John Tomasi on the Future of Free Speech
John Tomasi sees "lots of potential for Heterodox Academy to help build a culture of open inquiry at Furman."
This month, we bring you an exclusive interview with John Tomasi, President of Heterodox Academy, one of the major non-partisan organizations helping colleges like Furman become places where “intellectual curiosity thrives.”
He visited Furman during homecoming and sees a bright future for our school. He believes that his organization can help the university continue to improve its climate for free speech.
🤝What is Heterodox Academy? What are your goals and principles?
Heterodox Academy (HxA) has been around for 10 years. We’re a membership organization of professors. We’re committed to making our universities better, specifically by fostering cultures of open inquiry. We think a culture of open inquiry has three components. First, it has protections for the free exchange of ideas. Second, it has a variety of viewpoints on the campus — among the faculty, students, administration, and trustees. Third, it has constructive disagreement. That means the ability to listen to people and hear what they’re saying without closing your ears or yelling at them.
If you only have some of those things without all three, you won’t have the knowledge-building capacity of a university. So, for example, if you have a university that has formal protection for the free exchange of ideas, but everyone there thinks pretty much the same way, you don’t have viewpoint diversity. If you formally protect the free exchange of ideas and you have a variety of viewpoints on the campus, but the viewpoints are all balkanized into the different groups so people aren’t listening to each other, you don’t have constructive disagreement. You won’t get this sort of magical process that comes with the free exchange of ideas on a campus of open inquiry. You have to have all three of those components.
The First Amendment protects free speech everywhere for lots of good reasons, but many kinds of speech the First Amendment protects are not what you necessarily want on a university campus. On a campus, you want people talking in serious ways that lead to greater knowledge. Building out that culture of open inquiry is what HxA is really all about. My friend Brian Casey, who’s the president of Colgate University, said to me once: “You know John, at the end of the day, we care about the policies, but what we really care about is what kind of conversations happen in the dorm on a Tuesday night. Do the students talk? Or do they self-censor?” At HxA, our three principles are ultimately aimed at building whole campus cultures of open inquiry.
🛠️What do your daily operations look like?
Increasingly, we’re equipping campus leaders and presidents to build cultures of open inquiry. For example, we provide toolkits for institutional neutrality, which is one of the really important pillars of the culture of open inquiry. We’re developing models about viewpoint diversity: How do you hire excellent faculty while still bringing neglected ideas into the conversation? How do you encourage active, constructive, critical listening among students, rather than snowflake culture or eggshell culture? How do you break down these barriers around self-censorship? Our studies show that something like three-quarters of American students describe themselves as not saying what they believe, or not saying anything if they think it might be controversial, because of something like eggshell culture.
Another big, big thing we do is build our membership, especially among the faculty. We’re constantly recruiting more faculty and administrators into our ranks. Once we have a cohort of at least 10 professors on a campus, we encourage them to create a community—a formal gathering place where they can get together and talk about these issues and get a deeper understanding of the ideas themselves. Most professors aren’t trained in open inquiry. We’re hired because we’re excellent in our academic subfield, but that doesn’t mean we’ve really thought about university culture. So HxA tries to educate our members to become the campus experts on these things. Once members have created a community, they start recruiting more faculty, and eventually start offering their help to presidents who are trying to push for open-discourse-friendly policies. So those are the ideals, and the strategy that we use. We build organically and work from the inside. That’s the only way to build a campus culture that will endure.
🔍What kind of presence does HxA have on Furman’s campus?
The number is very small. Certainly less than 10. There were two very dynamic members, Ben and Jenna Storey, who are no longer there. When I first joined HxA, we talked about trying to build a bigger presence on Furman’s faculty. Jen and Ben told me that Furman people really value the Furman community, and there was a concern that being a Contra — which being an HxA member sometimes was in those days — wasn’t really in keeping with how most Furman professors wanted to operate.
Still, I see lots of potential for HxA to help build a culture of open inquiry at Furman. I’m hopeful that Brent Nelsen and the Tocqueville Program will serve as a rallying point for HxA to build more faculty presence in the Furman campus. Brent Nelson is great and the Tocqueville Center is just remarkable. I mean, truly remarkable. I would love to see HxA expand on the Furman campus, recruit more top professors to join us, and help Furman become the place it could be.
🏛️What kind of relationship does HxA tend to have with universities?
