Can faculty lead the reform of higher education from the inside — and if so, who checks whom?
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.
