the term or school year, providing funding for adversarial collaborations. But if you don’t have funding, like one smaller thing you could do is just institutionalize the idea of the 10th man. So this is an idea that comes from World War Z, both the book and the movie, I think. But the idea that, you know, if everybody in the room agrees, somebody has the responsibility to try to give the steel man version of the alternative argument or set of alternative arguments and kind of take that seriously.

And so to kind of normalize that approach, I think would be really helpful. And then finally, I would say just reminding people how to disagree. And I would, this is going to sound, you know, totally suck upy, but, you know, promulgating the XX way principles, because I found them really helpful as just a reminder of like, oh, right, like when I feel myself slipping a little bit too much into an ideological mode, the HX way is kind of helpful for kind of bringing myself back. And so I would advise, you know, chairs, deans, just to kind of circulate that or their own kind of updated version of it that I think would be really helpful.

Justin McBrayer: That’s a good suggestion. I did that in my classes, actually. You know, I’m a philosopher by trade. So we would talk about, you know, what does justice for transgender athletes look like? And what do we say about the abortion? Like really controversial things. And I would use the HX way in my classroom. And it was a beautiful model for how to engage with one another in constructive, but civil ways. Good suggestion. Jesse, concrete things we can do.

Jesse Smith: Yeah, you know, this one, it’s maybe not usually one you hear about in these conversations, but I think it would be both direct and relatively straightforward.

I think in the, just the ecosystem of journal publication, if you made it easier to publish critiques of existing work, and a very good example of that, I think Brain and Behavioral Sciences does this all the time, where they’ll publish an article, and then they’ll have like a whole series of different perspectives, different counter arguments on whatever the target article was actually very appropriately for this there was a very famous article I learned a lot from about political diversity and social science from jose duarte I think jonathan height and a few other people and I found that such an enriching thing to read I felt like I learned so much not just from their article but hearing like 20 different people respond to it and seeing all the different forms of pushback I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t you know scale that up or make it more of a journal norm and I think you would get a lot of traction that way.

Justin McBrayer: I remember my first year in graduate school, my professor made the point that René Descartes was one of the first to publish work with responses to critics, you know, so he’s, he cycles the meditations across all of the main kind of big name thinkers in Europe at the time said, what do you think about this? They wrote objections, and he had replies. I just think reading through that dialectic as a graduate student, here’s what Descartes thought, here’s some pretty serious criticism of his work. Here’s what he thought. Just that back and forth was such a model of good thinking that, you know, we could do a better job of that in our own work and in journals and the like. So that’s a great suggestion, Jesse.

Okay, I’m going to turn to some questions and raise some issues that our viewers are raising. And I just, I have to tell you that Heterodox Academy viewers, they don’t pull their punches. So you’re going to get some, You’re going to get some good questions, and I’m excited to see what you have to say about them. So the first one comes from David. He says, I think that academic disciplines often carry political bias. For example, tongue in cheek, every historian is liberal, every civil engineer is conservative, and so forth. As universities have to replace faculty in specific academic areas, departments are likely going to propagate their bias.

And so repeated over many years, hiring is just going to intensify the viewpoint biases in faculty, not diversify them. What do you do about it?

Jesse Smith: I guess I can start on that one. I mean, that’s a very difficult question. I don’t think there’s any silver bullet to it. I do think it matters just kind of instituting viewpoint diversity or whatever diversity we think is helpful as a value and something that we should actually prioritize and potentially hire for, which is not, it isn’t something that comes naturally, I think, within the current structures. When you’re looking for who you’re going to hire, you look for who you’ll get along with and for who has a really impressive research agenda and CV. And of course, you should look at all those things. You don’t necessarily look for the person who’s going to challenge dominant assumptions. If anything, it’s the opposite.

That person is probably going to make things a little bit more uncomfortable around your department. So maybe subconsciously, you might not go for that person. And I think kind of adopting an ethic of like, no, we actually should be trying to bring in the critical perspective, even if they get on our nerves, because they might actually contribute a lot to our epistemic environment. Even just getting people on board with that idea would hopefully be a first step toward actually now following through on it.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah.

Ashley Rubin: You know politically demographically experientially diverse faculty but if they’re all in their own little silos that’s a problem conversely if you don’t try to do like the political litmus test of aversion but you think like okay well we’re going to hire in particular areas and that’s going to fix the problem because different areas are kind of right or left coded so let’s say we’re in a history department american revolution is kind of now right coded so we think like okay we’re We’re going to hire somebody who studies the American Revolution, and that’s going to kind of fix our political problems without actually looking for are you actually a conservative or a moderate or whatever.

The problem is you can study the American Revolution from a lot of different perspectives, and you might end up, as Jesse said, you might get somebody who is looking at it from the exact same perspectives as everyone else in the department. And so you’re not actually just because you’re looking at this, you know, right coded topic doesn’t mean that you’re not looking at, you know, kind of left leaning theories. So that’s not really going to fix the problem. So for me, I think the solution has to come back to just getting back to what scholarship is supposed to be in the first place, like that, that treating it as a practice, institutionalizing, we have to look at different perspectives.

And so for administrators, I think looking and kind of setting up structures that say, hey, chair of this department, you know, what evidence can you show me that you guys actually are looking at things from different perspectives and not just kind of a theoretical monoculture that you even if you have people from different perspectives in your department, what sort of engagement are they having? What sort of, you know, contestations are they doing? Or is everyone just basically going on their own little path and not looking at the other paths. So I think kind of setting up those structures is going to be really key.

Justin McBrayer: Shiri, would you mind if I pivot to the next question in our queue? Because it touches directly on the point that Ashley just made. Is that okay? And then we can circle back. So Ashley, you were just making this point about what administrators need to do. And when we’re hiring, we’re like, well, here’s the next question in our queue. It comes from Duane.

As an administrator, it’s very hard to push viewpoint diversity when the hiring process does not collect that information and at most places you know inquiring about political viewpoint for example is not allowed so if the key to if what we are trying to do is hire a viewpoint diverse faculty how do we institute that in hiring like what how are we I mean actually you were just giving advice this is what the administration do are you like how do you do that we’re not we don’t have an equal opportunity office it’s like coding people for their viewpoints and we don’t. So just concretely, what does that look like?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah. So again, like I don’t want to code people by their viewpoints. I think that’s, you know, like that seems very close to illegal if it’s not actually. Instead, I would say like, have, you know, like we, when we do hiring, we have to fill out these forms about like different questions and like mandatory, what is it? MQs and DQs, like mandatory qualifications and desirable qualifications. One of those qualifications should be, are you evaluating, are you critically evaluating multiple perspectives or are you just pushing your own perspective? When you give a job talk, are you showing kind of competing explanations?

Are you talking about here are the limitations, not like not in the, sometimes we see like limitation slides that are just really you know paltry and it’s it’s just kind of rote stuff that everyone says like oh this is an observational study therefore it can’t show causality or something Instead, are you seriously engaging other viewpoints? And by viewpoints here, I mean perspectives, methodologies. Are you seriously kicking the tires of your study and thinking about things from these different perspectives? And if you have a lot of campuses now have an advocate who’s part of the hiring process, the advocate can sit in on the job talk and say, like, you know, what sort of questions are we seeing the department asking?

And, you know, are they kind of asking questions from multiple viewpoints? And if they’re not, maybe that department needs a little reminder about, you know, like, here’s going to be a training session on just basic stuff that we’re supposed to do in research.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good. Thanks. Shiri, you have ideas for what we can do, you know, of just concrete things that we could do either in a hiring committee or the like?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I mean, I agree with what Ashley said about just building the incentives into the structure, just because it is so hard to, it’s unintuitive to seek people out and invite them in who disagree with us and push back on our ideas. And so to the extent that in the hiring process, you can select for people who they don’t have to agree with your, you know, your disciplinary premises or methods or assumptions or conclusions, definitely not, but they should at the very least take a kind of pluralistic approach, like Ashley was saying, in their own research and in the way that they are willing to accommodate other approaches to similar questions.

And it just seems very hard to try to seek truth if not everybody’s on the same page about, you know, sharing that as a starting value.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good. Jesse, do you want to weigh in on Duane’s question about what are administrators supposed to do, given that you, in some ways, it’s very hard to measure whether changes you make as an administrator are making the faculty more viewpoint diverse or not? Like, suppose you’re one of the faculty who responded to this survey and you’re like, yes, I value this kind of diversity. Like, what is an administrator supposed to do? And they can’t do what Ashley thinks they shouldn’t do anyway, which is like try to slot people into views and code them. Like, what are you supposed to do then?

