Daniel Diermeier is Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, where he has served since 2020.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Daniel Diermeier discuss why American universities are simultaneously world-leading and losing public trust, whether elite higher education creates dangerous separation between the professional class and ordinary Americans, and how the shift from regional to national universities has reshaped American society.
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This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: You’ve been Chancellor of Vanderbilt University since 2020. I assume it’s been a very calm five and a half years.
Daniel Diermeier: It was quite something. I started on July 1, 2020, right in the middle of COVID. So it has basically been one crisis after the other. I think we had maybe one or one and a half years when we were not constantly dealing with another challenge. But despite all of that, we’ve had a great five and a half years. The university is thriving, but it sure has been an interesting time.
Mounk: One of the striking things about higher education in the United States is that it’s both an incredible story of success and is clearly losing the support and respect of a lot of the American population at the same time.
American universities continue to be world leading. Students still want to come to the United States to study over any other country when they have the opportunity. A huge percentage of Nobel Prize winners come from American institutions. The contribution to cutting-edge research is tremendous. The endowments and the facilities that you enjoy at American universities are more luxurious than what you can find in just about any other country in the world. Undergraduate students are treated to incredible opportunities. At the same time, you look at something like the Gallup poll that asks, do you have a lot of trust or some trust or little trust or no trust at all in the higher education sector? Ten years ago, most Americans had trust in higher education. Today, only a little more than a third do.
What is your diagnosis as to why that is happening? What’s the fundamental reason why so many Americans are losing trust in higher ed?
Diermeier: This is exactly the situation we find ourselves in. On the one hand, we have this tremendous history of accomplishment and success. The American universities, as you correctly point out, are still the greatest in the world, both in terms of their educational achievement, their research achievement, and then also their contribution to the innovation economy. So many of the innovations that have transformed our lives have originated in universities. Our university played an enormously important role in that, all the way down to AI and quantum and all of that. So that’s the success story.
The challenges, as you correctly point out, it’s very important for people to realize that this did not start a year ago when Trump took office. We have had an erosion of trust that goes back years. It’s an erosion of trust in universities both from the left and from the right. So the decline happened across the board. It was more pronounced and the decline was steeper on the conservative side, but both on the left and on the right we have seen significant erosion of trust. The concerns are different from the left and from the right.
If you look at this a little bit deeper, the criticism from the left is really that we are elitist. That’s about inequality to a large extent—that we’re inequality machines, that we’re replicating the elite, that we are unaffordable. That is, I think, really overblown. I think that when you look at particularly America’s leading universities, the commitment to financial aid is tremendous.
Mounk: I want to hear what the conservative concerns are that drive this decline in support. I agree with you that there’s a lot of popular misunderstanding about this. People see the sticker price at American universities, which is now huge, and which is often actually the biggest problem for the upper middle class, because really rich people happily pay that much money for their kids to go there.
People who make less than $150,000 a year, as you said, can now go to Vanderbilt for free. A lot of middle-class and upper-middle-class families may end up struggling to pay for their kids’ education, or at least having to save a great deal of money to do so. But the real problem, I think, is not about opportunity so much as about the recreation of a professional-managerial class that has outsized influence in American institutions and effectively runs the country.
I think the smartest objection, and perhaps not the most commonly voiced one, is not that it’s impossible for anybody to go to Vanderbilt because it’s too expensive. The facts don’t bear that out. The smarter objection is that Vanderbilt, Johns Hopkins, Harvard, and similar institutions scour the country for the most talented people. They often find them in really disadvantaged inner-city neighborhoods or in small, neglected, declining industrial towns in the Midwest.
They give people from those places extraordinary opportunities, which they richly deserve, and then turn them into members of a professional-managerial class who live in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, perhaps Chicago, perhaps Tennessee. They go back home twice a year, once for Thanksgiving and once for Christmas, and they lose touch with the rest of the population.
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Contrast that with the German university system, which we’re both from. It has many deep challenges, and I came to England and other countries for my studies for a reason. But most people attend local universities, stay much more involved in their local communities, live in ordinary neighborhoods rather than on campus, and perhaps as a result universities don’t create this kind of professional-managerial overclass in the same way.
