What Will It Take to Restore Universities to Their Core Purpose?

Chancellor of Vanderbilt University Daniel Diermeier’s Keynote Address to HxA’s 2026 West Coast Regional Conference

What is the true purpose of a university, and what happens when that purpose gets muddled? Those questions sat at the heart of Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier’s keynote at the Heterodox Academy 2026 West Coast Regional Conference, held recently at UC Berkeley. Organizing his remarks around three themes — progress, principles, and politics — Diermeier argues that despite real gains on free speech and institutional neutrality, the harder battle ahead concerns the erosion of scholarly standards inside the academy itself. His full speech is transcribed below; the video also features an introduction by UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons and a Q&A with Chancellor Diermeier and conference attendees.

---

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So that’s part one, progress.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---