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Can colleges be engines of rigorous civil debate, or are self-censorship and fear stifling the next generation of thinkers? 

Today, we welcome Chancellor Andrew Martin of Washington University in St. Louis, a leading scholar and administrator recognized for reshaping institutional culture at the highest levels of academia.

Chancellor Martin discusses his strategic initiatives to foster a climate of rigorous, principled debate and constructive disagreement at WashU, ranging from the creation of the "Dialogue Across Difference" program to groundbreaking admissions policies that increase socioeconomic and ideological diversity. He unpacks the recently released Vanderbilt–WashU Statement of Principles, a collaborative effort with Vanderbilt University, aimed at recommitting academic institutions to the foundational pillars of excellence, academic freedom, and free expression. 

Explore how WashU’s Order of Liberty and cluster faculty hiring initiatives promote diverse perspectives, incorporating both liberal and civic virtue frameworks. Understand how institutional neutrality, along with dialogue and engagement, fosters a dynamic academic community.

Andrew D. Martin is the 15th chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis, inaugurated on October 3, 2019. He previously served as dean of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan from 2014 to 2018 and is a political scientist known for the Martin-Quinn scores used to study U.S. Supreme Court ideology. At WashU, he launched access initiatives, including the WashU Pledge and Gateway to Success, and moved the university to a no-loan undergraduate aid policy. In fall 2024, he co-signed a Statement of Principles with Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier, adopted by both universities’ boards, affirming free expression, academic freedom, and institutional neutrality. In September 2025, he launched the Ordered Liberty Project to advance academic freedom, viewpoint diversity, and civic education.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Chancellor Andrew Martin, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Andrew Martin: Thank you for the invitation. It's good to be here.

John Tomasi: It's really a pleasure to have you here. You've been Chancellor at WashU since 2019.

Andrew Martin: That's correct.

John Tomasi: And we've been watching your work there with great interest here at Heterodox Academy. We're going to dive into that in a moment or two. Before you came to WashU, you were the Dean of, was it Arts and Letters at Michigan?

Andrew Martin: Literature, Science, and the Arts, LSA.

John Tomasi: LSA. And how long were you in that position?

Andrew Martin: I was in that position for four years.

John Tomasi: Oh, interesting. And before that, were you a department chair?

Andrew Martin: I was a department chair.

John Tomasi: At Michigan?

Andrew Martin: At WashU.

John Tomasi: Oh, at WashU. Oh, interesting. And so when you developed the, I mean, you literally have a metric in political science named after you. When I was teaching political science, I heard about the Martin Quinn score.

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: What is the Martin Quinn score for our listeners?

Andrew Martin: So the Martin Quinn scores were developed, Mercy, maybe 25 years ago as a way to take the voting records of Supreme Court justices and arrange them ideologically within a cohort and then using some longitudinal models, be able to bridge over time.

John Tomasi: Right.

Andrew Martin: So you can see how individual justices change and evolve ideologically, but also compare different eras of the court.

John Tomasi: And so you get a, it's a dynamic score.

Andrew Martin: It's a dynamic score.

John Tomasi: Using Bayes' theorem, I think, in the background.

Andrew Martin: We did, we used Bayesian statistical methods and some fancy things called Markov chain Monte Carlo Methods to estimate, to estimate the models. And at the time that was really cutting edge and now it's very pedestrian.

John Tomasi: Nice. I can see that you're warming to the topic.

Andrew Martin: That's a true, as a true nerd.

John Tomasi: I also want to just, just again, as we just begin the conversation, you also regularly co-teach a course, I believe it's called free speech on campus with Lee Epstein. Can you say a bit about that?

Andrew Martin: Yes, we developed this course when I started as chancellor. Lee was my doctoral advisor at WashU from back in the nineties. And we decided that it was going to be really important for me to, as a chancellor, to get into the classroom regularly. When we first taught this course, it was a regular class that met once a week. And it became too challenging for me to be in St. Louis every Wednesday from 11 to 1. And so now it's a one credit hour weekend course open to every undergraduate student at the university. And we have 75 or a hundred to take the course every spring. The way we teach the course is we really begin by reading some of the foundational philosophical documents about the foundations of free speech. We then very quickly teach the basics of first amendment law. And then we work through a series of case after case after case when various institutional values come into conflict with free speech principles. And so this is a course that we've offered annually since 2019. And later next month, we will have published a course book that could be used by anyone who wants to teach this course to undergraduate or law students, for that matter, anywhere in the country.

John Tomasi: And it's not just, I thought the course was mainly focused on, it is mainly focused on the first amendment, but there's also the background readings to give people a sense for the wider conceptions of the uses of speech.

