holding two ideas at once: the attack on universities is authoritarian, and viewpoint diversity is important

Posted on August 26, 2025 by Peter

Two points are valid, in my opinion, and we should address both:

First, the Trump Administration is using almost every available tool, including unconstitutional methods, to harm universities and to interfere in their internal affairs. At my university, they literally abducted a beloved graduate student because she had written a completely appropriate op-ed in our student newspaper, thus suppressing speech on our campus.

The Administration receives support from people who think that higher education has been intolerantly leftist (or biased against Israel). Trump and his close associates may believe those complaints. However, their campaign against higher education is top-down and self-interested and closely resembles that of other “personalist” authoritarian regimes around the world today, which range across the ideological spectrum:

“Under the [right-wing] authoritarian leadership of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, the government has started a culture war to dismantle the independence of academic institutions.”
“As Modi’s [Hindu nationalist] BJP tightens its grip, India’s universities become political battlegrounds where academic independence is sacrificed to ideological loyalty.”
In Venezuela, “The main public universities, in particular, have paid a heavy price as a consequence of their defense of democratic values and academic freedom, as they have been defunded by the government” (which is left-wing).
“Much of the structure of Turkish higher education” is being dismantled “through purges, restrictions, and assertions of central control, a process begun earlier this year and accelerating now with alarming speed.”

Both here and in other countries, attacks on universities are coordinated with attacks on broadcast media, foundations, law firms, civil servants, judges, and, often, the legislative branch.

In its battles with US higher education, the Administration has some grassroots support. In July, Gallup found that 41% of people had little or no confidence in higher education, and of those, 32% said it was “’too liberal,’ trying to ‘indoctrinate’ or ‘brainwash’ students, or not allowing students to think for themselves as reasons for their opinions.” That group represents 13% of the whole sample: enough to generate a flood of social media, but a minority of the population. The Administration’s agenda is mostly self-interested rather than populist.

Thus I disagree with people like Greg Lukianoff, the president of FIRE (now the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), who believe that American universities courted trouble by being intolerant of conservatives. He says, “If they’d listened to us 15 years ago, none of this would be happening.”

I welcome FIRE’s current work against the Trump Administration, but I believe that Trump would have gone after higher education in exactly the same way if universities had attracted more prominent conservative faculty and speakers or had avoided issuing statements about current events. Right-wing media would still have found plenty of anecdotes about liberal bias, and 13% of Americans would still have denounced higher education from the right. The administration needed a pretext–not a fair assessment–to squash higher education as an autonomous sector.

Second, I believe that one of our most important tasks–as humans, and specifically as people who study or work in universities–is to inquire into what is right. This process (call it “normative analysis”) is comparative or dialectical; it’s about juxtaposing alternative values and competing arguments and reasoning about which is better. Furthermore, John Stuart Mill was correct; you can’t just read and discuss alternative arguments to feel their force. You must talk to peers who sincerely hold them.

I think that swaths of US higher education are too ideologically homogeneous to support this kind of reasoning well. In the liberal arts and some of the professions, the dominant ideology is left (although not Marxist, because real Marxism is marginal). In business schools, economics departments, and business-oriented engineering programs, I think the bias is center-right and biased toward technology.

I do not object to the characterization that the whole of higher education is too homogeneously center-left. For instance, at my university, less than one percent of faculty political donations went to Republican candidates or organizations in 2018. At the same time, the name “Marx” is mentioned in just four Tufts course descriptions this semester, half of which are in Art History; none in the social sciences. In short, the ideological range is constrained on both sides, not to mention that academic culture tends to be secular, meritocratic, cosmopolitan, civilian, Anglophone. and technocratic.

Excessive homogeneity can lead to clichés, “motivated reasoning” (selecting evidence to favor a preferred conclusion) and weak argumentation. It can fail to prepare people to engage the broader society.

Meanwhile, few faculty are trained and empowered to address questions of value in academically rigorous ways.

Normative analysis is the focus of a subfield in political science, political theory, which had about 75 job openings in the USA in 2022-3 (5.75% of all political science jobs). That year, there were also about 450 job openings in the USA for philosophers involved with value-theory (broadly defined). Put together, those searches constituted about one open job dedicated to teaching normative inquiry for every ten institutions of higher education in the United States.

Normative analysis is (and should be) conducted in other disciplines as well. Yet it is generally countercultural across higher education and in contemporary society.

Some right-wingers denounce discussions of “divisive concepts.” I have personally observed left-wingers who are genuinely intolerant of conservative (or classical liberal, or religious) arguments. And many administrators, professors and students are positivists. They believe that facts and values are strictly distinct; that values are matters of opinion; and that scholarship should be about facts. It is particularly difficult to have a serious discussion about values in a community where people share key political values and yet deny that values are relevant, claiming that research and teaching are only about facts.

