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Is the very field that studies groupthink falling victim to it?

Today on Heterodox Out Loud, Smriti Mehta, researcher at UC Berkeley and co-founder of the Heterodox Academy campus community, joins John Tomasi to examine a striking paradox at the heart of modern academia: the disciplines designed to study bias and conformity may themselves be shaped by it.

Drawing on her experience as a graduate student navigating pressure to conform—and her work building communities for open inquiry—Mehta explores how intellectual homogeneity can influence what questions get asked, what findings get published, and which ideas are considered legitimate.

From the politics of social psychology to the challenges of free speech at Berkeley, this conversation investigates how groupthink can quietly take hold—even in fields committed to studying it—and why viewpoint diversity is essential for maintaining the integrity of research.

Offering an insider’s perspective, the discussion explores how universities can foster genuine intellectual diversity without sacrificing rigor, and why teaching students to engage critically with ideas may matter more than enforcing consensus.

In This Episode:

•  How social psychology can fall into the trap of groupthink
• Why viewpoint diversity is often misunderstood
• The hidden pressures shaping academic research
• What makes certain topics “radioactive” in universities
• The tension between conformity and innovation in science
• Free speech, protest culture, and the heckler’s veto
• How students experience intellectual pressure on campus
• Why open inquiry is essential for truth-seeking

About Smriti Mehta:

Smriti Mehta, PhD is a researcher at the Department of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with the BEAR Center (Berkeley Evaluation & Assessment Research). Her research spans social-psychological factors in education, psychometrics, open science practices, and meta-science. She is co-author of the SAFE Model (State Authenticity as Fit to Environment), published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, which demonstrates that people experience authenticity as a function of self-concept fit, goal fit, and social fit to their environment. Her related work on social status and authenticity finds that those with lower status are less likely to feel they can be themselves, providing a psychological mechanism for why holding a minority viewpoint in academia suppresses not just speech but identity. She completed her PhD in Psychology at UC Berkeley. Beyond research, Mehta co-founded and co-chairs the HxA Campus Community at UC Berkeley. She was previously involved with the Berkeley Liberty Initiative, which funds faculty grants to redesign undergraduate courses around open exchange of ideas. She co-hosts Nullius in Verba, a biweekly podcast with Daniël Lakens (Eindhoven University of Technology) covering miscitation, scientism, incentive structures in science, and the philosophy of scientific practice.

Chapters:

00:00 Viewpoint Diversity vs Political Diversity

02:15 Graduate School, Conformity, and Speaking Up

06:10 Groupthink and the Ethos of Science

08:17 Ideological Bias and Chilled Inquiry

15:42 Conformity vs Creativity in Research

22:00 Building Open Inquiry at UC Berkeley (HXA)

27:54 Free Speech, Protests, and the Heckler’s Veto

37:25 Defining Viewpoint Diversity and Its Limits

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Smriti Mehta, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Smriti Mehta: Thanks for having me, John. It's great to be here.

Tomasi: It's a special pleasure for me to have you on the show. You probably don't remember this, but I remember the first time I ever heard you speak. You were a graduate student at Berkeley. And as I remembered, you spoke eloquently about the history of exclusion and the movement towards inclusion at our universities, especially elite universities. And something I remember you saying was that the generation of scholars before you had fought for the right for people like you, a woman of color, to be included, even in these elite programs like the graduate programs at Berkeley that you were part of. They fought for your right to be there, and you were grateful for that. But then you said something like: but now that I'm here, they don't really want me to speak. Do you remember that?

Mehta: Was that at the conference that we had?

Tomasi: I can't remember, actually. I remember you and I remember what you said.

Mehta: Yeah, that sounds like something I would say.

Tomasi: I remember hearing you say that and I thought to myself, this person's special. I hope that HxA can keep her in our orbit and learn from you. So tell us a bit about yourself. You did your graduate work at Berkeley. You're now a researcher there in the Department of Ed, I believe. Just say a bit about your graduate experience, what you did there, and what you're doing now.