Andrew Martin: Wider conceptions of uses of speech, important policy discussions that play out on university campuses. And then we, in a sense, in the, in the cases, we, we put students in simulations. So what would you do in this situation? If you were the head of campus security, if you were the university president, if you were the board chair, and, and some of those cases are easy once you understand the law. and some of the cases are really, really hard. and one of the, I would just say features of academic life, is that every couple of weeks, there's another case that pops up that we could develop into a full blown case to use with our students. I can tell you that it's been very, very beneficial to us at WashU to have a group of students, most of whom are pre-law students, but not all of them, who are able to think abstractly about free speech challenges on campus rather than emotionally.

John Tomasi: Right, right. we're going to speak in a, later on in this conversation about ordered liberty. And I'm just, I was interested in about your teaching your first amendment class because at HxA, we're very interested in the purposes of free speech and that free speech on a college campus, we think has a certain set of responsibilities that come with it to make that liberty ordered or valuable in a certain way.

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: And we'll come back around and talk about your conception of ordered liberty on that in a few minutes.

Andrew Martin: Right.

John Tomasi: just one thing before we begin on, just one more thing that I know you've been involved with it. It's one of the things that is most striking about WashU, the WashU pledge. Can you just tell us something about that and what that, what that is and for our listeners?

Andrew Martin: Yes. Well, the WashU pledge is something that we were able to announce during my inaugural address on campus. and it really was the culmination of work that began back in 2014, in 2014, which is the same year I started as Dean at the University of Michigan. WashU was the worst university in the country among the elite private universities for socioeconomic diversity. Only 5% of our entering class was eligible for the, for the Pell Grant. I think we were like ranked 118th out of 118. And it was a two or three percentage point gap before you got up to 117. so my predecessor and his leadership team and the board of trustees really began the work, to open the doors more widely, to Washington, to, to Washington University. And so the pledge was a commitment we made, to students from Missouri and Southern Illinois. That's what I remember. I remember that it was, it was initially those two states. It was geographic, geographic initially, Missouri, Southern Illinois, family income of $75,000 or less. You'd come to WashU for free tuition, room, board, books, laptop, suit for a job interview, a startup grant, every, everything you need to be, to be successful. And you couple that financial aid with some investments that we've made in comprehensive student support to ensure that every one of those students, is able to, to thrive when they come to our campus. So that was really putting a stake in the ground. And I've met so many students, you know, whose, whose parents had seen this on the local news that night when it was announced or a high school guidance counselor from outstate Missouri saw it on Facebook and began talking to talented students. That's really helped us, retain some of that talent that we're going to other institutions, around, around the country. We've made some other great strides in student financial access since then we were able to go no loan, just three years ago. so I'm sorry, need blind three years ago. So we don't look at the student's ability to pay when we make admissions decisions, year and a half ago, we announced our no loan program. so no undergraduate student is required to borrow any money as part of their financial aid package. We meet full financial need. And so we go from being 5% Pell back in 2014, fall of 2024, 25% Pell.

John Tomasi: Fascinating.

Andrew Martin: Right. So it's, it's dramatically changed. It's dramatically changed the composition of our student body and made the campus a much more intellectually and culturally rich place.

John Tomasi: Nice. And now we're going to, we're going to, that's a nice, opening for, for the conversation we'll be having about, dialogues across difference and so on that even obviously happening on your campus. So as you know, I want to turn now to the questions about open inquiry that are the bread and butter around here around HxA. And as you know, Heterodox Academy is a membership organization with professors all around the world to care about these things. We have 25 professors on the WashU campus. We're interested in building campus communities across North America. We have our eyes on WashU by the way, so we're, we're, we're, we're coming soon. We're coming soon for you. but we have a, HxA recently released a four point agenda that we call open inquiry you. Our idea is to encourage university leaders and to work with them, with our members to help university leaders build whole cultures of open inquiry on their campus. And that means, taking certain, certain initiatives. It means, creating certain policies at the university. But I really make, what we really care about is, to paraphrase a friend, Brian Casey, who's the president of Colgate. What we really care about is what happens in the dorm on a Tuesday night.

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: Like what happens in that dorm room? You know, what, behind closed doors, do they have the conversation? Do they, do they, do they have different views? And do they bring them forward? And so our, our four points on our agenda are commit to open inquiry, unleash the free, unleash the free exchange of ideas, insist on viewpoint diversity and invest in constructive disagreement. And as I, as I was preparing for this, conversation with you, I went through some of your initiatives that have happened to your, under your chancellorship. And it was just remarkable how many things you are happening at WashU that slide into those various categories.

Andrew Martin: Yeah, very much so.

John Tomasi: Really, really, really remarkable. So I'm not going to do it in the exact order that I just listed them, but, I want to just start talking about one of the really signature initiatives coming out of WashU is the Vanderbilt WashU Statement of Principles. And that was released, I think, in the fall of 2024, your board approved it?

Andrew Martin: We became public in March of 25.

John Tomasi: So tell us about it.