In sum: we should expand philosophical or ideological heterogeneity on college campuses, which means extending our ideological range to the right but also in other directions. We should do so because it is good for us, not because the Trump Administration claims to want this outcome. Trump’s people simply want to squelch autonomous civil society. A powerful civil society is confidently pluralistic and willing to debate normative questions from many angles. Getting there requires internal work, even as we battle our national government for freedom.

what causes works to be used in college courses?

Posted on July 17, 2025 by Peter

I just read a valuable forthcoming article about bias in college syllabi. I don’t want to “scoop” that piece and won’t address its claims here. It did get me thinking more broadly about why some texts are widely assigned in college courses.

Fashion: When I was a humanities-oriented undergraduate in the 1980s, it seemed as if every professor assigned Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935). I don’t hear much about that book these days, and other texts are more fashionable. Such changes presumably reflect shifts among intellectuals as well as prominent developments in the world. For instance, Benjamin’s book seemed prescient when culture was first turning digital but may now seem dated.
Ideological proclivities: Individual professors tend to prefer to assign works that they agree with. I recognize that many of my colleagues intentionally choose texts that they would criticize, but I am asserting that there is some degree of bias in the whole population of professors, with variations by discipline. By the way, a proclivity is not a bias if it’s reflective, acknowledged, and open to change. The main concern is unconscious bias.
Genre and style: It is much easier to use a text that is addressed to a general reader and aims to interest people in the topic and influence their behavior, rather than a text that is written for academic colleagues and meant to contribute to a literature. One issue is jargon (specialized terminology), but some jargony works are widely assigned anyway. I think the main issue is the purpose of the work. If it aims to influence a public audience, it is more likely to be assigned.
Marketing, broadly defined: Like everyone else, academics are influenced by marketing. I am not thinking of the deliberate advertising and promotion of specific academic books, because those investments are very modest. I am thinking about the difference between any academic book and a mass-market paperback that is sold in bookstores and reviewed in The New York Times. The latter will be used in more courses. By the way, ideological bias could be relevant here, but it would be the bias of commercial publishers and mass-circulation journals, not academics.
Personal branding: Some authors, including some professors, turn themselves into recognizable personalities. Nowadays, that means that they are prominent on broadcast and social media, and they exemplify a particular position or perspective. Academics quickly think of their works when deciding what to assign.
Hedgehogs, not foxes: When you’re designing a syllabus, you often want texts that clearly and directly represent a particular view, even if you are also looking for contrary views. For instance, in teaching 20th century political philosophy last spring, I wanted to include fascist texts. This was certainly not an endorsement; I just thought that we should analyze their views. I went looking for clear expressions of fascism, not subtle or equivocal arguments. I assigned a speech by Mussolini (probably ghost-written by Gentile). I did not end up using Heidegger’s 1933 “Rector’s Address” because it’s too complicated and addresses too many things at once. Authors and individual texts are more attractive if they say one thing clearly (like the proverbial hedgehog) rather than many things with various qualifications and complexities (like the fox). Therefore, our syllabi fill up with works by “hedgehogs.”

primer on free speech and academic freedom

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Peter

In US law and in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, free speech means rights of individuals and associations against their governments. If you have a right to a given form of speech, then your government may not block, ban, or punish that speech.

Free speech is very extensive in the USA. In 1969, in Brandenburg v. Ohio, the Supreme Court found that a KKK leader had the right to advocate publicly for “revengeance” against “black peoples” and “Jews.” This decision clearly protected hate speech and remains the law.

One important exception has involved non-US citizens. Periodically throughout US history, the federal government has barred people from entry or deported them on the basis of their speech. This is an unsettled area of constitutional law that is before courts right now.

Notwithstanding their constitutional free speech rights, Americans generally lack the right to speak as they wish at work. An employer can usually fire you for what you say, or even for speaking at all.

There are some exceptions. Many employees have a right to advocate unionization under the National Labor Rights Act, although that right is poorly enforced. Some public employees have free speech rights because their employer is also the government, but they are not protected when they are speaking in their governmental role. For instance, a state attorney does not have a constitutional right to dissent publicly about a case being handled by his office (Garcetti v. Ceballos, 2006).

Since the late 1800s, some have argued that students and faculty need freedom of speech to advance the mission of an educational institution. An early statement was by the University of Wisconsin in 1894: “Whatever may be the limitations which trammel inquiry elsewhere, we believe that the great state University of Wisconsin should ever encourage that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found.”

This is academic freedom in the form of rights for individuals and groups of students and faculty in relation to their own educational institutions. Today, it is encoded in the form of policies adopted by specific schools and colleges, employment contracts, student disciplinary codes, prevalent norms and expectations, and some state laws that afford rights to students or faculty in state schools and colleges.

For the most part, academic freedom is not a constitutional right derived from the First Amendment. A college or a state system can choose not to offer it. When individuals sue for academic freedom, it is usually for breach of a contract that was voluntarily adopted by their employer.

