Civics lessons, earning potential, and government control–oh my!

What is the purpose of the university?

Well, there’s one topic around which we’ve definitely got viewpoint diversity: the purpose of the university. 

If you ask the folks running the Wall Street Journal’s recently-released rankings, what really matters is which institution’s bachelors’ degrees will make you rich.

But on our newest pod, Carleton College historian Amna Khalid argues that “the mission of higher education” is “critical inquiry and training citizens.” It’s an argument Khalid also made this past spring in the Chronicle of Higher Ed with Jeffrey Aaron Snyder.

In the lively pod convo, Khalid describes the undergraduate university as “a place to practice citizenship,” including protest, while HxA President John Tomasi frames the university primarily as a truth-seeking and knowledge-generating project. 

The idea that universities and colleges should be doing explicit civics training has certainly become popular, as some hope to see citizenship-focused interventions in higher ed as a way to reduce political polarization. This isn’t just a seasonal concept tied to the presidential election; back in 2021, HxA Director of Communications Nicole Barbaro documented the popularity of the idea that college is for farming civic life. But it certainly has become popular lately. Witness the College Presidents for Civic Preparedness, a group whose name takes me back to the barrels of vitamin-laden candy in my Cold War elementary school’s bomb shelter.

Of course, not all universities and colleges are created equal; missions may necessarily vary. In just a week, on Sept. 19, we’ve got Wellesley’s Kathryn Lynch, Mount Holyoke’s Cass Sever, and Barnard’s Scott Kaufman booked for a public conversation about women’s colleges. The trio will be tackling the question of how open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement (HxA’s trinity) can advance women’s colleges’ missions. If you think this isn’t an interesting topic, you might not have heard of gender. Sign up here to see where this informed convo goes.

As you might expect, as we do our work, the HxA staff often come back to the question of the primary purposes of colleges and universities. In a recent exchange on Slack about the “citizen-training” notion of higher ed’s mission, Executive Director Michael Regnier observed, “Political philosophy, the role of the state, the role (if any) of politics in human flourishing—these are contested questions, and just using the word ‘democracy’ doesn’t answer them. Part of civics ed is understanding different views of civics, not simply providing para-academic ‘training.’”

HxA Director of Member & Campus Engagement Martha McCaughey, who has been observing the substantial bloom of civil-discourse campus initiatives, noted that the Heterodox Conversations program looks to promote constructive disagreement as part of the shared pursuit of knowledge.

Unlike the many civil discourse programs that facilitate talk across political divides, Martha said, “Heterodox Conversations bring two scholars together who make their case with evidence and model intellectual humility as they disagree constructively on a topic they have both studied carefully. Here’s where our model provides epistemic fuel to the dialogues among people with competing viewpoints, without which such dialogues too often devolve into, at best, a pleasurable exchange of uninformed opinions or, at worst, indoctrination and cultural warfare.”

Speaking of cultural warfare, in an ongoing duel about the purpose of the university, Christopher Rufo recently informed Jordan Peterson that public universities “belong to and should reflect the values of the public. In Florida, voters elect their representatives, who, in turn, charter, fund, and govern the public universities. The takeover of New College [by Rufo and others] was, in this manner, an expression of the democratic will, moving the public university in line with the wishes of the public.”

In case you’re not familiar, Rufo is tired of the left controlling the course catalog and wants to “recapture territory” for conservatives in universities following a period in which the political identification of the professoriate has been increasingly skewed left. (By the way, our internal surveys show HxA’s members are politically quite diverse.) Governmental intervention—including as it is imagined and attempted in places like Florida—is undoubtedly going to be a topic of discussion at HxA’s June 2025 conference, the theme of which is “Truth, Power, and Responsibility.”

Broaching the topic of the political skew in higher ed, the Chronicle of Higher Ed just asked a number of scholars to weigh in the question of whether it matters that conservatives are rare in academe. The very interesting responses included HxA members Jon A. Shields, Gregory Conti, and also Mark Lilla (who will be doing an Heterodox Conversation at University of Toronto this fall on the subject, “How has postmodernism impacted truth and trust in higher ed?”) as well as Elizabeth Corey (who moderated a “Faith and Truth Seeking” HxA event in 2021). 

In that Chronicle exchange, HxA’s Musa al-Gharbi pointedly challenged the idea that politically “progressive” campuses function as lifeboats to those in intellectual need, writing that, “inculcating an environment that is hostile to conventional norms and more ‘traditional’ values and worldviews, although typically carried out in the name of diversity and inclusion, will often have the perverse effect of excluding and alienating those who are already underrepresented and marginalized in elite spaces.”

Speaking of the underrepresented, following the recent Supreme Court decision on affirmative action, reports are showing a decline in enrollment of black students at Amherst College, Tufts University, the University of Virginia, MIT, and the University of North Carolina, with increases among Asian American students at a number of schools. These shifts may have long-term effects on what viewpoint diversity looks like in higher ed research and teaching.

As you may know, my column last week centered on university presidents all over the country starting off the school year by declaring their intention to maintain political neutrality in institutional statements. Since then, institutional neutrality has moved forward at more than a dozen institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, University of Alabama Birmingham, Washington State University, and Simon Fraser University.

Penn’s move follows HxA’s new policy team sending a letter to that institution’s administration “urging them to protect academic freedom by adopting a policy of institutional statement neutrality.” (Read more here.)

It’s worth noting that a generally-accepted exception to statement-neutrality is when a political issue is directly related to a university’s mission—so, what the mission of the university is understood to mean will matter in statement-neutrality practices.

In response to last week’s column about what presidents are saying in their back-to-school messaging, one full prof wrote in to wonder, “Will all these university leaders stick by their ‘free inquiry’ statements?” She added, “Only time will tell!” 

Well, time and HxA.

Before I sign off for a week-long vacation, one programming note: The application window is now open for research post-docs and faculty fellows at HxA’s Mike & Sophia Segal Center for Academic Pluralism, which “hosts researchers to explore and disseminate research insights concerning the philosophy, law, history and science (broadly construed) of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in higher institutions of research and education.” These are great opportunities to study and effect positive change, so please do pass them on.