Andrew Martin: We did all of the work in, in, in calendar 24.

John Tomasi: And so you're working with Daniel Diermeier, presumably, obviously. Can you just say a bit about that work? And what, what, what are the Vanderbilt WashU Statements or Principles?

Andrew Martin: Yeah. So, Daniel and I began having these conversations really years ago, about the trends we were seeing that everybody in higher education was seeing in the polling data. And we were all ignoring, which is the decline in trust among America, the American public of what was happening at our institutions and a polarization, right? With folks for other Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative were viewing what was happening on college campuses, very, very differently. You know, we were also working, together, on an important political issue, which was the endowment tax, which we knew regardless of what happened in the election was going to be something that needed to be handled in this, in this, in this, in this calendar year. and as we thought about what are the ways in which we as institutional leaders can work to regain the trust of the American people, it became clear to us that we needed to start with our principles, that we needed to put pen to paper, and to write down, what we, what we aspire for our institutions to be. And that's, that's where the, that's where the principles came about. in our case, it turns out that that articulation of principles is entirely consistent, with the rest of our governing of governing documents. In fact, on the WashU website, you actually see footnotes referring back to our tenure policy and policy for academic freedom and so on and so forth to sort of see where those, where those ties were together. both Daniel and I thought it was really important for there to be rock solid alignment, between our board and what we were doing as, as leaders. And so, each of our boards took a slightly different approach, but during the calendar year, 2024, we worked with our boards, to make sure that these principles were codified, and to be used in a sense as a North star, for how we would be leading our universities going forward. I think for both of us and the way in which both of us have led our respective institutions at a, I'll call it an interesting time. I, I don't think that there was anything in there that's particularly new, but it did, it did allow us in a very concise way to say, these are the things that are going to be the basis for our decision-making and our actions going forward.

John Tomasi: And I read, I read the principles, the WashU principles as having three main pillars, excellence, academic freedom, and free expression. Would you say a few words about what those values mean in the WashU context?

Andrew Martin: Sure. I mean, excellence is really straightforward. You know, we are in the knowledge creation game, right? and, if we don't hold ourselves to the highest standards of excellence, we're not going to create as much knowledge and understanding about the world as we could be. and that plays out in different disciplines and in different ways. But at the end of the day, we need to be admitting talented students because of their talent, regardless of what they're, you know, regardless of where they're from or what their previous opportunities look like. We need to recruit the very best faculty. again, all about the quality, the quality of the work, but to center that, as the defining characteristic, you know, academic freedom and freedom of expression are, are of course, different things. but I think both are related to the idea, that, that people need to be able to have rigorous principled civil debate on a college campus. and so, you know, freedom of speech of course is broader than that, right? There's lots of speech that we wouldn't want on our college campuses that are, that's constitutionally protected. but, but the idea of censorship, whether that's formal censorship by institutions, which rarely happens, self-censorship, which happens all the time among our students and some of our faculty colleagues, that's a real problem because that's going to limit the knowledge creation, the knowledge creation business. And of course, academic freedom, is so important. it's so important for our faculty, to be able to ask big questions, including controversial questions, and then get to the answer, whatever the answer, whatever the answer might be. I do think it's important as one thinks about academic freedom, to, to look at not just what the rights are for faculty members, but also the responsibilities.

John Tomasi: Right.

Andrew Martin: And academic freedom, you know, is the right to explore and, and really the necessity, to ask and answer complicated questions, but it's also a responsibility to do so within disciplinary standards, and to use disciplinary standards of excellence.

John Tomasi: That's right. That's, that's, that's very well said. One of the, one of the, one of the principles that comes out of the three pillars is this idea of institutional neutrality and heterodox academy. We've been advocating institutional neutrality since our beginnings. It's obviously a link to the Kalven Report from Chicago from 1968, WashU's endorsed institutional neutrality.

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: Have there been times in the past year or two when you have spoken or you've been tempted to speak, in violation or in accord with that, with that principle? Because as you know, most formulations of institutional neutrality have a, a clause that says, the university leaders should remain neutral so they can platform the voices of their professors and students.

Andrew Martin: Exactly.

John Tomasi: Unless central core issues or missions of the university is under threat. Have you had, have you had occasions to, to speak out on issues of the day over the past year or two, or have you been tempted to and not done so?

Andrew Martin: I think over the last year or two, I have spoken out in a number of different fora about things, that are fundamentally important to the university. you know, one of those is the clinical practice of medicine, which is an important part of what we do at Washington University. So too is the importance of federal research funding, for, you know, from NIH, NSF, DOE, and other, and other federal agencies. I speak out all the time about the importance of the Pell grant, and those things. So those are the sorts of political issues.

John Tomasi: So funding, mainly funding issues. It sounds like, primarily funding issues.

Andrew Martin: That's right.

John Tomasi: For research, and undergraduates.

