Yes, we can still criticize the academy in the Trump era.
Two things can be true at once.
A defining feature of Heterodox Academy’s annual conference is that it really delivers on viewpoint diversity — especially in the plenary panels. Whereas academic conferences often default to polite agreement and incremental elaboration, our plenary sessions lean into spirited disagreement, to the great interest of our members. It’s not just refreshing — it’s necessary for the health of the academy.
The 2025 HxA Conference was no exception. We witnessed spirited debate between Dartmouth’s President Sian Beilock and Wesleyan’s President Michael Roth over what actions are most urgent in the current political moment. Mark Bauerlein, Trustee of New College of Florida, and Steven Brint, professor of public policy at UC Riverside, disagreed on the role of government in shaping higher education. Jerry Coyne of University of Chicago, John McWhorter of Columbia, Louis Menand of Harvard, and Jennifer Frey of University of Tulsa, offered conflicting views on the nature of truth as the core mission of the university. These exchanges were not signs of dysfunction or misplaced focus, but evidence of a thriving intellectual culture.
At the heart of many of these disagreements was a fundamental tension: Should we be focusing on internal problems within the academy while facing an unprecedented political assault from the federal government?
In the view of longtime HxA member Michael Roth, worrying about culture on campus is “like talking about needing a better milkshake when the house is on fire.” There are bigger fish to fry. With a second Trump administration cancelling research funding and ideologically restricting scholarship, university presidents must rise to the challenge. It is their responsibility to protect their institutions against existential threats from the outside.
But universities are not just run by presidents. They are living ecosystems of sorts, composed of faculty, staff, and students, each navigating their own challenges. And for many of our members — especially individual faculty — the "big fish" are not in Washington, but in their own departments, disciplines, and classrooms.
The idea that external and internal threats are mutually exclusive is a false binary, as Dartmouth’s Beilock said in her response to Roth, and threats to our universities are not zero-sum. Multiple stakeholders, with different spheres of influence, can and must act concurrently. There is a role for all of us in reforming our colleges and universities to be the places we all believe they can be.
For nearly a decade, HxA has been a voice chiefly for internal reform — critically examining the consequences of ideological homogeneity in higher education, and advocating for institutional cultures where open inquiry and viewpoint diversity thrive. Because the academy’s faculty leans predominantly left, our critiques have often been directed inward — from the left, toward the left.
As Jon Haidt noted in the founding of HxA, “our goal is to attain enough diversity — and enough room for diverse viewpoints to be aired without fear of consequences — that orthodoxies get disrupted and the normal processes of debate and disconfirmation can work their magic.”
HxA’s original mission remains vital. And the 2025 conference reflected this enduring commitment. Across sessions, we saw how sociopolitical bias can impact patient care in medical professions; how new research methods can free science from unjustifiably biased conclusions; what methods are tried and true to promote open discussion in the classroom; what reforms can open up ideological constraints in faculty hiring. These sessions put on by nearly 100 of our members modeled the very virtues HxA has championed from the beginning.
This work has never been more urgent. Public confidence in higher education has eroded dramatically over the past decade — falling from 57% in 2015 to 32% in the latest poll. Many argue that this decline is due in part to ideological imbalance from within the academy itself and the resulting politicization of academic research.
That erosion of trust has not gone unnoticed. In fact, it has arguably fueled the political backlash we now see from the right. As Bauerlein of New College remarked during his plenary session, “if the university had not sunk so low in public esteem, this would not have been politically possible… the estrangement of ‘town and gown’ is what licensed this process to take place.” Many now see the academy as needing a top-down correction.
Many others in the academy however, perhaps the majority, view the government intervention as an existential threat to our universities. And leaders like Michael Roth, Harvard's interim president Alan Garber, and others are right to focus their energy on defending institutions from these attacks. They are, quite literally, on the front lines of a national political struggle. For them, “worries” about the sociology department, for example, may seem trivial by comparison.
But for most of our members, their departments are exactly where their work for reform occurs. Their push for open inquiry and viewpoint diversity is not happening in the state legislatures or congressional hearings — it’s happening in faculty meetings, on hiring committees, during their classroom discussions, at disciplinary conferences, and in academic journals. That’s where they have the power to bring about sustainable change. And that’s where HxA members are making a tangible difference, year after year.
Over the last decade, our members have modeled the scholarly virtues we promote. They’ve hosted campus events, led campus workshops, engaged the public, improved pedagogy, created new ways to conduct research, and organized reform efforts on their campuses. These actions matter. They have expanded the bounds of what can be said, heard, and considered on campus. They have launched new initiatives and published impactful research. They are the steady force pushing institutions closer to their highest ideals.
If we want our universities to be seen once again as institutions committed to knowledge-seeking, not ideological gatekeeping, we must embrace both forms of action: internal reform and external defense. This is not a zero-sum game.
While university leaders wage the political battle in Washington, faculty and staff must continue the persistent and sustainable work of cultural change on campus from their positions as academic insiders, campus leaders, and principled allies in HxA’s mission. The shape of the work depends on where you sit.
“Two things can be true at once,” as Beilock noted.