I’m proffering you a must-watch video, at least if you’re interested in the rise and fall of American academia.
Vanderbilt University, with its emphasis on free speech, academic freedom, and institutional neutrality, is rapidly becoming the University of Chicago of the South—or should I say that The University of Chicago is the Vanderbilt of the North? For Vanderbilt has been transformed since hiring the University of Chicago’s previous Provost, Daniel Diermeier, as its Chancellor (i.e., President). Diermeier is implementing the Chicago Principles in a big way at Vanderbilt. In fact, he’s doing better than Chicago. For example, when pro-Palestinian protestors illegally occupied a university building in Vanderbilt in 2024, the protestors were removed after 22 hours, with some students arrested and others suspended.
In contrast, when this happened four times at Chicago (i.e., violations of University rules during anti-Israel demonstrations), nothing happened to the students. Some of them, and lik-minded faculty, were arrested after a sit-in in our Admissions Office, but all charges were dropped. Bachelor’s degrees with temporarily withheld here from a few later protestors, but then the degrees were granted soon thereafter. At Chicago, violations of university rules during protests—invariably pro-Palestinian protests—are met with no punishment, which of course simply encourages further rules violations. When inquiring about this laxity, I was told that it would be the worst possible optics if the University police were seen to “lay hands on protestors.”
So here’s a one-hour talk by Chancellor Diermeier at the Heterodox Academy meeting at UC Berkeley (he’s introduced by the UCB Chancellor). The Youtube notes are below.
Centered on the theme “The Value of Viewpoint Diversity: Why It Matters and How to Practice It Well”, this conference offers actionable insights, fosters rich intellectual exchange, and brings together individuals from across the region who are invested in the future of higher education.
Notice that Diermeier speaks without notes, yet the speech is well constructed and logical. Kudos to him. At the beginning he outlines three areas of inquiry, which I’ve put in bold. I’ve also added comments.
Progress
Diermeier argues that there has been progress in free expression of universities: there is now less shouting down of speakers—something he attributes largely to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). To see if he’s right, you can check FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database. So far, there have been 98 deplatformings or attempted deplatformings in 2026, and the year isn’t half over. I’m not sure that this isn’t an increase rather than a decrease over previous years. You can count them if you wish.
Diermeier is also glad that institutional neutrality is spreading rapidly: more than 140 schools, he says, have adopted some kind of position of being institutionally neutral—that is, taking no official position on political, moral, or ideological issues unless they have a direct influence on the stated mission of a university. I was dubious of this figure, but he’s right. Here’s a chart from an article in Free the Inquiry showing the remarkable rise in U.S. and Canadian universities adopting institutional neutrality. Look at the big jump starting in 2024!
And there’s also been some improvements in the UK as reported by Times Higher Education: click to read (h/t Jez):
Finally, Diermeier states that the intrusive and ideologically extreme versions of DEI are becoming less powerful in universities. Here he’s right, too, though that may disappear after Trump goes. Extreme forms of DEI will certainly return if we get a Democratic President—one of the bad side effects of Democrats, especially “progressive” Democrats, gain power.
Principle is the second area of Diermeier’s talk. His topic is the answer to the question, “What is the purpose of a univesity?” And here he has no doubts, for the purpose is to produce “pathbreaking research and transformative education”—production of knowledge and conveying this knowledge to society via publications or other scholarly outlets.
He goes on to discuss the importance of free speech and emphasizes that it’s not the same thing as academic freedom, a point I’ve made repeatedly. As a private citizen I am free to espouse creationism as much as I want, but I am not free to teach creationism—or other palpable falsehoods—in my biology classes. You can’t say anything you want as a professor teaching classes.