Perhaps the fundamental objection many people have today against experts, elites, science, and universities is not that little Joey is talented and can’t get a good education. It’s that little Joey gets a great education and goes off to become a master of the universe in New York, while the people who don’t are governed by a class produced by the country’s leading universities, a class that has become disconnected from them.
Diermeier: So I think that’s really two points you make here and it’s worth unpacking that a little bit. I think one point is that every country has a means of recruiting and then educating the people that run the country fundamentally. And in the United States, that’s the university and especially a residential university.
So just as you say, the model is you leave home and you go to these places, usually far away from home, it’s residential. You don’t live at home like in the European university, but it has huge advantages. You meet people from all sorts of life. You meet people from different regions. You interact with people that you never would interact with in your home environment. So I think that has a lot going for it.
If you always stay in the milieu that you grew up with, you just don’t have that. That I think is something that’s a loss. The second point I think you’re making is that these universities are basically a pipeline towards these regional centers—New York, LA, and so forth. That is historically true. If you look at Vanderbilt’s history, you can see the entire development there. For the first hundred twenty, hundred twenty-five years, we were basically a great regional university. Our nickname was always “the Harvard of the South.” So this was for people that lived in the South, and wanted to get a great education. But the understanding was they would go there, get a great education, maybe meet their life partner, get married, come back and stay in the community.
There were many universities like that. We were like that. Northwestern was like that. Emory was like that. Rice was like that. And then about 25 years ago, we all decided that we’re going to compete nationally. Not everyone did, but most of us did. We became national universities.
We would recruit from across the country, but people will tend to go back to where they came from. So they may have come from New York and then others that had an opportunity would go to New York, Boston, and Chicago, whatever. But that’s changing now, in the last five years. That is driven by macro forces that are, I think, exemplified by what’s happening in universities, but not necessarily driven by them, which is the move of talent from the traditional centers like the coasts or the Midwest to the South.
Texas is booming, Nashville, Tennessee is booming, Florida is booming. Those places are now magnets for talent and we see this from students as well. Public universities in the South are absolutely busting at the seams. We see more people now that go to Nashville—they still may want to go wherever they want to go, but many of them see opportunities in Dallas, in Nashville, in Florida, in Miami. So the dynamism of the South starting in Texas and ending in Florida, I think is really changing that narrative.
Mounk: I see the appeal of moving to Nashville and having visited Vanderbilt a couple of times, I know it’s a wonderful university. But let me say the point one more time in a different way.
I think part of this is a question about regional versus national universities. You’re right to point to that transformation as a very important factor and one that’s perhaps a double-edged sword. I think part of this is about each system having its own way to select an elite and that’s always going to have its own advantages and disadvantages. But I do think that the mode of selection also shapes the nature of the elite.
When I look at Germany, I think one of the good things about the German elite is that it’s quite rooted in different parts of the country, that it’s not very abgehoben.
Part of it is about industrial structure. The biggest German media conglomerate is based in Gütersloh, a city which many American listeners perhaps have never heard of. It’s unimaginable for the biggest American media conglomerate to be based in a similarly insignificant town. People often don’t move from their hometown for universities, they stay in those local communities.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I think all of that has tremendous disadvantages. I think the German political, cultural, and other elite is often quite provincial, and is often insufficiently ambitious. And that has gotten the country into a world of trouble across a number of dimensions. But it also has this advantage that when I talk to really the people who are in charge in Germany in a variety of ways, they feel like they live more or less in the same world as their fellow citizens.
In America, it just strikes me that I’ve been living in this country for 20 years and perhaps this just says bad things about me, but I barely know anybody who didn’t go to college. I barely know anybody who didn’t go to a top 25 university. I barely know anybody who doesn’t have a master’s degree. That’s because when I arrived here, I was doing a PhD at Harvard and I was living in a complete bubble of people.