Andrew Martin: Correct. That's right. That's right. you know, the commitment to institutional neutrality plays out, almost every day. Let me give you a, I mean, a very recent example. you know, after the, the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk last week, I had many, many faculty members and students who were writing and say, the university needs to put out a statement, about condemning, condemning, condemning what happened. And the answer is no, we're not going to make a statement about that. Doesn't, we're not, we're not, you know, obviously we don't condone murder. but there've been lots of murders around the country. and we, we're not in the business of deciding which are the ones we comment on and which are the ones that we don't. Obviously if it took place on our campus or a member of our community, that would be a, a slightly different, a different situation. and so our answer was no, we're not going to comment, about that, really horrific incident. I was also receiving lots of inbound communication about why on earth we lowered the flag, at Brookings Hall. we have a very neutral, which is a form of communication and some people's. But it is a form of communication and we have a nice neutral policy. Expressive. It is, it is, one, one could view it as expressive, right? And we have a nice neutral policy says that we follow whatever the president of the United States and the governor of Missouri said with regard to the flag. Now, whether or not that's the right policy or not, I mean, who knows? we might decide institutionally that it's important for us to talk about that, to talk about that particular issue. but if we'd made the decision not to lower the flag, right? That would have been in violation of our policy, which in fact is a neutral policy that says we're not going to discriminate, based on anything. We're just going to follow, our national and state leaders.

John Tomasi: And I'm just curious where the, the Charlie Kirk case is such a fascinating one that I've been talking with people, as you can imagine all over the country about that case and what it means. And I just want to pause there for a minute more. Here's a case where a person is being assassinated for, for political speech on a college campus in the act of, in the act of speaking. That doesn't come close. That doesn't come close enough to the mission of WashU to tempt you.

Andrew Martin: I don't think it comes close enough to tempt me.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Andrew Martin: it's closer than many other, I would say it's closer than many things.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Andrew Martin: But not close enough.

John Tomasi: Yeah. It's fascinating. And I just want to ask one more thing about this, about the Vanderbilt Washington Statement of Principles. there's a, there was a convening in Dallas.

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: And HxA sent, we sent some of our senior leadership there to have heard of that or that, that I was, I was at Colgate that day myself to speaking with Brian Casey, but we sent some senior, senior leader, some of our senior leaders there. can you just characterize a little, tell us a bit more what happened in Dallas and what your objectives were because what we saw was a remarkable, I won't say coalition, but a remarkable gathering of university leaders who seem to have a shared interest. They come at it from different angles and they have their own approach, of course, as every, every university does, but it was a quite remarkable gathering of university leaders who are broadly aligned with what I call the HX, the HxA opening career principles, the four, four, four, our four point agenda. What was your objective? What were you, what were you and, what were you and Daniel thinking when you brought that together? Was it, is there an attempt to organize a group of presidents like citizens and scholars, for example, organize this presence around civic values?

Andrew Martin: Right.

John Tomasi: Can you just say, tell us a bit more about what was in the backs of your mind or the four of your mind you're willing to share?

Andrew Martin: Well, we wanted to, we wanted to shift the national conversation.

John Tomasi: Nice.

Andrew Martin: I thought, I thought it'd be something very, very, very, something like that, to get, to get conversations to take place, about some issues that, that we collectively had been ignoring, for, for a really long time, which, which has, you know, led to the decline in trust among the American people, which is why we're seeing some of the legislative attacks and administrative attacks on our universities today. we put out an invitation. So, Hey, you would like to come, to Dallas and have a conversation with us about these principles. We're not asking you to sign up. you know, this isn't a litmus test. It was like, we would just like you to come in conversation. And we invited, presidents and board chairs from, a very heterogeneous groups, a group of universities. you know, some AAU universities, some liberal arts colleges, some public, some private. and we would have been happy if 10 presidents and board chairs show, we had 45 university leaders, who decided to make that trip on very short notice.

John Tomasi: Right.

Andrew Martin: Just to have the conversation.

John Tomasi: Fascinating.

Andrew Martin: And we've carried some work forward, since then we're in regular conversation. I think the last thing the world needs is another organization to represent higher education institutions. we think it's important to continue to work, for our institutions through AAU, obviously through ACE and other, double AMC, other organizations, other organizations as well, but we just wanted to shape the narrative, and to get people talking about issues that we thought were important. and at one level, it's kind of staggering, right? We, we, we became public with the principles back in March. you know, we ran the, we ran the advert, we ran the full page ad in the Wall Street Journal. we published the, the initial op-ed in the chronicle. You know, and here we are six weeks later. and when I'm, or six months later, when I'm talking to my peers at other universities, when I'm talking to trustees and board members from lots of other universities, all they want to talk about is what's Vanderbilt and WashU up to and, and, and, and why are you doing this and why it's important?