Jesse Smith: That’s a very thorny question. And one thing I think is in general challenging about viewpoint diversity conversations is that what valuable viewpoint diversity actually looks like is going to differ by every subfield, by every department. So we’re always trying to have these conversations at the 30,000-foot view, but it’s going to be completely different in cultural anthropology versus the sociology of religion or whatever it is we’re looking at. So I know something both the Yale report on higher ed reform mentioned and then the Vanderbilt report that actually helped write mentioned was about having departments engage in some kind of self-study where you look at, okay, what are the gaps in our inquiry, our research agendas?

What do we think is missing that would be helpful potentially? Which, again, isn’t something you necessarily just do naturally or intuitively. You might need to be prompted to do it. But so that may be something an administrator can do is just prompt departments to undertake that kind of like it’s almost like a meta analysis of like what it is that we’re doing here. Obviously, departments have to be on board with that to do it well. But if it is something they’re open to, then maybe they can give you the feedback and they can tell you what they would need to do to improve kind of the diversity and epistemic quality of what they’re doing.

Justin McBrayer: OK, good. I want to ask a question. And this is not verbatim from one of our viewers, but I’m piecing together several questions that are in this vein. And it’s also something that’s very much in the air right now when it comes to higher ed reform. What do you do when your department tells you everything’s fine, but you suspect that it’s not? So you do, Jesse, you ask them to go through this meta-analysis. They say, we’ve taken a look at our curriculum. We think it’s spot on. Ashley says, well, when you do a search, make sure people, you know, seriously kick the tires on other views. They’re like, oh, we do. This is the proper range of views. It’s only neo-Marxist views.

Outside of that, those aren’t even like, and within that range, they kick the tires on all four of the ways of reading Foucault or like, you know, like what, like, what do you do then? This is the really hard and uncomfortable question. I know, this is why I raised it for you. Yeah, I appreciate it.

Ashley Rubin: My personal take, you know, because there are some options on the table that I think make us all very uncomfortable that kind of feel authoritarian, top down and scary. And, you know, it’s not clear that they would work in the way that we would even want them to work. And so I kind of want to put those aside. And so my preferred solution is, you know, I think we need to work on incentives and make voluntary change and give people opportunities to do that. And if you have a department that’s just very reticent on doing essentially their job, my preferred solution is to create a new department that people can voluntarily go into where that new department has to be committed to, you know, the basic foundation of how we’re supposed to do scholarship.

We are supposed to do this, you know, stress testing approach. We are supposed to be open to different viewpoints. And as long as you can do that and you’re willing to stick to certain structures that are going to keep checking that you’re doing that it’s not just going to be like a one and done thing that I think giving people the opportunity to do that and then you put resources into that department so long as it’s doing its job and then you just don’t give new hires to the department that’s not doing that unless they start to change their behavior. And it’s still, you know, kind of an uncomfortable solution, but it’s at least it’s voluntary and it’s not actively penalizing, like they can keep doing their thing.

But it’s just, you know, hopefully at some point going to come to an end one way or another.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah. I appreciate both the clarity of your answer and your courage to make it so clear, but it’s the sort of build and then kind of let lie kind of strategy. So I appreciate that. Shiri or Jesse, would either of you like to weigh in on this? The question again is like, what happens when a department tells you that they’re kicking the tires on serious views, when they tell you that their curriculum’s covering all the valuable stuff, but there’s some kind of good reason to think that they’re not? What do you do, either as a faculty member in that department or as an administrator? Well, I’m also kind of scared of that question, but it also is one that I think can’t entirely be avoided.

And that actually the Vanderbilt report kind of touches on this too, when it talks about the difference between astronomy and astrology and yeah, when the astrology department, they’re telling you that everything is fine, then what do you do?

Jesse Smith: And I think the, at minimum, I don’t want to get into specifically what the interventions would look like, but you do at least want to be able to make the argument and say, okay, we don’t believe you. We have good reason and to think that things are not just as fine as you’re telling us they are. And so you would want some kind of criteria to be able to evaluate or articulate as an administrator what your problems are and ideally maybe get someone from maybe other departments in that discipline or adjacent disciplines. You might need some kind of external assessment, but you want that external assessment to be as close to the core of that discipline as possible in order to make it as authoritative as it can be.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, nice suggestion on a review. And of course, reviews of that sort are part and parcel to your life as a faculty member, right? You’re reviewed by your peers, your published work is reviewed, your department is reviewed on a periodic basis every five years or seven years or whatever. So it does seem like that is a norm within higher ed to rely on outside experts. The question is just, you know, who counts as the experts and how do we identify them, especially if you have worries about the discipline writ large. Shiri, do you want to say anything else on that topic?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I thought Ashley and Jesse gave great answers.

Justin McBrayer: Okay, great. Let me ask one other kind of hiring-related question, then I want to pivot to a teaching student-related question. The hiring-related question is this one. Is there a danger of preferential hiring or changing our hiring practices in ways that favor viewpoint diversity, but then they sort of melt into some of the same questions that we had during the DEI era or affirmative action era. I mean, is there a worry, this comes from Jeff, is there a worry that hiring for viewpoint diversity might fall prey to all the same kind of mistakes that we made when we were hiring for DEI reasons?

Ashley Rubin: I can go ahead and start us off. Yes, absolutely. I think this is the super lazy, sloppy way to go about it. And this is the way that I think a lot of us are worried that viewpoint diversity will be handled by universities. And so I think all of us would say, you can’t just go for this one thing and kind of prioritize it, that is support for viewpoint diversity or ability to practice it. You have to be looking across the board that this is a high caliber scholar who matches the qualifications you would expect in your department. As soon as you start prioritizing the support for viewpoint diversity above other things. I mean, I do think engaging in viewpoint diversity as a scholar is fundamental to scholarship.

But if that’s the only thing you have going for you, that’s that’s not a strong candidate. So I would say you still need to hit all of the other, you know, MQs and DQs, you know, like that still has to be there. This can’t be this can’t be something that overrides, you know, obvious problems with a candidate. It’s a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Exactly. Yeah. Thank you.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah. Jesse or Shiri, like, are there risks that hiring for viewpoint diversity might, you know, land us in the same kind of hot water that hiring for other kind of diversity might land you in? Thoughts?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I think there definitely are risks, especially if we’re engaging in the same kind of demands as DEI statements engage in. For example, if we’re just substituting those kinds of statements with other attestations that we’re asking scholars to make, that seems probably problematic. Problematic, but I think that efforts to recruit, identify understudied topics in a discipline and try to recruit for those, that’s on much firmer ground, in my opinion, just because anybody can, you know, be interested in, for example, military history. You don’t have to be conservative. And in fact, many people might be interested in military history, you know, just because. And so that’s my opinion about a more legitimate weight.

And it’s also grounded in an epistemological argument about what would improve inquiry in our discipline. We’re looking for scholars who can fill in the blind spots that we have and push our assumptions. And yeah, in my view, that’s on way firmer ground than recruiting on a personal characteristic, like who you voted for, which is illegal, I would think.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah. Jesse, you should not feel any pressure to end. Do you want to chime in any way on this?

Jesse Smith: Oh yeah, I can say briefly, and I would actually maybe circle it back to the report because the, so in general, the report suggested that faculty tend to value diversity on these different metrics, but they value methodological and theoretical diversity really highly and other things less. And to me, the obvious distinction there is that, well, you can tell exactly how more theory and method are going to contribute to inquiry. It’s less obvious how those other things are going to do so. I think they can, but it’s not on the surface.

So to me, it’s whatever diversity you’re looking for, political or racial or demographic or whatever, you should be able to translate it into a theoretical and or methodological contribution and explain how it’s going to be valuable on that level, rather than expecting that the characteristic in itself is going to contribute something. And if you can’t really make that case, then it is probably not that valuable. Good thought. I’m going to pull moderator’s privilege and ask an uncomfortable follow-up question before I pivot to the pedagogy.

Justin McBrayer: Jesse, you made the point, well, you allowed that John Stuart Mill made the point that engaging with people who genuinely disagree with you is a good, an important epistemic good. Ashley and Shiri, I think the two of you each agree with that. Like it’s a really good thing to have people who are actually committed to these ideas because maybe they’ll put them in better light or whatever. But none of the suggestions that you just gave are guarantees that we will get people like that. Like, actually, we could invite people in to give job talks. They might all seriously. We could, Shiri, look at syllabi and they might be diverse in terms of ideas and whatever. And Jesse, you know, we might be able to look at some scholars profile and she’s published.