Now, when you look at the social, ethnic, and national backgrounds, it’s a very diverse set of people. When you look at what the educational trajectory was, they were all the best in their high school. They all went off to good colleges. They all got into good grad programs. They all, to varying extents, are very successful today. They all make six figures today, unless they’ve made very deliberate choices that precluded them from doing that.
So it’s just very easy for the American elite, even in a broad sense, to become far removed from the average population. On the plus side, they’re surrounded by the brightest minds from an early age, there’s much more ambition, they end up founding AI companies, getting Nobel Prizes and feeling at the age of 28 that they can go and do something in the world in a way that I think is very rare for people in Europe, sadly. When I look at the level of ambition of students in America, it’s much higher than our students in Europe and there are lots of good things about it. But the bad part about it is that it separates this professional managerial class—and not just the top 10,000 people, the top two million people in the country—from the rest of the population in a much more extreme way than when it’s the case in a place like Germany. Do you think that’s a fair complaint or am I getting something wrong?
Diermeier: I think it’s an interesting perspective and very much worth thinking about. It’s always helpful to contextualize this a little bit historically. This is different from European countries. America is a vast country. It’s an immigration country where people come from all sorts of parts of the world.
There is a really important value in bringing people from different parts of the country together to get to know each other as friends and members of one community. That is a very valuable thing. Especially post-Civil War when really so many of the public universities were founded and many of the great research universities that—not all of them, but many—Stanford, Hopkins were all founded after the Civil War.
Vanderbilt’s mission statement, when Cornelius Vanderbilt founded us, said the goal was to found the great university that brings together all the parts of a divided country. That was the idea. So I think the historical mission of the American university to do just that has been enormously successful.
That’s bringing together different backgrounds, culturally, regionally, and so forth. What you’re pointing out is something very important, where what people now call the college divide or the degree divide is that the cultural differences in this country correlate now largely, or to a much larger extent than before with whether you have a college degree or not. That is both academic, that is both economic opportunity and success, but more importantly, I think, values. So the value divide that you have and the political divide now cuts through that. That is clearly manifesting itself politically, it’s manifesting itself in this backlash against universities in a different way. Now, what do you do about that?
We don’t want to give up the model that this is a place where we bring together these exceptionally talented individuals from across the country, from very different backgrounds. We help them not only to get a great education, but we want to prepare them for a role as citizens in a democratic and free society, where they can interact with people from different backgrounds and so forth. But we cannot lose the connection with people that did not go to these places.
Now I’ll give you something that may sound completely off, but I actually do think this is important. One thing that we do very intentionally is we are very much connected with our community. We were connected with our medical center that provides Medicaid, so there’s community presence as a force for good. That’s number one. One important way in which the community really connects with us is through college athletics. There is a shared communal aspect but the communal aspect of sharing that experience is a powerful thing.
Bottom line, no matter what we do, whether through community engagement, athletics, or the arts, that bond with the community needs to be strengthened. The last thing I should say: we have to be super careful that the values that are more common in rural communities, in communities that are not knowledge centers, are represented and discussed and respected inside the university.
I think a particularly toxic component of this is contempt for people that have different beliefs than oneself. That’s fueling a lot of the anger and the backlash against universities. But that is a job that we need to do inside the university. It’s not just driven by where we recruit locally or nationally.
Mounk: That brings us naturally to the next topic. We were talking about analyzing why some on the left have been critical of universities and what their fundamental complaint is. As you were saying, there has been a decline in left-wing support for universities, but there’s an even steeper decline among conservatives in the United States. What is the nature of the complaint about American universities from the right?
Diermeier: One simple way to say this: the left thinks we’re inequality machines, the right thinks we’re woke factories. Everybody thinks we are unaffordable and badly run—bureaucratic with too much overhead and all of that. That’s the situation in a nutshell.
Mounk: Having been a member of many institutions in Europe as well as the United States, every institution has too much bureaucracy. American universities are in certain ways inefficient and bureaucratic. My God, are they more efficient and less bureaucratic than any European university I have ever been in touch with.