Mehta: I caused a lot of trouble and I'm continuing to cause a lot of trouble — that's how I would put it. But yeah, I did my work in the social psychology area at the Department of Psychology at Berkeley. My research is related to academic motivation, or was related to academic motivation. I've always been interested in classrooms. At the time I thought that my goal in life was to figure out how to get everybody as excited about being in a classroom as I am. And so that's why I was working with faculty in the education department as well, where I continue to be affiliated. Mark Wilson was and continues to be my advisor.

My experience at Berkeley was interesting as a graduate student. I joined in the fall of 2019, right before the pandemic, right before the George Floyd incident and everything that happened as a result of that. And so what you're saying continues to resonate with me because I remember so many instances, even in the five or six months before the pandemic hit, where people said things that I disagreed with, that I thought — not just that I disagreed with, but that I thought, of all people, social psychologists should know better than to say things like this. And everybody just nodded their heads and there was this intense pressure to just go along with what was being said, even if you disagreed with it. And I just realized I couldn't do it. I think if somebody must speak up, why not me? And I thought the fact that I have been invited to join this department and join this wonderful university must mean that they want to hear what I have to say. To me, that is really the key of having diversity. You want people who have different opinions, so you should be open to listening to them. And in that spirit, and in good faith, I think I spoke up when I thought I should speak up. But that wasn't appreciated, at least not in the psychology department. I eventually found other places on campus and people and communities that I still continue to be part of. But it was challenging. The pressure to conform, and the uncomfortable feeling of: people are going to think I'm a bad person if I say this, is so deeply disturbing. And I think it's one of the reasons why people end up just staying quiet. But then we find communities like HxA and we find other people who agree with us, and that makes it so much easier to not feel like you're alone.

Tomasi: And you said a moment ago that in the field of social psychology, people should be especially aware of something. What should they be aware of in social psychology? What should they know that they seem not to practice?

Mehta: The dangers of groupthink, right? That you want to create environments where people not only are open and willing to share ideas that are different, but that you should actually actively try to get people to play devil's advocate. Because we know there's an intense risk of groupthink and making bad decisions as a result of not exploring all different options and all different viewpoints. And in some cases, you see reflections of certain prejudices and certain biases. I mean, we talk a lot about things like implicit bias, but it almost feels like it's always talked about in a very specific way. And we tend to be blind to other kinds of biases that creep into the way we ask questions and the assumptions that we make. Especially if you're in an environment where everybody thinks the same as you do, it's so much harder for you to locate your biases and for somebody to question them.

Tomasi: Right. Let me ask you about your podcast and the name of your podcast, Nullius in Verba. I'm not sure if you're aware, but at Berkeley, UC Berkeley, they have something called the Latin Workshop. Do you know about that? So there are a bunch of these programs around the country, all modeled on the Latin Workshop at Berkeley. They teach graduate students foreign languages in a crash course. And a million years ago when I was in graduate school, I went to Berkeley to learn Latin. It's an eight-week program and they take you from knowing no Latin to being able to translate Latin to English as fast as you can write by the end of eight weeks. And I wrapped up that program knowing no Latin, and within eight weeks I found myself one happy day translating it as fast as I could write. But what they didn't tell us was that if you don't keep taking Latin after that eight-week cram session, it turns out that you lose your understanding of Latin at exactly the same rate. So eight weeks after I ended the course, I knew no Latin. Nullius in Verba. I was trying to translate that. Tell us what it means.

Mehta: It's the motto of the Royal Society, which is the oldest scientific society. There are different ways to translate it, but: on the word of no one.

Tomasi: Right. That's what I thought. And so you chose that name for your podcast. What does that mean, on the word of no one?

Mehta: I think it captures what is the spirit of science, right? That we don't take anybody's word for it. We don't believe something because somebody in authority is stating that this is the truth. The power of science comes from the fact that we can test things for ourselves. If you do a study, I can go check your work, I can try to replicate the study, and if it's true and if it holds, then I should be able to go and evaluate it for myself. And in that way, I think it's quite egalitarian. It's one of the most egalitarian systems we have. Anybody can question any assumption, any claim, and we should be able to test it for ourselves.