Diermeier takes up the issue of the meeting: “viewpoint diversity”, which many people think is the real kind of diversity that universities should strive for. But he notes that although viewpoint diversity is a worthy goal if it’s meant to buttressfree speech, he’s not clear about what the term really means. Diermeier notes that viewpoint diversity as a desideratum is really the byproduct of a more important goal: preventing the erosion of scholarly standards by political or ideological principles. If that erosion is taking place, as it is in many areas (science is somewhat of an exception, but, as Luana and I showed, the erosion is even affecting biology), then it enforces a conformity that stifles free speech and academic freedom. Thus, if you prevent that kind of erosion and its chilling effect on speech, viewpoint diversity should automatically inrease.
Diermeier then gives several examples of the kind of symptoms we see when academic fields are afflicted with ideological erosion. The symptoms are “citation justice,” “positionality statements,” and “avoidance of trans issues” (he means the fear of academics to even discuss trans issues). I’ve never heard a college president be so open in opposing these trends, but he’s right.
Politics is Diermeier’s third topic, and this is where he suggests remedies. He notes that ideology isn’t pervasive in academia, guessing that about 85% of faculty are committed to doing their academic mission—investigating the areas of interest to them, like me working on speciation in fruit flies. But, he says, the other 15% “have political commitments that they consider essential to who they are as scholars.:” Examples of these people, in my view, are Chicago professors like Alireza Doostdar and Eman Abdelhadi, pro-Palestinian scholars who are always spouting off or demonstrating against Israel. Abdelhadi is reported as saying this:
Abdelhadi. . . . described the University [of Chicago] as “evil” and “a colonial landlord” in her remarks, which centered on the topic of political organizing in one’s community.
“Why would I organize here? I don’t care about this institution. Like I don’t—like fuck the University of Chicago, it’s evil. Like, you know? It’s a colonial landlord. Like, why would I put any of my political energy into this space,” Abdelhadi said at the conference. “And I kind of had a moment of disdain for people who spent a lot of time doing that.”
“The genocide really collapsed that and made me realize two things,” she continued. “One is that, well, my students need me. So, it was like: ‘Oh, I actually have to organize here to take care of my students, who I do care about.’ But I also realized—and I think this is a painful lesson that a lot of us in the Palestine solidarity movement have been learning—is that we don’t have power.”
Despite her criticisms of the University’s role as a “landlord, a healthcare provider, [and] a police force,” she described UChicago as “a place where [she has] access to thousands of people that [she] could potentially organize” politically.
In other words, damn the scholarship; she is here to ideologically convert “thousands of students.” This is what Diermeier means by the “other 15%.” He adds that people with such an agenda are mostly on the Left, and yes, that is also correct.
How do we fix this? In the Q&A session beginning 44 minutes in, this is precisely the question that Abby Thompson of UC Davis asks Diermeier, and his answer isn’t completely satisfying: he says that the faculty must organize and stand together against this kind of ideological erosion. My response is that that’s way easier said than done.
But I’ve gone on too long, and my summary is no substitute for listening to this engaging talk. It’s the best discussion of the state of American universities that I’ve heard since I started teaching:
In the past, the London School of Economics and Political Science made public statements on contested matters, but under its current Vice Chancellor, Larry Kramer, has decided to adopt institutional neutrality: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/highereducation/2025/11/06/if-its-lawful-speech-dont-ask-us-to-condemn-it/
Sadly, only 18% of UK universities have done likewise.
While it’s true that some universities have publicly embraced an institutional stance of political neutrality, the wokeness of these institutions is not going away. At my cozy university, the president in late 2024 made a show of explaining to the university community “why I have come to the view that it is important for university administration not to take public positions…on partisan political matters and current events.” But at the same time the same president continues her pursuit of race-based hiring of black or indigenous faculty members under the principles of what’s known here on Turtle Island as the Scarborough Charter (another regrettable product of the 2020 George Floyd paroxysm).