Diermeier: I think that’s true, but we can do a lot better too. I think we can lean in more. This is an underappreciated component of the whole debate that requires a lot of thought and intentionality and sometimes doesn’t happen. Sometimes people that work in universities feel this is beneath them, to worry about how facilities are operating. But I think that’s a managerial problem that with intent and better management practices can be fixed.
The woke thing is really interesting. After the Trump administration took office, there was talk about an endowment tax, basically an excise tax that would particularly hit wealthy private universities. There was a lot of conversation on that. I spent a huge amount of time in Washington talking to members of Congress, members of the administration. The original proposals were very harsh.
Mounk: Well, one of the striking things about it was that at least in one version of a proposed bill, it would take effect just about if you had about $100 million more than Notre Dame University because they didn’t want Notre Dame to be taxed. So they put it just above Notre Dame.
Diermeier: Yeah, that’s the political process, right? Notre Dame is now subject to the endowment tax, and so are we, but at a lower level. If you are like the most well-endowed universities, it’s pretty material and has a direct impact on what you can do.
The reason I’m mentioning this is that endowments are used for financial aid and to support faculty research. They are basically the accumulated stock of philanthropic support of generations. So you’re basically taxing philanthropy that supports these universities. That’s a pretty extraordinary thing to do, and I think it was a wake-up call for all of us.
But even more striking is what people would say. When you meet with senators or members of Congress more generally, members of the House, their staff, there were astonishing things that people said. People on the right would basically say something like this—and it’s almost a reflection of the conversation we just had: We know you’re educating the leaders of this country and we don’t like what’s coming out the other side.
We’re giving you billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars in research funding and student aid, and you’re creating graduates that hate America. That’s the statement. The second thing is, they said, we will use all tools at our disposal to make sure that that changes.
Mounk: Is there truth to that statement?
Diermeier: Well, the leverage that Congress and the administration have is on taxes, research funding and all that stuff. The post-October 7th drama with Harvard and all of that—that’s all driven by that concern.
Now I think “hate America” is clearly an exaggeration for rhetorical purposes, but that’s what people said. The problem, the way I see it, is this political drift of universities is a reality. It has been happening for years and manifesting itself in multiple ways.
The debate over free speech, which really started in earnest around 2015. That’s when speakers were canceled, and we had speech codes. You remember the Halloween costume controversy at Yale? The Christakises—that was one chapter.
Mounk: I remember it well.
Diermeier: The next big chapter, of course, was October 7th and the debate over institutional neutrality. Then there’s the next chapter, which is DEI. Now the newest thing, which is really the most important one, is what happens in the classroom. The concern now is that there is political bias, ideological capture and lack of viewpoint diversity. These are all different ways to talk about a phenomenon. They have different meanings and they need to be carefully parsed. But that’s what’s happening in the classroom. It’s happening in research publications. It’s happening in professional associations. It’s pervasive.
The root cause of that—at least the way I think it makes the most sense—is the concern that we are subverting scholarly standards, scholarly and educational standards, to a political ideology. That’s the big problem. That manifests itself now in different ways: free speech constraints, institutional neutrality, DEI and so forth.
The problem is that there is a group among students, but also very importantly faculty that have a particular political point of view and that’s pushing a lot of these things. Then, the flip side of that is that presidents and boards have not reacted to that at all, I would say. Or not all of them and not coherently enough. Over the last weeks, there’s been a big debate about faculty recruitment and discrimination in faculty recruitment inspired by an article in Compact Magazine. It’s certainly true when I talk to friends of mine that they have experienced in hiring committees explicitly illegal justifications for how to proceed, justifications by the way that would have been illegal even before the recent Supreme Court ruling about affirmative action.
Mounk: This feels to me like a dog that hasn’t quite barked yet in the broader public debate about universities, in part because so many people who probably could sue are worried that they would be completely blackballed from academia and therefore have not done so.
It seems likely to me that this issue is going to move not to the very center of the debate, but more centrally into it over the next few years, in one way or another. What is your view on this? Do you think there has been large-scale illegal discrimination on the basis of race and gender in faculty hiring at American universities? Do you think this will move more toward the center of the debate around higher education?