Tomasi: Right. And I think there's been discussion recently about the connection between the basic principles of the liberal order and the basic principles of universities. And in many ways, those principles about equality or egalitarianism in the political realm are reflecting this idea that within the academy, ideally at least, anyone should be able to speak and be responded to by the quality of their arguments, by the evidence they bring forth, not simply by their identity or by their status.

I want to dig in a little bit into social psychology. There's a famous paper from 2015 by Duarte, Crawford, Haidt, Lee Jussim, Stern, and Tetlock, a paper that talked about the rise of political ideology conformity within the behavioral sciences and social psychology in particular. And in that paper they talked about how that imbalance had skyrocketed from being roughly balanced in the mid-20th century to something like 14 to 1 left to right by 2012, and as high as over 300 to 1 in some surveys. They argued in that paper, as I'm sure you know, that this homogeneity undermines science through scientific mechanisms, because those mechanisms only work if we have people who are raising new questions challenging existing paradigms, encouraging researchers to consider the basic assumptions behind the scientific models they set up and the experiments they run. And if those assumptions aren't being excavated or made clear, then we lose sight of them and bias starts to creep in.

I'd love to hear a bit from you about how you see that. You've spoken in your podcast about how it's possible to have a healthy climate for open inquiry on campus but still face a chilly climate within your discipline. Campuses swim within a broader sea of disciplines. Can you say a little bit about that? How does that change in the ratio of left-to-right-leaning professors across the discipline of social psychology affect the prospects for having open conversations on a campus like Berkeley, for example?

Mehta: So, I should mention my co-host is Dutch. He's at a Dutch university. So the landscape is a little bit different there. I think they're just more blunt. They say whatever they want to each other. They don't have the same problem that we do of politeness on campuses in the US — too much politeness and, I think, reluctance to criticize ideas as openly and as directly as I think they can. But he's also a social psychologist, and I think he's seen this at least in our discipline a little bit.

It definitely affects, in some ways, both the people who are invited to join the discipline, which we see from the numbers from the paper you mentioned. There are certainly people in the general population, but even academics, who will openly say: I would never hire a graduate student who was right-leaning. So there's a bias against people who hold certain ideologies. And that in turn affects the kind of questions that you ask, especially related to more sensitive topics. Political psychology, I think, is affected — there are certain issues like inequality where you can almost hear in the way the questions are framed that there is a lean towards what is the correct answer or the correct way to think about an issue. Or for example gender bias: there will be a question asked something like, should a woman pursue a career in a predominantly male discipline like engineering? And if a person says yes, then they're automatically coded as being biased against women. Not considering the fact that somebody with a different viewpoint, a different background may answer that question with a yes, but their reasoning could be something not related to anything to do with thinking that women are less than or that they cannot do well in this area.

You see multiple examples of this. The framing of the questions, the kind of questions that are asked, is affected by people's personal and political beliefs. You also see it in cases of disciplines that are considered inappropriate, or when if you're pursuing a certain research question, people impute certain motives to it. Intelligence is a great example. It's related to work that I did during my graduate studies. I was really interested in how people think about intelligence. And when you go into the literature on intelligence and you talk to people about this work, people will often say: yeah, that person is just trying to push a certain agenda. They're just trying to say that it's all genetics or whatever. They must have some ulterior motives for even asking questions about whether there are group differences in intelligence. Touching that area, it's just radioactive. If you were somebody trying to do research with an honest curiosity about it, they take it one step further: you must be doing this research to find certain results that will eventually harm somebody.