One current example: School of Criminology, Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Crime and Inequality at the rank of Associate or Full Professor. “Pursuant to Section 42 of the B.C. Human Rights Code, the selection for this position will be limited to candidates who self-identify as a Canadian Indigenous person, a gender minority and/or a woman, [or] a person with a disability.”
https://www.sfu.ca/vpacademic/academic-careers/faculty-positions/arts-social-sciences.html
As Leslie has explained in these pages, this is all perfectly legal: provincial governments created cut-outs in our human rights laws for practices to address “systemic racism” that would be otherwise illegal (as well as wrong and likely to lead to poor outcomes for teaching and research). The declarations about political neutrality in public declarations are welcome but paper-thin relative to the practices of the same universities, which are still functioning as sheltered workshops for indigiqueer disability activists to make $130,000–$180,000.
Re: Ideological Erosion of Universities, this essay in my feed at Substack really, really shook me.
It describes the experience of a bushy-tailed English Literature major at Columbia University in 2015. That’s eleven years ago. Guess what she was forced to read as part of the English Literature curriculum; this has relevance to the commencement speech at U. Michigan in today’s Hili Dialogue.
Tell me, exactly what the hell is going on at our Universities? (And what is the Statute of Limitations in New York State for fraud?):
https://substack.com/home/post/p-195696724
Thanks for this thoughtful memoir. An analysis of the same subject is at: https://jamesgmartin.center/2025/10/how-english-departments-became-broken/ , and the book it reviews.
Academe’s trouble has been its loss of the telos of knowledge production and conveyance—replacing it with political goals, DEI, post-colonial grievance, etc.. Underlying this change, we have the prevalence of the postmodernist doctrine that there is actually no such thing as knowledge. (Hence, Pluckrose and Lindsay’s description of wokeliness as “applied postmodernism”.) It is as if automobile repair shops adopted the view that there is no such thing as Physics.
Looking forward to watching this! Thank you for posting it.
I’ve said this before, and I’ll continue to say it: I have no difficulty with peaceful protests of any sort. But once anything illegal is done, the responsible people should be treated like any other miscreant. Just because they are college students or faculty does not give them a free pass to do whatever they want.
As to trans rights, they are not entitled to these by removing the rights of others. This will require compromise on both sides. Expecting one side to surrender to the other is not acceptable.
What compromises do you think that the gender-critical “side” should make?
Sympathizing with Coel here, and thinking of game theory. Why shouldn’t we, the gender-critical side, demand surrender from the activist side? Especially when the very essence of “trans rights” just is the removal of our side’s rights (to women-only spaces, to use correct pronouns without fear of punishment, to protect children from medical treatment that has no evidentiary basis, to avoid hiring flaky, aggrieved people who will disrupt the workplace with demands to police misgendering), all in the name of falsity-based ideology? What would a compromise look like, in your view, Mr. Broner? Which of those toxic “rights” — and they are all non-negotiable items in the trans catechism — should we be obliged to accept? And what’s the source of that obligation?
We don’t need to humiliate the trans activist side into capitulating and admitting it was wrong all along. It just has to get the message that we are saying No, forthrightly, all the time. What, after all, can it do if we refuse to yield to any of its demands? It’s not going to force us to the negotiating table by going to war with us or trying to bankrupt us.
We only negotiate when we don’t have a walkaway position that’s acceptable to us. This happens when the other side has leverage over us, i.e., when we are afraid of what it might do, such as kill a captive hostage if we don’t concede something and we are unable to free the hostage by other means. (In Canada, we have to negotiate with aboriginal activists because we are afraid of them. But we aren’t afraid of trans people, …are we?) Otherwise we just say No. No need to compromise if the other side doesn’t hold something over us, and I don’t see trans activists having anything of the sort.
Besides, No can always be turned into Yes if circumstances change. Never the reverse.
Nice talk given very thoughtfully. I should be proud to have him as my university president. The real meat came around 40:00 when he started to address what positive action faculties must take: it is not enough to throw darts and complain about what is; you must present a cogent alternative objective and a pathway to accomplish it. This gives policy-making boards and individuals a clear choice, two paths to compare, contrast, and vote between…OR…build another alternative that is not simply a compromise between two alternatives but a stronger composite, building on the different ideas. I think the organization that prof Pinker and colleagues put together at Harvard does this. Members of these groups and policy-makers who even positively entertain these alternative directions should wear a thick skin as you are likely to be called names and otherwise made uncomfortable. Such is a bit of the cost of change these days. But having lost control to the organized groups that have taken the school off course, the pain of change is absolutely necessary.