It is tempting to envision academic freedom as just like freedom of speech, except that an educational institution is like the government: prevented from censoring or punishing individuals’ speech. But this model quickly falls apart, because educational institutions are fundamentally and intrinsically involved in choosing, evaluating, rewarding, and penalizing speech. For example, a department will select the prospective instructor who offers the best writing and oral presentation among all the applicants. That person is hired to teach courses in the approved curriculum. Professors award grades based on the quality and relevance of the students’ writing and speaking.

Thus the idea of neutrality or non-interference, which applies to governments, simply cannot govern schools or colleges.

Instead, academic freedom is a patchwork of provisions that vary by institution. Many universities have adopted explicit policies of not restricting faculty or student speech based on its point-of-view or position, usually within limits. (For example, the right to express opinions on political issues does not allow a faculty member to take extensive time in the classroom to discuss issues unrelated to the course content.) Colleges generally adopt procedures for faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure that are meant to enhance freedom along with quality. We talk about a “tenure case” because it has the feel of a legal process, with rights afforded to the applicant. Receiving tenure then prevents professors from being fired for the content of their speech.

Further, universities assign many decisions to groups of students or faculty instead of the central administration. For example, student groups often have broad rights to invite speakers of their choice. Departments are influential in choosing faculty and determining curricula. The whole body of faculty of a college votes on key curricular matters. These are examples of academic freedom as a kind of freedom of association for specific categories of people within the institution. The Supreme Court has also sometimes acknowledged a free speech right for each university to determine its own programming (Justice Powell in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, 1978).

The norm not to interfere with speech on the basis of viewpoint or content is quite strong in higher education (much less so in K12), yet the prevalent rules leave many gaps. In particular:

Only students and “instructors” are typically protected. At my university, just under 30% of the employees are faculty, broadly defined. In general, if you cut the grass at a college, you have no more free speech than if you cut the grass at a condominium. And if you are a dean or vice-provost, a laboratory technician, a clinical physician, or a counselor, you may not be covered by academic freedom.
Academic freedom is quite strong in a setting like a philosophy seminar, where the participants probably enrolled by choice, the professor had a lot of scope to choose the curriculum, and everyone can choose their own positions. But switch your example to a laboratory in the medical or engineering school. This is a highly capitalized enterprise with expensive equipment and many at-will employees. It probably exists thanks to government grants and private philanthropy. These two go together because private donations are what allow universities to hire the faculty, attract the graduate students, and build facilities that make them competitive for federal funds. Harvard wins $8 billion in federal grants annually because it has $53 billion in private money. In the lab sciences, key decision-makers include donors (often members of the board of trustees) and government officials. Now switch back to the philosophy class and bear in mind that overhead from STEM research may subsidize the professor’s salary. From this perspective, a university is not a community of citizens in a republic of letters who each decide what to say. It is an expensive, top-down enterprise whose research agenda is negotiated with outsiders.
Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prevents discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. For decades, it has been interpreted to mean that schools and colleges have a legal obligation to prevent speech by their own students and employees that causes discrimination. This principle is in tension with academic freedom as the right to choose and express one’s own view.

I do not regard this tension as simply unfortunate. In an educational institution, which is an employer, a gatekeeper to professions, and usually a landlord as well as a venue for “continual and fearless sifting,” both academic freedom and anti-discrimination are important. But I have long worried that penalizing speech and treating it as a disciplinary concern violates valid speech rights, hampers debate, and creates opportunities for bad actors to suppress valuable speech.* The Biden Administration investigated at least a dozen universities for potentially failing to protect Jewish students’ civil rights by stopping anti-Israel protests. I strongly disagreed with those actions, but far worse are the Trump Administration’s arbitrary and vindictive attacks on specific universities, which use Title VI as a weapon. (Interestingly, the latest letter from the Trump Administration to Harvard drops the pretext that the issue was ever antisemitism.)

Alex Gourevitch makes an important point that the whole framework of preventing harm to students especially threatens the right to protest, because protests involve “public expressions of hostility toward political views and often the people who hold them.” I would add that protests are collective actions, during which individual participants can say a range of things. If a whole protest is shut down or punished because of what some people say, then all the other people’s right to protest has been curtailed.
There is a live debate about whether educational institutions, as opposed to individual faculty and students, may or should speak. Proponents of the Kalven Report argue that speech by university leaders may chill individuals’ dissenting speech and purport to represent employees and students who cannot determine what the college says in their name. Critics of the Kalven Report argue that universities should be able to speak freely in the public sphere and doubt that these institutions could or should be neutral. I served on Tufts’ committee that considered these issues, and I am proud of our report, but I can’t describe it yet because it hasn’t been released. I would only say that this is a complex topic because institutions communicate in so many ways. Statements by university presidents are just one example.

envisioning a new model for higher education

Posted on April 18, 2025 by Peter

Harvard is prominent in the news because of its battle with the Trump Administration. The model that Harvard epitomizes is worth fighting for, but fragile. While defending it, we should also be thinking about radical alternatives.

