President Pano Kanelos: How We Sustain Diversity of Thought

Our university may well offer some lessons to older legacy institutions in how to sustain intellectual pluralism.

This article was originally published in The Boston Globe on October 28.

A new academic year has set a new tone for higher education in America. College convocations have inaugurated a fresh start, a new chance for students, faculty, and administrators to come together and rededicate themselves to the ideals that bind their scholarly communities.

We are coming off a jarring year for higher education. The litany of post-Oct. 7, 2023, conflagrations exposed ideological double standards at many elite universities. Yet there are signs that some institutions are attempting to course correct. Leaders of Ivy League institutions like Harvard University and Dartmouth College have made a point to urge their students to accept different points of view. At the University of Pennsylvania, Stanford University, and elsewhere, governing boards have formally adopted policies of “institutional neutrality,” preventing their institutions from taking official positions on political issues.

“Be prepared to defend your point of view,” Harvard President Alan Garber said in his convocation address to the Harvard Class of 2028 on Sept. 2. “Be prepared to articulate points of view that are different from your own. Be prepared, most of all, to change your mind.”

These are all welcome changes and no doubt meant in good faith. But they are also self-evidently reactive. If a university rediscovers the principles of intellectual and academic freedom only among the shattered glass of its windows and the scrubbed-out obscenities on its walls, the work of undoing a long-standing political monoculture and fostering a truly intellectually pluralistic community has only begun.

It takes a deeper and more intentional commitment to ensure that institutions of higher learning 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 dismissed after equivocating before Congress about antisemitism on her campus — remarked that “by quieting Penn’s institutional voice, we hope to amplify the expertise and voices within.”

I would argue that the role of the institution is not simply to amplify but to see that the “voices within” are polyphonic and that all are committed to the foundational conditions that foster truth-seeking, open inquiry, and civil discourse.

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

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

Encouraging tolerance of different viewpoints and tamping down institutional opining are helpful measures, but if a commitment to intellectual freedom and the measures that sustain it are not codified into the rules and principles that govern the institution, the shadows of censorship and ideological conformity will loom once again.

At the University of Austin, we have formally enshrined our commitment to the principles of open inquiry and civil discourse. Every year, our faculty and staff gather with public intellectuals and outside scholars at an annual First Principles Summit, where we reflect on how we’ve been adhering to our founding ideals and in what areas we can improve. This self-assessment holds us all accountable to each other and to external stakeholders.

Our student experience is grounded in dialogue and the unfettered exchange of ideas. We insist that all opinions must be heard but also that all opinions must be backed up by evidence. We abide by the Chatham House Rule, which holds that ideas expressed in class cannot be shared with attribution outside the classroom without the permission of the speaker, to alleviate the fear of malicious social media exposure and encourage an atmosphere of trust around the seminar table.

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

Any institution, no matter how mission-driven or unified in purpose, can expect to entertain disputes. The mark of a healthy institution, however, is found in the procedures it has in place to address such moments. The University of Austin constitution includes a judicial review system that allows anyone in our community who feels their academic freedom or spirit of inquiry has been violated to bring that matter up for adjudication to an outside, wholly independent body. This avoids the traditional pitfalls of star chambers and oblique processes. This panel’s decision will be binding, much like that of a supreme court.

The University of Austin does not open its doors this year with the intent of shutting out the tumult of the outside world. But with our commitment to open inquiry bolstered 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 to emerge better prepared to serve the core purpose of higher education — the perpetual pursuit of truth.

Pano Kanelos is the Founding President of the University of Austin.