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How did America’s universities lose the trust of the public, and what will it take to restore faith in higher education?

In this episode, we are joined by Benjamin and Jenna Storey, renowned scholars, co-authors, and directors at the American Enterprise Institute’s Program on the Future of the American University. Together with host John Tomasi, they undertake a searching examination of the forces eroding confidence in universities and offer a roadmap for rebuilding their legitimacy and civic purpose.

The conversation draws on the Storeys’ personal journeys through academia, they explore how universities have shifted away from their civic mission, the implications of declining viewpoint diversity, and the urgent need to re-envision liberal education in a polarized era. Their discussion critically engages with recent initiatives, including the founding of university-level Schools of Civic Thought, and emphasizes both the perils and promise of institutional reform amidst increasing political and public scrutiny.

Read the report: “Civic: A Proposal for University Level Civic Education” (AEI, December 2023) 

In This Episode:

• The crisis of public trust and universities’ civic responsibilities
• The decline of viewpoint and ideological diversity in academia
• Innovative models for enhancing open inquiry and faculty diversity
• The case for new academic structures—Schools of Civic Thought
• Navigating political pressures and governmental reform efforts
• The enduring value of liberal education and practical wisdom

About Benjamin & Jenna:

Benjamin Storey, Ph.D, is a senior fellow in Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). He is concurrently a research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin. At AEI, he focuses on the culture of higher education, the nature of liberal and civic education, and efforts to enhance viewpoint diversity on college and university campuses. He co-organizes AEI’s conference series on the Future of the American University and its workshop on the Conservative Intellectual Tradition for University Faculty.

Jenna Silber Storey, Ph.D, is a senior fellow in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies department at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she concentrates on political philosophy, civil society, classical schools, and higher education. She is also the co-organizer of a conference series on the future of the American university. Dr. Storey is concurrently a research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and a Tocqueville scholar at Furman University, where she was previously research professor, assistant professor in politics and international affairs, and the executive director of the Tocqueville Program.

Dr. Storey is the coauthor, with her husband, Benjamin, of Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment (Princeton University Press, 2021). Together, the Storeys are working on a book titled The Art of Choosing: How Liberal Education Should Prepare You for Life.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Jenna's story, Ben's story. Welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Benjamin Storey: Thank you, John Tomasi. Very wonderful to be here with you.

Jenna Storey: It's great to have the chance to talk to you today after knowing you so long.

John Tomasi: Yeah, it's really a pleasure to have you guys. I've been following your work now for some time, especially your work in the Schools of Civic Thought area. But I know you're doing some other really interesting things, too. We're going to cover a lot of ground. I just want to begin, though, just by inviting you to tell the audience a little bit about yourselves. As I understand, you both went to, you both studied your PhDs in the Committee on Social Thought at Chicago. Were you there at the same time?

Benjamin Storey: Yes, we met at a cocktail party at the University of Chicago in about the year 1999. We had an argument about Weber and Aristotle, as Committee on Social Thought students are wont to do. We continued that argument the next day. This turned into a long-running conversation that has continued for the subsequent 26 years.

Jenna Storey: Very fortunate.

John Tomasi: Wow. Wow. Wow. So that's even better than I hoped. I was thinking you were both nerds in love, but in fact, you were like nerding on Weber and so forth. That's fantastic. Weber. That's fantastic. And then you both taught at Furman. Were you in the same department at Furman?

Jenna Storey: Yes, we were. So Ben was a year ahead of me at the Committee on Social Thought and went on the job market first, got a job at Furman. I followed him there. We had children. I eventually finished my dissertation and started teaching in the same department.

John Tomasi: Nice. And you were both involved with, I think, co-running the Tocqueville Forum there. Can you say a bit about that?

Benjamin Storey: Sure. The Tocqueville Program is a project that I founded, actually, with my colleague, Ari Tessitore, in about the year 2008. And that's because we wanted students to have an opportunity to engage with the moral and philosophic questions at the heart of political life in the quest of becoming more dignified human beings and more thoughtful citizens, which was a big part of our understanding of really what liberal education's basic promise is. And so we hosted speakers from across the aisle. We hosted reading groups and we set up a whole series of courses to put this into practice. And Jenna came on board after a couple of years, after our children were out of diapers and when she was ready to get back in the classroom. And this really became this sort of wonderful family affair with terrific momentum. And that was really a great part of our academic careers and something that we've been drawing on ever since.

John Tomasi: And so how many years were you at Furman?

Benjamin Storey: I was there for 17 years.

John Tomasi: Oh, a long time. I didn't realize it was that long. And Jenna, so you were there 16 or so, right?

Jenna Storey: Same. I taught for about 11 years.

John Tomasi: Oh, for 11. Right. Okay. And then you guys, just if I continue the love story, the academic love story, you co-wrote a book on why we are restless. Princeton, 2021? 2022?

Jenna Storey: 21, right. Yeah. So we had been writing some shorter things together, but that was the first book we collaborated on. It really was a book that started with Ben's dissertation, which was on Montaigne. He was one of the authors, the first author we treat there. And so it was something that he'd been really thinking about for a long time, and we'd been talking about since we met each other, arguing about it first, fiercely, coming closer and closer together on the topic, close enough that we could actually co-author a book.

John Tomasi: Nice. And you've recently left Furman, as I understand, and you're co-directors, I think, at the American Enterprise Institute's program on the future of the American University. Is that right? Can you just tell us a bit about that?

Benjamin Storey: Yeah, so we were headed on sabbatical in the year 2021. We thought about where we would like to go for the sabbatical. We thought about going to another university campus, have one of those wonderful experiences of being in residence someplace else that we'd have before. But we thought, you know, we've been in academic life for a long time, and there are other ways of thinking than the academic way of thinking, and we'd like to get a taste of that. And so we had a dear old friend, Yuval Levin, who had just started up a new division here at the American Enterprise Institute, the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies Division. And we got in touch with Yuval, and we'd been very interested in just finding out what his project was going to be. This is a person in whom we have just very great confidence in the kinds of projects that he leads. And so we wanted to know what he was doing, see if we could be part of it in some way, and the sabbatical was coming along. We thought, maybe we'll go to D.C. Maybe we'll spend a little time with Yuval, with the people at AEI, and see how that enhances our perspectives on things. You know, I'd been a political science professor for all those years, and I'd really never had a firsthand look at politics. And so coming to D.C. seemed like a really useful way to inform our perspective on things. And we got to AEI, and we just found a scholarly community there that was just tremendous. And we thought that for causes that people like everybody on this call care enough, for causes like the vibrancy of discourse on college and university campuses, there's actually some things that we could do from AEI better than we could do when actually employed as faculty members on one individual campus.

John Tomasi: That's fascinating.

Jenna Storey: I might like to add for a moment.

John Tomasi: Please, please.