Tomasi: Right. And can I note that that example about race and IQ, that scholarship, such of it as there is, is radioactive. I've talked with Glenn Loury, he's a good friend of mine, and he's very skeptical of a lot of that research, but for reasons. He thinks there's a misunderstanding and confusion about the nature of race, there are obviously complications about IQ, and he thinks it's an interesting topic because you can break the question down in ways that suggest the question's not a good question. That's different from what you're describing, which is saying: we think you must think this. And it works the other way too, I think — there are certain questions that are off the table because if you ask them, that must mean you're not with the team. The worry I have sometimes is that it also suggests that the only questions you're allowed to ask, or the questions we're most encouraged to ask, are ones that are seen as being on the team. As though we know in advance what the answers should be, rather than seeing ourselves as engaged in discovery.

Mehta: Yeah. And that, either directly or indirectly, does affect the kind of questions that get asked, because especially young scholars are sensitive to what is popular at this moment, what is something that people want to know more about, things that are more likely to get funded, papers that are more likely to be published. So it affects things, and sometimes you have people who will even change their framing just to use concepts or ideas that they know will get them some traction. In the case of intelligence, you may have people who are trying to ask the same questions but will just not call it intelligence. They'll just call it something else.

Tomasi: Right. Let's push on this one a little bit more if we may. So there's a lot of meta-science showing that funding ecosystems tend to reward incremental extension of existing paradigms, building on the shoulders of giants, rather than funding genuinely creative scholarship. I just wonder what you think about that. There's a paper by Michael Polanyi that I really enjoyed, called The Republic of Science. Do you know that paper? It's an old paper, maybe from the 1960s. One of the ideas in that paper is that science happens with scientists working on problems in full view of each other. He describes how when scientists do that, they're watching each other's work and learning from how they put their puzzles together. In fact, he gives an analogy at the very beginning about some people shelling beans, sitting at a table and taking beans out of their shells. They can only release as many beans as they can shell themselves individually. And he compares that to science, which is more like a group of people sitting around a big table with a huge complicated puzzle on it, the puzzle of physical reality, let's say, and I'm watching you over there working on the blue section of the puzzle. I now know that I can work over here on the green-blue edge, and we combine our findings and we accelerate our learning because we're doing it in view of each other.

But here's the bit I wanted to mention, because it bears on this question we're talking about. Polanyi says that in ordinary science, there's always a frontier, a place where the most interesting, hardest work is being done to put the next puzzle piece in. And what interests me about that concept is that it suggests that it's a necessity to have a kind of limited frontier where we're all focusing our attention and trying to make progress. And if you have heterodox thinkers popping up here and there, putting puzzles together in upside-down ways or whatever it might be, that doesn't really fit into the whole product of science. So some people say that academic freedom has this odd character of being, on the one hand, very conservative.

Is it only works if we're working on the shoulders of giants and those focus spots where we all share some assumptions. On the other hand, we have this affinity for the novel and the creative and the disruptive. I'm not sure what my question is exactly here, but there's an interesting puzzle that no one has a good answer to that I've heard. We want to have creativity and heterodoxy, but we also seem to need a certain amount of conformity so that we can have that frontier and make progress on it. Do you have any thoughts about that in your field? Should we be conforming to some degree? Is it wrong to challenge our own assumptions?

Mehta: Well, in a sense, you do have to conform quite a bit in science when you're doing science. You have to conform to certain theoretical frameworks, methodological frameworks. Otherwise what you're doing would just not make any sense to anybody. You do have to be part of the tribe and speak the same language in order to do the work and make incremental changes. The other thing is, if you're proposing something as a theory, a claim, it does have to tie in with existing work, things we consider to be true. So in that sense, it cannot be something so radical that it doesn't tie back to anything else in the discipline.

And I think we want viewpoint diversity. We want people to be heterodox, to think in new ways. But at the end of the day, how do we figure out something is true? It's through consensus. So there is this fundamental paradox of wanting people to propose different ideas for the goal that eventually we will all converge on the right answer. Your end goal is consensus on what is true. So I don't think it's a bad thing necessarily. I think it only becomes problematic if that initial stage of, you know, let the ideas flow, let people who may have heterodox views bring their ideas to the table, if that is not happening, then the likelihood that you will eventually get to the truth is lowered. And so that is where the problem lies.

