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What new vision can pluralism bring to today’s universities?

Founder of Interfaith America Eboo Patel, joins John to discuss how pluralism can be a guiding principle in transforming higher education away from rigid ideological confines towards a more inclusive and dynamic intellectual space.

Eboo shares his journey to understanding pluralism. He views pluralism as a way to embrace one’s identity while valuing others and notes that the approach to anti-racism in some universities is shifting from helpful to controlling. Ebo believes that pluralism can balance extreme views by fostering intellectual diversity and respectful dialogue. He also suggests ways to create "Pluralist Universities," such as starting pluralism fellowships, doing research for future diversity needs, and developing a liberal arts curriculum that reflects a diverse society.

Eboo Patel is a civic leader who believes that religious diversity is an essential and inspiring dimension of American democracy. Named “one of America’s best leaders” by U.S. News and World Report, Eboo is the Founder and President of Interfaith America, the leading interfaith organization in the United States. Under his leadership, Interfaith America has worked with governments, universities, private companies, and civic organizations to make faith a bridge of cooperation rather than a barrier of division.

Eboo served on President Obama’s Inaugural Faith Council, has given hundreds of keynote addresses, and has written five books, including We Need to Build: Field Notes for Diverse Democracy. He is an Ashoka Fellow and holds a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University, where he studied on a Rhodes scholarship. Eboo lives in Chicago with his wife, Shehnaz, and their two sons.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Eboo Patel, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Eboo Patel: Awesome to be with you, John. I'm a regular listener of the podcast, and I am a huge, I'm a participant in Heterodox Academy. I'm so grateful that you and Jonathan Haidt, the whole crew, created this, because I find myself intellectually at home in your community.

John Tomasi: Thank you. We feel the same way about the work you do, as you know. I only found out about 10 minutes ago that you were not going to walk into the studio here in New York, and we were not going to be sitting together. I didn't realize we were doing this remotely until literally 10 minutes ago. So it would have been a double pleasure to have you live to do this.

Eboo Patel: I would have loved to have been there. I'm sorry that that did not work out. But inshallah, we will see each other in person soon.

John Tomasi: Inshallah. So you're the founder and president of Interfaith America, and I'll be asking you about Interfaith America and the work that you do. But I wonder if you could just say a few things at first about yourself and who you are. I'd like to invite my guests to share with our listeners just a little bit about their story, about who they are, the path they took to get them to where they are today. Can you tell us about your path and how you got to where you are today?

Eboo Patel: Sure. So I was born in India. My dad came here to do his MBA at Notre Dame University. So I came when I was very young, like one or two years old. So first couple of years in South Bend. Then we moved to Chicago and various inner ring suburbs. My dad worked in corporate advertising. My mom stayed home with us for the first few years. I grew up mostly in a leafy suburb called Glen Ellyn, a western suburb of Chicago, in a professional middle-class family. My family is Ismaili Muslims, which is actually core to who I am. I think both in terms of kind of ethos and formation and also belief system and the way I navigate the world, both ethically and intellectually. Spent most of my high school career trying to fit in, get to college, hear language like white supremacy and institutionalized racism, swallow the pill hole. There were parts of it that were very, very true and, and useful. But I didn't just take those parts. I took everything. And I became kind of an angry diversity activist for 12 or 18 months. I'm not actually naturally an angry person. And, I wanted a way out. And the way that I got out of that kind of vortex was when somebody said to me, have you ever heard of Dorothy Day? And she, of course, is the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement. And I became very involved in that kind of faith-based social justice kind of work. Realized as much as I admire the Catholic Worker Movement, and, I'm not Catholic and I don't really feel like, feel like becoming Catholic, although I have huge admiration and affection for it. So that begins my kind of exploration of diverse religious traditions. Realize that there's something very powerful, powerful and common between diverse religious traditions, which is their, theologies of social action, but also theologies of pluralism. And so here's, here are traditions that are very different in doctrine and ritual, et cetera, et cetera. And yet there's profound similarities. I've become very interested in that as both a civic project. How do you encourage different religious communities to work together, in concrete projects for, for an overlapping consensus or some kind of vision of the common good, but also how do you have a diverse democracy? How do you have these different religions living in the same nation together with such profound, disagreements and then realized, actually, this is how America started. This is the positive. This is one telling of the American story, which is so often not told these days, which is as the Nate, as the world's first religiously diverse democracy. And so interfaith America started as interfaith youth core 25 years ago, is both a civic endeavor that seeks to do concrete projects in the world around interfaith cooperation and pluralism, but really also an intellectual endeavor that seeks to understand and extend the American projects, devotion to pluralism. And I mean that in kind of its intellectual sense, you know, from, from William James through Kwame Anthony Appiah, Danielle Allen and John Inazu, and higher education is kind of the central laboratory and launching pad and institution that we work with. Oh, that was a long answer. Sorry.

John Tomasi: No, no, no, it was great. I mentioned you're the founder of interfaith America. when you founded the organization, you were, you were a child, you were 23, 22, something like that.

Eboo Patel: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John Tomasi: That's so you're, you're out of college at this point, or are you still in college?