Jenna Storey: It's been so interesting to be part of two very different kinds of intellectual institutions. So a think tank and a university or set of universities, just to reflect on the way that institutional structures shape your thinking. And I'm sure each university, each think tank is a little bit different there as well. But at AEI, we have the very fortunate position of really not having any institutional positions. And that surprises a lot of people who don't know how AEI operates. But we have scholars that fiercely disagree with each other about universities, about economics, about foreign policy, and so forth. And you see how institutional neutrality works a little differently in the think tank world and the academic world. And you see how, or in the university world, I should say. And you just see how having students, not having students actually shapes your relation to your colleagues differently. You see how hiring your peers or not hiring your peers shapes your relation to your colleagues differently. And this is just a really interesting topic I'd like to reflect on more at some point, not necessarily during the podcast. But I think it's an interesting topic for people to think about as institutions are changing so much nowadays.

John Tomasi: Yeah, that's great. So let's move now to the substantive ideas. And that's a nice segue into them. I want to begin by just inviting you to share your reaction to, there was a Gallup poll, I'm sure you knew about a couple of years, two years ago now. It showed that over the past 20 years, there's been a cratering of public trust in higher education. One common reading of that cratering is that it's connected to an inability or a perceived failure on the part of universities to educate people for citizenship. And that the polarized era that we're seeing in our society, in many ways, perhaps partially reflects some kind of failure within the university. Jenna, do you want to speak to that? Do you have any thoughts about that?

Jenna Storey: I mean, that question of the loss of public trust in universities is obviously a very urgent question to get some perspective on because universities are suffering. I suppose you might say right now from that lack of public trust in a particularly dramatic way. I think that the contention that universities are not educating students well enough for citizenship is one that we really need to take seriously. But I would put that in a kind of broader picture and just suggest this framework. It seems to me that universities are meant to be a place that provides a particularly good opportunity to reflect on the world. That's not my phrase or other people have echoed that sentiment, but I like that. And I think universities should be a place that give you time, give you resources, books, classes, conversations, other people that will help you in that effort to reflect on the world. I think the loss of public trust right now is due, if you could put your finger on one factor, to the contention that universities are not doing very well at reflecting on the world. I think not educating students to be citizens is one aspect of that. I think the lack of viewpoint diversity in universities is another aspect of that, because if you don't have a wide range of viewpoints that helps you understand your world, your society, at home in the university, then you're not going to do very well at that job. And I think also the way that we think about liberal education puts us a bit askew to the perspective that we need to really reflect well in the world. A wise man once said that, I'll quote this wise person, that the university should be, quote, an island of patience and a culture of haste. I can't, I can't, I can't remember who said that, but it's just stuck in my mind.

John Tomasi: Was it the person sitting next to you? Well, who is that? That was funny because. Whose line is that? I love that line.

Jenna Storey: That's Ben's. He wrote that line.

John Tomasi: Let me say, again, an island of patience and a culture of haste. And I'll just share with you that a chancellor, a wise man, a chancellor of Brown University in recent years, once said to me that the genius of universities is slowly. Now, I'm not sure to think about that. And like you, having moved from an academic world to a think tank, a think tank, or sorry, is a nonprofit, I find that I'm in a much faster paced world now, but I have to get things done. And I'm always amazed at the disciplining virtues of being in a faster paced world. But do you want to say anything more about that, that wise quotation from either of you?

Benjamin Storey: Well, I'm going to reflect on the wise quotation that you gave us from the Brown president, as opposed to reflecting on the genius of myself, which, you know, I have a lower estimation of. But that remarkable comment that the genius of the university is slowly, I think that's profoundly right, which is that we do live in a culture of haste. That culture of haste drives us to be reactive, to be constantly in a sort of responding mode. And the university should allow us to sit back, reflect, think profoundly about what we want to do and why we want to do it, and act in a much more, in the light of a much more comprehensive view than we might be able to take if we were constantly living in the reactive environment of the day to day. And so, in that sense, the, you know, that's the universities are structured to encourage this kind of long-term thinking. They're, they're institutions that count their lifetimes and centuries. And I think that's a, that's a real treasure that they have to offer us that we, that's, that's one part of what's, what's going on on campus that we need to help build up. I want to pick up on a, please, Jenna, please.

John Tomasi: Sorry, I know it's hard to interview two people.

Jenna Storey: That's fine, that's fine. But you have touched on a subject of great importance to us, which is the virtues of thinking and talking slowly and the virtues of thinking and talking more quickly to the point. As you say, the book that we're writing about liberal education, I might say, is meant to explain how liberal education helps you, we say, not just be a critical thinker, but someone who can be practically wise. And so, it's about liberal education orienting you toward action in the, in the world, primarily. I think the, I think the virtue of responding quickly, as you put it, is one of the key virtues of the active person, right? And it, and as you say, it requires a lot of things. It requires you, if you do it well, you've thought through all the issues beforehand. You've ordered them in your mind. You've figured out what is the most important thing to say in the 20 seconds you have. You've thought about the psychology of the person in front of you. You've thought about where you are relative to them, even physically. Who else is around? And you've thought about what ball you want to move with that person so that they move some other ball. And it's really a fascinating topic to me. I think you're right to say in the nonprofit world, it is, it has to be exercised in a way it doesn't really get to be exercised. Usually in the university world. And in part, it's our fascination with that. It's in part our sense that universities, while they may be, they certainly shouldn't operate according to that all the time. Having more respect for the active life, as it were, would actually do universities quite a lot of good.

John Tomasi: Nice. Can I return to a point, Jenna, you made a few minutes ago, started to make a few minutes ago about, about ideological diversity and the importance of that, importance of that within the university. And let me just, let me just, let me just, set the stage with a, with a, my own observations, how, how I sort of see that, see the terrain here. I think historians looking back at this period of, period of our, our troubles, and I mean sort of a 50 year sweep now taking the universities at their slowness, but also at their broad gauged capabilities. I think a historian of universities would say there were two great trends going on regarding conclusion and diversity within universities. On the positive side, over the past 50 years, we've seen a tremendous transformation of universities in the U S in particular towards inclusion. So, universities were not that long ago, extremely exclusive places, especially the elite schools were primarily for people of a certain socioeconomic standing, one gender, tip almost entirely one race. Well, the final Ivy league school, this is one of my favorite stats with the final Ivy league student, the final Ivy league university only began graduating women in 1987. Wow. Columbia that's the year I graduated from college myself. So it's like, to me, it seems like yesterday, but it's pretty shocking to realize that the, the citadels of power were exclusive, excluding, excluding women, even that recently, African-Americans were excluded historically. It only began arriving on campus fairly quite recently by that historian's perspective, the blink of an historian's eye, we might say. Jewish students have been discriminated against historically in different periods from the beginning. Muslim students only began arriving on campuses in any significant numbers in very recent years. So on the one hand, we're part of this historical, we're standing at this historical moment of this, this, this particular juncture point, perhaps where, a massive attempt towards inclusion has occurred. It's never happened before. Historically, it's unprecedented. All the great universities of the past, Plato's Academy, Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, early Harvard, even the great universities of the mid 20th century, the early 20th century, for example, Johns Hopkins and Chicago, they never attempted inclusion on the scale like we've done. So on the one hand, we've done this, we've done this incredible project of bringing in people who are excluded, which is important. If you're thinking, if we care about truth and knowledge and understanding across differences and growing together as imperfect learners, that we want that. On the other hand, now the other side of the story, the historians would tell is that over the past 50 years, 60 years, there's been a remarkable decline in ideological diversity. On some studies, you, I'm sure you know some of the statistics on some studies in 1960, 1960, 61, professors in the U S, identified left to right, roughly two to one today on some measures, maybe optimistic measures. It's about 18 to one. If you break that demographically and look at more junior professors, it's even more extreme in some departments and some disciplines, Republicans are effectively extinct. So on the one hand, we've seen this opportunity of inclusion while we've had this countervailing sweeping trend, perhaps path dependent. I'm not sure anyone planned this and did this thing intentionally, but let me just invite you, either of you, both of you to reflect on that. And I, you mentioned ideological diversity and its importance. Do you want to speak to the importance of that or what are we missing and what's, how did we get here? If you want to talk about that, but why is it important to have more, a more, a wider range of political viewpoints within?