And I cannot stop without saying that though I knew neither except through their writings and appearances, President Diermeier seems to evoke much of the strength of the late UChicago President Zimmer who I think was his boss.
I did not hear Abby’s question because the audio was breaking up so bad on the first guy’s question I gave up at that point. But I think that my point that yes it is not easy, but each faculty must take an activist role or no change will happen. There is a skill to building a team and analyzing a situation and developing recommended solutions AND pushing those recs through to an outcome. Not necessarily a skill owned by even the best academics. Be open to bringing in a professional facilitator to help shape your work.
My view about what universities are for is a bit expanded from the view that they exist “to produce pathbreaking research and transformative education—production of knowledge and conveying this knowledge to society via publications or other scholarly outlets.” That view is absolutely true, but in the process of educating young people, universities become the only route to many careers in business, medicine, science, engineering, and education. So they are a necessary path to certain vocations.
In terms of societal benefits, universities are the highway for people living in effective poverty to ascend into the middle class. I see this every semester where I teach.
This is the part of social engineering that I applaud about universities.
Vanderbilt is indeed an excellent university, and it is good to know that there are places where sense and critical thinking prevail.
I should also mention that, if one wanted to study brain evolution, it was/is one of top universities in that field, because of the lab and influence of Jon Kaas.
A suggestion on how to ensure faculty follow the rules : should a faculty member break the rules, then give them a first and final warning. If they break the rules a second time, fire them.
My understanding of tenure is that uni profs. are guaranteed a job regardless of their actions – within reasonable limits. Is that correct? If so, why should they be a special case? In any other job, if a person breaks the rules or fails to perform, they’re out on the street.
Here I have to quote Richard Dawkins in The Ancestor’s Tale when he talks about sea squirts :
“Like many larvae of sedentary, bottom-dwelling, filter-feeding animals….”
Then goes on :
“More than once I have seen a reference to the larval sea squirt which, when the time comes, settles down to a sedentary life and ‘eats its brain, like an associate professor getting tenure’.”.
He provides a photo of an adult sea squirt comically captioned thusly :
“Like an associate professor getting tenure?”🤣🤣.
That does not sound like an endorsement of tenure to me.
I don’t know about the history of tenure, but it’s a practice that had begun long ago in a different time when todays’ social activism was far in the future. A tenured professor can be fired, though, for various reasons that go well beyond speech, and firings happen every year.
I have seen it twice on campuses that I worked in. One was a dept. chair.
Thanks Mark. I was under the impression that firing tenured profs. was a rare event and happened only for such serious offences as plagiarism, canoodling with the Dean’s wife, etc.😀
When I was a postdoc, my dept. chair encouraged me to try for non-tenure track positions. I said no, since I wanted tenure track. He said tenure is worthless, and bet me ten bucks. That he could prove it to me in under a minute.
I should have known better, but I took the bet, and he proceeded to show me how a department chair could take my research space, and then inform granting agencies that I could not perform research, so I would lose my grants. And then, since i couldn’t get grants, he could demand more teaching from me: he suggested 75 hours/week of teaching comparative anatomy of the anal sphincter. And when I said “no one can teach 75 hours /week!”, he replied “you refused to teach? That is grounds for firing, tenure or not.”
Ten bucks gone. And since my pre-tax salary was $18,500/year, it was an expensive lesson. He is gone now, and I miss him.
Leslie MacMillan’s comment hopes to “protect children from medical treatment that has no evidentiary basis”. Trouble is, the universities have enshrined a vein of word salad according to which the very concept of evidentiary bases is just another story, no more serviceable than songs, myths, fairy tales, subjective fantasies—and even rather disreputable due to its association with European civilization. Academia has undergone ~40 years full of programs, departments, centers, and “scholarly” journals equivalent to flat earth studies.