Like it all may look diverse on the surface but every faculty member on campus could be an evangelical christian or every faculty member like and by your own lights we’re missing a good there is there anything we can do about that or are you willing to just say there’s some good things we can’t rightly inculcate do you guys see what I’m pressing

Ashley Rubin: Yeah I can start us off yeah this is one of those things where we just have conflicting values. We have a legal structure and I think a fairly strong normative structure that we’re not supposed to hire people based on certain protected statuses and categories. And I think politics is often included as one of those. Or hiring somebody for their beliefs. There’s just something very icky about that. So even though we can all recognize that that is really important to do, to have that available, our legal system doesn’t allow it. And I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable advocating for doing that. If for no other reason, it’s really hard. I mean, people can also change their minds or you can be of a particular party. You can donate to a particular group.

You can vote for a particular candidate. But that’s, you know, there’s such a diversity within each of those categories that we’re not necessarily going to bring, you know, the person who actually, let’s just use abortion as an example. You’re, you know, just because you hire a conservative doesn’t mean they’re actually against choice or whatever framing you want to use. So there’s kind of also this risk of essentializing. So there’s kind of like a practical matter of just because you hire somebody you think is going to have this view doesn’t mean that they have that view or that they’re always going to have that view. I mean, we are supposed to be scientists and scholars. We are supposed to change our mind when we see different evidence.

So it’s very risky. So I would say at the end of the day, it’s just a tension between different values. Like it would be great if we could have that on offer for our students and for the world. But getting there, I think, is just practically and legally very challenging.

Justin McBrayer: Nice point. As a philosopher, I think about the distinction between those two, Ashley, is differences between your goal. You know what John Hite likes to call your telos, where you’re headed and then your side constraints. And your side constraints are the ethical parameters between which you agree to operate. And the point you’re making is we’ve got these side constraints that we’ve agreed to. And it might turn out that those side constraints block us from certain ways of achieving our goal. Like there are appropriate ways of achieving it, non-appropriate ways of achieving it. Earmarking people by their, you know, their voter registration or whatever is outside the side constraints. Nice. Jesse or Shiri, would you like to weigh in?

Like there’s the good of having genuine disagreement. And yet the interventions that we’re talking about don’t guarantee that you’d get them. Thoughts?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Just really quickly if we’re if we’re willing to expand the scope beyond hiring for a second hiring is not the only mechanism it expands the pipeline you could say but you can also do things like invite you know someone with a different perspective to guest lecture in your course or to you know present at your brown bag speaker series so that doesn’t address the pipeline issue but it does address the people presence

Justin McBrayer: Good Yeah it does get you face to face with like true believers or whatever yeah good Jesse any thoughts yeah I guess I would let’s say I see the distinction you’re drawing and it in a theoretical sense I think it could be relevant and I would agree that you can’t you know hire or try and promote diversity based on like what people hold in their hearts you can’t really look at that But in practice, I’m not sure it would necessarily be

Jesse Smith: So difficult as it sounds like in practice. And just to take Ashley’s point about like your views on abortion. So if you’re a philosopher, if you’re like, say, an ethicist who explains why abortion might be a bad thing, and if you’re an ethicist who makes the pro-choice argument explaining why abortion might be a good thing, you don’t need to look at people’s hearts. You can look at their arguments and try and get the diversity of perspectives from that. And I guess it’s always possible that what people believe deep down is just completely out of alignment with the things that they’re arguing in their scholarship. But in general, I would expect those things to be aligned enough that you don’t need to try and peer into people’s hearts.

You can probably judge pretty well based on their scholarship, whether they’re going to offer something valuable.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good thought. Okay, let’s pivot to pedagogy. This question comes from Pilar. Can you help with this? Yes, my students have expressed that it’s more important to be kind and not hurt people’s feelings rather than risking being uncomfortable with a potentially contentious discussion or raising viewpoints or perspectives that would challenge people’s identities or their, you know, their core beliefs. What do I do about this?

Ashley Rubin: I can jump in. That’s a thorny question. I mean, I think that one of the things that I wrestle with, and I think everyone in heterodox wrestles with is, you know, like, we want to be open to different perspectives. But sometimes those perspectives are antithetical to the core perspectives of what we’re supposed to be doing. And, you know, like, yes, kindness is important. But at the end of the day, we have to tell the truth, we have to be willing to look at different perspectives. And, you know, if you have this idea that certain perspectives are just they can’t be on the table, you can’t address them. That’s a really dangerous, you know, approach to take.

And I realize like my own, you know, like I could be being hypocritical, you know, by saying that because I’m saying like this is a dangerous perspective. So it becomes kind of circular, but we’re not circular. But anyway, so I think this is really challenging. And so I think one way to handle this is maybe to have an open conversation. You know, if you haven’t already, this might have resulted from that very conversation. But have, you know, a discussion and have students offer kind of like, OK, so give me the steel man for the other view. Like, why might it be important to hear arguments that might be uncomfortable and that might make people, you know, uncomfortable, basically?

And, you know, one argument that I like is if we really think a view is problematic, then exploring that view should give us the chance to actually see that it’s problematic. So we shouldn’t be afraid of ideas because if there really is a bad idea, we should be able to figure out through a debate or a discussion or through evidence that it’s a bad idea or that it’s wrong. So this is one reason why, for example, I think we absolutely should test hypotheses that we find personally insulting. Resulting, because if we truly believe that that hypothesis is wrong, factually or morally, we should find some data in the course of doing a systematic analysis of it. And just to be clear, I’m not saying like, go and find proof that it’s wrong.

I’m just saying like, you know, do a real investigation. And if we truly believe, you know, we’re right, then the data should, you know, hopefully come out that way. And if it doesn’t, then that should also cause us to reevaluate our position. So I think there’s a way to get to this kind of point that we should always be investigating even the most offensive ideas because, you know, hopefully truth will prevail.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. I’m tempted to put your point in like slogan form. It depends on whether your goal is truth or preserving what you already think. If it’s preserving what you already think, then it’s going to be scary to test things or whatever. Your goal is the truth. There’s nothing to lose. Yeah.

Ashley Rubin: And, you know, like, why are you in college if you’re not here to be exposed to different ideas and to ultimately try to find the truth, you know, and follow, you know, the data wherever they go.

Justin McBrayer: Nice. Jesse or Shiri, advice on students who, you know, want to prioritize kindness or niceness over contention?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Ashley’s comments reminded me of one of my favorite Atlantic op-eds ever, and I’m going to send it in the chat here. But it’s a piece by, I think, Princeton political scientist Lauren Wright. Right. And she did this kind of qualitative project with Princeton students where she asked undergraduates to describe the opposite political view of the one that you hold on various issues. Conservatives could tell you front and back what a liberal thinks about Stein or abortion or any number of issues.

Issues the liberal students could not tell you what you know in any meaningful sense what a conservative honestly thinks about these things and a lot of them said you know I really don’t like to think about that that just feels too icky or you know things like that they just avoided engaging with it and what she found I mean as these you know these experiences from students would suggest is that conservatives were leaving college much more equipped to advocate for their views than the liberal students and so I sometimes like to say that you can make a completely self-interested almost I almost think of it as like harm reduction kind of argument for viewpoint diversity like some students I don’t know if you can ever get them to buy into the idea that they, you know, they should expose themselves to disagreement because, you know, eating vegetables is good for you.

And so is exposing yourself to difficult ideas. But you can buy them into the idea that do you want to be a good advocate for your beliefs? Do you want them to be based in good reasons and not be flimsy and fall apart with the slightest pressure? This is why you should talk to people you don’t agree with. You know we can kind of we don’t have to put on blast that oh maybe you will also change your mind about some things or maybe you’ll realize you weren’t 100 right about this or that but for me that’s like the entry point just to get them to even consider it

Justin McBrayer: I Love it I’m trying to put together in my mind like the “too long, didn’t read” you know to the answers to pilaf’s question so Ashley gave an epistemic reason you’ll do a better job finding the truth she was giving a like psychological reason. You’ll be more resilient. You’ll be a better, like a thinker, like you yourself will process information and understand things better having been exposed in the right, like a kind of exposure therapy kind of.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: You’ll be rhetorically a better, a better advocate.

Justin McBrayer: Agreed. Nice. Yeah. So there’s also that, a rhetorical advantage to doing that. Nice. Jesse, you want to add?

Jesse Smith: I wouldn’t add a whole lot, I suppose. I guess I’d just say you can’t force students to do or believe anything. But if you’re the instructor, you do set the norms and to some extent the practices for the classroom. So just make the case up front to the students why this is ultimately a good thing. And having, you know, ground rules for how to communicate so you can work through disagreement without excessively stepping on each other’s toes.

