How colleges can build a diverse thinking community

‘Be prepared to defend your position’ Harvard President Alan Garber said in his convocation address to the Harvard Class of 2028 on September 2. “Be willing to express views that differ from your own. Above all, be prepared to change your mind.”

These are all welcome changes and undoubtedly meant in good faith. But of course they are also reactive. For a university to rediscover the principles of intellectual and academic freedom only among the shattered glass of its windows and the erased obscenities on its walls is to undo a long-standing political monoculture and foster a truly intellectually pluralistic community. only just getting started.

A deeper and more conscious commitment is needed to ensure that higher education institutions create the structures and cultures that will encourage and sustain productive disagreement in the pursuit of their highest purpose: the advancement, transmission and preservation of knowledge.

Larry Jameson, Penn’s interim president — whose predecessor was fired after he hesitated before Congress about anti-Semitism on its campus — noted that “by silencing Penn’s institutional voice, we hope to amplify the expertise and voices within.”

I would argue that the role of the Institute is not simply to amplify, but to ensure that the ‘voices within’ are polyphonic and that they are all committed to the fundamental conditions that underpin the search for truth, open inquiry and promote civil discourse.

This fall, the University of Austin enrolled its freshman class. These courageous students are the first to enter an institution expressly designed to cultivate and sustain a culture of intellectual pluralism, a particularly difficult, but undoubtedly essential task in this age of polarization and zero-sum politics.

The University of Austin was born in the crucible of debates over academic freedom—and faced no shortage of criticism for its mission to build an institution dedicated to destroying the deadly intellectual binary that has defined our culture, including our universities, seems to keep under its spell. Our university, which we have been working on for three years, may be able to offer older institutions some lessons in how to build a truly diverse community of thought.

Encouraging tolerance of different points of view and restricting institutional views are useful measures, but if a commitment to intellectual freedom and the measures that preserve it are not enshrined in the rules and principles governing the institution, the shadows of censorship and ideological conformity ever loom. again.

At the University of Austin, we have formalized our commitment to the principles of open inquiry and civil discourse. Each year, our faculty and staff gather with public intellectuals and outside scholars for an annual First Principles Summit, where we reflect on how we hold fast to our foundational ideals and what areas we can improve. This self-assessment holds us all accountable to each other and to external stakeholders.

Our student experience is based on dialogue and the unfettered exchange of ideas. We insist that all opinions should be heard, but also that all opinions should be supported by evidence. We adhere to the Chatham House Rulewhich means that ideas expressed in class cannot be shared outside the classroom with attribution without the speaker’s permission, to reduce fear of malicious exposure on social media and promote an atmosphere of trust around the seminar table.

Our student-run debating society, the Austin Union, based at the Oxford Union, has already become a forum for grappling with some of society’s toughest questions. And we hope to expand the model beyond our campus by developing programming through our Mill Institute that models civil discourse practices in the K-12 classrooms, where we have already reached more than 15,000 students in 500 classrooms in 41 states and 11 countries.

Any institution, no matter how mission-driven or united in its purpose, is bound to encounter disputes. However, the mark of a healthy institution lies in the procedures it has to deal with such moments. The University of Austin constitution includes a judicial review system that provides anyone in our community who feels their academic freedom or research interest has been violated the opportunity to refer that case to an external, fully independent body. This avoids the traditional pitfalls of star chambers and oblique processes. The decision of this panel will be binding, just like that of a Supreme Court.

The University of Austin isn’t opening its doors this year with the intention of shutting out the tumult of the outside world. But with our commitment to open research, strengthened by an institutional structure purpose-built for its preservation, we hope to show American higher education a better way to navigate the tumult of this moment and become better prepared to meet the to serve the core purpose of higher education – the eternal pursuit of truth.

Pano Kanelos is the founder and president of the University of Austin.