Diermeier: We just can’t have that. That’s the long and the short of it. As you point out, even if you are a strong supporter of race-conscious admissions, that’s about student admissions. That’s not about faculty hiring. Faculty hiring based on race or protected category issues was illegal all the time. You just can’t have that. It’s illegal. You can’t do it. When you find evidence of that, you have to stop it. It’s not that simple.
Now, how broad and how widespread that was is very difficult to say. My worry is that some universities just basically took a casual approach to that, in part because maybe they supported it deep down, and maybe also because university faculty hiring is very decentralized. I have to tell you, if you force diversity statements or you put a DEI representative on search committees, you shouldn’t be surprised that this is happening. People understand the cues and they act accordingly. All of that, I hope, is changing.
Blatantly illegal behavior is part of the past. It’s good that we are talking about it, but we can’t have it. That’s just that simple.
The same is true of discriminating hiring based on political viewpoint. Same thing. Faculty need to be hired based on their scholarly expertise, full stop. That’s it. I’ve been pretty vocal on that in the past. I think this is a very important thing. I don’t know how widespread it is. We’ll have to tackle it whenever it occurs.
Mounk: I’m curious about how you think about this. You were saying that the idea that these universities are producing graduates who hate America is an overstatement for rhetorical purposes, and I certainly co-sign that. I can see, however, why conservatives might feel unwelcome on campus for two subtly but importantly different reasons.
The first is that there is a supermajority of people on campus who deeply dislike the Republican Party and who probably do not recognize that there is a rich conservative tradition that would be worth taking seriously, even if, like me, you have very fundamental objections to Donald Trump. This, of course, in some ways comes downstream from some of the things we talked about in the first strand of our conversation.
It is now the case, I think, across the professional and general elite of the United States that we have seen strong polarization by educational status. The best predictor of whether somebody votes for Democrats or Republicans now is not income and not a bunch of other things. It is how educated you are. Obviously, at the educational institutions that mint that educational elite, you are going to have a supermajority of people on one side of the political aisle.
That does, I think, inflect how we think about ourselves and our blind spots in important ways. I remember many years ago, at Harvard Kennedy School, being at a dinner in which a speaker claimed that conservatives have a lot more money than progressives in American politics. They had basically counted up the budgets of all the explicitly conservative institutions—the Heritage Foundation and those kinds of places—as well as the explicitly progressive institutions, like the Roosevelt Institute. They found that the conservative institutions had more money.
I said, well, what about this dinner? We are sitting at the nicest restaurant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with ten endowed professors who all had chairs at Harvard Kennedy School, all paid for by the lavish means of this institution. It was assumed as a ticket of entry—unspoken, just unimaginable—that somebody sitting there might not support the Democratic Party or might not be on the left side of the political aisle. All of that in the study had been counted as neutral money because Harvard, of course, is a nonpartisan 501(c)(3) charitable institution.
I do not think this is because of some conspiracy by the president of Harvard or the chancellor of Vanderbilt. It is not even really a conscious conspiracy by many of those professors who, by the way, have perfectly reasonable views. These were not radicals. These were mostly center-left liberal faculty members. In that milieu, it is simply assumed that you are on the left, in a way that would understandably make even a very reasonable, moderate conservative feel quite unwelcome and feel like they always have to watch themselves.
There is a second problem, which I think affects a minority of faculty members. That problem certainly exists. It involves faculty members who feel both motivated and empowered to use the classroom to impose their political views on students. I see this when I emphasize to students at the beginning of the term that I am going to play devil’s advocate and push points of view that I feel are under-voiced in the discussion.
I want them to bring their whole selves to the discussion. I want them to actually say what they think. I grade papers on the quality of the argument. I do not care whether I agree with the argument or not. I care that they make the argument as strongly and cogently as they can. It takes repeating this point a few times, and then seeing me in action in the classroom for a few weeks, for them to start trusting that I actually mean it.
I do sometimes hear from students, “I just got accustomed to writing in papers what I could tell my professor believed, because otherwise I might get a bad grade.” I do not think that is the case for most faculty members. It is enough, however, that students experience that a few times early in their education for them to learn the lesson: jump through the hoop, echo what my professors say, do not rock the boat.