John Tomasi: And so there's, I'll just say from, from our perspective, talking to professors all around the world, there's buzz, there's considerable buzz about this, this initiative. And, and I think that there's something about it and not being a formal organization that maybe adds to the, to the buzz in some ways. People want to know, you know, what are they doing? What's the, what's the plan? How's it going forward? And, and, and that Atlantic piece without, which I was jokingly asking you about because the title seems so over the top. Nonetheless, I think it does pick out something really important about the, that, that group of university leaders who are sincerely addressing what they see as serious problems on their own, on their own campuses. I want to turn to WashU in particular now and talk about some of the initiatives you've been doing because they're just of great interest to us. So, you know, one of the things that one of our four principles is, is invest in constructive disagreement. That means invest time and resources and attention on, on those topics. And at WashU, there's a number of different things going on. Maybe I'll just ask you to invite you to talk, to say a bit about Dialogue Across Difference, the civil side initiative, if you want to, the Gephardt Institute, but maybe start with Dialogue Across Difference. What's, can you tell us a bit about that program?

Andrew Martin: Yeah, Dialogue Across Difference is a program we stood up a little over three years ago. And the purpose of the program is, is really simple. It actually gets back to what you were talking about a little bit earlier about what are the conversations at two in the morning in the dormitories? You know, for those of us who attended colleges in the United States for the 80s or 90s, we had a very, very different experience than what our students are facing, are facing today. I mean, you know, you can sometimes walk in to our cafeteria and see two students sitting with each other, each on their phones, probably texting each other rather than engaging in conversation and dialogue. And, and so, you know, we came to the conclusion that while at the time we, we were coming up, this was sort of a natural thing that happened, that actually being able to sit down and have dialogue with someone, particularly someone who you disagree with about a very fundamental issue, whether it's politics, whether it's religion, whether it's about identity or something else, that that was actually something that we could teach. And so what we did with this program is we have built a team of professional facilitators, most of whom are professional staff, some of whom are graduate students, and some are members of our faculty who learned how to teach and model dialogue. We've built this into our first year experience. If you want to live in our dormitories as a first year student, which we require you to do as a first year student, you're also required to take this course.

John Tomasi: And it's a course, this is, is it an eight week course?

Andrew Martin: It's an eight week course. It's not credit bearing. It's just part of our, just part of our student experience.

John Tomasi: And so, I'm sorry, from a student's perspective, they're taking a course that lasts 12 weeks or something like that. And they do this as a sub course along the way?

Andrew Martin: No, this is just a, this is just an add on.

John Tomasi: I see.

Andrew Martin: Just like, you know, if your dormitory said you have to do 10, you know, 10 hours of community service where you need to show up at four social events over the course of the semester. This is a, this is just part of our expectation. We then offer lots of other experiences to sign up for. And every year we have well over 1500 students of our 8,000 undergraduates who are raising their hand and say, I would like to sit down and talk with someone who has a different religion than I do, or I'm really interested in sitting down with someone who has very different political views, that I do. And we, we work with those students so they can have those dialogues, with one another and flex that muscle that then they can take out and use in the rest of their, their campus life.

John Tomasi: And to say again, this is, this is their fall of their freshman year.

Andrew Martin: Correct. We start, in fact, the very beginning starts during orientation. and then it's the very beginning of their first semester.

John Tomasi: And you said a few moments ago that, the, for a variety of reasons, including to do with having, a wider range of undergraduates, a wider range of socioeconomic backgrounds for the undergraduates coming to WashU. Did you have a more diverse student body?

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: Are there other steps you've taken in terms of, maybe it just happened organically, but are there steps you've taken in terms of your admissions programs to try to look for implicit biases of ideological conformity? Is that something you're aware of or care about at this point?

Andrew Martin: So I'm aware of it and I care about it. it is something that we continue to look at particularly in the essay questions and so forth, that we ask, among, among our students. One of the things that we've been doing that I'm really proud of, is that we've spent a lot of resources, you know, many of which have come from philanthropic contributions to go out and find talented students wherever they are. Right. you know, we do that in cities all over the country. we also have a program, two different programs actually to go out and try to find talented rural students. we'd rather, we'd rather have those students. I mean, we'll take students from wherever they come, but we're going to have a much greater chance of getting those students from Missouri and Southern Illinois. and so we have a team of individuals who are visiting high schools all across the state of Missouri who might have one or two students who have the horsepower to come to a place like WashU. and certainly given the curricular, the curricula in their high schools are not going to have the same level of training as someone who went to a fancy private school, say here in New York.

John Tomasi: Andrew, can I just, can I just interrupt to tell you or share a story that you, that you might enjoy? So I, I, I've had this experience now probably six or seven times where I have a, had a freshman advisee at Brown, some very talented person, often from a non-traditional Brown background who would tell me that there had been really, they'd been aggressively recruited by WashU and that they were on the fence about which way to go. And the ones who went to WashU, I never, I never met, but I've met probably seven people I can remember who sat in my office saying, boy, I had this really interesting experience where this particular university really made it clear they wanted me to go there and recruited them to come. So it was probably a part of that same initiative.