Jenna Storey: Well, I think, one reason it is important to have a wider range of viewpoints in the university is, and this is just one reason, but a wider range of people in society feel, like they have a stake in these institutions. I think the loss of public trust that you were speaking about at the beginning is in part due to the fact that so many people feel excluded from our universities. but if you don't feel like you have a stake in an institution, you become willing to, destroy it, right? You don't care what happens to it and whether rightly or wrongly, I think enough people feel that way that they've been able to empower certain people to, to take some, steps that might be shocking to those inside the universities right now.

John Tomasi: I want to ask you about some of the current actions by the federal government, but let's pause on that still just for a bit later. We'll, we'll, we'll, we'll save that question. Is there more about, about ideological, ideological diversity that you want to, you want to add?

Jenna Storey: Well, I think this has been a topic that's important, been important to Ben and I since the beginning of our teaching career. in part that's, I, I guess I would most fundamentally that would be because we had perceived that there were certain questions that were not being routinely asked in our discipline. certain topics that were not being explored, certain books that were not necessarily being read or to the degree that they should be read or explored. And I would say, you know, that is really the fundamental driver for us on the viewpoint diversity question. Although I think it's obviously very important to consider, what I just said about the public trust angle. so our Tocqueville program that you mentioned at Furman university was like, many other such programs around the country. And, and, may perhaps in some way your, your program, John at the political theory Institute at Brown, a place that was meant to be a home for, students all over the political spectrum to meet and to examine, you know, different, really widely different political and other ideological perspectives on, on every issue. We're very happy that we actually had a society of fellows program. So students that committed to the Tocqueville program to take a certain number of courses and do extracurriculars. And when I, I didn't think about where they were coming from politically, but when I was pressed on it, I counted them up and it was, you know, pretty evenly split split with a few in the middle who didn't know, know what they were up to, which is great, you know? And so it made for a really good discussion. I think that's the other important corollary. No one felt like they could walk in the room and just say something and get a laugh or, or a sneer. Everyone felt like if I'm going to say something, I have to, I have to back that up. And I'm also counting on, given the environment, those students were able to help us create, counting on people to take me seriously and ask questions, argue back, ask for more. so, you know, it's, it's, it's a number of things, questions, not being asked, really good conversations, not being had. Also just the university of becoming a place that doesn't reflect well on society and therefore society starts to give up on it. These are all reasons we care about viewpoint diversity. So when we, we did something at Furman for that, and we, you know, we're very happy with that. But when we came to AEI, we saw one of the things that we could do from here that was, not what we could do within the context of any particular institution would be to start thinking about the very hard question of how do you get viewpoint diversity in the faculty? because it's, there's a very particular method, of course, of hiring faculty and promoting faculty and cultivating faculty that is, unique to the university. so they're not employees like other businesses. And, how do you, how do you tackle that, that difficult problem? So we have, proliferated models over the last four years, I'd say. and, at this point we're purveyors of models of viewpoint diversity. We have short-term solutions. We have medium-term solutions. We have long-term solutions. I have to say we've been very, grateful to, and gratified to be able to partner with some universities, who are also thinking hard about this faculty and administrators who are thinking hard about this to, launch some programs together.

John Tomasi: So I'm going to go a little slower and just pause a bit longer on ideological diversity. So I, I'm sort of hearing two things that you're saying. One, I heard very clearly, and that's the, something like if a university system, which takes a lot of public funding. Which all universities do public or private. If they're private, they take, you know, they have all kinds of tax advantages and so on. If a university system that takes public funding allows itself not to be representative of the, of the citizenry broadly. It's unfair for one thing. And it's also setting itself up for, for a backlash. That's an important point that Jenna, you made, just a moment ago quite well. I want to just put another one, another thought on the table. It's just to see what you think about it. Because that's sort of what I, what I learned building a center at Brown. There's also something about an active loss of opportunity for learning on the part of students. That goes way beyond questions of fairness or just anger at the fact that the institutions would, would, would do this, do this to themselves. And all that, I think that it's okay. And let me express that if I may, dramatically, I had a, the, my center at Brown was founded because of these two students, both very prominent speakers on campus, one from the left, one from the right. They both had columns in the student paper. One defended the mainstream democratic party view. One defended the mainstream Republican party view. And they came to me with a, this feeling of restlessness, this feeling of, wanting more than what they're being served up. And one of the students said to me, he said, this is about the two parties now, he said, we did not come to college merely to become more skillful defenders of some inherited ideology. We came here to think for ourselves. And I mentioned that, I mentioned that student's line because the point of having different viewpoints is not just so you can learn to be a Republican as given by the Republican party or to learn to be a Democrat as given by the Democratic party. Rather, that's a very ideal. That's a very ideologically loaded way of thinking about learning. I think you, we all as professors know, or at least we hope that learning is really about the future, the frontier about new things. And I think you want to have students here from different viewpoints from Republicans and Democrats, not so they can know what those viewpoints are so much as so they can have launching points, different sets of assumptions, different, different questions that are seen to be important that they can develop their own minds in response to. I mean, does that, does that ring, does that resonate with you at all as teacher? Ben, what do you think about that?

