How Colleges Can Create a Diverse Thinking Community

“Be prepared to defend your point of view” Harvard President Alan Garber said this. in his address to the Harvard Class of 2028 on September 2. “Be prepared to articulate points of view that differ from yours. Be prepared, first of all, to change your mind.”

All of these changes are welcome and undoubtedly made in good faith. But they are also obviously reactive. If the university is rediscovering the principles of intellectual and academic freedom only among the broken glass of its windows and the scrubbed obscenities from its walls, then the work of breaking down the long-standing political monoculture and creating a truly intellectually pluralistic community has only just begun.

What is required is a deeper and more focused commitment to ensure that institutions of higher education create structures and cultures that will encourage and support productive disagreement in pursuit of their ultimate purpose of advancing, transmitting, and preserving knowledge.

Larry Jameson, Penn’s interim president whose predecessor was fired after controversial remarks before Congress about anti-Semitism on her campus, noted that “by taming Penn’s institutional voice, we hope to strengthen the experiences and voices within.”

I would argue that the role of the institution is not simply to expand, but to see that the “inner voices” are polyphonic and that they are all committed to the fundamental conditions that promote truth-seeking, open inquiry, and civil dialogue.

This fall, the University of Austin began recruiting freshmen. These intrepid students are the first to enroll in an institution designed specifically to cultivate and sustain a culture of intellectual pluralism, a particularly challenging but certainly important task in these times of polarization and zero-sum politics.

The University of Austin was born in the crucible of debate over academic freedom—and has faced no shortage of criticism for its mission to create an institution dedicated to dismantling the deadening intellectual binary that seems to hold our culture, including our universities, in thrall. Our university, three years in the making, may well have some lessons to teach legacy institutions about how to build a truly diverse community of thought.

Promoting tolerance of differing viewpoints and suppressing institutional opinions are useful measures, but unless the commitment to intellectual freedom and the measures that support it are enshrined in the rules and principles that govern that institution, the shadows of censorship and ideological conformity will one day loom. again.

At UT Austin, we have formalized our commitment to the principles of open inquiry and civil dialogue. Each year, our faculty and staff gather with public intellectuals and outside scholars for the annual First Principles Summit, where we reflect on how we are living up to our founding ideals and in which areas we can improve. This self-assessment requires us all to be accountable to each other and to external stakeholders.

Our student experience is based on dialogue and the unrestricted exchange of ideas. We insist that all opinions must be heard, but also that all opinions must be supported by evidence. We comply Chatham House Rulewhich states that ideas expressed in class cannot be transferred outside the class without the permission of the speaker, in order to alleviate the fear of malicious influence on social media and create an atmosphere of trust at the seminar table.

Our student debating society, the Austin Union, based at the Oxford Union, has already become a forum for addressing some of society’s most pressing issues. And we hope to expand this model beyond our campus by developing a program through our Mill Institute that models the practice of civil discourse in K-12 schools, 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-oriented or united in purpose, can count on dispute resolution. However, the sign of a healthy institution can be found in the procedures it has in place to deal with such situations. University of Austin constitution includes a system of judicial review that allows any member of our community who believes that their academic freedom or spirit of inquiry has been violated to refer the matter to an external, fully independent body. This avoids the traditional errors of star chambers and oblique processes. The decision of this commission will be binding, like the decision of the Supreme Court.

The University of Austin is not opening its doors this year to shut out the noise of the outside world. But through our commitment to open inquiry, supported by an institutional structure specifically designed to preserve it, we hope to show American higher education a better way to navigate the turmoil of this moment and become better equipped to serve the core purpose of higher education—the constant pursuit of truth.

Pano Kanelos is the founding president of the University of Austin.