Harvard spends more than $6 billion per year, drawing its revenue from philanthropy (45%), tuition, including executive education (21%), research grants (16%), and an “other” category (18%) that includes clinical fees and intellectual property.

Harvard spends very large sums on scientific research and depends on the federal government and wealthy donors for a majority of its budget. It’s largely an illusion that philanthropy provides financial aid. With an endowment of $2.1 million per student, Harvard could charge zero tuition for all. Instead–and, I think, understandably–it charges a high sticker price for those who are able to pay, offers steep discounts for others, and uses a large proportion of its net revenue for research.

The advantages are whatever benefits society obtains from the research. The vulnerability is the university’s dependence on national politicians and the donors who dominate its board of trustees. From an outsider’s perspective, another drawback is that the university rejects an extraordinary proportion of the people who might want to study or work there. Its exclusiveness makes it a rewarding political target.

Such universities also face internal conflicts when federal grants or endowment funds are threatened, because their funding models vary drastically within the institution. For example, the Harvard Divinity School is really financed by endowment returns, obtaining few grants and little tuition revenue. The much larger Harvard Medical School gets a majority of its funds from grants or clinical revenues and only 27% from endowment. The Law School relies on tuition for 43% of its revenue, as compared to 10% in the Medical School. If the trustees stop donating, the market falls, or the federal government suspends all grants, the repercussions will be very uneven. At Columbia, internal conflicts between STEM programs and the liberal arts contributed to its weak response to the Trump administration.

Of course, the Harvard model is not relevant across academia. Wesleyan, which has been courageously opposing the Trump Administration, received a total of $11 million in government and private grants in 2024, representing four percent of its revenues. Wesleyan does not generate the kind of labor- and capital-intensive research that Harvard produces, so it is much less vulnerable.

Most US college students attend public institutions that are not research-intensive or endowed, where tuition really dominates revenue. If Trump’s assault on higher education succeeds, it will cause massive damage on some campuses and have little effect on others.

Traditionally, one way that Americans have responded to crises is by creating new types of colleges–from Calvinist beacons in the 1600s, to Black institutions in Reconstruction, to the California public system after WWII (and many other examples). However, I have shown that the rate at which new institutions are launched has fallen to an all-time low. And, despite the prevalence of several different basic models, the degree of similarity across categories of universities is striking. Each research-intensive university operates largely like all the others.

Here is an alternative that we might consider today:

A new institution would be a cooperative owned and run by its employees, with considerable involvement by students.

The college would incorporate as a nonprofit but only accept donations into its general fund (no earmarks), and its governing board would be elected by its employees plus some student representatives. Employees and students could accept grants and contracts, but there would be no sponsored research office, so the college would be ineligible for most federal grants.

It would minimize costs. It would not provide housing or many services to students outside of the classroom. (As a result, it would be less appropriate for students who have various kinds of needs.) Faculty, staff, and students would do a lot of the management by rotating on committees.

The base tuition price might be set at $12,000, with a faculty/student ratio of 15:1, producing about $180,000 per instructor, which would be divided between instructors’ salaries, benefits, and additional staff (such as accountants, facilities workers, an IT department, etc.). Financial aid would, for the most part, consist of salaries for student workers who would provide essential support. So more financial aid would equal lower staff costs.

The location would have to be urban or suburban, because this would be a commuter school. It could be located in an underserved city, perhaps one of the cities that ring Appalachia. Or, for symbolic reasons–and because there are educational advantages to studying in Washington–it could take residence in the Nation’s Capital.

This design is meant to maximize autonomy and accessibility and serve as a refuge if the existing models succumb to political pressure.

how to engage our universities in this crisis

Posted on March 31, 2025 by Peter

I write after the Trump Administration has abducted our beloved student Rumeyza Öztürk (please read the profile of her by her department) for contributing a well-reasoned op-ed to our campus discussion.

Many of us are familiar with a framework in which the university is a powerful institution with resources and discretion. For example, it decides whom to admit to the middle (or upper) class and what to teach them along the way. A university may be complicit with other institutions, investing in South Africa in the 1980s or fossil fuels today. It is an “it”–potentially a target of our pressure–not a “we” whose actions reflect us.

Naturally, then, the activist’s toolkit prominently includes tactics like insisting that the institution speak on the issues of the day, occupying the administration building, or demanding that the college divest from certain companies or industries.

Some of this script has become almost automatic, and I hear it right now. But the traditional framework and toolkit do not necessarily apply when the federal government is making college students and employees and the institutions themselves into targets and victims.

Christopher Rufo has disclosed his goal of putting “universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets …. in a way that puts them in an existential terror.” Before we occupy administration buildings, we might want to think about whether Rufo would be glad to hear about that extra pressure. Indeed, the eerie quiet on many campuses probably reflects a realization that the usual toolkit won’t work.