Benjamin Storey: Yeah, John, this comment causes me to reflect on a couple of documents that have become really important to Jen and I lately. One is the AAUP's AAUP's 1915 report on academic freedom, really the founding document of the AAUP. And for this conversation, what's most important about that document is that therein, the committee that wrote it identifies both a legitimately progressive element of scholarship and a legitimately conservative element of scholarship. And I think we've lost sight of that legitimately conservative element of scholarship and that impoverishes the kinds of conversations that you can have on campus. And I say this, I say this not out of a desire to go backward and this is, this brings me to the second document that your comment reminds me of, which is Hannah Arendt's wonderful essay on the crisis in education, in which Arendt describes the posture that an educator ought to take with respect to the young. The educator should, Arendt argues, take the perspective of someone who takes responsibility for the young, not so as to simply cause them to be simple continuations or reincarnations of the world of the past, simply to form them into that mold. That's right. But so as to actually allow them to make something new of their lives that is informed by what has come before them. And so, you know, I think most teachers are familiar with the experience of watching students try to sort of live up to an imperative of originality and not be able to do it precisely because they are not sufficiently informed. To understand what has actually happened, the ways in which people have solved the problem of their lives in the past. So as to think about what it would really mean to take a real account of our circumstances and figure out the proper way to navigate them.

John Tomasi: That's fabulous. That's fabulous. And I just want to emphasize why I like that so much. It's very heterodox academy in a whole bunch of ways. What I like about it is that it gets us past a certain way. I think a lot of people who come to these issues, especially alums looking at their universities, looking at the way things have changed, looking at some of the ideas coming out of universities that have caused some problems in our society in recent years in particular. And they see the lack of ideological diversity, and they really think about that first point. It just seems unfair. They get angry for understandable reasons. And yet it's also important for us to recognize that it's not just the fairness point. It's really a question of what we're trying to do at universities at all. And those who say, I mean, I have people say this to me at a variety of universities. Why do we want viewpoint diversity? I thought universities were about searching for the truth. If we've come to a consensus through free hiring and argumentation through the years that all on the left, so no intelligent person can be a Republican, Republican, for example, isn't that what you want if you want to search for truth? But we know as educators, and as people of any kind of intellectual, any degree of intellectual humility, we're always going to be searchers. If we close off whole patterns of premises and assumptions and ways of understanding the world, and we think we're going to have the truth in any kind of lively way, we're fooling ourselves. And I think that's really the, in some ways, that's the deeper point. It supports some of the angry alums, but I think it does it at a deeper level that is maybe more communicable to university presidents and to students. Jenna, a few minutes ago, you were about to start talking about some institutional initiatives you've been involved with. I want to mention one. I read a report of yours that you guys produced, I think, two years ago now on schools of civic thought, which I think is just one of the best. It's one of the, I read a lot of reports. That's one of the best reports that I've read. It's so, not just because it's well-written or clear or important, it's just something about the depths of intelligence with which you did it, the way you connected this idea of this, this fascinating idea of a new discipline to our current condition. It was just really remarkable. But I don't mean to steer you directly to that. Please go any direction you want. You're going to speak about some institutional initiatives that you guys have been involved with through AEI and perhaps on your own. Jenna, do you want to speak to that?

Jenna Storey: Yes, I would. I'd love to talk about schools of civic thought in a moment. But, and that's something, as you say, we've been thinking and thinking about. It's a, it's a, it's a very rich and complicated project.

John Tomasi: You've been thinking, you've been thinking deeply about it. That report is called civic thought, a proposal for university level civic education from AEI, December, 2023. We'll put a link to it in our, in our, in our podcast, but that's, it's, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a treasure. But anyway, please.

Jenna Storey: I might just speak to the, your previous point for one moment though, about the, the deep reasons to have viewpoint diversity in the academy. And not just the political reasons. I think because I mentioned before, we've kind of organized our models for introducing viewpoint diversity or enhancing viewpoint diversity in the academy into short, medium and long-term solutions. And I, I think actually that is important to do just for practical reasons, because you do need to do something right now. You need to do something that's going to have effect for the current cohort of undergraduates, medium term. But you really do need to think about the long-term health of the academy, then reference 1915. Like we're trying to think in very long-term perspectives here, right? What has happened over the last 20, 30 years? What has happened over the last hundred years to depart even from that document? And so I might start with the long-term actually, because it speaks most directly, I think, to your point that the, the deepest reason to have viewpoint diversity in the academy is for richness of thought. The question there, the, the, the, the problem that we're trying to tackle there is a, is a problem of pipeline, right? So Steven Teles at Johns Hopkins wrote a really great essay in national affairs last June called beyond academic sectarianism.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Jenna Storey: And, we were corresponding as he was writing that and, and after he was writing that and out of that essay in our court and our correspondence, it grew this program to help, help first communicate to young people, whether on the right. The right or actually, you know, really any young person who wants to engage with ideological difference that the academy would be a home for them because currently the academy doesn't necessarily look like a home for that kind of thinking and talking.

John Tomasi: Right.

Jenna Storey: And so the concern of Steve and other professors is that the academy is slanting further and further in one direction, but the tent is getting narrower and narrower on one side because it's no, it's, and then it's a self-replicating problem. It doesn't look like a place where you want to go if you want to have really deep across ideological. So we basically designed this program that draws on students who are attracted to places like AEI summer honors program, Hertog program, Hudson program, ISI, IHS. So students who want that kind of conversation. And we've been, gratifying to find out that we've been able to partner with, professors from the top 10, most of the top 10 political science departments who are wanting to mentor those students, help them with applications, but also help them down the road with publications. So this is a long-term thing.

John Tomasi: And what motivates those professors?

Jenna Storey: I think the sense that, well, yeah, that's a very good question. The sense that their discipline is, needs attention if it is going to, you know, be a place where the, the broad range of questions is being asked in the future. So I think the deepest motivation for everyone in that group is there are topics that are really not being considered. And there are questions that seem off the table and that, that shouldn't be. Now that's really hard to break into, you know, that kind of thing because those questions don't look interesting or whatever to someone who's editing a publication. But if you have really, top professors willing to, to say, this is a problem and I'm, I'm willing to help with that. And I'm willing to mentor young people so that they can break in with their new questions and topics. This is to me, one of the most sort of deeply authentic ways to address the viewpoint diversity problem in academia.

John Tomasi: Yeah. Thank you. Ben, do you want us to add to that? Or other institutional things you want, you want to mention?

Benjamin Storey: Sure. The, Ashley, there's a, there's a neat project that builds on, you know, Jenna's point that actually the point of the, of the exchange between the two of you just a moment ago, Jenna spoke of the professors that we've been working with to try to, encourage some more ideological diversity on the population of graduate students. And John, you said, what motivates those professors? And I think that's a, I think that's really interesting, right? The professors, most of them are not on the right. The, are interested in broadening the academic tent, the, because they see that there's something crucial to the thing they love to inquiry about doing this. And so I've actually developed another program to work with faculty members in conjunction, actually at this suggestion of one of the, one of the founding members of Heterodox Academy, Jon Shields at, Claremont, out in, out in California. John wrote this wonderful piece in the New York times, a, a few years ago called liberal college professors can save the GOP. And what John was worried about.

John Tomasi: I remember. I remember. It's, it's, it's, it's a great piece.