Andrew Martin: It's part of the same.

John Tomasi: That was really striking. And I'll just say it's, it's the only school that I can remember a student saying to me, boy, you know, this school really made an effort to get me to go there and WashU's the kept coming out.

Andrew Martin: Well, and we really value diversity at WashU. And what that means is we've got to go out there and we've got to find people wherever they are and make sure that they can understand what are the opportunities for them there. And we need to make sure that we're prepared to offer to those students what they need to be successful.

John Tomasi: Right.

Andrew Martin: And a student coming from rural Missouri is going to need something very different than a student that's coming from a public high school in New York.

John Tomasi: Sure. Sure. It's fascinating. Is there any special orientation program for people from different groups?

Andrew Martin: We orient all of our students together. So we spend a week before classes start to take this mishmash of students from all over the country and actually all over the world and bring them together. We do have a handful of special programs. We do have one targeted towards rural students. We have an academy that will bring students before their junior year in high school to come to St. Louis. We do about 20 students a summer. We bring them to live in St. Louis for a week. Some of them had never been to St. Louis. And if they had, they'd come in for a Cardinals game or to go to the zoo, not to spend a week, to take a college course, to live in the dormitories, to be mentored by current students who have similar backgrounds. And then for us to work with the families to say, look, this is what you're finding. We'll tell you now that if your son or daughter is admitted, this is what the financial aid package is going to look like.

John Tomasi: Wow.

Andrew Martin: So you can come to WashU in a way that's far more affordable than going to one of our great public universities in Missouri.

John Tomasi: Fascinating.

Andrew Martin: Right. And that's been really helpful in recruiting those talented students to WashU.

John Tomasi: It's so interesting. I want to return to the concept that we mentioned a moment ago about Ordered Liberty.

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: Which is a concept to do with, well, actually, I'll invite you to talk about Ordered Liberty. So you've started a fascinating initiative called the Ordered Liberty Project. I want to talk all about the faculty hiring piece of that, which is probably the most striking piece. But let's just begin by just inviting you to say a little bit about Ordered Liberty and what it is. You've said some remarkable things about how close Ordered Liberty, that ideal, is to the soul of a university and maybe the soul of WashU in particular. Can you just say a few words about what Ordered Liberty is?

Andrew Martin: So, you know, Ordered Liberty is a concept that's similar in many ways to classical liberalism. You know, the idea that individuals have freedom, that democratic institutions are important, and so, too, is the rule of law. Ordered Liberty sort of takes that as a beginning standpoint. And layers on the idea that there, as being part of a civil society, there is a collective responsibility. If you think about that in a governing way, there's sort of a civic responsibility for us to be good citizens. I think it's similar to how we think about things on an academic campus, right? I mean, unfettered free speech on a college campus is great, but that's actually not going to advance the academic mission, right? Having real, reasoned, principled debate is going to advance. And so that idea of order within the context of liberty, you know, we thought was a good way to talk about the type of scholars that we're interested in recruiting to WashU.

John Tomasi: Nice. And on the wall up here across from us, we have a listing of the HxA Way, which is a series of imperatives that we encourage among our members and the people who follow us to use their free speech rights on the college campus for the particular purposes of the university.

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: And we can read them together. You can read them up here. Make your case with evidence. You don't have to. You can speak freely and give no evidence at all. You can just spout off, but you could instead make your case with evidence. Be intellectually charitable.

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: Be intellectually humble. Be constructive. You don't have to be. You can be destructive.

Andrew Martin: You can.

John Tomasi: And then number five is a bit obscure, but it's actually my favorite. Be yourself. And that means actually come to a conversation willing to share what you know because of your own life background.

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: Don't hide, but actually be who you are, right? And share that in the hope that people will share that too. So that's a, when we think about ordered liberty, most, I do, I'm back on some political theory and I think about ordered liberty. I think of Edmund Burke. And I think of these classical liberal civic virtues to do with using our liberties in ways that aim towards a good life and a good life for a community in a civic sense. But I'm just interested in the context of a university. It seems like ordered liberty is going to take on a special character tracking something like those four, those five pieces of the HxA way, perhaps. Do you see it? Or you mentioned ordered liberty as being connected to classical liberalism, which is a political ideology, broadly speaking. But ordered liberty on the campus is like, isn't that connected to something like enlightenment values of learning and knowledge?

Andrew Martin: I think that's right.

John Tomasi: Do you, do you distinguish the use of, I'm putting this badly, but do you distinguish the use of ordered liberty on the campus from other more political uses of ordered liberty? Or do you see them as the same?