A university is not the enemy. It is not alien to us. To a considerable extent, it is a victim, and resistance should be directed at those who bully it. We should also recognize genuine limitations that confront administrators and other official representatives of universities.

First, they must negotiate with–and litigate against–a hostile federal government. When you negotiate or litigate, you don’t disclose your strengths and weaknesses or your strategy.

Second, the administration can target colleges one by one and pick on any that are especially bold. As my friend Archon Fung says, “If you’re just considering Harvard University or Columbia University all by itself, maybe it is organizationally rational to try to get the best deal that you can … But that might be quite bad for higher education as a whole.” The most effective actors may not be individual institutions but coalitions (like the Mutual Academic Defense Compact proposed for Big Ten Academic Alliance) or independent actors like the ACLU.

Third, administrative positions are not tenured. Of course, resigning can be the right thing to do. But the problem is not that individuals may lose their jobs; it is rather that an institution can be held responsible for what each administrator says.

These are reasons to give each university’s administration a bit of grace. On the other hand, their business is our business. As members of a university community, we have the right and obligation to debate what it should do and to express our views about that question.

Although universities are not democracies, they must have public spheres. As Hannah Arendt writes, tyrants “all have in common the banishment of the citizens from the public realm and the insistence that they mind their private business while only the ruler should attend to public affairs” (The Human Condition, p. 221). According to Eric Calvin and Calvin Woodward, Trump recently “marveled” that universities are “bending and saying ‘Sir, thank you very much, we appreciate it.’” That “sir” is yet another indication that we are renouncing republican virtues of self-respect and honesty as we slide into tyranny. It is like the sudden doffing of hats to aristocrats that marked the end of the Florentine republic.

So what does it mean to make the the business of the university our business? For one thing, we must discuss how it should respond to existential threats.

I am just back from a quick visit to Columbia University, and I suspect that Maya Sulkin’s article entitled “Columbia President Says One Thing to Trump Admin—and Another in Private” gives a pretty good flavor of the way things have played out there. President Armstrong, who resigned on the day I visited, negotiated a deal with the Trump Administration and then reportedly tried to manage “the depth of the faculty’s frustration” with the arrangement by telling them that she would not fully comply with it. This is not exactly an accountable and public process.

Much is happening under the surface. In the Wall Street Journal, Douglas Belkin writes, “Columbia University is fighting two wars at once. One rages publicly against President Trump, whose administration in recent days ordered the arrest of a student protester and canceled federal funds to the Ivy League school over allegations of antisemitism. The second conflict simmers behind the scenes: a faculty civil war that pits medical doctors and engineers against political scientists and humanities scholars.”

This conflict began last year, when Columbia’s STEM professional school faculty were (in general) more likely to oppose the anti-Israel protests than liberal-arts faculty were. The conflict has intensified now that the Trump administration is holding Columbia’s STEM funds hostage in return for actions against the protesters and their faculty allies. Such intramural conflicts will intensify when any university must make deep cuts as a result of federal actions.

Looking beyond Columbia, Ian Bogost reports that he’s “spent the past month discussing the government’s campaign to weaken higher learning with current and former college presidents, provosts, deans, faculty, and staff. And in the course of these informal, sometimes panicked text exchanges, emails, and phone calls, I’ve come to understand that the damage to our educational system could be worse than the public comprehends—and that calamity could arrive sooner than people expect.” It would come, basically, in the form of drastic cuts in federal grants, overhead funds, and financial aid that would destroy the current business model.

As they say in community organizing, power corrupts, but so does powerlessness. It is a mark of powerlessness to be satisfied with expressing the opinion that a university should refuse the Trump administration’s demands. Are you sure that would be the right thing to do? Do you know the costs and risks? Do you have the information that you would need to decide? Should you have the information, or would secrecy better serve the university’s interests in negotiations? Meanwhile, what are you doing to weaken the government’s side in the conflict?

As Columbia’s crisis unfolded, I would have wanted to know: How likely would the university be to prevail in our actual federal courts if it refused to comply? Would a First Amendment (or statute-based) lawsuit win? Further, what else could the Trump Administration do if the university fought back in court? For instance, revoke all visas of foreign-citizen students and employees? Cancel the university’s nonprofit status so that it would have to pay corporate taxes? How likely would the university be to prevail in lawsuits against those actions?

Next, what would happen financially if the university lost its federal funding? Columbia has an endowment worth more than $14 billion, but most of that is permanently earmarked for specific purposes; it can’t be used to replace canceled federal contracts. How much is available for flexible purposes? Could the university borrow against the endowment, and on what terms?

What would it look like to fire the employees who had been covered by federal funds, versus retaining many of those people and cutting others? How would the internal politics of the university play out if the budget were dramatically cut? Would the STEM fields or the liberal arts prevail? Would the university cut early-stage faculty without tenure or could it compel senior faculty to retire? On the other hand, could the institution gain–for example, reputationally–if it went into full revolt?