Benjamin Storey: And, and what John was worried about was, you know, he was seeing a, just a, a hollowing out of the intellectual life of the American right, which was something that was a problem for everyone. And he looked at our college campuses and say like, well, you know, if it's an intellectual problem, college ought to have something to do to address it. But he also knows very well because he wrote a book about the subject that there are almost no conservative professors who can address this kind of thing, who could give the young right that is advancing through college, a better education. So it's allowed them to think more seriously about the, the, the public problems that they're going to go on to try to address. And so John said, well, look, you know, ideas are not the same thing as identities. The, we ought to, see if liberal professors would, you know, he, he just suggested liberal professors, you ought to teach conservative ideas. It would be better for everybody. It'd be better for you. It'd be better for the students. It'd be better for liberal students. It'd be better for the conservative students. It'd be better for the country. Everyone would profit if he did this. And John got a flood of mail and the, from people who read this article, you know, professors who read this article said, Hey, if I could get trained in something like this, this is something that I would, I'd be, very eager to do. And so John came to us last summer and said, Hey, do you think I could partner with AEI to set up a program to actually train people? The, who are not already members of the choir, who have not been through the small, but tight knit world of conservative academia and, see if some of them would be interested in learning about some of these conservative ideas, the, and incorporating them in some ways or other into their, into their teaching. So John and I, set up a program with the help of AEI's academic programs team. We have been, we're going to, we're going to run this thing, this may for the, fun first time, going to be a week long workshop. We've got wonderful scholars at AEI, people like Yuval Levin and Matt Continetti and Adam White, and also, people from around the country, like, like, like Jennifer Burns, the, from, from Stanford and Frank Leichter from Emory and, and, and a, and, and John himself.

John Tomasi: The goddess, I mean, Jennifer famously wrote The Goddess of the Market, a book about Ayn Rand at a time when she was, I think, an untenured history professor. I met her, I was out at Stanford giving a talk and this person walked up to me and said, I'm working on a book on Ayn Rand. And I said, good luck, good luck to you. I'm just not sure what's going to happen. And now when I was at the more recently, you know, she's finished a book on Milton Friedman and she, you know, whatever she's, she's prospering, but yeah. So there's, there's all kinds of interesting surprises, in the academy.

Benjamin Storey: Well, and that's what's that, that's, that has been echoed by my experience in setting this up. You know, you get wonderful people like Jennifer and John involved and, and the next thing you know, people come out of the woodwork to come do this. And so we've got about twice as many applications as we had slots, for this, for this program. There are lots of people who want to come to AEI, this institution that has been a dead sand, the, in the development of American intellectual conservatism over the course of the, the 20th and now the 21st century, they want to come, they want to learn about this. They want to incorporate it into their teaching. And this is another way in which this is another of the, you know, Jenna was speaking about a very long-term solution for bringing, ideological diversity in the academy, but there are also things you could do much faster by just like getting some new books and, into the classroom, getting some new courses, the, into the catalog.

John Tomasi: That's right. And, and I'm sure you're aware of there are initiatives underway. We're going to move to the federal changes happening in a moment or two, but there are initiatives underway at a number of growing number of colleges to talk about constructive disagreement, ways to do discourse across disagreement. And that's, that's been another, it creates a certain pipeline urgency, which I think opens the door for people seeing the importance of the project, like the one you guys have been involved with at AEI. That's, that's sort of in the, in there, but I, I do, I do want to just invite you to say a little bit about the school of civic thoughts initiative, because I personally, that's just really fascinating. Would you want to say just a few words about that either of you?

Benjamin Storey: Yeah, sure.

John Tomasi: The, you, you, did you co-write that report? Is that, is that by you?

Jenna Storey: Yes.

John Tomasi: And so it's fabulous. It's fabulous.

Benjamin Storey: So if there's, if, if, you know, the, the, we have the advantage of writing together, John, of not just having to rely on a single mind. It's a, we have this wonderful sort of iterative process in which we trade drafts back and forth. And that really does allow us to, to think better together than either one of us to be able to do alone. And so that's one of the things that, that we're really grateful for in the way that we've been able to, to lead our academic lives. Now on, on civic thought. So as, as you know, as, as I'm sure most of your listeners know, there is a widespread bipartisan sense that, we need better civic education, that better civic education needs to go on at all levels of education in the United States. And there's a level of this that is appropriate to the university. That is our universities need to give our democracy more of what it owes it to, to paraphrase a little bit from Ron Daniels, the, the, the president of, of, of Johns Hopkins. A big part of his argument there is that universities are not giving a democracy what they owe it. That is our, a democracy like ours in particular has a tremendous need for the input of universities. And part of the reason that our, democratic constitutional order is in the trouble that it's in is because it's not getting the, what it needs, from its universities. So there's this, widespread bipartisan sense about the problem of civic education. Universities like Johns Hopkins, like Stanford are starting to stand up new programs to deal with this, but actually the most aggressive and interesting new programs are coming out of places, in, coming out of flagship public universities, the, places like Arizona State, University of North Carolina, the university of Texas at Austin, Florida, yeah, the university of Florida, they're, with, driven by, Republican legislatures. They are actually standing up whole new academic units in the center of the university. And this has of course been a, been a controversial thing, but for us, it prompted a question. Hey, maybe it is in fact the case that there's something called university level civic education that actually ought to take its place among the other disciplines of the university, the, as a free and independent academic unit, in the same way that the history department is a free and independent academic unit or the political science department has that kind of standing. If maybe university level civic education needs to be organized in that way. And that depends.

John Tomasi: And then may I just interrupt just to say that, I'm loving the way you're setting this up. When I was so struck by the report, right from the beginning of the report, you say, the, this, these ideas of school, these schools for civic thought arose because of a political need, I felt political lack in our, in our, in our, across our polity. And yet to succeed, they need to be justified themselves by academic standards. And what you do in that report, among other things, the two of you is you give a, you make a, you make an intellectual case for the, for being a discipline of, of civic thought, which I think with that's exactly, you have to do both those things. Again, if we're thinking about just the fairness point, a running on the anger part or the outrage at universities failings, that's, you can go so far with that, but what you all are doing, I think is that next part, which is actually speaking the language of the academics in the academy, not just, just as, not just as rhetoric, but in a profound way to make the intellectual case for the importance, the scholarly importance of a new field. So I, I didn't mean to, that's, that's, those are your, those aren't your, your words, but those are your ideas that I, that's why I found that report so electric. Would you, either of you want to say a bit about, about what the scholarly case is?