And potentially modeling, too, if you think your students just aren’t really going to do it, but you really want them to see the value in it, and maybe be intentional or present something provocative and see if you can go admit a participation or have another faculty member who disagrees with you on something important come and debate you or maybe you can expose them to the value of it that way if they’re not initially on board.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, nice. So we’re moving towards the tail end of our discussion. We’re winding down, but I can’t help but wanting to slip in one more question from our Q&A.

And we’re going to return all the way to where we started back to like research questions and figuring out what the world is like this question comes from elizabeth and I’ve been puzzling over this myself elizabeth so I’m so glad you raised it two studies were released in the last few days that contradicted one another so there’s this one and the studies have to do with like why is it that sociology majors are so liberal and why is it that business majors are so conservative rid of them like what are the causal mechanisms driving that you know is it self-selection or is there some kind of you know change happening to these students once they get in the measure so one study found that disciplinary coursework seemed to change students political leanings that that paper was featured in chronicle higher ed like two days ago there’s a write-up on it but then there’s a working paper from brown university that found that actually student self-selection was a much better prediction rather than coursework or what happened with faculty.

So like, how is a lowly philosopher supposed to figure out what’s going on? Like, I’m not an expert at this. Like, how are we supposed to read, you know, between these kind of two different studies that seem to contradict one another? And how might your study, Shiri, either help us understand what’s happening here with contradictory findings or like, how should we be thinking about this?

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah, I became aware of both of those and yeah, I’ll be honest that they seemed to, I think, point in slightly different directions, at least on their surface. I’ll be honest, I tried to read the studies and I was like, this is, I’m not super familiar with the methods they used. I gave them to Claude and asked them, Claude, like where do these papers Where do they disagree? And it gave me this very nuanced like threading the needle. Here’s how. I’m not sure I totally followed it, but what they agreed on was that, OK, there’s a leftward skew among faculty. Self-selection does drive part of the effect here. It’s not clear whether faculty really have like an influence. I think they both reject the indoctrination idea.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah. So how that can be - So are you saying that maybe what they differ on is like percentages? Like one paper saying that selection effect explains more of that skew than influence or because - It could be - Yeah, go ahead.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I think it’s also that they were different methodologically. Like one of them looked within the same, they held the course constant and they looked to see whether like the ideology of the faculty member teaching it affected students maybe voter registration changes and but the other one was much bigger in scope looking at way more schools and it looked the focus was just different I don’t remember off the top of my head but I think maybe these methodological differences the measurement differences there are ways that the findings can be kind of reconciled but I think maybe there’s others that they don’t quite agree on

Justin McBrayer: Fine points here yeah Jesse Ashley other thoughts like what do we do I mean how do you think about this as an expert and how should I be thinking about it as a non-expert you know as a humanist who’s trying to read social science findings and try to figure out what’s driving some particular phenomena.

Jesse Smith: And I would say, so Shiri did more work than I did. I’m aware of both of those studies, but I didn’t actually undertake to try and like tease apart what the differences are. I wouldn’t necessarily read that much into them in the sense of thinking about what your responsibility is as an educator. I think all the principles we’re talking about here would still apply fly, whatever the data says about it. And I don’t see any contradiction. It could be you could self-select into sociology because you feel like it sort of fits with your worldview and then have that worldview continually reinforced as you go through your major. So both things can be happening at the same time.

But I think in either case, if you think that kind of stress testing or presenting different perspectives is valuable, both pedagogically and as an approach to scholarship, then it’s always going to be a, that’s always a positive thing to implement in the classroom in either case.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good. Ashley?

Ashley Rubin: Yeah, I would say, you know, I think if you have two contradictory studies, it just means we need more data. This might be a methodological difference, it might be just a basic data difference, like studies don’t always replicate. And that’s why we need so many studies. So, you know, we can see how much of this is just by chance it turns out to be different. You know, like when we use a 0.05 distinction for significance, like one in 20 times that we just might be, you know, wrong by chance. So I would say, you know, this just means we need more data.

Justin McBrayer: Elizabeth, thank you for raising that question. I now want to do a study where I map faculty ideology and which study they shared on social media. Like, were the right-leaning faculty quick to share one and the left-leaning family quick to share the, and not right. Cause I do think that we see evidence through our own prism and we’re anyways, I’d love to do that study. Okay. We’re, we’re wrapping up. Can I give each of you a minute to give us like a final takeaway, or if you want to talk about stuff that you’re doing or offer our viewers suggestions for where to find more of your thoughts on these areas, a couple of things they should be looking at. Let’s just go around. Everybody can give us a wrap up. Shiri, we’ll start with you.

Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I guess what I’ll say is what we saw from the report is faculty don’t personally distinguish between these different forms of diversity all that much. Each form of diversity was positively correlated with each of the other ones. That’s not something that we reported in the report, but there were just support for one predicted support for each of the others. And so I think that we would probably do well to think about diversity broadly construed because that’s how faculty seem to think about them and yeah as far as what HxA is doing or what I’m doing you know check out my articles on Free the Inquiry I like to digest psychological science, give my take on it.

Justin McBrayer: And thank you all for coming. It’s been great. Shiri, will you drop your Substack subscriber link in the chat while everybody else is talking? That way our viewers can have that. It’ll be easy for them to just click on it and follow you there. Thank you. Jesse, let’s go to you next. Final thoughts, wrap up. What are you working on? How people can connect with you or stay in touch?

Jesse Smith: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve written a fair amount on political diversity in particular and what that actually looks like and how we translate that to something that’s epistemically valuable that actually aids inquiry rather than being some kind of representation thing or a political litmus test thing. So I guess in addition to other sources, I can shamelessly promote my sub stack. The next turtle down has a few pieces on this general topic. And just kind of a general thought. So I’d say I think it’s important to have these high level conversations like we’re having about just what the principles look like, how this plays out in practice.

But to me, the very logical next step is more focused on how these things play out on the ground as well and what this actually looks like in any given subfield in any given department. I think there’s a gap there that can be bridged, but that would really be the next step to turn this into practice to, I think, live the diversity, as Ashley put it.

Justin McBrayer: Yeah, that’s a nice thought. If you don’t mind, put your Substack link in the chat, too, to make it easier for folks to follow you. Ashley, you have the final say.

Ashley Rubin: Great. Thank you. Thank you so much for hosting and organizing this. It’s been really great. Right. Yeah, I would say, you know, I think just reiterating what I said earlier, we have to, you know, it’s not enough to celebrate viewpoint diversity, either in lip service or like to truly mean it. We have to actually engage in it. And importantly, we have to encourage each other to hold up the practice and, you know, like help each other to do that. And, you know, right now we talked about a lot of like principles and abstract stuff. And as Jesse said, you know, we’re going to need data to see like, okay, so what happens? Like maybe we have to change our mind when we get more data.

Maybe it turns out that, you know, a lot of the stuff that we said from a kind of principle perspective turns out to be wrong if, you know, three years from now we’ve taken our advice and it turns out not to be good advice. So basically stay tuned. And I’ll go ahead and drop my sub stack in the chat as well. Jesse and I spar on Substack about viewpoint diversity sometimes. And it’s really fun.

Justin McBrayer: I love that. I’m also going to add Ashley, the link to your Vanderbilt–WashU report on scholarly standards in sociology. So everybody has that. Thank you to my esteemed panelists, Jesse, Ashley, Shiri. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. Thanks to all of our viewers. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow at our virtual event and in April at our national conference. Ciao. Thank you.

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Featuring conversations with leaders from Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Denver, the University of Virginia, Cornell University, the University of Wyoming, Dartmouth College, UC Berkeley, and more, these excerpts showcase practical ideas for strengthening higher education through free inquiry and intellectual pluralism. A transcript of the episode is below.

Andrew D. Martin — Chancellor, Washington University in St. Louis (Episode 39)

Andrew D. Martin: Dialogue across difference is a program we stood up a little over three years ago. And the purpose of the program is really simple. It actually gets back to what you were talking about a little bit earlier, about what are the conversations at two in the morning in the dormitories. You know, for those of us who attended colleges in the United States in the 80s or 90s, we had a very different experience than what our students are facing today. I mean, you can sometimes walk into our cafeteria and see two students sitting with each other, each on their phones, probably texting each other rather than engaging in conversation and dialogue.

And so we came to the conclusion that, while at the time we were coming up this was sort of a natural thing that happened, that actually being able to sit down and have dialogue with someone — particularly someone who you disagree with about a very fundamental issue, whether it’s politics, whether it’s religion, whether it’s about identity or something else — that was actually something that we could teach. And so what we did with this program is we have built a team of professional facilitators, most of whom are professional staff, some of whom are graduate students, and some are members of our faculty, who learned how to teach and model dialogue.

We’ve built this into our first year experience. If you want to live in our dormitories as a first year student — which we require you to do as a first year student — you’re also required to take this course.