Eboo Patel: I was out of college. I was not by much, not by much, by like 18 months. not even maybe a year. It was the, it was June of 2022, sorry, June of 1998. And I graduated in summer of 96. So maybe I was out of college two years. Now I'm at this interfaith conference, you know, cause I'm interested in, in how different religions connect to social justice. So there, I find out about this thing called the interfaith movement. So I'm going to all these interfaith conferences and it's boring. It's like, it's like middle-aged guys on a platform talking, which of course, that is not what I do for a living. Like literally I'm a middle-aged guy on a platform talking, right? Back then I thought it was really boring and it might even be boring now. I I'm more interested in it now. I stood up at this conference. It was the United Religions Initiative Global Summit at Stanford. And I literally threw my fist in the air and I was like, you people are boring. This is boring. You know, where's the edge? Where's the heat? Where's the social action? Where are the young people? Like, for whatever reason, I thought that interfaith cooperation was going to be like, you know, Thich Nhat Hanh, Dorothy Day, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. I thought it was going to be like, this is the collection of all the faith heroes. And it wasn't. It was like a collection of the, you know, senior theologians working things out, which is just fine. But at that moment, I was still a bit of a hair on fire activist looking to call people out. And something very powerful happened to me in that moment. And I write about this at the beginning of my book, We Need to Build. So after all the kind of oohs and ahs of here's this young activist calling out the adults, this woman comes up to me and she's like, that's an interesting idea. This notion of, you know, an organization that would bring together young people of different faiths for social action. You should build that. That's like literally the beginning of the rest of my life. You should build that.

John Tomasi: Nice.

Eboo Patel: Not, hey, congratulations for telling other people what they're doing wrong.

John Tomasi: Right. Right.

Eboo Patel: You have a vision. Why are you telling other people what to do? You should build that.

John Tomasi: Well, that's the theme of that book, which I really admire in that book that I see in a lot of your work. We sometimes say at HXA there's sort of two paths to social construction or social change. One is by fighting the bad things in the world. And the other is by building beautiful, good things in the world.

Eboo Patel: That's right.

John Tomasi: There may be, there's probably some roles for each. There are dragons in the world that need to be confronted, but there's something very powerful about social builders like you who try to build great things. I want to move to the conversation about pluralism. And you mentioned William James a minute ago. We were recently, you and I were recently at a conference in Nantucket, the Nantucket Project run by Tom Scott, which is this fascinating pluralism conference that takes pluralism and blends it through personal narratives and has this wonderful way of having us think of new things and see old things in new ways. At that conference, I heard you give a talk and you talked about pluralism and William James and an essay, a lecture he gave at Oxford, I think in the early 1900s. Could you say something about the origins of pluralism as a theory? We'll get into the practice before long, but would you just mind just starting with saying something like, what is pluralism? What's it against? What's, what is it?

Eboo Patel: Yeah. So let me just quickly say how I come to pluralism as, as an idea and then get into the William James thing. So, so I'm studying at Oxford. I've won this, I'm this professional middle-class kid who went to the university of Illinois, did real well in school, win this fancy scholarship, met Oxford. And I'm doing, I'm doing my PhD in my own faith community, which is the Ismaili Muslim community. And it turns out that the concept that the Imam, the Aga Khan, the leader of my faith community uses over and over again is pluralism. And the big idea is be proud of your own identity, recognize that other people should be proud of theirs, take the good in everything, learn how to relate to people well. Okay. So that's the big idea of the, of the Imam's understanding of pluralism. So, and part of what he's doing is he's helping his Ismaili Muslims adapt to a situation of diversity, right? Ismailis were a very, insulated community for many, many generations. And then they found themselves moving to the West, Toronto, New York, London. What do you do now that you're amidst this diversity? The Imam is saying, be proud of your identity and relate to other people. Well, so at the same time, as I am doing my, my PhD on this community and my community and reading the intellectual work of the Imam, I'm also starting this organization at the time called Interfaith Youth Core, now called Interfaith America. I'm meeting a lot of Diana Eck, who is kind of a central scholarly, academic, and civic figure in interfaith work. And she uses the word pluralism all the time. It pluralism is the kind of guiding, guiding, way that people should interact. And so you start digging into that intellectual tradition and you find out that rabbit hole goes very deep and in the American tradition, it begins in 1908. When William James comes to Oxford, actually he comes to Manchester College, which is not a part of Oxford university at the time, but it's in the city of Oxford, later gets absorbed at Oxford university. And he basically has an argument against Hegel and Hegel believed the universe was one. It was a block universe. The same thing repeated over and over. And William James famously says the universe is many, there is an and trailing after every sentence. He says, in fact, we shouldn't even call it the universe. We should call it the pluriverse. So he is making a case about reality. Reality is diverse and it hangs together in interesting ways. And in that audience are two Americans that William James taught at Harvard some years back. Alain Locke, who goes on to become what's called the father of the Harlem Renaissance and Horace Kallen. Alain Locke is gay, black, and converts to the Baha'i faith. Horace Kallen is Jewish. And these two Americans, studying at Oxford at the time, adapt William James' notions about the diversity of the universe to the growing diversity of early 20th century America. And they create the notion of cultural pluralism. Here's what's interesting. Here's what also happens in 1908. Israel Zangwill's play, The Melting Pot Goes Up, in the United States. Theodore Roosevelt calls this the greatest thing since sliced bread, right? Theodore Roosevelt is not a great fan of American plurality, multiplicity. He likes the idea that we all melt into one. Horace Kallen and Alain Locke return to America and basically argue against the Israel Zangwill view of America. They say, actually, America is many. And that manyness is generative for American democracy. This notion of pluralism also engages some of the other great philosophers of the time. Charles Peirce, Jane Addams, John Dewey. It is one of America's great organic inventions, pluralism. And here's the wild thing. I mean, we have so many great philosophers working in this area now. John Inazu, who wrote Confident of Pluralism. Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers. Our Declaration. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism. Here's the wild thing. Virtually nobody within the formal field of DEI work refers to these philosophers or refers to the intellectual tradition of pluralism, although it is this great American tradition contributed to by a vast number of identities and great philosophers. And the big idea is people of diverse identities should take pride in their identity and relate to each other in positive ways and contribute collectively to the nation. Respect, relate, cooperate. It's pretty simple in a civic format, but it has got this deep and profound American tradition.