Tomasi: That's a nice formulation of that. One way we could say it is that we want to have, if we're searching for knowledge at universities, that's the telos of the university as I believe it is, and that's an HxA view that I think you hold too. If we hope for knowledge, then we should hope for some degree of consensus on progress towards knowledge. And yet we're also aware, I think HxA is acutely aware, that despite that structural need for conformity and this aspiration for convergence on truth, the lived reality of human beings and the roles of professors does not make us immune to ordinary human biases. And the mere fact of conformity is not always justified by the fact that this must be truth. The fact that social psychology changed so much, the delta of conformity in one political direction — you could say on that model that's because they're converging on the truth. But that's a pretty self-satisfied view of convergence and about the way humans actually interact.

Mehta: Yeah, we converge on the answer by shutting everybody out who was saying something different. So now we've converged on...

Tomasi: That's right. We shut them out, or we just genuinely didn't think they were working on important questions, because we became increasingly insensitive to what's a great question. We became numb to whole domains of social space as we were all focused on the same areas that our paradigm had converged on as being important.

I want to shift gears a little bit, though I could love talking to you about this stuff and could do it forever. I want to talk about some things you've been doing at Berkeley as an HxA member. As you well know, at HxA we started an experiment a few years ago of bringing our members together, instead of just as individuals on campuses, bringing them together into chapters and communities. And you're one of the people we appreciate so much for having co-founded the HxA community at UC Berkeley. Berkeley, I think, now has 56 HxA members on the faculty, which is a lot of firepower out there. Can you just tell us a bit about your experience starting the campus community at Berkeley? What do you all do? How are you perceived? What's your experience been?

Mehta: Yeah, so I and another graduate student in the psychology department — at the time we were both graduate students — started the campus community at Berkeley in 2023. And it has been just such a pleasure for me because it got me talking to and interacting with so many wonderful people on campus. The first thing we did was just reach out to people who are on the HxA list as official members. And people were extremely receptive. There was a lot of interest in talking to other people who held similar views about, well, we all hold different views, but we all agree that we should be allowed to hold different views. And so we got people together, got the momentum going, and then we held regular meetings and still do, though less regularly, where we come and discuss what's happening on campus.

The interesting outgrowth from that initial push was that there were faculty members who started a faculty group on campus called the Berkeley Initiative for Free Inquiry. Will Fithian, who's in the statistics department, was a key leader in this area on our campus. I think part of why he started BIFI was because of the momentum that he saw us building through our HxA campus community.

Tomasi: And for our listeners, what does BIFI stand for?

Mehta: Berkeley Initiative for Free Inquiry. And there's a big debate about whether we should call it beefy or bi-fi. My vote is for bi-fi. I don't think beefy is any better.

Tomasi: Tell us about BIFI.

Mehta: So we have this bifurcation of responsibility. BIFI focuses a lot more on governance and policy issues. There's a lot more work on: how do we get more faculty involved in faculty governance, get faculty to join the Academic Senate, and change policies that we think go against academic freedom and free inquiry.

Tomasi: So policies like university policies regarding institutional neutrality?

Mehta: Institutional neutrality, policies related to what does campus do when there are cancellations or when faculty are being punished for certain speech, things along those lines. Or DEI statements, for example, would be a policy issue.

Tomasi: And isn't there also a separate curricular reform effort? Are you part of that? The Berkeley Liberty Initiative?

Mehta: Yeah, so the Berkeley Liberty Initiative. After I graduated, I was a postdoc for a year and then I joined the Berkeley Liberty Initiative as the executive director. I was there for a year. The Berkeley Liberty Initiative was an initiative that was started about ten years ago to bring more diverse voices to campus. At the time, Ambassador Frank Baxter thought there were some voices that were not being aired on campus, certain viewpoints. And so his goal was to bring more conservative views to campus. For the longest time, it was just an annual lecture. And then when I joined, it was a time when they were trying to expand and do more in this space. So HxA Berkeley was an obvious partner for BLI. We like acronyms here, I don't know if you've noticed. And one of the first things that we did when I joined was to start this small grant initiative where we invited faculty to change some part of their curriculum where they included either diverse viewpoints or got their students to think about diverse viewpoints or got them to engage in conversations that are contentious, maybe a little bit difficult. And so that was one of the first things that we did over there.

