The university is supposed to be the place where difficult ideas are examined rather than avoided. But this week offered another reminder that, on many campuses, contentious views are still often unwelcome. 

UCLA is making headlines for the cancellation of an event that was to be hosted on Friday, February 27, featuring The Free Press founder, UATX founder, and newly appointed CBS editor-in-chief Bari Weiss. She was to deliver an annual address as part of a lecture series, which “celebrates the memory of Daniel Pearl as a prominent journalist,” according to UCLA’s website. Weiss was to discuss “the future of journalism” — squarely within her expertise with her role at CBE, and having worked at The New York Times before founding the successful Free Press. 

It remains unclear to what extent Weiss was involved in the cancellation of the event, with reports of her team claiming “security concerns.” Such concerns were almost certainly related to the petition of nearly 11,000 signatories urging the cancelling of the event citing Weiss’ ties to the Trump administration. A staff member at UCLA even threatened to resign if the Weiss event went forward. It’s an eerie reminder that an expert in their field can still be run-off campus for holding right-of-center politics, despite the general pendulum swing toward cancellations being executed by the right we’ve experienced this past year.

That pendulum swing can be witnessed over at the University of North Texas, where an art exhibit was shut down before it was scheduled to open on February 19. According to reporters, the artist was informed via a single paragraph email that the “exhibition was terminated” with no further explanation. It’s alleged that the anti-ICE nature of the artwork, on loan from Boston University, was to blame.

Right-of-center viewpoints are still taboo in many academic spaces, and left-of-center viewpoints are now subject to increased pressure campaigns in this new era. Over time norms of cancellation and social pressure to intellectually conform to the favored viewpoint of the moment creates acceptance for such illiberal behavior. These issues on campus have been further fueled by the normative practice of universities and their leaders taking sides on contentious issues — a practice that is still hotly debated. 

Vanderbilt president Daniel Diermeier discussed these issues on Yascha Mounk’s Persuasion podcast this week, explaining how leaders should respond to controversy and practice institutional neutrality on issues unrelated to the university's core mission. Diermeier is worth quoting at length:

We’ve seen mission drift. From my point of view … [Vanderbilt’s] 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.

Clarity of mission allows principled restraint by university leaders when choosing to speak out on controversies and events. Without institutional neutrality, he continues:

The problem is that once you have a specific incident… 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.

Diermeier recommends that other universities ”get clear about your principles” to change the culture on their campus. “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.”

These instances further show that campuses and academia more broadly desperately need to take viewpoint diversity seriously. As HxA member Sam Abrams forcefully stated this week, “Viewpoint diversity is not a conservative slogan or a Republican project. It is not a Trojan horse. It is the premise of liberal education. If universities cannot defend viewpoint diversity as a neutral institutional good, then academic freedom has already collapsed — not by law, but by culture.” 

And culture is the amorphous yet critical component that makes our campuses places of open inquiry, where free expression is practiced, viewpoint diversity is celebrated, and constructive disagreement is the normative mode of engagement. As HxA member Eitan Hersh elegantly stated in The Boston Globe, “Universities everywhere can change their cultures when faculty and students send clear signals to one another that they want our beloved institutions to be home to intellectual curiosity and vibrant discussion of the most important issues of our time.”

Cultural change at our institutions, where cancellations become a relic of the past, requires both individual faculty and staff to practice and encourage scholarly norms, with leaders relentlessly advocating and practicing the principles that underpin liberal education. If you work in higher education, you can join HxA in building cultures of open inquiry on campuses everywhere.