John Tomasi: I want to ask you more about DEI and about Woke too, and we'll come to a conversation about the universities and how your work applies at universities. But I'd like to say just a minute more on pluralism. So what do you make of the other quintessentially American expression, E pluribus unum, out of many one? Is that pluralistic? How do you square that circle?

Eboo Patel: It's a great question, and I have a great answer because I've got Danielle Allen on this. So in talking to strangers, Danielle Allen, who of course is the great political philosopher at Harvard University, who over the past couple of years has become a personal friend, she writes in talking to strangers, E pluribus unum, out of many one, should not be understood as out of many a sameness. It should be understood as out of many a new wholeness. So that is straight out of the intellectual and civic tradition of pluralism, right? That is straight Jane Addams. That is straight John Dewey. That is straight Horace Kallen and Alain Locke, which is basically all of us are from diverse identities, and we take pride in our identity, but we work well together. Horace Kallen's image of this is a symphony, right? Different identities are different instruments, and they have to play together. John Dewey points out, yes, but that playing together part, that's the hard part, right? Like, you know, it's easy to put the instruments on the stage. The question is, are they going to play well together? I think in the early part of the 20th century, the person who does this best is Alain Locke in his text, The New Negro, which is a gathering of all of these diverse Black artists, you know? Everybody from Black artists in the West Indies to Black artists who were part of the Southern migration, and he kind of collects all of these people, and he says, this is Harlem. This is Black America, right? And it feels much more like jazz than a symphony. But over the course of the next 100 years, all of these great thinkers, some in Europe, like Isaiah Berlin and Chantal Mouffe, and some in the United States, like John Rawls, they work within the tradition of pluralism to ask the question, how do people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies live together? Because for all of the sins and mistakes of the United States, we are the first nation to attempt to do that. Now, I don't think our sins and mistakes should be so easily dismissed and forgotten or even forgiven. I think that we should name those, and I think that we should talk about them. But we should not forget that we are the first nation on planet Earth to believe that people from the four corners of the Earth, praying together in different ways, speaking different languages, can come to the same patch of land and build a nation. I think that that's remarkable. And I think that we should make it our business to extend and improve that tradition.

John Tomasi: Can we pause on your musical instruments metaphors? It's quite lovely. I'm thinking of the philosopher William Godwin, who in the 1800s talked about the tyranny of the baton, and he was worried that even music, he was a sort of an early anarchist, and he thought that society should be completely free of individuals, they should be free individuals doing completely creative things. And he thought that an orchestra where people are sort of lined up, sit in their seats, are given a script to play, was a terrible way to do music and also a terrible way to organize the society. You said jazz. And what is it about jazz that attracts you as a metaphor for pluralism?

Eboo Patel: Yeah. So Diana Eck is the first person who I heard say this, right? But a million people I've heard say it since. I wouldn't Marcellus. You know, he's like, I know classical music and I know jazz. And boy, jazz is harder to play because it requires that you listen to other people. And I think that that's a huge part of democracy. You listen to other people and you see if what you play can be in conversation with them. I think that part of what's beautiful here and important, so the improvisation part is important, right? Not everything is pre-baked. We're constantly creating. Listening is of essential importance. But I think a third thing that's really important is virtuosity, is just being excellent. You have to, this is what I love about the Grateful Dead. It's what I love about, you know, exceptional athletes. It's what I love about exceptional intellectuals, is you take your craft so seriously that you believe that the genre that you're working in, whether it's baking or folk music or jazz or building a baseball team, is so remarkable that it requires your highest excellence. And I mean, honestly, I think that that is missing from a lot of talk in universities these days, particularly diversity talk. Like, what is it that you're trying to be excellent at? What is it that we are seeking to nurture excellence in? And I think that diversity work is so important. This is where I'm a firm believer in DEI. Diversity work is so important that it deserves our best work. It deserves our excellence. And it deserves that we demand excellence of others.

John Tomasi: I love the excellence point. And I'm thinking about a line of yours that I also really enjoy. You say somewhere that pluralism cherishes particularity. But there's something about, do you want to just comment on that? What does that mean? It cherishes.

Eboo Patel: Yeah, pluralism requires particularity, right? And I'm actually writing a book on this right now. I don't know, whatever. I'm 40% through the first terrible draft. And at some point, I'll be 100% through the third or fourth draft. And it'll actually be a book. So here's, it's very interesting to kind of trace the intellectual conversation around diversity and liberalism right now. So over the last 10 years or so, as you, John, and Jonathan Haidt, and Musa al-Gharbi, and Yascha Mounk, and Rachel Kleinfeld, and many other smart people have pointed out, that since roughly 2010, 2012, 2014, there's been a sharp leftward swerve in university life and intellectual life towards a progressive ideology that assumes that everything is racist and everything is sexist and we need to undo those systems. And the response to that has been a response by a set of very smart liberals, Yascha Mounk, Adam Gopnik, and others, who are saying, actually, liberalism is a pretty darn good tradition. The guy who wrote the book, Liberalism is a Way of Life, with Princeton University Press, his name is escaping me right now. But these are some really good books. Liberalism, and they point out that pluralism is a property of liberalism, and liberalism is kind of best understood. There's the political version, there's the version of politics, separation of powers, everybody votes, et cetera. And then there's the kind of version in culture, which is live and let live. I'm a Christian, you're an atheist, live and let live. So the thing that I don't think liberalism does a good enough job on here is taking people's identities seriously. I don't want my Ismaili Muslim-ness to kind of be put under the category of, well, it's live and let live. It's actually core to who I am, and I want to talk about it. And I actually want to know about your Zoroastrianism or your commitment to the Baha'i faith or your atheism. I want to talk about it. I think that that is actually constitutive of a civil society. I think it's constitutive of a civilization. And so I think pluralism in the Horace Kallen and Alain Locke and Jane Addams and John Dewey and Diana Eck and Aga Khan version of this actually says, our particularity is foremost, and the question of how we have our particularities interact with each other in the building of a nation, but also in the continuity of those particularities, that's what a civilization is. And I think that pluralism is a better way of thinking. Pluralism is a better term for kind of good diversity work versus bad diversity work. And I honestly think a huge part of America can be captured in the category, this is what good diversity work looks like. For the world's first diverse democracy, we are working on how you have people of diverse identities and divergent ideologies retain their identities, work positively together, contribute to a collective project called a nation, be kind to the rest of the world and the earth. That is what good diversity work looks like. And I think it is deserving of its own tradition. And I think that tradition is pluralism.