I suspect these questions are quite hard. I am sympathetic to many current campus leaders–although not all, because some appear to be cowards. But their business is our business, and we need to shoulder it.

As we respond, we must acknowledge the full extent of the threat and contemplate radical responses, including restructuring our institutions to survive. But we must not yield to fatalism. Ian Bogost’s fine article might suggest–although he doesn’t say so explicitly–that the DOGE cuts (and more that will come) are permanent. On the contrary, Trump’s actions can be reversed. His successor would not even need congressional approval, because support for higher education is already required by federal law. And colleges have powerful constituencies distributed across the country.

In short, the battle is joined, but it is by no means lost. The antagonist is not in your campus administration’s building but in the White House. Individual universities may make good or bad choices; so can each of us. A robust debate is essential; consensus is impossible and probably undesirable. We must be citizens, not spectators; sober but not demoralized; realistic and also idealistic as we struggle to make our institutions better than they were before.

podcast on free Speech, democracy, and campus discourse

Posted on November 26, 2024 by Peter

In this episode of Pulse Check, entitled Reclaiming Free Speech, Democracy, and Discourse on Campus: A Post-2024 Election America, I was interviewed by Dr. J. Cody Nielsen. Recorded just days after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, our discussion addressed the election’s implications for higher education, democracy, and meaningful dialogue and civic engagement on college campuses.

Key Takeaways (as summarized by the podcast organizers):

Shifts in Youth Engagement: While youth voter turnout has improved [since the early 2000s], today’s students are more critical of social media’s role in public discourse and democracy.
The Role of Higher Education: Colleges are pivotal in teaching nonviolence, civic history, and bridging ideological divides while navigating heightened polarization.
Practical Civic Education: Institutions must focus on actionable outcomes, like developing research-based initiatives on civic issues rather than performative statements.
Opportunities Amid Challenges: Despite political instability, fostering consensus in civic education and equipping students with tools for nonviolent activism is essential.
Resilience and Positionality: Faculty and administrators, especially those with privilege, must stand up for civic democracy and support those most vulnerable to harm.

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civic themes at #APSA2024

Posted on September 3, 2024 by Peter

Anyone who is attending this year’s annual American Political Science Association meeting in Philadelphia and who is curious about engaged research might consider:

“Cutting Edge Community Empowerment through Civically Engaged Research: A Roundtable Discussion and Panel“

This session will include five original papers and 8 responses, almost all by people who have been part of our annual Institute for Civically Engaged Research (ICER) at Tufts’ Tisch College of Civic Life. There will also be an ICER reception on September 7 from 7:30-9:00 PM, which anyone at APSA can attend. ICER will continue in 2025 and beyond, so these are good opportunities if you think you might be interested.

Another aspect of this year’s meeting is a mini-conference on “Civic Learning on Campus” (part 1 and part 2). One of my contributions to that strand will be a talk about Elinor Ostrom’s 1997 APSA presidential address. In that talk, she defined civic education as learning to address problems of collective action at all scales, not as studying the national government.

Finally, the Civic Studies Group brings you a panel on Innovations and Theories for Public Engagement, with papers on forms of self-governance at the community level.

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a collective model of the ethics of AI in higher education

Posted on August 29, 2024 by Peter

Hannah Cox, James Fisher, and I have published a short piece in an outlet called eCampus News. The whole text is here, and I’ll paste the beginning here:

AI is difficult to understand, and its future is even harder to predict. Whenever we face complex and uncertain change, we need mental models to make preliminary sense of what is happening.

So far, many of the models that people are using for AI are metaphors, referring to things that we understand better, such as talking birds, the printing press, a monster, conventional corporations, or the Industrial Revolution. Such metaphors are really shorthand for elaborate models that incorporate factual assumptions, predictions, and value-judgments. No one can be sure which model is wisest, but we should be forming explicit models so that we can share them with other people, test them against new information, and revise them accordingly.

“Forming models” may not be exactly how a group of Tufts undergraduates understood their task when they chose to hold discussions of AI in education, but they certainly believed that they should form and exchange ideas about this topic. For an hour, these students considered the implications of using AI as a research and educational tool, academic dishonesty, big tech companies, attempts to regulate AI, and related issues. They allowed us to observe and record their discussion, and we derived a visual model from what they said.

We present this model [see above] as a starting point for anyone else’s reflections on AI in education. The Tufts students are not necessarily representative of college students in general, nor are they exceptionally expert on AI. But they are thoughtful people active in higher education who can help others to enter a critical conversation.

Our method for deriving a diagram from their discussion is unusual and requires an explanation. In almost every comment that a student made, at least two ideas were linked together. For instance, one student said: “If not regulated correctly, AI tools might lead students to abuse the technology in dishonest ways.” We interpret that comment as a link between two ideas: lack of regulation and academic dishonesty. When the three of us analyzed their whole conversation, we found 32 such ideas and 175 connections among them.