John Tomasi: And it’s a course. This is an eight-week course?

Andrew D. Martin: It’s an eight-week course. It’s not credit-bearing. It’s just part of our student experience.

John Tomasi: And so — I’m sorry — so from a student’s perspective, they’re taking a course that lasts 12 weeks or something like that?

Andrew D. Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: And they do this as a sub-course along the way?

Andrew D. Martin: No, this is just an add-on.

John Tomasi: I see.

Andrew D. Martin: Just like, you know, if your dormitory said you have to do 10 hours of community service, or you need to show up at four social events over the course of the semester. This is just part of our expectation. We then offer lots of other experiences to sign up for. And every year we have well over 1,500 students of our 8,000 undergraduates who are raising their hand and say, “I would like to sit down and talk with someone who has a different religion than I do,” or, “I’m really interested in sitting down with someone who has very different political views than I do.” And we work with those students so they can have those dialogues with one another and flex that muscle that then they can take out and use in the rest of their campus life.

John Tomasi: And to say again, this is the fall of their freshman year they take?

Andrew D. Martin: Correct. We start — in fact, the very beginning starts during orientation — and then it’s the very beginning of their first semester.

John Tomasi: And you said a few moments ago that, for a variety of reasons including to do with having a wider range of socioeconomic backgrounds for the undergraduates coming to WashU, did you have a more diverse student body?

Andrew D. Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: Are there other steps you’ve taken in terms of — maybe it just happened organically — but are there steps you’ve taken in terms of your admissions programs to try to look for implicit biases of ideological conformity? Is that something you’re aware of or care about at this point?

Andrew D. Martin: So I’m aware of it and I care about it. It is something that we continue to look at, particularly in the essay questions and so forth that we ask among our students. One of the things that we’ve been doing that I’m really proud of is that we’ve spent a lot of resources, many of which have come from philanthropic contributions, to go out and find talented students wherever they are. We do that in cities all over the country. We also have a program — two different programs, actually — to go out and try to find talented rural students.

We’d rather have those students. I mean, we’ll take students from wherever they come, but we’re gonna have a much greater chance of getting those students from Missouri and Southern Illinois. And so we have a team of individuals who are visiting high schools all across the state of Missouri who might have one or two students who have the horsepower to come to a place like WashU and, certainly given the curricula in their high schools, are not going to have the same level of training as someone who went to a fancy private school, say, here in New York.

John Tomasi: Andrew, can I just — I’d rather tell you a story that you might enjoy. I’ve had this experience now probably six or seven times, where I had a freshman advisee at Brown, some very talented person often from a non-traditional Brown background, who would tell me that they’d been aggressively recruited by WashU and that they were on the fence about which way to go. And the ones who went to WashU, I never met. But I’ve met probably seven people I can remember who sat in my office saying, “Boy, I had this really interesting experience where this particular university really made it clear they wanted me to go there,” and recruited them to come. So it was probably part of that same initiative.

Andrew D. Martin: It’s part of the same.

John Tomasi: That was really striking. And I’ll just say, it’s the only school that I can remember a student saying to me, “Boy, you know, this school really made an effort to get me to go there.” And WashU, though, kept coming up.

Andrew D. Martin: Well, and we really value diversity at WashU. And what that means is we’ve got to go out there and we’ve got to find people wherever they are and make sure that they can understand what are the opportunities for them there. And we need to make sure that we’re prepared to offer to those students what they need to be successful, right? And a student coming from rural Missouri is going to need something very different than a student that’s coming from a public high school in New York.

Jeremy Haefner — Chancellor, University of Denver (Episode 40)

Jeremy Haefner: These principles of free expression, of open inquiry, of thought pluralism, and constructive dialogue and disagreement — those are fundamental things that we believe in at the University of Denver. And I want everyone to know that if you adhere to those principles and our values, of course, then we’ve got your back.

And the ways that we started doing that are organic ideas that have come from the faculty. So the Denver Dialogues, for example, is a wonderful initiative from our Joseph Korbel School for International Studies that really brings in partners like AEI, Hoover Institute, New America, Aspen Institute, and brings in scholars from these think tanks to discuss, in front of our students, faculty, and staff, issues that have some controversy on them. So whether it’s immigration, or congressional reform, or democracy around the world, or climate change, for example. These are hotly contested topics, and to see scholars have discussions that are very balanced — and students walk away with the fact that you can have these discussions and disagree — is really powerful.

John Tomasi: And how often does a Denver Dialogue occur? Is it once a year or twice a year?

Jeremy Haefner: It’s at least once a quarter. So they’re organized by, again, the Korbel School and the Scrivner Institute for Public Policy, which is part of the Korbel School. And they worked really hard to really bring in this balanced kind of conversation for our students, faculty, and staff. They did it at the Aspen Institute one summer when there was a focus on security in particular. Of course, one of our famous alums is Condoleezza Rice, and she is, of course, the director of the Hoover Institute. So she kicked off our inaugural Denver Dialogue with the other leaders of those think tanks. And it was a marvelous gathering of diverse thought.

John Tomasi: When was that? When did it kick off?

Jeremy Haefner: Jeez, that was almost two years ago. So that would have been ‘23. I’m pretty sure of that.

John Tomasi: And on those events, do you find that— So, I ran a center at Brown that had something we called the Janus Forum, or the Janus Lecture Series, which was two speakers in conversation. What we found early on was that sometimes we’d get two speakers who are really combative with each other. A memorable one for me was — the topic was justice, gender, and the American dream — and we had Harvey Mansfield, the well-known conservative from Harvard who’d just written a book called Manliness, pitted up against Catharine MacKinnon, a very famous feminist philosopher. And it was an incredible event, but it was kind of like a combat on stage. And we were worried that the student experience was really sort of passively watching an exchange of ideas, rather than what we actually cared about, which was the students — what happened in their minds, and did they change?

I’m just wondering, have you had that experience with the Denver Dialogues? Is it passive? Do you have any sense that it’s actually active? Is it having the effect on students that you wanted to have, or does it become a spectator sport?

Jeremy Haefner: A great question. One of the things, of course, that we always insist on doing is having a robust Q&A of the speakers, and Korbel School does a really good job at empowering students to ask questions along the way. So I think from our student perspective it has this potential for really engaging students and not being passive around this.

The other idea that we’ve had modest success with is to build little follow-up seminars around the discussions that are student-focused, and faculty lead those discussions in order to help the students think — well, break down the arguments that all the speakers presented, and which ones did you feel carry your thoughts along the way? And did they argue persuasively? So we need to do more of that. But I think that is a great example of it sinking in.

Mary Kate Cary — Founding Director, Think Again, University of Virginia (Episode 41)

John Tomasi: Think Again at UVA — what is that?

Mary Kate Cary: Think Again is dedicated to four pillars: viewpoint diversity; freedom of expression; intellectual humility, because people of all ages can be wrong; and critical thinking, where you don’t just believe everything everybody tells you, you investigate both sides for yourself and decide what you believe.

So we have year-round programming. We call it Free Speech Fridays. Some of them are things like speed debating — and we make the “b” of debating smaller, so it looks like speed dating, because we really want them— We’re going to do that around Valentine’s Day. We want them to debate things and then fall in love and get married. And then we have another one called Low Stakes Hot Takes, where the students sit around a table and say things — not presidential elections, but, “Is Taylor Swift overrated?” Half the room says, “What? How could you possibly say that?”

John Tomasi: So, Low Stakes Hot Takes. What are you trying to do? What’s your— Because I know you’re always working on numerous levels. What are you doing?

Mary Kate Cary: That one’s trying to get them to see that it’s okay to express an opinion that somebody might disagree with, right? And to start with low stakes and then eventually get braver and go to high stakes.

We have another one that does graduate up, called Food for Thought. And Food for Thought starts with softball questions: what’s the best fried chicken in Charlottesville, and why? Right? Medium ball would be, what’s your favorite and least favorite class at UVA — a little uncomfortable to talk about, in case you hurt somebody’s feelings or something. And then high stakes, a hardball, would be: tell us about a time when you changed your mind about something important in your life.

John Tomasi: Nice.

Mary Kate Cary: And that one, we have the room for two hours. I figured they’d come in, grab a piece of pizza and say, “Oh, Professor Cary, I can’t stay, I’ve got a quiz, thanks so much,” and they’d all take the food and sneak out. At the two-hour mark, every table’s still full. I go over to one of them and I say, “So, guys, we’re gonna run out of time in the room here, I’ve got to kind of send you on your way. But tell me what you’re talking about.” And they said, “Oh, we’re doing the hardball.” And I said, “Which hardball did you pick?” And they said, “The time you changed your mind about something important.” And I said, “What was it that you changed your minds on?” And they said, “Oh, going from atheism to a life of faith.”