Andrew Martin: I think they're the same.

John Tomasi: Oh, interesting.

Andrew Martin: I think they're the same.

John Tomasi: You, I'm going to quote you.

Andrew Martin: Okay.

John Tomasi: You say just that. No, I'm going to, this is how you put it. At one point you said, ordered liberty is not a departure from what we already do at WashU. It is a name for it.

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: I thought that was a fascinating, a fascinating formulation. Can you say a bit more about the ordered liberty project and what it's at one point I, somebody said, I've read that it's meant to knit together a variety of different initiatives on the campus, probably including the dialogue cross difference.

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: Can you say more about what, what the ordered liberty project is and how it, what's it trying to unify? What role is it going to, is it one thing among many on the campus? Is it an overarching ambition for the whole culture?

Andrew Martin: So it's an, it's an overarching, it's an overarching framework to think about a lot of different things that we're doing together. I think a good analogy is that on our campus, like many others, we have a million AI initiatives, but haven't been able to articulate what is our comprehensive artificial intelligence strategy.

John Tomasi: Right.

Andrew Martin: We've been doing a lot of things across the campus. And when I was looking, you know, particularly at this moment where we're looking at university budgets and trying to find efficiencies and make sure that we're investing every last dollar in the very best way, I was like, wow, we have a whole host of programs that are all about how do we build better citizens, right? How do we educate our students about the importance of civic virtues and academic community? And when working with some of my faculty colleagues who lead some of these initiatives, we said, look, why don't we pull these together under a common framework and then let's go out to the market and hire more faculty members who study and teach in these important areas. So we're bringing together a lot within this umbrella. We have the Weidenbaum Center, which is a very well-funded research center that funds basic research in political science, economics, and sociology. We have the Danforth Center on Religion and Politics, which studies sort of the central role that religion has played and continues to play in American politics and has also engages the public in important programming around religion and politics. We have the Gephardt Institute, which is all about how do we get our students involved in civic affairs locally at the state level and nationally. And so we're bringing together a lot of existing assets. And then we're adding faculty. And so we're in the market right now to hire three endowed chairs who can, frankly, join any department that makes sense. But we have an omnibus search committee who's out looking for talented folks who want to come to the university and write and teach on these issues. Andrew Reeves is a political science professor who is an HxA member and also Stefanie Lindquist is chairing that committee. Andrew and Stephanie are our co-chairs, and Andrew directs the Weidenbaum Center, and Steph is the dean of our law school.

John Tomasi: And so can I just get a little technical of it? Because at Brown, as I was mentioning before we came on the air, I did some faculty hiring. So I was very involved in different strategies to build different kinds of structures to incentivize people to make the outcomes be positive. I'm just curious, can you tell us a bit about how you're structuring these three searches at WashU? Are they all endowed positions?

Andrew Martin: All three are endowed chairs. That means there'll be big time, full professors who are coming.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Andrew Martin: That's the expectation, at least.

John Tomasi: And so that means they come with tenure?

Andrew Martin: Yes.

John Tomasi: So where will their tenure home be?

Andrew Martin: So their tenure home will be in one of our tenure granting units. So the way that this hiring is working, the position is on the street. There's lots of people who are interested. The committee is...

John Tomasi: The position is on the street. Are you saying that it's out there, it's available for departments? Oh, nice. It's been posed. I love that expression.

Andrew Martin: Yeah.

John Tomasi: So before we came on that I created a market mechanism for the different departments to sort of be...

Andrew Martin: Yes, yes, yes.

John Tomasi: But you... Well, like if it was on...

Andrew Martin: It's on the street. Yeah, we pushed it out on the street. So people are talking.

John Tomasi: That's good. That's even stronger.

Andrew Martin: And so, you know, a lot of people have raised their hand and said, look, this is something that I'm interested in.

John Tomasi: You mean departments have?

Andrew Martin: No, no, no. Individual faculty members. So we have an omnibus search committee, faculty members from around the country who have said, I would be interested in coming to WashU and being part of this work. But before we go any further, we go to the home department. So we go to the political science department, we go to the economics department, we go to the philosophy department or the history department or the law school or the business school and say, is this someone you might be interested in? Right. Knowing that a significant but not all of their salary is going to be paid for by what we call the central fiscal unit or the center of the university plus the endowment payout for those particular chairs.

John Tomasi: And is that a way of saying that you can present these lines, these tenured positions, these slots to the departments in a way that the departments won't be thinking to themselves, if we accept this position, we won't be able to make another hire next year. It's an add-on, as it were. Is that too strong?

Andrew Martin: I would say that's about right. We never like to do these hiring initiatives and make them free, which means that the department or the school has no skin in the game. Right. And so there is always going to be cost to the department and or to the school. But what it allows you is to add faculty members that you wouldn't be able to hire otherwise. And we've used this hiring model in the past. It's worked very well in other domains. And so we'll see.

