After Donald Trump’s election on Nov. 7, The Economist recently reported, European leaders gathered to “Trump proof” their foreign policy. They worked out responses to anticipated changes, such as the demand that Europe address its trade surplus, increase defense spending, and perhaps make a few concessions to big tech. 

Within a matter of weeks, however, they found themselves living in a very different reality: President Trump and his team embarked on a shakedown of Ukraine for its mineral resources, glad-handed with Putin, supported a German party with Nazi-adjacent members, and announced an intention to annex Greenland.

I feel some sympathy for those non-plussed European leaders. On January 20, I wrote a letter to President Trump outlining ways that his administration might enact federal polices to support HxA’s mission. My suggestions included: ending political litmus tests in the hiring and promotion of faculty; implementing Title IX regulations that prevent discrimination without infringing on academic freedom or due process; navigating campus unrest while protecting free speech; and thoughtfully addressing antisemitism on campus.

Within a few weeks, however, we campus reformers found ourselves living in a very different reality. A total pause of federal funding, later overruled by a judge, threw universities’ budgets across the country into chaos. An executive order moved universities to end required DEI statements in hiring. But the breadth of that order also cast a chill over research and teaching on a great variety of topics. Nonresident graduate students have been arrested on the streets and face deportation for their political activism. Most recently, Columbia’s interim president Katarina Armstrong yielded to a federal demand to place its department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies into receivership, (among other measures) to avoid a $400 million funding cut—and then resigned from her post.

In periods of sturm and drang, it is helpful for membership organizations to be mindful of the problems the organization was formed to solve and the specific manner by which they go about that work. So, in this month’s letter, I’d like to share with you how we see this moment, and what we at HxA think today’s changing circumstances say about our roles as agents of change. 

HxA’s mission is to build a culture of open inquiry in higher education. In 2015, Jon Haidt, Chris Martin, and Nicholas Rosenkranz, formed HxA as they and other scholars worried that our universities were falling short of the ideal of open inquiry. 

First and foremost, as a result of a 50-year trend, our universities had become increasingly ideologically narrow. Some data on faculty political leanings show that a Left-to-Right ratio of 2:1 in the 1960s ballooned to a ratio of more than 12:1 ratio by 2020. This imbalance is unprecedented in modern times, and demographic analyses suggest that it is poised to become even more extreme.

Of course, as I have written elsewhere, over the past 50+ years our universities also saw a remarkable improvement of viewpoint diversity with the arrival on campus of historically excluded groups—women and people of color most notably. That was an enormously important and welcome development. Nonetheless, the sharp decline of viewpoint diversity on the political dimension contributed to a second obstacle: the concern that universities have become political echo chambers, increasingly operating separately from and alien to wider society.

In recent years since HxA was founded, universities increasingly became dominated by a censorious, conformity-demanding culture that is again unique in the history of the modern of American university. To take one example: there were more faculty cancellations during “the Great Awokening” than during the Red Scare of the McCarthy era. In recent years, the excesses of DEI and the gender ideology movement worked as accelerants to the creation of campus cultures that are deeply and punitively censorious, rather than intellectually generous and open to inquiry.

So these are the two great cultural obstacles to inquiry that HxA was formed to address. But over the past two years, two new threats to open inquiry have stepped onto this (increasingly crowded) stage.

Third, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, cancel culture became an activist movement that, in some instances, was so deeply and unreflectively anti-zionist that it merged into outright antisemitism. To be clear, this is not in any way to say that Israel’s historic policies toward the Palestinians, or their current conduct of the war against Hamas, are justified: as an open inquiry organization focused on reforming higher education, HxA takes no organizational view on such political issues. But incidents of antisemitism on American campuses have spiked dramatically since 2023. And this threat to open inquiry and the idea of conversation-across-differences does concern us.

Now, finally, our fourth actor is ready to step on stage. Partly in response to the obstacles to open inquiry just listed—the increasing ideological homogenization of the faculty, the rise of cancel culture, and the emergence of open antisemitism—politicians, most notably Republicans, have begun intervening on campuses. Some of the interventions have been positive, for example, bills that eliminated speech codes and bills that ended the use of DEI statements as ideological filters in faculty hiring or promotion. But too many of these interventions put open inquiry at risk. Unlike the earlier threats to open inquiry, these threats do not arise from misgovernance or negligence within the university but from political actors who are responding to the internal failures of universities themselves.

Unfortunately, politicians have often intervened in ways that generate a new species of threat to open inquiry. The Stop Woke Act in Florida was the first shot across the bow, but the election of Donald Trump, with the enormous financial power of the federal government behind him, and his sledgehammer approach to solving the real problems in higher education, has elevated the political threat to universities to a historically unprecedented level. 

What does all of this mean for HxA? 

Well, first, and most obviously, it means that HxA, instead of confronting the problem of stubbornly entrenched, slow-moving institutional structures, is now operating in a highly fluid and unpredictable environment. Some HxA members have long believed university leaders would only begin supporting our change-efforts if they first experienced some kind of exogenous shock. Arguably, the Trump administration’s interventions in universities is a shock of that sort. But even if true, that gives us no guidance on how best to navigate this new (and still-emerging) set of campus realities. Nor would it help us understand what attitude might be most appropriate for this challenging moment.

Allow me to make some suggestions on each of these points. 

First, I’d like to emphasize that, while the news cycles are (understandably) focused on the threats to open inquiry posed by (ham-handed) political interventions, HxA must not forget that the first set of obstacles to open inquiry of higher ed’s own creation are still real and pressing obstacles to open inquiry. Yes, we must continue to defend open inquiry against governmental interventions that threaten that value. But even if such a defense were successful (or if this political moment should pass), our existing universities are still not genuinely open to diverse viewpoints and they do not celebrate and practice open inquiry. With political fireworks exploding around us, it takes discipline to remember those deep and long lasting obstacles to open inquiry, and to continue our steady work–in the classroom, in departments and disciplines, on campus, and in the realm of policy–to address them.

Second, through this cycle of political change and those yet to come, we must remember that we are an organization of academic insiders. A year ago, anticipating the emergence of political action directed at universities, HxA created a policy team. We see our policy work as mainly setting the conditions in which our insider approach to cultural change can be most effective. But at the end of the day, the quality of campus culture depends upon the scholarly attitudes and practices of campus exemplars, like each and every one of you. However the political situation shakes out, each of you has it in your power to model the HxA way in your role as teachers, researchers, and members of your departments, universities and disciplines.

We seem to be entering a period where our universities will be re-setting their relationship with the wider society that supports them. During such an adjustment, focusing on these more local and concrete ways of being change-agents may provide you with positive ways to contribute, and perhaps give you a sense of certainty in uncertain times. As this process matures, you may find that your university leaders—themselves looking for positive and principled paths forward—may be ready to consider anew HxA’s vision of open inquiry and the knowledge-seeking university. HxA stands ready to help them.