GPA is a huge issue here. There is grade inflation. Everybody gets an A or an A-minus in most courses. One class where you get a B-minus because your professor is upset with what you were saying for ideological reasons is really going to push down your GPA. It is just not worth the risk. Are these two complaints fair and legible to you?
Diermeier: I think the evidence is super strong that this is certainly the case among students and even among faculty. What you call this kind of unspoken consensus, I would think of as an institutional orthodoxy. Those are the types of things that are just part of being part of an institution, and you stick out like a sore thumb if you’re not part of that.
The important part is that this is not destiny. You can do things to prevent it. What we’re finding right now is that the evidence is just mounting—survey evidence from students, from faculty, from what’s happening in classrooms—that this is a real problem. It is clearly a political problem. It is an educational problem, because students are no longer engaging with each other in serious debates and discussions. That is something you can do something about. That is not a given. There is no natural law or anything like that.
We were very concerned about this already when I arrived. What you do is you get clear about your principles. In our case, the principles are a commitment to free speech, what we call open forums, institutional neutrality, and what we call civil discourse, which is that you use arguments and reasoning and you don’t ostracize each other just because they have a different point of view. Remember, they’re members of one community. That’s number one.
Then you have to act accordingly when things get tough, like during October 7th, because people pay attention to that—whether you’re doing that, whether you’re even considering having BDS as part of your endowment or not. Those are important things that reinforce or challenge this institutional orthodoxy.
There is also a very important component on the student side, which I think is again underappreciated. We do enormously thoughtful and intentional work to recruit students to Vanderbilt, to attract students to Vanderbilt who have what you just described. They talk with each other. They’re curious. They have serious debates with each other. Still, even though we talk about it and have this framework, they’re worried. They’re worried because in their high schools they were not prepared for that, since the institutional orthodoxy is already present in their high school environment.
The result is that they come in, and first we have them all sign a pledge. These are our values. This is what we hold dear, just like an honor code. Then there is programming. The critical thing we’ve learned, however, is that the biggest problem is that they are worried they’re going to say something their peers consider outrageous and then be ostracized and excluded from parties. That’s their biggest fear.
At the core, you need to create a relationship of trust among students that this is how we do things around here. We’ve developed a whole program around that called Dialogue Vanderbilt. That’s the key.
Mounk: Tell us about that, because I agree that when I speak to students, the fear of a professor giving a bad grade is real—particularly in certain institutions. It is less so in my own, but I have heard it a lot in some other institutions, and it is certainly something that motivates students.
Part of campus life, part of that pressure-cooker environment, is that you are around your peers 24/7. You are not part of the normal community most people inhabit. The fear of saying something in the classroom that somebody takes objection to, or perhaps exaggerates, or perhaps completely distorts, and then makes a TikTok about—after which all of your neighbors, your suitemates, and the people you are friends with are no longer going to talk to you—is certainly real and very vivid in the minds of students.
I think part of the problem with the contemporary American university is that, in some ways, administrators decide too much for students. How, then, can a university shape a culture that remedies this without making the entire social scene even more one in which the assumed referee for everything is some student-life administrator who may themselves have quite strong ideological leanings and who may actually be part of the problem?
Diermeier: This is exactly the wrong way to do it. Having the administration constantly adjudicate this debate or that one is exactly the wrong approach. I want to start by telling you what the results are, and then I’m going to tell you what we’ve done and how we deal with this. Let me give you just a couple of pieces of evidence. We have very strong College Republicans and College Democrats on campus, and they jointly organized a debate entirely on their own, with no involvement from us, right before the presidential election. On most campuses, College Democrats and College Republicans do not even talk to each other. After Trump was shot, they issued a joint statement condemning the shooting and reaffirming their commitment to civil discourse. What we are seeing is students accepting that this is how we do things around here. It becomes a culture.