Jenna Storey: I'll say a little bit and then let them add to this, but I think, this is a very good way you posed the question. When we were, when we started thinking about civic education, we thought citizenship is, is, is this a topic that's worthy of serious study? You know, that's the question that would, if you answered in the affirmative, well, maybe it should be a discipline or a field of study. is it, is citizenship a topic of worthy, worthy of serious study? After we thought about it for a few minutes or a few hours, we realized, yes, absolutely. There is a human capacity, for thinking and acting as a citizen, which is a particular dimension of, of human life that is, is worthy of serious study. It's a complicated thing. We have tried to be self-governing creatures for millennia and it works out well sometimes and not so well other times. And it's very difficult to understand exactly what forms of human relations, what forms of institutions, what kinds of customs actually further the, the project of self-government and which don't, and how that might be particular to different, different peoples at different times. So that itself just seemed like a topic of study that would be worth delving into. and then we asked, we, we could go further on this as well, but we asked also, is this being done anywhere in a systematic way in the university? Because if it already is, we don't need to start a new field. And it really, it really isn't. You can find fragments of asking this question of what it means to be self-governing in different disciplines. but you don't really see these gathered together in any kind of systematic or coherent form of study. So one of the interesting things that happened after writing that AEI report is that, have been contacted by a lot of different people, both administrators who are curious about this, this whole idea, but also different faculty members, not only from, you might expect political science or history, but also from English, also from the sciences saying, I think I actually have something to contribute to that question of how human beings can think and act like citizens. And I can't really do that where I'm located. So to me, that's an argument for reorganization of intellectual energy, put these people together in a school and a department program and let them do their thing.

Benjamin Storey: So to add one note of amplification to what Jenna was saying there, when we started thinking about this, we were fixated or our attention was drawn to the Greek figure of Prometheus. That is, we, we, we started to wonder why is it that the first self-governing people, at least in our tradition presented themselves to the world in the light of this figure who, who stole fire from the gods. And I, I think the reason they did that is because it's a very appropriate image of what citizenship entails. Think about, we together are going to take power over exercise responsibility for all the decisions of our common life. We're going to decide what the laws ought to be. We're going to decide who ought to hold office, when we should kick them out. We're going to decide, what counts as crime and what the punishments ought to be. We're going to decide who's guilty and who's innocent. We're going to decide when to go to war, when to make peace. We're going to decide what the children should be taught. We're going to decide what the, what the older owed by their society. We're going to decide everything, everything. That is what it means to be a self-governing people. And when you think about that, it's kind of nuts. The, I mean, in other words, like, wow, I am expecting myself to take responsibility with others for something absolutely tremendous. It is an extraordinarily high order ambition of the, fully worthy of, the best energies that a university can give to.

John Tomasi: I love that you put it that way, but let me just confess to you that, or I'll just share with you that when I first heard about your work on this area, I thought to myself, a discipline of, of civic thought seems way too narrow. I thought, you know, civic thought, what's it going to be? They're going to learn, how does a bill become a law? Okay. They do that in high school. You really need it. Do we need to spend four years? What's that going to be? Then in your report, as you know, you just, the way you describe it, it starts to be extremely broad, to be a responsible citizen, to be, to be, to be, to be involved in a process of self-governance responsibly. And I wrote down a couple of your areas. You say it requires you to know something about not just how a bill becomes a law. You need to know that. But you also need to know some things about how economics works, some political economy. You need to know something, what it means, how, how, how do you educate a human being? You need to know something about, you know, what art, science, and literature are and whether government should be involved in sponsoring them. What does that mean for them to be involved in sponsoring them? You need to know something about the relationship between human beings and nature, right? More, you say, you need to know what religion is and how it connects to politics and what the space of the private might be on that interface with the, with the public. You say, you need to know something about war and peace, cultural and economic exchange and international relations, again, to be a responsible citizen. And you go on to basically the, at one point you say the whole of the domain of human life. And at that point, I'll just tell you, I'll tell you to myself, this is too broad to be honest. It's too broad. It's like the old philosopher, there's a joke among philosophers that when you hear a philosophical argument, you can present a paper, the audience usually begins by saying, oh yeah, because they're really skeptical. Then you show them, show them what you mean, you approve your point. And they say, yeah, well, so what? I kind of have a similar feeling like, I guess too narrow, it's too broad, but, but, but you, but you, you, but you do make that case and you did it again just a moment ago that there's something, you haven't used the word liberal arts yet, but there's something, something very broad about it, about civic thought as a potential field of study. you also say something, you also say something that I want to ask you about civic thought. And then you mentioned this to me once at a cocktail party and it really stuck in my mind. I'm not sure what to think of us. I get my chance now finally to ask you, you say that civic thought as a discipline also involves some special responsibility of communicating ideas to a broader audience. And that's not the way academics normally think. Academics usually go interior, the less, the less scrutable you are, you know, the more deep in the discipline you are, but you're thinking this is one has a different characteristic about having something public. Can you say a word about that? Either of you?

Benjamin Storey: Yeah, sure. I'll, I'll say a, say a quick word here. And then I, I want to hear what, what, what Jenna might add, but you know, this is in part driven by our experience and moving to a place like AEI. AEI has this wonderful library on the first floor and you stand there and you, you look at the extraordinary scholarly production of this institution over the course of the years. It includes books like by people like Irving Kristol and James Q. Wilson. And what is so magnificent about these people is they could not think more seriously. These are very determined minds trying very hard to get at the heart of their subjects, but they try to write in such a way that a, an intelligent college student could read them and be informed by them. And so they're, they're trying to take a, they're, they're trying to do very demanding scholarship, but they're, but they don't allow the notion that I'm going to do scholarship to, exempt them from the notion that they want to communicate their ideas clearly. And so it seems to us that, that, that universities should be focused on, intentionally developing, that kind of scholarship that can be more publicly accessible.

John Tomasi: That's nice. And can I, man, just, just an example of that, if I may, and I'll just see what you think about this. You know, for me, one of the most stunning examples of that, of a particular AEI scholar doing that is Charles Murray, especially in his book, Coming Apart. And as you know, in Coming Apart, he talks about this divide, which turns out to be a prescient, you know, as often with him, a very prescient, work. But what really struck me about it was that, he uses examples. You probably know the famous test he developed is about how thick your bubble is. And he developed these kind of homey questions. Like when's the last time you had a six pack of beer and cans in your fridge? who's Jimmy Johnson? I said, I answered the football coaches. He said, but the football coach, you get one point. Jimmy Johnson is like the most famous NASCAR, you know, all this sort of stuff. He sort of shows you the limitations about our bubbles, but he does it in a way that's directed an audience of regular people, undergrads, for example, not the elite way back in the, and, and, and I think that disciplined him to be really thinking about, well, what's coming apart? This particular society is coming apart. I'm not making an abstract argument for the ages. I'm talking about something fundamentally deep, fundamentally important, fundamentally social scientific about this world. And I'm going to do it by messing around with your views about who Jimmy Johnson is. And, and that's, and to me, that was like, there was, there was a additional intellectual firepower that can only have been brought to bear because he was aiming to communicate that to regular people. You don't, you don't talk about that in your report, but I, but I just found that really, I found that just compelling.