John Tomasi: Let me ask you more about something you said a moment ago about this movement that we've been tracking at HXA. I know that many people are tracking it as well, that something started to change on our campuses in particular around 2013, 14, 15, something like that. I mean, you described it as the rise of a certain kind of left view. I wonder if it's a left view. It certainly cloaks itself in the language of progressivism. But it's a view that is, I think, in a fundamental way, anti-pluralistic, in part because it's authoritarian. It's a view that sort of has a conception of a firm grasp of the truth. And it's much more like asking its adherents to be members of an orchestra, whether we're required to play their parts, be given out to them from the front of the stage, rather than a jazz band. You have a line that I want to ask you about, about pluralism with respect to wokeness. You say, well, I'm just going to quote you. I love this line. You say, pluralism seeks to cultivate the wide space between wokeness and whitewashing. So there's wokeness on one side, there's whitewashing on the other side, and pluralism seeks to cultivate, which I love that choice of word, that wide space in between. Can you just say a word about those two, what whitewashing is and what woke is, and then tell us about that wide space in between?

Eboo Patel: Yeah. Thank you for quoting that line. I love it. I mean, you know, sometimes I'll add to that, you know, cultivate the wide space between Ron DeSantis and Robin DiAngelo, right? So when I was in high school, I learned barely nothing about slavery. I think I read, I don't know if I read a single black writer in high school. That's a travesty. You're missing out on a whole part of the American tradition. You're just missing out on an important set of things that happened. And I think that, you know, I'm brown, and I spend a lot of time, like, not wanting to be brown, like, just straight up, not wanting to be brown. And when I get to college and I hear the terms, white supremacy, it's systemic racism, I read Audre Lorde, I listen to Ani DiFranco. As I said, like, it hits me emotionally. And there's a truth to that. There's a reality and a truth to that. The problem is, if you squeeze, if that becomes your worldview, and now you're squeezing the world into that worldview. You know, my PhD advisor said that's the cardinal sin of the intellectual, is squeezing the world into your worldview. If that's the only thing you can see, okay, now you have a problem. So I actually think about things like anti-racism as a sharp kitchen knife. It is very useful for certain things. I'm giving you an example, the kind of thing it's useful for. What happened to Jeremiah Wright in the Obama campaign of 2008 was racism. And it should have been called that. Like, a pastor being quoted dramatically out of context, you know, in the middle of a war, saying, God damn America, biblically, this is what the Bible said about warmongers. There is no doubt that the image of the angry black man, the Afro and the dashiki, is like playing in a Willie Horton way in people's heads. And that was straight up racism. And because so many center-left people like me so wanted Obama to win, we just didn't talk about it. We didn't want to make a thing of it. But you need a sharp kitchen knife there, right? You know, it wasn't just another campaign move by Fox News or whatever. It was racism. And there are things you need a sharp kitchen knife for. That is a perspective. It is a useful perspective. And what an intellectual has is multiple useful perspectives. You have many utensils in the cutlery drawer. The problem over the last 10 years is that virtually every other utensil has been removed. from the silverware drawer. All the spoons, all the butter knives, all the forks, and it has been filled entirely with sharp kitchen knives. And now you're eating your cereal with a sharp kitchen knife. That's dangerous. Now you're holding a sharp kitchen knife at somebody else's throat. And that's a murder weapon. This is the problem with making, I call it a shift from anti-racism as a perspective. Very useful. To anti-racism as a paradigm. Not so useful. Actually kind of stupid. If you think that the most important thing in every situation is always racism. And you always have to root it out. Okay. So now you're squeezing the world into your worldview. Because there's lots of things that are more important than racism in lots of situations. Okay. But actually something worse than that has happened in certain quarters of higher ed, which is anti-racism has moved not just from a perspective to a paradigm, but from a paradigm to a regime. And what a regime is, is a paradigm with the power to coerce and punish. A DEI statement is a coercive instrument. You are required to adopt our particular view of lifting people of diverse identities up. By the way, I think lifting people of diverse identities up is fine to require. I think that's an important thing. Right. But to say that there's only one way to do it, and we are going to exclude you from our faculty if you do not hold to our way of doing social mobility, that's a regime. A bias response team is part of a regime. We are looking for ways that you might be racist. Right. Reading James Baldwin aloud in class, that might be considered racist. Assigning to kill a mockingbird, that might be considered racist. Right. And we will investigate you. So I think that that's part of what's happened. So look, I want to say this very clearly. I think the knife of anti-racism should remain in the kitchen drawer. There are racist things out there, and we should be able to call them racism. And we should recognize that that is always a possibility. It is always a possibility that something is racist. We should give that a hearing. And then we should also have spoons and forks and other ways of understanding the world. And I think that actually a big part of pluralism is intellectual pluralism. And by intellectual pluralism, I mean really, number one, the nature of reality is diverse. This is William James. Number two, we have multiple disciplines and modes with which to investigate the diversity of reality. So anthropology to astronomy, qualitative to quantitative. This is how universities are actually set up. And number three, part of the job of the intellectual is to generate multiple intellectual frameworks or theories to make sense of all of the data that they are gathering in the world. What are the patterns here? Right. That's intellectual pluralism. That is at the heart of what a university is about. That's what Jonathan Haidt would call the truth-seeking university. I also think universities should be about social mobility and cooperation across difference and dealing with deep disagreements and weighing different values. All of those are also part of pluralism. And so right now, we have Free Speech University, University of Chicago. We have Social Justice University, Oberlin. Part of my goal is that you have a bunch of universities stand up and declare themselves pluralism university.