One of the most popular classes on our campus, which I think you’ll appreciate, is called Free Speech and Dangerous Ideas. There are about 450 sophomores in the class, and all they do is talk about controversial topics. Several things need to happen. Let me highlight a couple. First, the commitment to free speech has to be active. It cannot just be something you put in your bylaws. It has to be operationalized. What that means, for example, is that every registered student group or faculty member can bring any speaker to campus as they see fit. This is a commitment we have had since 1964. In 1967, for example, students organized what was called the Impact Symposia, where they brought Strom Thurmond and Stokely Carmichael to campus. You can imagine what that did at the time. That is how we do things around here.
Let me give you a more recent example, because the practical details are critical. Three weeks after October 7th, we had a strong chapter of Young Americans for Freedom on campus, a conservative student organization, and they brought a speaker to campus named Michael Knowles, a very conservative speaker who tends to attract controversy. The topic of his talk, three weeks after October 7th, was “In Praise of Settler Colonialism.” You can imagine that many of our students were very unhappy about that, but students have the right to bring anyone to campus as they see fit. It is not checked by us. It is not controlled by us. Other students can protest, but they cannot disrupt. We do not have a heckler’s veto. As you might imagine, this created a stir in the student community. I later had a discussion with the student newspaper, The Hustler. They said this was terrible, that it just created controversy, and they made the usual arguments. We sat down and said: let’s think about this. How should we do this in general? There are three doors. Door one is that we have no speakers on campus, because people can always be controversial. Door two is that students and faculty decide, as part of academic freedom. Door three is that I decide, or a committee I appoint decides. Of course, everybody wants door two.
Mounk: What they actually want is door four, which is that magically I decide, and people who think like me decide, and the sensitive decision always aligns with what I prefer. This is the door people always imagine exists in these free speech discussions.
Diermeier: Exactly. The important point is that the mechanism is critical. By making these decisions, you are implicitly adopting a governance mechanism for how decisions are made. You want to think about the mechanism, not about every individual case. That was a good moment for us as a university community, and people understood it.
We have not had any disruptions or speakers being shouted down. That is just part of the culture. You have to do it, and you have to reemphasize the principle when these controversies arise. The culture is reinforced in other ways as well. We have student ambassadors as part of Dialogue Vanderbilt, built into an advisory board that now has more than 150 members. There was so much demand for this that we expanded it to freshmen as well. You have to do a lot of things to signal that this is how we do things around here.
The last thing I would mention is that our faculty, through the Faculty Senate, recently passed a resolution on academic freedom. It was about as good as one could hope for. The vote was something like 56 to 4. That shows that the faculty is buying into this as well—not everyone, not all the time, but as part of the culture. This requires multiple things: principles, creating a culture, and then practicing it. Practicing it matters, because practice is how you reinforce that this is how we do things around here.
Mounk: This is what strikes me about this moment in universities. I think the societal trends do provide significant headwinds in terms of the partisan polarization by educational status, because of a number of other factors we’ll get to in the conversation. What strikes me is the reluctance of many university leaders to actually explain, both to the outside world and to the university community, what the university should be for.
This is not to say that they should impose political views on the university community. They certainly should not. They should be able to formulate basic principles like academic freedom and its importance to a culture of successful inquiry in convincing ways. So few of them try. This, to me, was the most striking lesson from those famous congressional hearings about anti-Semitism, to which the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn, I believe it was, had been invited.
It’s not that they made a couple of missteps under hostile questioning. It’s not that there are some incidents on those campuses which perhaps are really open to criticism. It’s that they made no concerted attempt to use this moment to speak to the American public about this is who we are, this is what our principles are, this is why we have great institutions that are actually doing something valuable that you should care about. It’s that unwillingness or inability to formulate that basic case which, to me, was infuriating.
Diermeier: I totally agree. I think there’s a reason why this is so difficult for many university leaders. We’ve seen mission drift. From my point of view—and it’s certainly what’s happening at Vanderbilt, and was happening at the University of Chicago as well—our mission, our purpose, is utterly clear. It’s about path-breaking research and a transformative education.