Jenna Storey: I think, I think it'd be very helpful for academics to, to realize are growing a greater number of them to realize that writing for the general public is itself, as you said, a discipline. it's a very exacting enterprise. And I think one way to see that is to, juxtapose it to writing for peer review. When you're writing for peer review, you know who your peers are. Basically you have to learn and you have to do work and, but then, you know, and there are 25 people, 50 people, a hundred people, maybe at the most, when you're writing for the public, you actually have to create your audience most of the time as you're, as you're writing for them, or at least when you're starting out, you have to create that audience. I feel like almost in every new piece we have to create, think of the audience that created. and that is an incredible challenge. I also wanted to say one thing about, I think how that you, you, you juxtaposed, writing something abstract for the ages to speaking to the now we've been thinking a lot about what it takes to write a book that endures, right? Cause you want your books to endure, or you just want to understand books that have endured. It's a, just strikes me as an amazing thing that we're still reading, say Plato's Republic after 2,500 years. How did he pull that off? and it's actually, I think not that he was, writing abstractly for the ages so much, or just writing like, you know, something that wasn't specific to his moment. It's actually quite specific to his moment. It's you have to, he had to speak to his moment to get anyone to, you know, copy that over again or handed down or what have you, to the next generation, but you have to speak to your moment in a way that, isn't just specific to the passing, you know, day, but gets at the really core issues that you find kind of reverberating throughout the moments. Right. So I think that art of writing publicly in a really good way, like, like Charles Murray does and others is to speak to the moment and to all, you know, ages as you put it, at the same time.

John Tomasi: And another example of that, for me, maybe for me, maybe the most shining example is Tocqueville. Tocqueville's writing about a particular, particular moment, but he's also talking about the coming of the age of equality. And he just, and as you know, just runs this analysis of this one society and over a period of basically a decade or so, he's describing what's happening in America then, but he's reaching and sketching in these broad, you know, as you, I'm sure it's a cliche that Tocqueville is still the most quoted person in the, in both sides of the, of the aisle and Congress. That's, that's a pretty remarkable accomplishment over a hundred years past. Speaking of government and Congress now, I want to invite you to, just share with us any thoughts you might have about our, our current moment politically. we're having this conversation, several months after president Trump's inauguration, we have seen, some truly remarkable, federal efforts to, I'll say reform universities, but certainly, impact universities. How do you see this? how do you see this backlash? We began by talking about, a lock, a last of public, the dangers of losing public trust. Maybe we're seeing some part, some of those dangers of what that looks like now. How do you, how do you see this moment? And what's your attitude towards all of this? Yeah.

Benjamin Storey: Thanks for the question. Who wants that question?

Jenna Storey: I'll take it.

Benjamin Storey: Go for it. Go for it.

Jenna Storey: Yeah. So, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a challenging question. It's a, it's something that we try to think about, a fresh every day because things are changing every day in fairly dramatic ways right now. is obviously, obviously a challenging situation for universities. There are truly damaging things, that are happening, as a result of some of the federal actions. I think, our position on this is why we regret some of the ways, or we, we don't agree with some of the ways that the government is going about, trying to make change in the universities. We, we, we, we do understand where the public distrust of universities is coming from. And we sympathize with, with much of that. I, to return to our initial theme, I would say that the university isn't really serving society as it should. And that's not necessarily serving it directly, like, you know, giving it hamburgers or something like this, but it's not cultivating citizens. It's not cultivating thoughtful people. It's not even doing really the research that, always doing the research that it should be doing, not creating that environment that you mentioned being an island of patience and a culture of haste that doesn't describe the current university well enough. So it's, you know, it's hard to, to, to know what to do in this particular situation, but I'll give you a little bit of a sense of the way we're thinking about it as it pertains to our work and some of the work that we're trying to do in the university. Or in various universities right now, I think the first thing that we've come to realize is that, change is coming. We are going to live, we people that work with universities or in universities are going to live in a new environment. I think that hit us with particular force when we realized that it wasn't only the Trumpist right or even the center, right. That was, feeling a distrust of the universities, but a lot of people on the center left, you can look at the Gallup numbers that you cited. You could also make reference to, commentators on the center left who have expressed, sympathy with some of the, at least the aims, that are that Trump administration has been pursuing, if not always the means. I heard someone, a very prominent, foundation, person on, on the center left side the other day, you know, I, I don't like Trump, I'm a Democrat, but I could have basically written that letter that they sent to the Columbia university. When I heard that, I realized that there's a significant chance that universities will need to change. So what do you do in light of that situation? If I'm right in reading it that way, well, what we've, thought to do is, you know, still we've been working on these programs for viewpoint diversity, for civic thought, for liberal education for a long time, as have you, John, and many other people. And I think people in this situation should keep their eye on the balls they've been pushing for, you know, decades in some cases or years and see how you can advance those, in a, in a very different and disrupted field. It's still possible to do these things and do them well and do them with integrity, even, and even today. And I guess to say three more things that would guide our action there, we try to look for a large majority of people in the university now that would support what we're trying to do. Like if when 70% of people say, yes, that's a good idea, that's usually a good idea. Two, you have to be willing to innovate a bit with university structures, not with abandon, but with some daring to achieve those ends, really keeping your eye on the ends. And third, I think it's very important to say the same thing all the time. In other words, say the same thing to different audiences. I think a lot of times people, you know, having worked in a university, we say one thing internally and another thing externally, and I just don't think that's going to fly any longer. There's too much of a spotlight on universities and people have to figure out how to account for what they're doing and what they want to do in universities in a way that will play in some fashion with the general public and with the political actors who are in power.

Benjamin Storey: I'd say I just add a quick point to what Jenna has said there. Which is that understandably, a lot of university leaders right now are thinking about, how do I respond to the Trump administration? And of course, that's a reasonable question, given what's coming at them. And insofar as that means, you know, we've got to defend ourselves in court, we have to reach out to Republican politicians and these kinds of things, all that, that they're well within their rights to do these things. But I think in this very tense moment, I hope that university leaders are keeping their eye on public opinion and the loss of faith that they have undergone in that public opinion. Because that is why they're a political target. And if they can address these longer term problems while they're dealing with these shorter term problems, because of course, the short term crisis, I wouldn't want to be a university leader right now. I feel for them and trying to deal with it. But the short term crisis is also an opportunity to address some of the problems that have been so hard to fix for so long.