John Tomasi: I want to ask you about that thought, because I'm very interested in that thesis that I know you're working on now. Let me just go back a minute, though, just for a second, to be sure I underline something that I think is just really interesting you've just been saying. You know, you talk about pluralism, and you use terms like particularity as being so important to them. And then what really struck me is when you talked about excellence, the idea about excellence being fundamental to pluralism. I think people often don't think of it that way. They think of pluralism as kind of a wishy-washy, you know, moral relativist, all things go. But I see you and I read you as saying that it's a, well, I'll use a different term. I'll use a term you don't usually use, but I'll use it anyway. There's something deeply humanist about your approach, because it seems to see pluralism as a way to unlock the particularity of each individual so that each of us might become more fully unique person we are, not just by ourselves, but powered through our interaction, like with jazz, powered by our interaction with others. If they weren't playing next to me, I couldn't have thought to play that note, this line, this way. But because they are playing and I'm listening, then all of a sudden we can do these remarkable things together. But I love the way you're now taking pluralism and tying it to a virtue, something like excellence, which I think university is often not, often thought not to be a humanist virtue. It's thought to be this kind of this cold, you know, heartless, competitive. You don't see it that way at all, do you?

Eboo Patel: I don't. And look, I'm going to give you two places that come from on this. One is, one is Islam, right? So, so in, in the Quran, the universe is many. The universe is many. It is, it, God, who is one, creates the universe as many and gives Adam the first man and the first, the first human being, the first prophet. The gift he gives Adam is the ability to flow with diversity. Adam, according to the Quran, knows the names of creation. The names are plural. The angels do not know the names of creation. They only know the ability to call God his name over and over again. The angels only know one thing. Adam knows many things. So I, you know, 1400 years before William James says the universe as many, the Quran says the universe as many, right? And that, that's, that's very powerful to me. You know, I come from a religious tradition for, for which pluralism is at the center. Now, here's how it connects to excellence. There's a, there's a part, part in the Quran, where it says, God made you different nations and tribes that you may come to know one another, compete in righteousness and excellence. Right? Engage one another, be excellent together. Your engagement with one another should make you excellent. Right? So that is a very important ethical, religious tradition in my life. I'm going to give you another one out of left field. Ready for this? The Grateful Dead. So it looks like just five or six white guys on stage, right? But actually they come from very different musical traditions. Okay. So Mickey Hart is a world music drummer. Jerry Garcia is originally a bluegrass player. Right. Phil Lesh, the bassist is a jazz guy. Bob Weir is kind of a, a, a honky tonk cowboy guy. Their original keyboardist pig pen is a blues guy. So these, these guys come from deeply different musical traditions and they form a band in which they don't play the same 20 songs every night, the same way, the way most bands do even excellent bands like you too, right? They have 200 songs and they play a different 20 songs every night and they play it all different ways. So that for me is pluralism is excellence, right? And in order to do that, you have to be a virtuoso. You have to know your own instruments so well, but you have to be able to listen to other people playing their instrument. You have to be able to understand the language of their instrument. Bob Weir's kind of cowboy rock and roll inflected, rhythm guitar lines, Bill Lesh's bass inflected jazz lines, right? You have to be able to listen to that and you have to be able to match and be in conversation with that. So for me, like pluralism is, is all about excellence. I think about like in Islam, there's a line, God is beautiful and loves beauty. God is beautiful and loves beauty. And, and that's what we should be striving for together in a humanistic way and a collaborative way. You know, like I'm, I'm not a particularly competitive person, but I love excellence and I love being around excellence.

John Tomasi: You know, when I'm hearing you talk about excellence in this context now, you haven't used the words liberal arts, but I keep thinking of liberal arts because people often say, what's liberal arts for? Well, in some ways it's, it's, it's, it's like doing what you said about the players in the Grateful Dead. It's becoming more fully yourself. It's understanding the, the, the width of possibilities, the depth of your own roots, like the place you're from, how the important, understanding more about the importance of that while also recognizing the possibilities. And that, I just, I just think, I think it's fascinating the way you connect pluralism to excellence. And I think maybe it's about the excellence of being a human being, excellence of being the person that you are and the person that I am and the person that each of us might be and being true to ourselves as we do that.

Eboo Patel: I mean, you know, you know, Martha Nussbaum in her book, Not for Profit, I, there's, I think the epigraph is from Seneca. While we are human, we ought to cultivate our humanity. And I, I, I think that that is best done at a university and, and in certain religious communities, it's, it's, it is, that is where we cultivate humanity.

