Last summer, when announcements of new “civics centers” were appearing ahead of the new academic year, HxA saw this new emerging landscape as an interesting experiment in “building” for viewpoint diversity in higher ed. As noted by our Executive Director Michael Regnier at the time, these “schools and centers within universities organized around themes the mainstream has neglected… could address the narrowing of research and teaching through broadening inquiry rather than constraining coercion.”

To keep the frontier of inquiry truly open, we must address the lack of viewpoint diversity in the academy. HxA’s most recent report reviews literature on faculty political diversity, and draws attention to a potentially narrow range of political viewpoints on campus — with some important caveats. We found that left-leaning faculty are the norm, yet many faculty are apolitical or independent and only a small proportion are conservative.

Other work is less equivocal about the state of viewpoint diversity. Analyses of available course syllabi point to a clear left bias in the classroom. Case studies demonstrate ideological distortions of entire fields of research. And the AI revolution seems poised to flatten, not broaden, academic research.

Higher education faces a choice on how to proceed: build to expand, or ban to counter. Both of these competing approaches are underway, and this week’s news displayed that tension.

The 28 public colleges in Florida must use a state curriculum framework to teach their introduction to sociology courses. This follows the announcement that Florida International University, which I wrote about a few weeks ago, requires general education sociology courses to use a state-approved textbook that redacted 60% of the content on “divisive issues” of race and gender. “The framework serves as a baseline — institutions can add to it but should avoid subtracting key elements or adding content that risks violating state statutes,” Jose Arevalo, executive vice chancellor for the Florida State College System, told Inside Higher Ed this week.

This is part of a larger effort by Florida’s state college system to roll out state-approved curriculum for public colleges. Arevalo said that their department is working with history professors to revise American history courses next.

Texas is also working to scrub unapproved topics from courses. This week, the University of Texas system board approved a new policy that states faculty have the responsibility to “eschew topics and controversies that are not germane” to their courses. The policy asks UT to “build appropriate breadth and balance in the faculty body and the curriculum so that students have access to a variety of viewpoints and perspectives and are not, as a practical matter, only exposed to a single viewpoint or perspective” but also wants students to meet gen-ed requirements “without a requirement to study unnecessary controversial subjects.”

The broad goals of the policy are not heavily disputed, but the vagueness of the policy is causing concern among faculty. Key terms like “germane,” “controversial,” and “unnecessary,” among others, are not defined, and it’s unclear who will decide what counts as policy violations — and who will enforce them . Such vagueness is likely to result in self-censorship in the classroom as faculty seek to avoid penalties, including job loss, if they stray over the fuzzy boundaries of this new policy.

Most charitably, these attempts to control classroom content are ostensibly in pursuit of expanding viewpoint diversity. While this approach may seem to correct for excess or skew, it’s also antithetical to the pursuit of a campus culture in which self-censorship is a relic of the past and inquiry is free.

On the insider-reform front this week, academics are proposing new pathways to expanding viewpoint diversity and the academic skills necessary to reap its benefits.

History of Education professor at University of Pennsylvania and HxA member Jonathan Zimmerman argues for revising and expanding the viewpoints in courses about the West and Western culture. He explains that pressures in the late 1980s led to universities dropping courses on the “Western canon” and launched the era of critical studies courses, which have fallen under intense scrutiny the past few years.

Zimmerman explains that the main consequence of this shift is the loss of a shared knowledge among students and a disconnect between modern ideas and historical ones. The elimination of shared texts about the West meant that:

…there was nothing binding them together: no collective tradition or set of ideas that connected them to the past, or that prepared them for the future. And, most of all, it left students bereft of a shared civic culture around self-government. The ancient texts of the West — and their more recent addenda — provide a lesson plan in democracy: how it starts, how it grows, and, yes, how it fails. Our own American experiment is under enormous stress right now. And we won’t revive it if we don’t teach our young people about its roots, achievements, and dilemmas.

Rather than disregarding the “Western canon” as illegitimate or eliminating critical studies as “divisive,” we need to instead bring them together as a way to provide a fuller and more comprehensive look at “the West.” HxA member Musa al-Gharbi similarly quips in his book, “Woke ideology is, of course, itself a product of ‘Western Civilization.’”

Harvard student Ava M. Ribaudo also emphasizes the benefit of shared experience to build connection and constructive disagreement in the classroom. She criticizes the top-down approach to fostering constructive disagreement across viewpoints. While administrative actions can signal important values, Ribaudo says such actions are “divorced from the realities of the classroom.”

Instead, Ribaudo argues that Harvard should institute a campus-wide ethics course requirement that builds productive skills that students can apply throughout their studies.

Ethics offers a practical skill set that encourages students of all concentrations to engage in good-faith disagreement. It poses questions with no single objective truth, nor a faculty-endorsed one. Moreover, an ethics course engages both faculty and students — neither opinion holds power in the conversation. Establishing an ethics requirement at Harvard serves a two-fold goal: curbing the effects of faculty activism and alleviating concerns that students participate in implicit censorship. If Harvard wants civil discourse to exist beyond the bounds of abstract mission statements and committees, a true ethics requirement is the answer.

A culture of inquiry that truly embraces viewpoint diversity must also be one in which members of the campus community can productively engage in discussion — and disagreement. As HxA President John Tomasi has argued previously, civic dialogue programs without a real commitment to expanding viewpoint diversity risk “becoming academic theater: earnest, well-mannered, but intellectually parochial.”

To keep the frontier of open inquiry alive in the classroom, we need more building and less banning. Bans create cultures of fear and impose bounds on intellectual engagement. Instead, we should approach the classroom as a place to expand our perspectives and practice how to productively engage within and across perspectives — a more challenging mission than bans, but infinitely more intellectually rewarding.