John Tomasi: That's nice. Let me, allow me to, as you reach the end of this conversation, I want to try to situate where I see you doing your work and how I, I think you're the kind of, the way you're approaching your work is very similar to what we're doing at HXI, but I'm really, HXI, but I'm really thinking about, about you guys and some of the things you said about institutional change. So I wrote a, I wrote a short piece, we have a magazine called Inquisitive, which we recently launched, and there's an issue coming up on power. And I wrote a piece on Mill and Marcuse, and as you know, the great debate between Mill and Marcuse, Mill says there can be a free exchange of ideas can lead to truth, 1956, right? And then in Marcuse, 1968, writes this thing called repressive toleration, repressive tolerance, this Marxist article saying, well, yeah, free exchange of ideas can lead to truth, but if the power, if the pre-existing power imbalances are out of whack, they'll just reproduce the imbalances and get them again. So Marcuse says in that case, to, to correct the imbalance of power, you can use all available, illiberal means, violence, all kinds of things. And as many of us, many people have noted, the cancel culture of the last 10 years that has been so extreme on campuses has been led by people who were inspired by Marcuse. They, in their own wisdom, saw American society as a right-wing project. They wanted to take, they took it upon themselves to correct America by taking over the universities and doing these things. And now what we're seeing, though, with, with, with, with, with, with Trump coming in is a very Marcuse and counter movement, but it's still a very Marcuse and he's saying there's an imbalance of power on the campuses. And I don't care about the free exchange of ideas and respecting all the norms of, of, of, of non-censorship. I'm going to, I'm going to use the force against these people big time. And I'm not going to worry too much about the legality, the legal niceties of some of this. And so we really find ourselves is that there's, there's, there's a conflict on campus. There's already a backlash, backlash growing against the Trumpian position. There's, there's, we find ourselves in a conflict between illiberals to the left of us, illiberals to the right of us. I can't help quoting Tennyson, illiberals to the left of us. I'm paraphrasing Tennyson, illiberals to the left of us, illiberals to the right, volleyed in thunder into the, into the valley of death, fell our university system. Something like I'm trying to do the charge of the Light Brigade, probably not very well, but that's, that's what's happening on campus. And those are the loud voices on campus. But the question is people like you and the work you're doing is the movement towards liberalism. It's saying, we're not going to go to either of these extreme sides of anti-liberal, perhaps lawless behavior. Instead, we're going to do the quiet, serious work of institution rebuilding. And Ben, you just said, I was so struck by the way you said that a moment ago, that as university leaders start facing the fact that they need to change, you hope they're going to listen to the wider society. Not, I hope not listen to them the way that the Marcuse and cancellation people did, but rather listen to it to the way that I think both of you do. That is saying, well, we want to listen to a wider range of viewpoints because we're Americans and we're in a democracy. And you caught Aristotle at one point about, you know, people ruling, politics is ruling and being ruled in turn. And that means respecting different voices. When I think about your work and the things you were describing, Jenna, about the institutional stuff you guys were doing at AEI, that's the liberal project that I see you engaged in. Do you see it that way? Do you feel like you're a liberalist to the left of you, a liberalist to the right, trying to prevent the university from falling into the abyss? Is that overstated or how do you see your work?

Jenna Storey: Well, I'd say two things. I think whenever we're coming up with some new model of viewpoint diversity, as it were, we ask or any kind of innovation we're speculating about in the academy, we say, does it go with the grain of academic life? So not does it necessarily adhere to the current practices of the university, because I think those have gotten us off the grain of academic life, but would a well-intentioned professor, student, administrator see this as actually just an improvement on what they're really trying to do?

John Tomasi: That's lovely.

Jenna Storey: So that's the primary way I think about it, and I think Ben thinks about it. And I think is it a liberal effort? In some ways it is. It certainly tries to get a lot of different people and different viewpoints talking together, but I might say it's more political than some understandings of liberalism may allow, and that would be another debate maybe. But I think that I sort of follow Hannah Arendt here in thinking that to form a culture, a revival culture, you need to have some kind of intensive political engagement, meaning an intensive conversation that aims at understanding how we should act together. And sometimes liberalism in various formulations of it or practices of it doesn't actually encourage that kind of vigorous political action.

John Tomasi: When I said liberal, I meant something like liberal in the meliorist sense, that is the sense of making things better. As opposed to the radical, the views of radicals from left or right is that the system's broken, you should not respect the norms, blow it all up, start fresh. But the liberals have this idea, I mean liberal in the classic sense of liberal. Liberal meaning you try to gather people of good faith. You try to gather people of goodwill. And you enlist them in a project. And what you guys do, I think, which is so impressive, and the phrase you just used, Jenna, just demonstrates it. What did you just say? You want to find things that go with the grain of academic life. That's the kind of language, not just language, but a mindset that gives me some hope for the future in these troubled times. Let me just say that. Ben, did you want to do it?

Benjamin Storey: Yeah, yeah.

John Tomasi: Please, please.

Benjamin Storey: I just want to add one, actually, just sort of turn the prism a little bit, John, on the way that you're describing this. I think you've accurately described this as a liberal project. I think it could, interestingly, also be described as a conservative project in the Burkean sense, right? Because what Edmund Burke understands is that in order to conserve, you often have to reform. And that is that, you know, things that simply persist in their old patterns of doing things, they lose life, they become encrusted. I'm reminded here of the phrase of Daniel Coit Gilman at the founding of Johns Hopkins who said, universities frequently fall into ruts.

John Tomasi: I love that. I love that line. I saw that. I saw that in your report. I just underlined that twice.

Benjamin Storey: Yeah, it's, you know, and that's where we're at. I think the universities are in a rut. And, you know, they're going to be.

John Tomasi: And Ben, I'm sorry, but I'm sorry, but I need to say, you added, you quoted that. And then you said, I think you said something like, and they need something external to push them out. Like, so it's a wagon and a rut, but you need someone to say, let's get this thing up and out. Right. And, you know, not blow it up, not, not, not put dynamite there and blow the thing up, but like push it out of the rut and keep it moving.

Benjamin Storey: Right. And there's a, there's a distinction between giving something a shove so as to give it out of a rut and hitting it with a sledgehammer in order to smash it. The, and, you know, I'm in favor of the, of the former, not the latter. The, but that is the, but that's where we're at right now is that this needs to be, you know, I, Jen and I recognize that this country is inconceivable. Without the contributions of its universities. Harvard was founded in 1636 in time for the first generation of children born in that colony to get college educations. And that is absolutely essential because our regime is really complicated. It's a constitutional democracy with all kinds of Rube Goldberg projects built into it. You don't think unless you've got a significant measure of, of, of education. So we have to run ourselves in an educated way. And so we, we love our universities and want them to flourish, but right now in order to flourish, they do need some outside help.

John Tomasi: Jenna's story, Ben's story. Thanks for coming on Heterodox Out Loud. I admire the work you're doing tremendously. Thanks for your leadership at AEI. I'm hopeful. I'm, I'm hopeful. I'm more hopeful for our future than I was before we started this conversation. Whether that hope will be borne out in our lifetimes, I don't know, but I am sincerely more hopeful from having talked with both of you. Thanks for what you do. And thanks for being on the show.

Benjamin Storey: Thanks, John. You know, Heterodox has been an important, beacon of hope to us since it was founded. The, when, when we were signing onto Heterodox from our, our positions down at Furman. So we're really grateful for all the work that you do. The, and to, and to have this chance to, to talk with a wonderful community that's gathered around Heterodox. Thank you.

John Tomasi: Thank you both. Take care.

Jenna Storey: Thank you.