John Tomasi: As you know, there's been a lot of emphasis on the university about free speech and there are a huge gift was recently made to the university of Chicago to encourage, open discourse, open inquiry, and free speeches was included as part of their announcement. You've, you, you've raised some questions about the importance of free speech. how do you, what do you think of the university? What's the role of free speech? Do your thing on that, please. Tell us what you think.

Eboo Patel: So other than the fact that they, they stole, our senior vice president to run their, their forum on free, on free expression and free speech, I'm not mad about anything.

John Tomasi: And who is that? And who is that?

Eboo Patel: Tony, Tony Banout.

John Tomasi: I'm well aware. I just wanted to say the name. He's a board member. He's a board member at HXA.

Eboo Patel: So we, we, we, we retained him while he moved to Chicago.

John Tomasi: Sorry, you lost him.

Eboo Patel: Well, a couple of years ago, he calls me. He's like, Hey, I'm in the area. I'll drop by for, I'll drop by and say, hi. I'm like, I'm picking up sushi for the boys. Come on over. I'll get you some rolls. So he comes over and give him his veggie rolls. Hands me a 20. I'm like, brother, what are you doing? I'm not taking your money. We eat, we sit down. He turns the music off. He's like, I'm moving to the university of Chicago. Like, give me that 20.

John Tomasi: Oh my gosh. Give me that money. I didn't know that story.

Eboo Patel: That's good. That's good. So, so here's the thing I don't really understand about kind of the deification of free speech. Right? So clearly free speech as, as an archetype in this moment is an alternative to social justice university. Clearly that's what's happening. Right? The resurrection of the California report, et cetera, et cetera. There's a couple of things I'm like, just curious about if, if there were two groups of students on the quad chanting, one group is chanting two plus two equals three. And the other was chanting two plus two equals five. Would any university president point to them proudly and say, look at how civilly they are chanting. They're exchanging brownies. They're exchanging views. This is what we're about. Right? No, that's not what you're about. Right? And one of the things I don't, I'm not super supportive of when it comes to, to a campus protest, not that I'm not supportive. I just like, you don't go to the university to learn slogans, to shout at people you don't fully understand.

John Tomasi: But let me, let me ask you just on the, on the, on the mathematics question, I'm curious about this. So if you have two groups of students, one civilly politely saying two plus two equals three and another group saying two plus two equals five. And now let's imagine the third group saying, oh, actually, you know what? I thought more about it and I studied it. And I think it's actually two plus two equals four. Now they've got three different groups on campus. Is that pluralism? Or does the university say there's a special place in standard status of the people who say two plus two equals four? How does, how does the pluralist, your pluralist view of the university connect to the truth seeking view of the university? Is it, is it a rival? Is it a, is it a path towards the truth? How do you see those three groups? Are they all equal? Are they all pluralistically okay?

Eboo Patel: Excellent question. Okay. So, so I think that there are at least four parts of pluralism that a university excels at. I'm going to get to the thing you just mentioned last. Once it's intellectual pluralism, it may be the most important part of a university, right? But there's three other parts I want to briefly mention. One is agonistic pluralism, which is associated with the, with the Belgian philosophers.

John Tomasi: Exactly.

Eboo Patel: How do we pronounce her last name?

John Tomasi: Mouf.

Eboo Patel: I say Mouf.

John Tomasi: Mouf.

Eboo Patel: Okay. Chantal Mouffe. But who knows? Agonistic pluralism basically is the recognition there are deep disagreements between people and those people have to live together anyway. Right. And so the big, the, the big move there is from enemies to adversaries. So the university is where we learn how to do that. Okay. You learn how to move from enemies to adversaries. Second part of pluralism is values pluralism. This is Isaiah Berlin. Freedom and equality and other such social goods are, are not all, they're not, they're not always aligned. They're sometimes intention. And university is a place where we go to figure these questions out. How long do you keep somebody alive in a house, in a hospital with a ventilator? How do you balance those deeply held values? Right.

John Tomasi: And I'll add, I'll add a lot of that made with the value pluralism. As you know, Isaiah Berlin and others said that there are, there's, there's complexity woven into the fabric of the universe and not every, not every, not every situation can be, can be resolved. Some of those, there's tragedy, we have to live with tragedy in some ways because values don't, values are pluralistic and then always, don't always resolve to one.

Eboo Patel: Exactly. This is the whole point. And, and we need a place in our society that is not just trying to achieve efficiency in terms of dealing with values pluralism, but really thinking through those situations. So that's the second kind of pluralism a university excels at. We're auto-exceling. The third part is identity pluralism. Black and white, Muslim and Jew, rich and poor. You cooperate across differences. Not necessarily, they don't, they don't necessarily always have to be disagreements. But differences and, and, and, and in having people from diverse identities work together in common projects, intramural soccer, biology labs, that's a really good thing. Social mobility, that's a really good thing. Okay. So those three parts of pluralism, I think are at the center of what a university is about. Now, the part you talking about, John, intellectual pluralism, they will be the most important part. Okay. And, and, and so the two plus two equals three, two plus two equals five, two plus two equals four. What's going on here? That is quintessential intellectual pluralism. First of all, the universe is many. And so we are going to explore it in a variety of ways. One of these ways is mathematics. Mathematics is invented in, you know, algebra invented by, by Hindus and Arabs, right? this is a, this is a beautiful thing that there's different cultures contribute in significant ways to, to intellectual civilization. Okay. So, so we gather data about the world and then we create, we generate intellectual frameworks to help us make sense of that data. So mathematics is much more straightforward than most things, but, but are revolutions good? Okay. So that's another kind of question. So let's go out and gather data about 20 different revolutions. Right. And now let's have intellectual frameworks. Thomas Paine, revolutions are always good. Edmund Burke, revolutions are typically bad, right? And now you're in a conversation and you're trying to, you're trying to have intellectual frameworks help you make sense of the wide variety of things in the world. And you're in a constant conversation about, well, what about this? What about that? What about this? What about that? That, that, that's, that's what an intellectual conversation is. What about this? What about that? And the key intellectual on the nature of the intellectual conversation is Karl Popper, who's almost never referred to in, in diversity work these days. And, and Karl Popper's big insight is once you have settled on a worldview, it's time to challenge it. Your goal is to find the case that challenges the paradigm, because that's how you decide whether the paradigm is accurate or you extend and improve the paradigm. Once I read about that in grad school, it changed everything for me. Like you can no longer be an ideologue when you, when you, when you recognize that that's the difference between intellectual life and, and, and ideological life.