Tomasi: And so, let's just talk generally about Berkeley. So, famously Berkeley is the birthplace of the free speech movement, widely described. I can't go to Berkeley without someone reminding me of that in some lecture. And yet FIRE recently gave Berkeley an F in 2025. And there have been, in 2024, twenty-six documented examples of deplatformings at UC Berkeley. What's your sense about this? Which way does the institutional legacy cut? What's your lived experience of the state of open inquiry at Berkeley?

Mehta: I think it cuts both ways. As you alluded to, there's a lot of lip service given to the legacy. The fact that it's the place of the free speech movement. But if you really think about it, it was political activism, right? It was students rising up to say no to something that they thought was wrong, that their rights were being violated. And so in some sense, you see the spirit of protesting and wanting to speak up when the students think that something is wrong. Even the protesting and the heckler's veto and canceling of speakers that people find unpalatable, I think that just goes with the legacy of the free speech movement.

And so I think my experience is that the campus has been in the past quite true to the value. I mean, think about 2017 when we had Milo Yiannopoulos come to campus. I don't know if you remember that incident.

Tomasi: Of course I do.

Mehta: Yeah. And our chancellor at the time went out of their way to provide security to make sure that the event continued, that we would not allow the heckler's veto, that we believe in free speech. And so in a lot of ways, the campus has continued to support free speech. But the heckler's veto is still a thing, still an issue, it does pop up. And I think it comes again in part because of the free speech legacy of student activism and students wanting to protest. I think there are students on campus who think: before you graduate, you must attend at least one protest. It's part of the Berkeley experience.

Tomasi: Right. And it's the case on many campuses, but Berkeley's known for that. It's interesting too. You didn't quite say this, but you were close to saying something, so I'm going to say something that I almost heard you say. The Berkeley free speech movement, and also like the one at Columbia that ran at the same time, a little bit later, they were often directionally uniform. So it's not clear that those were advocacy for people speaking in all different directions on the Vietnam War or whatever it might be. It was people arguing for their right to speech where they converged on a particular view about the nature of the speech they wanted to have. And this is something that Nadine Strossen reminds me about all the time: a lot of people are for free speech, but there's always some issue in which we don't want it. That's a pretty common thing. But to actually be for free speech, to be a genuine free speech movement, would be to stand up for the rights of people to make claims in multiple directions.

My own view — you mentioned the Milo case, I'd be curious about your view on this. With Milo, I think that on universities, there's a certain bar of sophistication and maybe seriousness that a speaker needs to pass over to be allowed on the campus. It's not the case that everyone gets to go to Berkeley as an undergrad. It's not the case that anyone gets to be a Berkeley faculty member. There's a pretty heavy selection going on about a level of ability and commitment to giving reasons and exchanging sophisticated reasons. I mean, I do want to wonder: universities aren't purely a free speech zone in some ways. We are searching for truth.

Mehta: I agree with you. But I will also challenge that with: who gets to decide? Who gets to decide that this is a person who has the right credentials to speak? I agree with you that Milo Yiannopoulos, I think, was just a bad idea. Yes. But you have all other flavors of even academics, right? What about people who are doing work or research that we might think does not hold up to scientific or academic rigor? Should they not be allowed to speak? So who gets to decide?

Tomasi: Right. Well, on that question, I have some views. I think it's one of the really striking things, and one of the yet-another-understudied aspects of our university life, is that student groups are often empowered to invite speakers. And so they get to decide, officially at least. And yet the question is, what norms have they been told about, been encouraged to adopt, when they make these choices. I think that on a well-functioning university, students should be told: this is a power you have and it comes with responsibilities, ordinarily at least, to invite people who will present arguments with reasons behind them, who have data and are going to elevate the conversation. In a well-functioning university, we would have a lot of selection going on about who gets onto the campus to give the talk.

