Lines in the Sand
How long ago now seems spring 2024, when I flew to Chicago to attend my very first Heterodox Academy (HxA) conference and had a rollicking good time at the Marriott on the Magnificent Mile. The ballroom plenaries and breakout sessions alike were positively packed with various and sundry personages and characters, the food and drink were plentiful, and the vibe was for the most part infectious exuberance that we the renegade professoriate and allied free speech rebels were finally beating back cancel culture after a decade of struggle. Next time, the closing ceremony announced with no small fanfare, we’d reconvene in New York following our even more promising year ahead.
But as it happened, this year’s HxA conference, held late last month at a Brooklyn Marriott, was a more subdued and almost somber affair. The conversations were as meaty as ever, but the heterodox coalition for academic reform has frayed to the point of fracture. From the initial surge of “wokeness” circa 2014 up through Donald Trump’s second inauguration in January, the various schools of thought comprising not just Heterodox Academy the organization but the broader array of academic reformers fighting for freer discourse had long been marching more or less in the same direction. The problem, almost all could agree, was illiberal ideologies, bureaucracies, and administrators—and near-term progress would consist of persuading colleges and universities to embrace the better angels of their natures by affirming institutional neutrality as laid out back in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report.
And then came the wrecking ball: within weeks of taking office, President Trump declared war on American higher education as we know it, particularly singling out symbolically resonant elite schools like Columbia and Harvard. Abruptly, the diverse coalition for academic reform found itself divided, with reformers tending to fall into three broad categories. The first might be considered hawks, as perhaps best exemplified by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo, who believe that much of higher education as presently constituted is close to unsalvageable and that declarations of institutional neutrality are nowhere near enough. In contrast might be termed the doves, as perhaps best exemplified by suddenly very conciliatory university presidents, who are appalled by the Trump Administration’s siege warfare and think embracing the Kalven Report and trimming a few of their institutions’ most inflammatory excesses should be more than sufficient. And then, somewhere in between, are those of us in the mushy middle, who treasure the best of academia and may feel the Trump approach could use more scalpel and less battleaxe, but have also concluded that so much of the higher education sector has so betrayed the public trust in recent years that severe consequences are warranted.
My 11 years covering Columbia left me shaken and forlorn. It wasn’t that I didn’t meet a ton of great people, brilliant scholars of substance and integrity, but that there were just so many bad actors laundering corruption and bigotry into supposed scholarship and expertise. Having written official histories of three different schools, I appreciate as much as anyone Columbia’s distinguished tradition, but also think it’s evident that the university and many of its peers are no longer capable of meaningful reform without help from the outside. While I lament the present assault on, say, life-saving biomedical engineering research, I’ve also seen vast sums of money squandered subsidizing tendentious public health vaporware.
So I tend to think of the White House’s war on the higher education establishment primarily in terms of game theory. Donald Trump is basically the big bad wolf, come to huff and puff and blow the house down. Were that long-overdue reckoning to somehow be miraculously averted, what would the takeaway be for this failed generation of academic leaders? Gloating vindication, most likely, along with complacent certitude that they’d done nothing wrong and yet more contempt for their proven-ineffectual critics. No, grievous abuses must draw stinging rebuke to help ensure they don’t happen again.
But how? There are no easy answers, and the HxA conference offered a nuanced exploration of higher ed in crisis as of summer 2025. Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock had a fiery interchange with Wesleyan President Michael Roth on balancing academic independence with cooperation with government dictates, in one memorable session, while in another Emory Professor emeritus Mark Bauerlein clashed with UC Riverside’s Steven Brint on the scale to which the Trump administration’s actions might undermine U.S. scientific research over the long haul. And, just a scant few weeks before the University of Tulsa abruptly ousted her from its Honors College in what became national news, now-former Dean Jennifer Frey forcefully argued for rigorous traditional classical education emphasizing personal as much as professional development.
In a keynote inspired in part by a provocative post from Substack stalwart John Carter, HxA president John Tomasi formerly of Brown warned that colleges and universities could readily find themselves in a situation like English monasteries in the 16th century, being shaken down and eventually dissolved by Henry VIII. To head off that grim scenario, Tomasi suggested that institutions adopt “Open Inquiry U: Heterodox Academy’s Four-Point Agenda for Reforming Colleges and Universities” advancing such radical principles as committing to open inquiry, unleashing the free exchange of ideas, insisting on viewpoint diversity, and investing in constructive disagreement.
As I wondered last year with regard to similar recommendations, how is it that these notions somehow became ‘heterodox’? Isn’t that more or less the code of conduct we’re supposed to have internalized in elementary school? That such advice has to be formally codified and promoted in this day and age is as profound an indictment of the state of academia as any. Hopefully it will have taken somewhat more root by the time the next HxA conference convenes.
Next: To Forgive (But Not Forget) Is Divine
"Were that long-overdue reckoning to somehow be miraculously averted, what would the takeaway be for this failed generation of academic leaders? Gloating vindication, most likely, along with complacent certitude that they’d done nothing wrong and yet more contempt for their proven-ineffectual critics".
I'll take door #1, Monty.
Standards of scholarship are abysmally low in these places, have been for nearly fifty years, though there are exceptions. Hacks rule. Why? Because a century ago, literate individuals asserted proclaimed there is no such thing as truth. Everything in the colleges now is falsehood and made-up narrative. Pseudo-intellectuals predominate. Very few in the academy are truly literate. And they get paid for spreading their nonsense to children, whom they infect with their poison. Dry up the money and put them out on the street to get a real job!