John Tomasi: That's good. It's a very heterodox academy approach today. I want to, I want to know more about, I want to know more about how you see pluralism's role at the university. So I've heard, I've heard you say some things, I've read some things you've written where you talk about pluralism as an undervalued goal of university life. But sometimes, sometimes I think you say that it almost is, it is, it should be the goal of university life, maybe in those four, all those four dimensions you described. What, so is it, is it, is it free speech versus pluralism? How do you, how do you, how do you see all this?

Eboo Patel: No, I actually think that, so I, I, you know, I think, you know, and John hates kind of framing, right? Social justice university versus truth-seeking university. I think pluralism university takes the best and most relevant parts of free speech. And the best and most relevant parts of a particular understanding of social justice, which I happen to agree with, right? That particular understanding is that, is that barriers to particular identity groups are bad. Homophobia is bad. Anti-Semitism is bad. Islamophobia is bad. Racism is bad. Sexism is bad, right? But we are not going to, we are not going to assume that the most important thing about you is that you're a victim of racism. I can't stand it when people think that being a Muslim means being a victim of Islamophobia rather than being inspired by Islam. Right. What is most important about people's identities is the pride they take in their identity. That is straight Alain Locke, by the way. So there is an extremely important and beautiful intellectual and identity-based tradition of this kind of understanding. Alain Locke was in this big argument with Booker T. Washington, Marcus Garvey, and W.E.B. Du Bois about what Black people should be focused on in the early 20th century. And his major theme was we should be focused on cultivating pride in our identity vis-a-vis Black beauty and Black arts, right? And so I think, you know, back to the main point here is pluralism university, and these are the four parts of pluralism, intellectual pluralism, identity pluralism, values pluralism, agonistic pluralism. And if you have them in a concentrated geographic space, which is what a university is, I think of it as civic pluralism, right? In civic pluralism, you have all these things happening close to each other. I think it takes the best part of what I understand as social justice, which is we are against barriers to any identity group. And we will seek to cultivate pride in people's identities, and we will have particular emphasis on identities that are underrepresented here, right? So by the way, South Asians are not underrepresented in Silicon Valley. They are underrepresented in the Olympics. And I think we should pay attention to that. I don't think it has to be totally equitable. In other words, it doesn't have to be totally quality of outcomes. But yeah, like my kids, when they step on basketball courts and other people snicker, that's not good. I don't think it's the biggest evil in the world, but they're fully aware that there's a stereotype against Indians as athletes. Because we want people to be able to be who they might be. That's exactly right. Not being constrained by. That's right. But it's about the flourishing of that individual and about the individual, the identity, and the group, right? It doesn't have elephantitis of the ism. I'm not most interested in how you are a victim of something. I am most interested in how you are proud of something. And if there's a barrier to that, I'm worried. I want to reduce the barrier. But I'm most interested in the pride you take in your identity.

John Tomasi: And the emphasis on pride connects to another idea that I associate with you. And I think sometimes, I know sometimes you talk about pluralism as being tied to a term we haven't mentioned yet. Something like well-being. Like doing well in the world and being happy even. Maybe that's part of individuation. That becoming the person you might be by interacting with others as in a jazz musician might be. You get better at who you are, more distinctly you. And there's an element of just well-being that comes with that. But I think it's a really nice piece of your paradigm.

Eboo Patel: Like going through the world, looking for things that are trying to hold you down is not a good way to live. Everybody knows that, by the way. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that. Now, our friend Musa al-Gharbi, who kind of is a rocket scientist in his own area, has demonstrated this through research. He's like, actually, the people who do this, their mental well-being is at stake. By the way, can I tell you something like this is?

John Tomasi: Please. Please.

Eboo Patel: Okay. So I want to tell you a story. So part of the reason I'm so emphatic about this is because I was this guy for a period of time. You know, I was the person who, if you will, I hated the system more than I loved people. And that's bad. Right.

John Tomasi: That's bad. I know students like that.