The graphic shows the 12 ideas that were most commonly mentioned and linked to others. The size of each dot reflects the number of times each idea was linked to another. The direction of the arrow indicated which factor caused or explained another.

The rest of the published article explores the content and meaning of the diagram a bit.

I am interested in the methodology that we employed here, for two reasons.

First, it’s a form of qualitative research–drawing on Epistemic Network Analysis (ENA) and related methods. As such, it yields a representation of a body of text and a description of what the participants said.

Second, it’s a way for a group to co-create a shared framework for understanding any issue. The graphic doesn’t represent their agreement but rather a common space for disagreement and dialogue. As such, it resembles forms of participatory modeling (Voinov et al, 2018). These techniques can be practically useful for groups that discuss what to do.

Our method was not dramatically innovative, but we did something a bit novel by coding ideas as nodes and the relationships between pairs of ideas as links.

Source: Alexey Voinov et al, “Tools and methods in participatory modeling: Selecting the right tool for the job,” Environmental Modelling & Software, vol 19 (2018), pp. 232-255. See also: what I would advise students about ChatGPT; People are not Points in Space; different kinds of social models; social education as learning to improve models

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in defense of institutions as “garbage cans”

Posted on August 27, 2024 by Peter

In a 1972 article that has been cited nearly 15,000 times, Cohen, March and Olsen wrote that “an organization is a collection of choices looking for problems, issues and feelings looking for decision situations in which they might be aired, solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer, and decision makers looking for work. … To understand processes within organizations, one can view a choice opportunity as a garbage can into which various kinds of problems and solutions are dumped by participants as they are generated” (Cohen, March & Olsen 1972).

Cohen and colleagues derived their “garbage-can model” by observing a university. To illustrate it, we might imagine a professor who consistently advocates that a new position be created in a specific field. As time passes, this professor presents her proposal as a solution to many different problems. Sometimes it’s a way of meeting students’ declared needs; other times, a way of preparing them for the job market or challenging their values.

This professor drifts in and out of various conversations, sometimes serving on a key committee, sometimes absent on leave. And she is just one of a few thousand advocates for competing proposals who compose the faculty and the administration. In the institution as a whole, there is no explicit, shared understanding of what problems should be solved. People keep throwing diverse proposals into the bin, with constantly shifting rationales.

This is my hypothetical example, but I think it illustrates the formal model of Cohen et al. (which they represent with a Fortran program). They debunk the assumption that organizations are “vehicles for solving well-defined problems or structures within which conflict is resolved through bargaining.” And they conclude, “It is clear that the garbage can process does not resolve problems well.”

In his classic book from the subsequent decade, Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, John W. Kingdon cites the garbage-can model and comments, “On the face of it, this looks a lot like the federal government” (Kingdon 1984, p. 85). Kingdon develops a respected model of “organized anarchy” to describe US policymaking that draws heavily on the article by Cohen et al. However Kingdon is a bit less judgmental. He notes, “messy processes have their virtues” (p. 183). I would like to explore those benefits.

One basic assumption I would offer is that programs never simply work. Schools, doctor’s appointments, rural development projects, therapy sessions–these things are either beneficial, neutral, or harmful depending on how they are implemented. Human capital is always essential–i.e., the preparation, selection, and motivation of the people involved. And these people must always attend to the specific context and the communities they serve. Therefore, we can hardly ever demonstrate in the abstract that a proposal is the solution to a problem. Instead, individuals and groups are entitled to work on making their favored initiatives beneficial. Individuals ought to be loyal to specific ideas and to the other people who support them.

The other assumption is that we often rationalize when we make arguments. When we say why we favor a decision, the reason we give is not actually the explanation of our view. We originally favored a given position for reasons that are often opaque even to ourselves, and these reasons may involve bias and self-interest. We then come up with rationales for public consumption.

However, the psychologists Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (2017) argue that when we listen to other people rationalize, we are decently good at assessing their arguments and sometimes open to changing our views as a result. Kingdon anticipates their point when he writes about policymaking in Washington, DC:

Even if argumentation is nothing more than rationalization, it is still important. Some events may be governed by lobbying influence or by judgments about clout at the polls, but government officials still try to reason their way through problems.
Kingdon 1984, 126.

Consistent with his account, I would posit that officials mostly “reason” by critically assessing and comparing the rationalizations that are given to them by interested parties.

If these two assumptions are correct, then it may be healthy for an organization to consist of many advocates who are loyal to their own ideas and able to change the rationales for their proposals as their audiences and circumstances shift. Other people should listen to their rationalizations and decide what to do. Those who make proposals should be held accountable for helping to implement them if their ideas are adopted.