It’s about the creation of knowledge and then its dissemination or transmission. That’s what we do. We are not a political party. We’re not part of a political movement. That means we need to resist the temptation to act like one. That’s the whole essence of this debate over institutional neutrality. It is not about that. Our business is to create a platform where people can debate stuff. We want to encourage debate, not settle it, unless it is directly connected to the university.
The problem is that once you have a specific incident—just like in the free speech example—the pressure to take sides is super high. People do it, and then it drifts, and then the ship drifts a little bit more. It’s a little bit like a sailboat without a keel. Every time the wind moves, it drifts a little bit. The wind typically moves from one side, so things keep drifting in that direction.
Take an example. You have the Dobbs decision on abortion. Tennessee is a trigger-law state. That means the moment the Supreme Court decision came down, abortion became illegal in the state of Tennessee. That affects the university community directly. Institutional neutrality, just to be clear, means you focus on issues that directly affect universities and remain silent on issues that are beyond the purpose or core mission of the university.
Abortion is an interesting case. How do you think about it? Some universities said that the Dobbs decision—Berkeley, for example—is inconsistent with the mission of the university. That prohibiting or removing Roe v. Wade, a federal right to access abortion, is inconsistent with the mission of the university.
What we said is that we don’t have critics, and we don’t have a point of view on the Supreme Court. I don’t pretend to be a constitutional lawyer. My faculty has views all over the place. Some think Roe v. Wade was right. Some think it was decided incorrectly on constitutional grounds but is good public policy. That is exactly the kind of debate you want to have on campus.
What you don’t want to say is that a Supreme Court decision—which is not about the educational mission of the university, but about abortion generally—is inconsistent with the mission of the university. Think about how that feels if you are a law school professor who has written for thirty years that Roe v. Wade was decided incorrectly. Suddenly, your teaching is inconsistent with the purpose of the university.
That kind of thing goes on all the time. It has gone on in many different ways. You have to be clear about your mission, and then you have to act accordingly, even when it’s difficult. That’s the key. That has not happened.
When you then try to explain it to people, the problem is that you say, “We have a commitment to free speech,” and people look at the record and say, “No, you don’t. Here’s example one, two, three, four.” That’s the problem.
Mounk: I think certainly in the debate on free speech, including after October 7th, my position for a long time had been that many universities were in an impossible position because they had acted badly for many years before that. They had often censored people because of their viewpoints. They had often prosecuted students for saying things they did not like, in various ways, and punished them. They also had not properly imposed the one thing that every advocate of free speech agrees is important, which is limits on time, place, and manner. They had allowed students to disrupt events and so on, and had abandoned that over the last fifty years.
Suddenly, when universities were saying on the one hand that they were not going to punish genocidal speech, one community on campus said, why are you not punishing people for that if you are punishing people for all kinds of other things? On the other hand, Palestinian students understandably said, hang on a second. Suddenly you are telling us we cannot put up tents and cannot do all these things, but during Occupy Wall Street and all these other instances you did not take any action. That consistency over time is extremely important.
You were saying that the wind mostly blows from one side. In terms of the university community, that has for a long time been true. Right now, however, the wind is suddenly blowing in a rather gusty manner from the other side. The Trump administration was expected to be hostile to higher education in a number of ways, but it has taken much more robust and extreme actions than many had expected.
This includes the endowment tax you were talking about. It also includes direct targeting of particular universities, intense scrutiny of federal funding of universities, the cancellation of student visas for students who express disfavored viewpoints, and a whole host of other things.
How can a university that is serious about free speech stand up for those values at a time when doing so incurs huge financial risks? It turns out that even affluent private universities are deeply dependent on the financial support of the federal government. What has Vanderbilt done in response to this? What have other universities done? What do you think universities can do to protect academic freedom against a White House that is, I think, in many key ways, attacking it?
Diermeier: The description that the wind is blowing rather gustily from the other side right now is of course exactly correct. I think what you have right now is an administration that, as we said before, believes that universities have lost their way, have drifted dramatically to the left and they want to use every tool in their arsenal to fix that or to change that.
In the rest of this conversation, Yascha and Daniel discuss how the Trump administration is undermining free speech in universities and what the long-term impact of this will be. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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