John Tomasi: Wow.

Mary Kate Cary: And I said, “Really? I would have thought the other direction in college.” And I said, “Are you guys all old friends?” And they said, “No, we just met.”

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Mary Kate Cary: And I said, “You know what? Forget about leaving the room at the two-hour mark. You can have the room till midnight. You’re awesome. Have a good time.” And then probably the most famous is Disagree with a Professor. I shouldn’t say most famous — most popular.

John Tomasi: I can imagine.

Mary Kate Cary: And so, Disagree with a Professor. We get professors to each write three statements of their own creation that they think will be controversial with students. And some of them pick guns and abortion. Some of them pick some topic in their field of study. Some of them do something silly like, you know, peanut M&Ms versus regular M&Ms or something. So then we put them in a plastic sleeve that stands up on the table, so the students enter the room and look around at all the tables at the statements and then say, “Oh, well, I disagree with that statement, I’ll sit here.” And they sit and they start questioning the professor.

John Tomasi: Can I say something about that? Because I had a professor, Martha Nussbaum, when I first went to Brown. She’s a very famous researcher, and a person who’s also famously— no, she’s known for being very focused on her research. And when she was leaving Brown to take a job at Chicago, she took me out to lunch — I was a first-year assistant professor — and she wanted to give me a secret about Brown. And she said the secret was that at Brown you can advise a freshman if you want to. You can voluntarily be a freshman advisor, which no professor particularly wants to do, because you’re supposed to be doing your research so you can get tenure and so on.

But she said to me, “You know, every year, or every other year, you should be a freshman advisor. You should also offer a freshman seminar with your advisees in your class.” And this is, you know, people don’t want to teach freshman seminars because it’s not focused on your research. You can’t show them the book you’re writing and get help like you could with a graduate seminar. And she said to me — Martha said to me — “You should do it because it’ll keep you humane.”

And I bet the thing you’re doing there, by drawing those professors, like luring them into that room — I bet it affects the way they go about being a professor, about the way they see themselves and their role on campus. Because I think part of the role of HxA is to— And we talk about open inquiry as a particular thing that we care most about, but behind open inquiry I think is something more basic, and that’s just: do you care about the students? Do you care about the profession? Do you care about the search for ideas? Do you care about your university? Right? Are you a citizen, or are you just a professor of some discipline that you got your PhD in — important though that is — or are you also aware of your responsibilities to your university and to the next generation?

Mary Kate Cary: It’s the next generation.

John Tomasi: And it’s also the institution itself, right?

Mary Kate Cary: Right.

John Tomasi: So I’m really struck by that you’re forming — whether you’re doing it subconsciously, you probably are — not just the students’ experience, but you’re forming the experience of the professors, too.

Kavita Bala — Provost, Cornell University (Episode 42)

Kavita Bala: So one of the reasons I took on this role: I was excited to think about how should universities reimagine themselves, given this really rapidly changing landscape? And that’s actually another piece — the pace of change is so relentless, we’re not able to get ahead of it. We’re not able to design the laws, the public policies, the social norms even, of the technologies fast enough to stay ahead. And so I was thinking that we need to reimagine what the university teaches, what kind of research we do, how we engage with the world, because of these kinds of changes.

And then additionally, there were these two other disruptors that sort of made me stand up this committee that you just referred to. And the two other disruptors — you already mentioned one of them — is this loss of public trust in higher education, but actually in all public institutions. And that’s the part that we need to really worry about: in governments, in every aspect of public engagement now that society engages in, there’s a loss of public trust. I think tech plays one role in that because of the online polarization, et cetera, but that’s only one part of the puzzle. So how do we— We’ve lost the public trust. It takes decades to build, and we’ve lost it in a few years. How do we bring that back?

And I’ll say public trust is about different pieces. Viewpoint diversity, you know, those opinions, polarization — that’s one piece. One of the things that has been very surprising to me as a scientist is the loss of trust in science.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Kavita Bala: That is one I would not have predicted. Some of these I would have predicted; that one I didn’t see coming. And so we are seeing this backlash where, in this time of, you know, the anti-vax movement is gaining huge momentum, conspiracy theories about all parts of scientific discovery are rife. And so this loss of public trust is the other major disruptor.

And the third one, which really unfolded this year, was this renegotiation of the relationship between the government and higher ed. And so this has been a longstanding relationship — 80 years, or even longer if you go back from the founding of Cornell, for sure, in 1865. So given those three disruptors—

John Tomasi: Cornell, of course, is founded as a land-grant university, and it’s often thought of as the flagship example of a land-grant university because it does so much outreach in agriculture and other areas as well.

Kavita Bala: That’s a great— yes, exactly. Thank you for mentioning that. Right, so we’re a land-grant university — the only land-grant Ivy. We are in every county of New York State, and also across the country and the world actually, because of our land-grant mission of engagement and bringing the mission of the university out to the public.

John Tomasi: Can I just say a word on that, if you don’t mind, just to share something with you? We often talk about a mission of the university being to search for knowledge and to disseminate knowledge, and then people often talk about that as: universities have professors searching for knowledge, and then they disseminate knowledge to the students. But land-grant universities think of dissemination in a much broader way. They think about disseminating knowledge to the community, to people.

I spent an afternoon this summer with a friend in Idaho who spent his life at the UNLV Extension School. He works in hydraulics, and he was talking about how water systems work, and he would spend his whole life taking the knowledge that was built at universities and bringing it to people, farmers and other people. So at Cornell, that idea of dissemination as a land-grant university — dissemination is not just to the students, it’s disseminating into the fabric of society and the fabric of the economy in a really striking way. I just wanna mention that.

Kavita Bala: Thank you. That’s a great point. And I want to actually say another realization that we’ve been having increasingly is that dissemination is bi-directional. Yes, we disseminate out, but we learn from the communities we’re in. We learn what problems they’re facing. That drives the kind of research that we do. If you’re working with farmers in every county and you hear the problems that they’re struggling with, I think that’s an important part. It’s not a one-way, it’s a bi-directional flow and engagement that enriches us in our understanding of the problems facing—

John Tomasi: Oh, that’s good. That’s great. For me, I love that. And part of what I’m thinking is that, you know, good teaching, really good teaching, often involves a professor learning things from the students because they ask a question in a new way that you hadn’t thought of before. So we’re all familiar with that experience, but you’re saying the same thing about the extension.

Kavita Bala: That’s exactly— And it influences, it really seeps through. While we have the colleges, the contract colleges, and some of them, the land-grant mission is really across the whole university on every side, because — exactly — we engage with our stakeholders, which is the whole citizenry of America and beyond, and then we learn about what kinds of things should be important to a university. I think that does change the nature and the kinds of problems you solve, you know, in your research and scholarship and in your education.

Ed Seidel — President, University of Wyoming (Episode 43)

John Tomasi: You have institutional neutrality, I believe. When did you adopt that? Can you share anything about the pathway? And what’s Wyoming about it? What’s cowboy about it, as you put it a minute ago?

Ed Seidel: Well, okay. We were one of the first — at least in the new wave of this — to actually commit institutionally. We watched—

John Tomasi: We were cheering you.

Ed Seidel: Thank you. And it came out of our working group; that was a top recommendation. But it also does fit Wyoming, because Wyoming has been, over years, proud to call itself the equality state. So there was neutrality— You know, Yale only started admitting women in 1968, thereabouts. I was a grad student there, and so, yeah, women were there by then, but it was kind of a newcomer. Wyoming from its very founding was this way. And it’s called the equality state because women were the first to have the vote here. So that’s a kind of a libertarian view, I would say — not imposing on others. And I think the neutrality does fit that.

At the same time, it has created struggles that I hadn’t fully anticipated. So you can naively say, “Oh, we’re neutral as an institution.” And then something happens and you’re in a position: are you going to make a statement about it or not? And what are the actual facts? And does it violate institutional neutrality? So I have a little wiggle room in this, at least the way we’ve implemented it, if somehow a statement is important because it’s important to the mission of the university — which includes, are we building supportive community?

Are there times when I might say things that you might say could violate, in some very pure way, institutional neutrality? So I did make a statement on the October 7th attacks in Israel, and it was a bit controversial, I think, honestly, even for me. And I felt obviously the attacks were horrendous, but are we taking sides somehow? And I debated this with some of my team, and we decided that it was really impacting the cohesion of our university. We had faculty who were in Israel at that time. We had students from Muslim groups and Jewish groups and so on that were very much unsettled by the whole thing.