To use an example from Kingdon, advocates of federal funds for urban mass transportation first argued that it would cut traffic, then that it would reduce pollution, and then that it would diminish US reliance on foreign oil. A transit advocate told Kingdon, “You want to do something and you ask, ‘What will work this year? What’s hot this year that I can hang this on?” (p. 173).

I know little about mass transit advocates during the period that Kingdon describes (ending in the early ’80s). Some of them may have been self-interested in the narrowest sense, e.g., paid to lobby on behalf of companies that would win contracts to build mass transit. Others may have manifested a higher form of self-interest. For example, if you love New York City, you might have a bias for mass transit, because federal funds for subways would flow to your community. Still others may have favored mass transportation for a mix of reasons, from personal experience to political ideology to loyalty to colleagues.

I don’t think the best question is why people really want what they advocate. The important question is whether the federal government should fund mass transit. Subways and buses are “solutions looking for issues to which they might be the answer.” It is good to have such options.

This example comes from federal policy, but similar behavior is familiar in universities and other parts of civil society. As the winds shift, an advocate of community service may switch her rationale from democracy, to job-training, to social-emotional learning. Again, this is not bad if service projects have some merit. It should not surprise us that the same intervention may serve multiple goals. More importantly, it is not really true or false that service projects are good. They will be beneficial or harmful–for various purposes in various contexts–depending on how the people involved use them. (The same is true of mass transit, which has sometimes had catastrophic effects.) What we want are committed advocates for a range of plausible ideas, and it’s much less important what they advocate.

This means that when I look out at my own institution and others, I am reasonably tolerant of the messiness of what Cohen et al. would call the “garbage can.” A large organization should include many people who have partly incompatible underlying values and who want to do different things. There may be some value to discussing shared goals in larger forums, such as faculty meetings, but we shouldn’t hope for consensus about both means and ends. Key questions are often of this type:

If we did what Person A advocates, would we be able to count on that person and others to carry it forward? How much should we rely on their dedication, ethics, and skill?
If we decided to do what A wants, what are some immediate steps for which we already have the necessary resources, and how far would those steps take us? Do we have a prospect of finding additional support later on?
Since Person B is advocating something else, what can we do for B if we say yes to A? Can we simply acknowledge that B has lost out for now and thank them for their forbearance? Or do we risk losing them? Could we satisfy both A and B? (But what about C and D and E?)

In short, I’m pretty comfortable with moving from an organization-centered model, in which the goal is to “solve well-defined problems,” to a people-centered model, in which the goal is to enable individuals to advocate, act, and thereby grow in skill and wisdom.

This is a case for decentralization and against elaborate planning. I admit that I have a hard time taking strategic planning documents seriously and am much more interested in assessing the commitment and resources of various people in my environment. I have less tolerance for arguments of the form “This should be done” than for arguments that begin, “I want to be able to help us do this.”

I also tend to expect the most dynamic ideas to come from people who are directly involved in the organization’s work (e.g., professors who are currently teaching and researching, or civil servants who conduct federal programs, or indeed their students and service-recipients). I view senior leaders as people whose necessary task is to allocate scarce resources among the ideas that come before them. Leaders should consider the strength of arguments, but they should be equally concerned to attract and retain diverse talent. And, of course, leaders need to be accountable–not only for their specific decisions but also for the overall climate of the organization.

Following the line of argument from Cohen et al. to Kingdon, I have combined a university and the federal government into the same discussion. Obviously, they differ. For one thing, there are almost 3 million federal employees, whose salaries are paid by more than 300 million residents, who affect 7 billion human beings. These numbers are orders of magnitude larger than those in any educational institution. As a result, there must be much more distance between the formal decision-makers in the federal government (members of Congress and the cabinet) and frontline workers than should exist in any university. Still, Kingdon saw genuine similarities, and we might adopt similar fundamental values in both cases.

Sources: Cohen, M. D., March, J. G., & Olsen, J. P. (1972). A garbage can model of organizational choice. Administrative science quarterly, 1-25; Kingdon, J W. 1984/2011. Agendas, Alternatives, and Public Policies, Updated 2nd ed. Longman York, NY: HarperCollins; Mercier, Hugo and Dan Sperber, The Enigma of Reason, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 2017. See also: democracy’s sovereignty; loyalty in intellectual work (from 2017); making our models explicit; a flowchart for collective decision-making in democratic small groups.

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Civic Studies as a response to crises in American higher education

Posted on May 15, 2024 by Peter

This is a panel at the American Enterprise Institute yesterday, part of a daylong conference on “The Future of the American University: Civic Education, Past and Present.” I am on the panel with Justin Dyer, the dean of the new School of Civic Leadership at the University of Texas at Austin, and our moderator, AEI’s Yuval Levin. I made a case for Civic Studies as a new field and then enjoyed the discussion with my two colleagues and the interesting questions from the audience.

The rest of the day was interesting and valuable and can be explored here.

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