But I will say that there's another role for free speech, and that's one of the wonderful, challenging things about it: there are times when, to puncture a conformity or to expose sometimes what let's call it hypocrisy about the university's actual commitment to openness, you need to bring in a provocateur to show that in fact that person will not be allowed to speak because we don't really believe in free speech. Those are not normal times. If we're in times of deep conformity, then sometimes bringing in a controversial speaker who is a provocateur, such a person can play a role in puncturing a thick bubble that we're all living within so comfortably on the campus. That's my view. Have you ever thought about that?

Mehta: Yeah, I'm not sure. I mean, the idea of having some kind of guidelines for student groups to invite speakers, that sounds fair. But to me, what feels more important is: no matter who gets invited, even if it's a provocateur, you should think of it as a learning opportunity. So in response to the 2017 Milo Yiannopoulos case, there was a faculty member at the time in the physics department who wrote a response. He mentioned that when he was a student here back in the sixties, a neo-Nazi came to campus to speak. And he mentioned how everybody came, there was a full house, everybody listened quietly to the event. And then when Q&A came, one by one they completely obliterated each of his claims with counter-claims and evidence and arguments. And to me, I think yes, there can be value in bringing provocateurs, but I think our responsibility should be to teach students how to bring to light the inconsistencies and the contradictions in what the person is saying, instead of just saying we don't want to hear this person. And I think that's the real challenge. How do we teach students to do that well?

Tomasi: Yeah, I think that's very well said. In any liberal order, there's a domain of what the rules and the laws are. There's also a domain of the unenforceable that we also need to be aware of. And people do have the power in a free society to do all kinds of things that don't actually advance our social purposes. To have them be more aware of what those responsibilities are, what those powers might be, and how they should exercise them, is part of the adventure of being in a society together where people see the world differently.

And a great university, as you were describing — that person should be met with questions. There's an incident that I'm sure you may be aware of long ago when George Wallace was a political force in the South. One year he was invited to give talks at both Yale and at Brown. And at Yale they decided not to allow him on campus. And Brown, interestingly, back then had him come and they greeted him with not just protests but also hard questions. And it led to Yale doing a lot of self-reflecting. The Woodward Report came out of that, at least partly came out of that.

So this is a long, long history, predating the degree of conformity we see on our campuses now. But with this new era, with this new intensified conformity, the questions arise in more and more stunning ways very often.

I want to shift ground again because we're nearing the end of our conversation. You do so many things for the cause of open inquiry. You did this even when you were a graduate student, and that's part of what I admire so much about you, the way you've stood up for these things even when you weren't always in a position of strength and power to do that, which takes a special kind of courage.

Mehta: The way I say it, I had nothing to lose. I still have nothing to lose, so it's a lot easier to...

Tomasi: That's an interesting attitude. You also do a lot of building, obviously. And Heterodox Academy is having regional conferences this year. Instead of having our usual annual conference, because so many members wanted to do regional things, we decided to put our efforts into supporting regional conferences. There's a big HxA West Coast regional conference, April 23 to 24, at Berkeley. It's themed: the value of viewpoint diversity, why it matters, how to practice it. There are going to be keynotes by Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt, also by Musa al-Gharbi, longtime HxA member and spokesperson, and also now a professor at SUNY Stony Brook. Were you involved in organizing that conference, and what do you expect to see there?

Mehta: Yes, I was part of the organizing committee, and yeah, it will be pretty exciting. I will mention, so last year when I was with BLI, we actually got together faculty from all different UC campuses. And some of the key players — Rick Sander is leading this effort, who's a professor of law at UCLA and chair of the Heterodox Academy campus community at UCLA, and Steve Brint, who is the head of the campus community at UC Riverside.

Tomasi: Steve Brint — amazing force of nature.