So I made a statement, and some people said, “Well, that wasn’t neutral,” but I try to be neutral. And guess what? The statement I made didn’t appease neither the sort of the Jewish students nor the Muslim students. And so I took the opportunity and I invited them both, on different evenings, over to my house to have an in-depth discussion. And I think it helped us then prevent some of the really rambunctious and destructive things that happen on many campuses, because they took it in. We have to have not only viewpoint diversity, but constructive dialogue.

And so sometimes — like there was an event that was about to happen on campus — I had a call from the head of Muslim Student Association saying, “We’re going to actively try to make sure that this doesn’t go awry.” And so that’s an example. Another one: we had an incident last October where some pumpkins were found with some swastikas on them for Halloween, and it was a really tough thing. And by bad kind of communication channels, I didn’t find out about it until a few days later. But I did take two days to make sure I understood the facts and then understood exactly what was happening on campus. And of course I made a statement that seemed to many people to be a no-brainer, but it did take some time to think through. That’s what our community needed. It was about community support. And so I think there are certain areas where you have to interpret what neutrality really means.

John Tomasi: Let me just push you for a minute more on that really difficult set of issues regarding the Hamas attack and then Israel’s movement into Gaza. You made a statement, an official statement, and then you also described inviting students to dinners to talk about these things. And overall, the effects were generally positive, you believe, on the campus culture. But do you think the statement helped, or was it the bring-them-to-dinner that made the most difference?

And I ask because we have a president we talked with, Brian Casey, at Colgate. And Brian emphasizes that during that period, when those campuses were under so much internal pressure and external actors getting involved and all that stuff that was going on, what he and his team did was they doubled down on the dinner approach. And they hosted dinners all over. I can’t remember what number, but Brian went to something like 25 dinners in some crazy period of time.

One of the things Brian says that I’ve repeated before the show, but I’m just going to say it again because I find it really insightful: he says that policies matter, and he cares a lot about the policies for free expression — you have to have those as a backbone of the institutional structure — but what he really cares about at the end of the day is what kind of conversations happen in the dorms on a Tuesday night.

Ed Seidel: Totally.

John Tomasi: What’s the experience really like? Do they talk? Or do they just balkanize? I just wonder — was there a statement? Looking back on that whole episode now, would you retract the statement and keep the dinners, or would you say they’re both necessary and needed? What would you say?

Ed Seidel: I’ve debated that with myself. Should I make that statement? Would I do it again? Well, I’ll tell you, it definitely catalyzed activity that we wouldn’t have had without the statement. So I had immediate reaction from people across campus. But I didn’t just ignore it. I took it up. So when Muslim Student Association wanted to meet with me, I was there the next morning. When Hillel wanted to meet with me, the same thing. And that created the opportunity for more dialogue, which I think was helpful. So overall, I think it did work. You could debate whether I was right to make that statement. I still debate it. But okay, here we are.

John Tomasi: A very open-minded scientific approach.

Sian Leah Beilock — President, Dartmouth College (Episode 44)

John Tomasi: We did a big study recently about faculty. We studied all the studies on faculty diversity. We found that most of the studies are not very well constructed. The ones that were least well constructed tended to produce the widest variations, interestingly. But we have a pretty good sense now — the best data shows something like this: that in 1990, the ratio of left- versus right-leaning faculty was about two to one. Currently nationally, it’s about five to one, which is much less than you sometimes read. But in some disciplines, it’s extremely high — 30 to one, 40 to one, even higher perhaps. And there’s some evidence that if you do cohort breakdowns with younger faculty, you find higher imbalances.

One of the striking things about the convocation addresses we studied was that as presidents talked about open inquiry and constructive dialogue and all these different things they were doing, practicing trainings and so on, almost none of them talked about viewpoint diversity. They didn’t want to go near it. And I talk to presidents a lot. And that’s one of the things that when you come to that part of the conversation, it’s always like, “Yeah, well, that’ll work itself out.” And maybe that’s what you’ll say too.

But I’m just wondering how you see— So in ‘90 it’s two to one. Was that a problem? Or is that just like a natural distribution of people making choices based on their values and careers, which is part of what being a Democrat or Republican reflects? Was that worrying when it was two to one? Is it worrying that it’s changed so much now, almost tripled in 30 years? What do you make of the viewpoint diversity situation on campus regarding the faculty, for example?

Sian Leah Beilock: Yeah, I mean, look, I think viewpoint diversity is important, and it’s important to call out, because what I want, again, is students to have a broad range of opinions and ideas, and people who have different experiences on campus. So that involves making sure we are recruiting students who have different and diverse experiences and different ideologies. It also means that I want faculty who can teach from different perspectives and are focused on different issues.

I don’t love these studies either, because I look at faculty — I have faculty on campus, one of my faculty, Russ Muirhead, for example, who leads our political economy project. And he is in the Democratic state house, I believe. He’s a representative and he clearly has a political party. And he is one of the best people I know in terms of teaching a range of views across the spectrum. And so I worry when we’re using who gave to a Democratic or Republican election as a proxy for whether we are getting students to reach in their intellectual pursuits across a discipline. I worry that that’s the wrong measurement, that we actually have to look at what people are teaching.

Now, I understand the argument that, well, maybe someone who leans more conservative might be more likely in sociology to study the sociology of religion or marriage than someone who leans more liberal. And if it’s the case that we only have people studying the sociology of gender in our departments and no one looking at other areas, I think that’s where the problem lies. And this is where I think deans and provosts and presidents have a responsibility to make sure that the kind of ideas that students are being exposed to in the classroom, and that are being researched on campus, represent the breadth of fields. And I think if we can figure out how to look at that, that is a much better way to ask the question about whether we have enough of this diversity on campus, rather than just relying on whether someone gave $10 to a particular party.

John Tomasi: Right. But I wonder, on that line of yours — “universities must double down on supporting faculty who provide structured opportunities.” So do you give prizes to professors who teach these ways? Have you thought about doing that? What’s doubling down mean?

Sian Leah Beilock: Yeah, I mean, again, I think a majority of our faculty really are focused on giving broad ranges of views to their students, and we can uplift them. So as an example, our Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies faculty who have done this work — we actually have supported their ability to have more co-taught classes, bringing in more visiting faculty. I think visiting faculty are amazing, and were part of that Jewish and Middle Eastern dialogue. We had an Egyptian diplomat in Middle Eastern Studies and an Israeli writer in Jewish Studies.

And so, doubling down on those opportunities. Every year in Dartmouth Dialogues we have a special topic. We had Middle Eastern Studies our first year; we have immigration. And it’s really providing opportunities for faculty who want to push boundaries of the kinds of things that they’re hearing and studying on campus, to make that even more so.

And it’s also making sure that we’re helping — I help to fundraise for programs that bring in different views on campus. Our Rockefeller Center for Public Policy is a great one. We’re doing a whole focus on the 250th anniversary of the country, and the kinds of speakers that have come through campus and visited with our students, from Vice President Pence last year to — I think Ezra Klein is gonna be here in a week or so. So I want to support those kinds of things.

And what I worry about is how easy it is to push away from them, because it’s a little bit hard. It costs a lot to bring in speakers, with security fees and everything going on. It would be much easier to say, “No, we’re just not going to do it.” And again, it goes back to what I prioritize as most important and where I think the purpose of an institution is. I do believe that Dartmouth can be the model of what amazing, centered, elite higher education looks like in this country. And I’m going to do everything I can to help push that forward.

Smriti Mehta — Researcher, University of California, Berkeley (Episode 45)

John Tomasi: There’s a famous paper in 2015 by Duarte, Crawford, and others that talked about the rise of, let’s say, political ideology conformity within the behavioral sciences, and social psychology in particular. And in that paper, they talked about how that imbalance had skyrocketed from being roughly balanced in the mid 20th century, to something like 14 to 1 left-right by 2012, to being as high as over 300 to 1 in some surveys.

And they argued in that paper — I’m not sure you know that — this homogeneity undermines science through scientific mechanisms, because those mechanisms only work if you have people who are raising new questions that are challenging to existing paradigms, that encourage researchers to consider the basic assumptions behind the scientific models they set up and the experiments that they run. If those assumptions aren’t being excavated or made clear, then we lose sight of them and bias starts to creep its way in.

And I’d love to hear a bit from you about how you see that. So you’ve spoken on your podcast about how it’s possible to have a healthy climate for open inquiry on campus but still face a chilly climate within your discipline. So campuses and departments, they swim within a broader sea of disciplines. Can you say a little bit about that? I mean, how do you see that problem? How does that change in the ratio of left-right leaning professors across the discipline of social psychology affect the prospects for having open conversations on a campus, a campus like Berkeley, for example?

