At the close of my Inauguration Day note, I reminded you of a famous line from Frederick Douglass: “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.” Over the past two weeks, the team at HxA and I have been reminded how difficult that precept can be to follow in practice. But we have also been reminded of some hidden power lying deep within this approach: good things sometimes occur even when they are not intended or even foreseen.

It was only last August that HxA recruited Joe Cohn, the long-time and legendary leader of the legislative team at FIRE, to join HxA and build our policy team. Most recently, our policy team helped write HxA’s first-ever letter to an incoming US president, which we sent to President Trump on the occasion of his inauguration. That letter identified four federal priorities that could help advance HxA’s mission: (1) ending political litmus tests in the hiring and promotion of faculty; (2) implementing fair Title IX Regulations that curtail discrimination without violating faculty academic freedom or due process rights; (3) protecting free speech on campus; and (4) thoughtfully addressing antisemitism on college campuses.

And then the storm hit. Within the first two weeks of President Trump’s return to office, we counted no less than four Executive Orders and at least 5 other executive actions bearing directly on higher education. These actions were capped by the now infamous Office and Management Memo of January 29, an overly broad and we believe reckless order pausing the disbursement of federal funds, including many that support ongoing research projects at universities. Within 24 hours that order was itself paused by a court, and within 48 hours was rescinded by the Trump administration.

HxA’s policy team swung into action and has been working at breakneck speed to study each action so we could engage productively. HxA is politically non-partisan, so we evaluate each federal action not by which political party it came from, but strictly in terms of its impact on HxA’s long-standing goal of improving the quality of teaching and research at colleges and universities by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement.

Applying the principle of de-politicization to our own work, we support any actions at the government level and on the ground at institutions that steer universities to affirm the search for knowledge and truth as their primary mission, and that lead people to support the related principles of open inquiry and de-politicized funding for research. Members interested in these policy questions can see some early fruit of our policy team’s efforts as several institutions we urged to adopt policies on institutional statement neutrality, including the University of Pennsylvania, University of Michigan, and Yale University, formally did so.

President Trump campaigned on the promise to reform our “broken” system of higher education. While the early reform orders have been decidedly mixed in terms of advancing HxA’s values—including some that give us serious pause— there can be no doubt that we have entered a new policy environment. We anticipate seeing many more executive orders, administrative memos, proposed regulations, and no doubt legislative proposals (state and federal) all marching under the banner of “university reform.”

Along with entering a new policy environment—in terms of pace and density of regulatory outputs—the team at HxA is also aware that we have entered a new communications environment as well. "Flooding the zone" is a distinct and self-aware strategy, as the HxA team and I were vividly reminded over the past two weeks.

In any communications environment, HxA's primary role is to be not so much "first responders" as it is to be "thoughtful responders." That does not mean that HxA can't or won't be timely as new events break. But it does mean that we care first and foremost about our role of elevating conversations, often by providing principled guidance going forward. In the days, months and years ahead, you can rely on HxA to be a trusted, principled source of analysis of government actions that affect higher ed.

At the outset of this letter I mentioned that some deeper currents run beneath Frederick Douglass’s commitment to principled cooperation. I’d like to close by sharing with you a glimpse of developments in that space, the space of consequences of actions that are often unintended and unforeseen. For there, beneath the tumult and upset of the past two weeks, some green shoots may already be emerging.

The President and Provost of Brown University, where I spent 27 years of my career in a sometimes lonely struggle for open inquiry and viewpoint diversity, recently announced that Brown is prepared to exercise its “legal right” to push back against orders and actions by the Trump administration that compromise Brown’s mission. Indeed, according to a report in the Brown Daily Herald, “The two senior administrators affirmed Brown’s core mission of ‘advancing knowledge and understanding in the spirit of free inquiry,’ adding the University believes faculty and students should be able to explore subjects of their choice ‘without restriction.’”

Long-time members of Heterodox Academy may remember that HxA was “born” in part because of founder Jon Haidt’s argument that every university must declare its commitment to a single highest goal, a telos, or core mission. When the multiple values that the university might care about clash, Haidt argued, each must decide where their deepest commitment lies: is it the pursuit of Truth, or of Social Justice? Further, as aficionados may recall, Haidt offered one institutional exemplar for each approach. To represent Team Truth, Haidt chose the University of Chicago. To represent Team Social Justice, he chose…Brown.. If Brown University, my university, is now ready to join Team Truth, I say: welcome!

So too, and on the other coast, at an HxA-sponsored conference at the University of Southern California on Censorship in Science, HxA Board member Jonathan Rauch talked about threats that governments have traditionally posed to scientific research. Noting some potential threats to academic freedom by President Trump’s administration, Rauch urged the scientists at the conference to organize. And lo, in the wake of executive actions in the weeks since Rauch’s talk, a call indeed went out to “academic workers across the country” to organize and push back in defense of government funding for scientific research. The organizers so far have not stated that their defense of scientific research is based centrally on a commitment to open inquiry and funding free from political litmus tests—also key principles of HxA. But they are close. And so to these scientists, and indeed to all scientists committed to the principle of de-politicized state-funding for research, I say: Join us!

Now, do I think President Trump intended that his flurry of actions would result in presidents of universities like Brown releasing public statements clarifying that their core-mission is indeed knowledge-seeking and that they affirm open-inquiry as central to that mission–fundamental HxA principles? I do not. Do I think President Trump intended that his actions might result in scientists across the country stepping off the sidelines to begin organizing around the principle of depoliticized research funding? Again, I do not. But we are clearly entering a period where HxA and the universities we love will be navigating the dangers and opportunities of government power in many unexpected ways–the theme of our upcoming June Conference. You can rely on HxA to provide timely, thoughtful and consistently principled analysis and guidance through the complexities ahead.

If you are a professor or other academic insider, I urge you to join us on this great adventure. All are welcome.

Sincerely,

John