Mehta: Steven is amazing. Yeah, and so is Rick. And people from Berkeley — Chris Hufnagel, Will Fithian, who are members and leaders of BIFI, Ethan Ligon. And we got a lot of faculty from all different UC campuses together and formed sort of this umbrella group called the UC Initiative for Free Inquiry.

Tomasi: Come on, you didn't give the acronym. I thought you were going to roll right into it.

Mehta: UCIFI is what we're calling it. And so a lot of the members of UCIFI will be there as well. And so the topic of the conference is viewpoint diversity. We got a planning committee together of heterodox members from the West Coast. And the question was: what should we talk about during this conference? What's important? And we converged on viewpoint diversity because it is a big question at the moment. The term diversity is so loaded, and five or six years ago I think it was used in a very specific way to refer to racial diversity. And I think there is a risk that now when people say intellectual diversity, they mean political diversity, that anytime somebody says we need more viewpoint diversity, all they're saying is we need affirmative action for conservatives. And so there's a risk. And so I think this is a good time to really get together and think about: what does it actually mean? What is viewpoint diversity? Why does it matter for knowledge-seeking? How do we do it well? What does it actually look like? And I mean, I'm sure you've seen the AAUP article and the response to it as well, the seven theses against — yes. So it's a big topic. What does it mean, why is it important, and how do we actually implement it? What does it actually look like in the classroom, in our disciplines? What are the limits to it? Should flat-earthers be allowed to speak? That touches on viewpoint diversity. But what are the limits to it at a university campus?

Tomasi: That's right. If we're hoping for convergence, how wide is the window, how wide is the circle in which we continue to say "we" about the scholarly community, and what's outside that circle?

There's a really difficult question that we're working on hard at HxA currently about how do we get it. We have a developing theory about what viewpoint diversity is. I've been quite vocal about that question, but we're also very interested in how you get it. And one of the challenges is that so much of the work of HxA is grassroots, from the bottom up. We work through our members who are professors on campuses. And viewpoint diversity on the faculty, if it's only going to be from the bottom up, requires that departments start self-reflecting and thinking to themselves: what are we missing here? What range of topics should we bring in? But the incentives within departments are structured in such a way that people are always trying to build an empire in their subfield. They want to hire the next hot person in that existing subfield who's working on the same question the hot person was working on last year. That's how the rankings go up. And yet if you want to try to bring in some new perspective, start in a fresh place with seriously interesting questions that have been neglected for ideological reasons, that's a hard case to make within the constraints of normal departmental politics.

The alternative seems to be to come in from the top down. I don't know if you saw that Harvard just announced this week that they're seeking to create a whole new tranche of professorships to bring viewpoint diversity to Harvard. I'm not sure they yet know how they're going to implement that, how they're going to find ways to balance the importance of academic freedom and disciplinary expertise with the need to have some kind of a corrective for when the train goes off the rails, where it seems to have gone in many ways right now.

Mehta: Yeah. And the other difficulty is that we are social animals. That's one of the key insights your grandmother could have told you. But we are social animals, and it is much easier to interact and engage with people who think similarly to you, have the same frameworks, and even at the disciplinary level, have the same orientation in terms of methodology and views about how research should be conducted. And so if you have too much diversity, that could also be a problem just because it creates tensions within a department. Especially when you have to make decisions, that itself can create a lot of tension. So where's the right balance of having viewpoints that are different, but not so different that we just cannot agree on anything?

Tomasi: That's right. It's true substantively and also methodologically. Because if you're working in economics and something comes up with a completely different theory of what value is, then it's hard to have a conversation happen. Smriti, thanks for your time today. It's such a pleasure having you on the show. We think of you at HxA as one of our model members in so many different ways. There's an intensity and authenticity with the way you do your work, and also a gracefulness and modesty about it that really just stands out for us as a vision of what we want HxA to be. So thanks for being on the show and thanks for all the work you do.

Mehta: Thank you, John. HxA has been one of the bright lights in my life in the past few years. So the gratitude, it's all mine. Thank you.