Smriti Mehta: Well, I should mention my co-host is Dutch. He’s at a Dutch university. So the landscape is a little bit different there. And I think they’re just more blunt. They just say whatever they want to each other. So they don’t have the same problem that we do of politeness on campuses in the US.

John Tomasi: Sorry, the problem being too much politeness?

Smriti Mehta: Too much politeness. And I think reluctance to criticize ideas as openly and as directly as I think they can. But he’s also a social psychologist, and I think he’s seen this at least in our discipline a little bit.

But in some ways it affects both the people who are invited to join the discipline, which we see from the numbers from this paper you mentioned. I think there are certainly people in the general population, but even academics, who will openly say, “I would never hire a graduate student who was right-leaning.” So there’s a bias against people who hold certain ideologies. And that in turn affects the kind of questions that you ask, especially related to maybe more sensitive topics.

Political psychology, I think, is affected by it. There are certain issues, like inequality, where you can almost hear in the way the questions are framed in some of those areas that there is a lean towards what is the correct answer, or what is the correct way to think about an issue. Or, for example, gender bias. There will be a question asked something like, you know, should a woman pursue a career in a predominantly male discipline like, you know, real estate — is that a predominantly male discipline? — or engineering, something like that. And if a person says yes, then they’re automatically coded as being biased against women.

John Tomasi: Right.

Smriti Mehta: So, not considering the fact that somebody with a different viewpoint, a different background, may answer that question with a yes, but their reasoning could be something that’s not related to anything to do with thinking that women are less than, or that they cannot do well in this area. And you see multiple examples of this. I don’t want to use “implicit bias,” but the framing of the questions, the kind of questions that are asked, is affected by people’s personal beliefs, political beliefs often.

You also see it in cases of disciplines that are considered inappropriate, or when, if you’re pursuing a certain research question, people impute certain motives to it. So intelligence is a great example. It’s related to work that I did during my graduate studies; I was really interested in how people think about intelligence. And when you go into the literature on intelligence and you talk to people about this work, people will often say, “Yeah, that person is just trying to push a certain agenda. They’re just trying to say that it’s all genetics, or it’s all this.” Like, they must have some ulterior motives for even asking questions about, you know, are there group differences in intelligence.

So, touching that area — I mean, it’s just radioactive, right? So if you were somebody who was trying to do research with an honest curiosity about it, it’s like they take it one step further: that you must be doing this research to find certain results that will eventually harm somebody.

Cass Sunstein — Legal scholar, Harvard University (Episode 46)

Cass Sunstein: So 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 if, 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.

John Tomasi: Right.

Cass Sunstein: So the proportional representation stuff, I think 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 embedding, you know, capitalist terribleness — that would be, I think, very bad for a number of reasons. Now, as an English major, I hope it’s not overstepping.

John Tomasi: I didn’t know you were an English major.

Cass Sunstein: I wouldn’t say that— That isn’t if you teach Shakespeare or Milton. But 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. 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 a 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.

John Tomasi: Nice. So I hear us putting another marker down. There’s a question about where does viewpoint diversity matter and where might it not matter? Or we might say, where does it matter most directly or most proximately, and where might it not matter? And with respect to what?

Cass Sunstein: So, physics — there are forms of viewpoint diversity that are crucial, but they probably aren’t about whether the War Powers Resolution is constitutional.

Danielle Allen — James Bryant Conant University Professor, Harvard University (Episode 47)

Danielle Allen: I think there is a difference in the nature of the disagreements, and then also in the terms of the agreement we have for how we then debate those disagreements, between universities and the political sphere. And so I’ll explain that.

Let me though first say one further thing about the concept of covenant, which is, yes, sacramental. And I think in that regard, perhaps the first distinction that President Simmons was trying to direct us toward was between a religious community and the university. So a covenant in a religious community surely is an agreement on doctrine, right? You know, there’s the credo that I believe, and here’s the sort of list of things that I believe. So that is, I think, a powerful distinction. And so I would put religious communities in one place, and then universities and liberal democracies in another place, in this regard.

But then in terms of, again, what are the parameters, the institutional norms, for how that debate is handled — here, honestly, I would invoke Plato for understanding the difference between universities and the political sphere. The political sphere is often a sphere of judgment in conditions of uncertainty, when action must be taken. It’s a sphere where prudence is the kind of reigning virtue, and so the best you can do is make fallibilistic judgments. And in a democracy, what you’ve also done is decided that, you know, majority will win. So you’re not actually insisting that you’re looking for truth; you’re looking for a sort of stable decision that will carry popular support with it, in order to maintain legitimacy of institutions over time.

Now, that would be anathema to the decision-making basis inside a university. And that is probably partly where our problems come in: that in universities, we too often wanna kind of port that sort of majoritarian orientation of the political sphere into decision-making inside a university. Decision-making needs to be guided by norms of truth-seeking, right? Quality of argument, quality of reasoning, quality of evidence, and so forth. So that’s a sterner standard than the one the political sphere uses.

John Tomasi: And yet within the university, as you search for truth within some discipline, I gather we hope there would be some convergence of people’s thinking towards, at least, broad parameters in some area. Otherwise we’d be all over the place doing all different kinds of things.

So, I mean, some people have talked about this strange feature of academic freedom, that it has a conservative element and a sort of funky radical element. The conservative element is, we want our graduate students to learn all the arguments that there are, so they can go out to the end of the frontier — they know all we know; we don’t know everything they need to know. So then, at that point of sort of our conservative memorization and so on, we value the idiosyncratic twist, the next move, the great idea that adds. So there’s a strange tension there, isn’t there?

Danielle Allen: There is. And I mean, there’s also a tension in the notion that we talk about scientific consensus and that matters to us, right? Like, what is the scientific consensus about something? And we use that phrase, I think, because we acknowledge that it is when people come to agree with an argument that it gets to be sort of anchored as one of those building blocks that we then want to pass on to our graduate students. And so there is a funny blend in that phrase “scientific consensus,” of the kind of epistemic principles of truth-seeking individuals, and also a certain kind of community-oriented, kind of majoritarian element to it.

So I think that’s exactly what we have so much difficulty navigating in academic contexts, because then of course when heterodox views emerge that are counter to the scientific consensus, we sort of struggle to precisely know: when do we open up the consensus, when do we try to maintain it, and so forth.

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

Danielle Allen: Exactly.

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

Danielle Allen: And that’s the— it’s the requirement to listen. I think that’s so important and distinctive in the context of the university. So, you know, again coming back to the ancients, because they thought about this intensely, right? I mean, Plato and Socrates were trying to carve out a different kind of space for discourse from the political sphere. And one of the ways they captured the difference was, Socrates said in the Theaetetus, for example, don’t ever make me speak to the water clock. The water clock was the jug that ran out water to tell the time in the courtroom. So his point was, politicians are always obliged to speak to a clock: a decision must be made.

And the defining feature of true academic discourse is that it is not bound by time. If somebody brings an argument in, you know, meeting methodological standards, then we have an obligation to listen. And even time itself should not limit our patience with hearing those other arguments.

John Tomasi: Thank you for tuning in to today’s episode. Heterodox Out Loud is a nonprofit production of Heterodox Academy. We rely solely on support of listeners like you. If you enjoyed today’s episode, please follow our podcast, leave a rating or a review, and share it with your friends and network. Your support helps us reach more individuals who value diverse perspectives in higher education. If you are in higher education, visit heterodoxacademy.org and join the thousands of professors and students from all around the world who are working to support open inquiry. Until next time, I’m John Tomasi, reminding you that great minds don’t always think alike.

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

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

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

A transcript of the discussion is below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Len Gutkin: I did, yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McBrayer: Good, thanks. Len?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bromwich: It should mean just the opposite.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bromwich: Can you hear me now?

McBrayer: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

McBrayer: Yeah, I’ve heard.

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

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

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

Rubin: Fair enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gutkin: Can I add one thing?

McBrayer: Please.

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

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

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

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

McBrayer: Great, thank you. Ashley?

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

McBrayer: Great. Len?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Todd Wolfson: Please, go ahead.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Tomasi: A hundred years before.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danielle Allen: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danielle Allen: Right, exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danielle Allen: Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danielle Allen: Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danielle Allen: Yeah.

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

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

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

Danielle Allen: Yep.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Tomasi: You give them an F at Harvard?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Danielle Allen: Likewise. Thank you so much.

John Tomasi: Thank you so much.

Danielle Allen: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomasi: Interesting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomasi: I didn’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomasi: Yeah, dogma.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomasi: Right.

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

Tomasi: That’s nice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tomasi: Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

Sunstein: Thanks, everybody.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for your time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that’s part one, progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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