Eboo Patel: Yeah. It's not a good way to live. And I was self-righteous about it. And by the way, you know, as I said at the Nantucket Project, self-righteousness is mostly a bluff. It's mostly a bluff. But we don't talk enough about the costs and damage associated with this approach. Like we think that, you know, well, that, you know, that person's a critic, whatever. That's just their thing. Actually, there's costs associated with that. So I'm going to tell you a story about my own inflicting damage on people in this way. So my first job out of college is teaching at an alternative high school where students who had been dropped out of high school or gotten kicked out of high school went back to get their GEDs, their equivalency degrees. And it's a small program, 30, 40 students and the four teachers, you know, we all give speeches to the whole school such as it is on the first day of class. Introduce ourselves to them where we are. And all the other teachers talk about normal education things like, you know, you're going to work hard. You're going to show up. I'm going to show up. I'm going to help you. But this is yours to, this is your, you know, your river to cross all this stuff. I get up there and I talk about how they've been victims of a racist system and educational inequity and, you know, I'm not going to use the banking model of education from Paulo Freire, all this stuff, right? I'm very proud of myself. And after I get done, this, this student comes up to me. I still remember his name, Angel Perez. He was literally older than me. I was 20. He was 21. He's the oldest who could be in the program. So he's a year older than me. And he says, no, Mr. Eboo, thank you for your speech. It was very passionate. I appreciate that very much. You're talking about all this stuff like inequity and, you know, systemic racism. Thank you very much. So listen, I've taken the GED twice before and failed both times and you can only take it three times. So this is my final chance. And if I pass, I get a dollar more an hour at Cub Foods. So I just want to know, is all the stuff you're talking about going to help me pass my GED?

John Tomasi: Wow. Wow.

Eboo Patel: And can I tell you something, John? I had spent zero time thinking about that. I'd spent zero time, literally zero, thinking about how I could be a good enough teacher to help kids who did not have high school degrees pass their GED. And that's just, I mean, that's malpractice. That's like going to the dentist with a toothache and she pulls the wrong tooth.

John Tomasi: Right. That's right.

Eboo Patel: That's bad.

John Tomasi: Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And we see that on college campuses, a lot of the programs. I want to ask you, we're coming to the end of our conversation, end of this conversation, I want to ask you about Pluralism University and how do we move toward it? If a university president was interested in these ideas and was thinking about Pluralism as a way towards unlocking the potential of students on campus, better harmonizing them so they listen to one another and learn from one another. At HXA, we like to say the university is a community of imperfect learners who come together to show to one another the things they don't know, let their guards down so that they can learn and grow together. If a university president was interested in your idea of a pluralist university, are there policies they would do? How would they start? What would the first step be? Any thoughts about this?

Eboo Patel: Yeah. So, you know, we actually have an article on this that my colleague Rebecca Russo and I wrote and we'll give it to you and you put it up and, you know, put it up on the episode here, but it's basically the practice, the pluralism practices for a university. And it starts with...

John Tomasi: I haven't read that.

Eboo Patel: Yeah. Nice. So I'll send it to you.

John Tomasi: Excellent.

Eboo Patel: So a university president making a promise to both her students and the public and her faculty, pluralism is the North Star here. Intellectual pluralism, identity pluralism, values pluralism, agonistic pluralism. That is what we do here. Okay. So you're giving speeches to the Chamber of Commerce. You're giving speeches at first year convocation. You're giving speeches to your faculty. This is what we do. And by the way, I am only describing what the university has been since the beginning, right? Multiple departments, multiple methods, multiple intellectual frameworks, a multiplicity of people. I'm not telling you anything new. I'm simply summarizing a tradition that we are all familiar with in our bones. Okay. So there's a set of people who are, you know, so you give a speech about that and then you train your staff in it. And your student affairs staff have to be pluralism people. They have to be people who can initiate people into conflict. That's the Alasdair MacIntyre line, instead of inculcating them into a worldview. Interesting. Right now there's a lot of inculcation into worldviews happening. You are, you are, what you're really trying to do at a university is to say, here's a deep tension, an area of tension. Let's discuss and bring our identities and our intellectual frameworks and our data gathering abilities to bear. You know who does this better than anybody else is Kwame Anthony Appiah and the ethicist in the New York Times Magazine every week. Right. Every week. Here's what else you do. You have a pluralism fellowship on your campus where 10 students are paid every year to excel at pluralism. You do research on the major employers hiring your students, whether that's the local hospital system or the state department. And you see the diversity needs that those institutions are going to need over time. So who are the teachers that are going to be needed in the quad cities in 25 years? And Augustana College located in the quad cities says, okay, we are going to prepare teachers who can deal with that new diversity of students who are going to show up in our schools over the course of the next two and a half decades, right? So you're doing research for the purpose of backwards designing a curriculum, a liberal arts curriculum, not a narrow technical curriculum, but a liberal arts curriculum so that the teachers and nurses and doctors and diplomats and city council members and business people you graduate can lead the Utah, the New York, Florida, the Chicago of, of a generation from now. And that's what universities are good at, right?

John Tomasi: I mean, universities have those skills.

Eboo Patel: Exactly.

John Tomasi: And all of these things, these seven practices, they are, they are in a way like people, people should read them and be like, oh yeah, that that's what we do or should be doing. And you're just putting them in a package and you're connecting them to an intellectual tradition in American life. That's launched with William James, but you could maybe trace back to James Madison or maybe even Roger Williams, right? And, and you are, you are helping us real, you are helping us bake them into the DNA of this university. So that, that, that's the pluralism practices.

Eboo Patel: That's beautiful. That's beautiful.

John Tomasi: Eboo, it's been such a pleasure talking with you. Your ideas about pluralism are pluralistic, pluralistic in their nature. I mean, your idea of the university is not just, you're not looking for a telos or the one thing you're interested in us sort of living with the ambiguity of the many and celebrating that ambiguity and you do it with such obvious elan and concern for people. That's, that's so genuine. I just want to really thank you for being on HX, on Heterodox Out Loud today. It's been a great conversation.

Eboo Patel: Thank you.

John Tomasi: Thank you for the work you do and thank you for who you are. Thank you for leading, I think something that is really a revival of both intellectual and civic life in the university.

Eboo Patel: Thanks, John. Thank you.

John Tomasi: To be continued, Eboo.

Eboo Patel: Indeed. Indeed.