John Tomasi: I'm trying to understand how you came to identify classical liberalism as an area that was of need for you. Could you say a bit about that process? Did you examine the faculty to see whether there were existing classical liberals? Did you know that it was a missing area? Is there a process you can describe or did you sort of know it when you see it?

Andrew Martin: I think it was more, it wasn't nearly that systematic. It really was engaging with students and some faculty about what they were seeing in the classroom, right? And one of the things that I heard that I'm really proud of is that my colleagues at WashU are extraordinary, right? They're not bringing their politics into the classroom for the most part and are doing a really fine job of presenting both sides of debates on important issues of the day. And that's something that we all should aspire to. And that's exactly what should be happening, that should be happening in our classrooms. But talking to students, they weren't seeing as many perspectives, particularly at this moment where students, particularly students who are economically conservative or socially conservative or are deeply faithful, have a really hard time being their true selves in front of their colleagues. Right. And so, you know, this isn't, this isn't a program, this isn't affirmative action for conservatives, right? What this program is, is to bring more people to campus who are writing and teaching on important issues that are going to make the intellectual discourse at the university even richer, which will help benefit our students. And I think, help benefit the quality of the scholarly interactions happening.

John Tomasi: Did you consider, I'm just fascinated how you settled on classical liberal liberalism, which is a framework that I'm very sympathetic to and, and, think very highly of. But I'm wondering about other traditions, for example, a faith-based tradition, professors who have deep, whose faith deeply informs the way they go about their lives and maybe in the research as well. Or for example, a person who is, let's say, culturally conservative, or someone who is, you know, MAGA aligned, America first in those ways. Classical liberal is none of those things quite, but it is kind of its own space. So it usually involves, a commitment to limited, limited government, advocacy of spontaneous orders, especially market-based spontaneous orders and enthusiasm for the power of private property. That's a simplified version of classical liberals. Individual liberty obviously is central to that as well. Right. Ordered liberty, as you would say. I'm just curious. So did you, did you consider other dimensions of, of difference that are missing? And for example, a cultural conservative view or a, America first view. American exceptionalist view, and yeah, anything, or a citizen, a person of faith.

Andrew Martin: So at this, at this moment, I'm not sure.

John Tomasi: Or is that coming down the pipe in the next three years?

Andrew Martin: I don't know what's coming. I don't know what's coming. I don't know what's coming in the next three months, to be honest. no, it, I mean, in, in, in this moment, it, this just sort of jumped off the page is the right place is the right place to put our chips. You know, I'll, I'll tell you, we made a very similar investment back in 2020, you know, after George Floyd, we were as a community sort of grappling with the events, that took place, particularly our students, but also our faculty. and we made a decision to do a significant cluster hire to hire more people in the discipline studying race. Interesting. Right. We thought that that was a, that was also a very important time and moment to make an investment, to bring intellectual capital, to an important issue of the day.

John Tomasi: Right.

Andrew Martin: And so, you know, I, I think that, that the polarization, the rise of populism, the declining trust of institutions across the board, including higher education institutions, sort of led, led us to Ordered Liberty is the place where we wanted to make the bet.

John Tomasi: It seems like that WashU, you're tracking wider trends in society and trying to adjust things on your campus in light of those wider trends. So if there's a national conversation starting about race, you want to be in there. You want to be making a place where WashU has a voice and on campus discuss our voices. And so too now with, a time when populism is rising, but also when those people are disaffected with universities, they're, they're fearful that universities are really echo chambers or students are not being given a chance to think for themselves. You're tracking that too. And you're trying to adjust the faculty with respect to that.

Andrew Martin: Correct. And we're doing it in other areas as well. I mean, artificial intelligence, is a good example. I mean, we have more artificial intelligence initiatives across the enterprise than I could even count, still working on what that looks like in terms of a coherent strategy. Another important issue, which is sort of less about the faculty voice and more about how do we operate the university, the way in which we've funded particularly biomedical research since world war two, is not going to come to an end, but it's going to look very different a year from now than it did a year ago. And so one of the other big changes that we're grappling with is how do we fund a massive research enterprise, in a world in which federal funding is going down. Right. And, you know, part of that's philanthropy and part of that is how we partner, partner with outside firms and investors, to be able to keep things going. And that's just another example of you, you've got to, you've got to keep your eye on what's happening at a macro level and then adjusting the university at the margin to deal with those things.

John Tomasi: It's fascinating. it's been such a pleasure having you on heterodox out loud. So many initiatives that you're involved with are of great interest to us. The Vanderbilt WashU statement of principles, dialogue cross difference at WashU, the order of the Liberty project, which is a new initiative, which is especially of interest to us. thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for everything you do. We appreciate it.

Andrew Martin: My pleasure, John. Thank you very much.