Across Season 3 of Heterodox Out Loud, we spoke with university presidents, scholars, and public intellectuals about one central question: How can higher education rebuild a culture of open inquiry, constructive disagreement, and public trust? This special highlights episode brings together some of the most insightful moments from the season — from dialogue programs and viewpoint diversity to institutional neutrality, academic freedom, civic education, and the changing role of universities in a democratic society.
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.