We love our universities, and we want to make them better. But it’s often been the case in our 10-year history that our members found themselves in the position of being campus Contras, opposing their administrations, many of whom were going all in on DEI and other kinds of things that were incompatible with our principles of open inquiry
We’ve seen a sea change over the past two years, particularly since the Hamas attack and the Ivy League presidents’ failure to answer basic questions about the protection of free speech on campus while testifying in Congress. Suddenly, college administrators are much more interested in HxA and our insider approach to reform. They’re reaching out to us in ways they didn’t use to, even three years ago. I’ve been following the growth of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, and I think they’re also transitioning from Contra mode into being more accepted.
I hope alumni free speech alliances can seize this moment and are willing to work with their schools. You can always be a Contra, which can be interesting and fun to some degree, but there comes a point when every organization has to decide if they are willing to be insiders and help make the place they love better. Some folks just want to stick their schools in the eye, so to speak, because they’re still so angry about stuff that went down. The strength, though, is in the people who are willing to be principled allies.
That’s what I was doing when I was on stage with President Davis. I asked her about the fact that Furman used to be very focused on a certain form of DEI and now seems to be turning more to questions about constructive disagreement and viewpoint diversity. What explains the change? Those are uncomfortable questions to ask somebody, but they have to be asked, because we need to talk about them honestly and openly. Otherwise reform isn’t going to be real or long lasting.
📉How did universities drift so far from the principles of open discourse?
I think universities lost their way slowly and then suddenly. One of the most striking data points to me is that in the ‘60s, faculty described themselves as being left leaning to right leaning at about a 2-1 ratio. And back then, that probably seemed like a big divide. Now the distribution is something like 20-1, roughly, and is much more severe in disciplines like anthropology or sociology, where it’s approaching 100-0. So why the change from 2-1 to 20-1? That happened over a period of 60 years that prepared the ground by weakening the critical capacity of campuses to be more mindful about the threats to free expression posed by some of the new goals universities were pursuing.
So the ground was softened by this growing orthodoxy, this lack of viewpoint diversity, this culture of intellectual conformity. I don’t think it was intentional. True, in the 60’s especially, there were some groups that wanted to bring socialism to America by taking over the universities. That is a historical fact–think of the Port Huron Statement by the Students for a Democratic Society. But that’s not why the ratio went from two to one to 20-1. The real cause was not the fruition of some radical’s plan, it was some more prosaic, like mere path dependency. Academics just didn’t understand that they were getting more and more conformist in their thinking. Academic scholarship was damaged by that lack of diversity. But I think more importantly, the culture on campuses was weakened to the point where, when a new idea came to campus, like DEI or the idea the America was ripe for a “racial reckoning”— even if those ideas were in some ways valuable—it wasn’t moderated by respected voices on campus who were committed to the long run good of the school.
Instead, many who disagreed with some of the more extreme ideas in DEI were cowed into silence, and they either decided not to speak up, or they spoke up and they were savaged, fired, or canceled in various ways. So I think there were those two factors — first, a slow softening of the ground, primarily on the dimension of viewpoint diversity, and then, as groupthink started to grow, the ability of the culture to heal itself and stand up against exaggerated claims was weakened. When the DEI enthusiasm swept across the campus, there was very little to stand up against it or moderate it into more healthy channels.
🤫What can be done to address self-censorship?
Generally, we think that peak woke on campuses occurred around 2021 or maybe 2022. Right around then is when HxA’s data shows the most self-censoring, the most cancellations, and some of the most shocking numbers — graduate students in particular were much more willing to advocate violence against speakers then. But what we’re seeing nationally over the last year and a half is a huge swiveling of attention by university leaders to this quiet question about the quality of campus culture. They’re asking, “Do conversations happen in the dorm on Tuesday night? Or are people off in their siloed groups and self-censoring?”
Now, I didn’t see that at Furman because, while I did four different events, I was only there for a day and I was participating in programming hosted by the Tocqueville Program. What I saw with those folks was genuinely remarkable. There were very impressive levels of conversation in a number of different settings. I was extremely impressed by what I saw and experienced at the Tocquieville Forum events. If that quality of conversation and seriousness about ideas could be replicated across the Furman campus, it would be something very special indeed.
Nationally speaking, though, we did a big survey of presidents’ convocation addresses this last fall. There were remarkably high incidences of presidents talking about the importance of open inquiry, free speech, and constructive disagreement. The one topic that didn’t really get covered was viewpoint diversity, which is the toughest nut to crack from a university administration’s perspective.
We absolutely celebrate the proliferation of dialogue across difference initiatives, but we worry that when you neglect viewpoint diversity, these initiatives can be an easy out that leads to a culture of niceness, which is not quite what we’re after. We should be polite and civil, but that often means expressing a viewpoint that you think is worth considering which makes other people uneasy. Doing open discourse in a serious way is not as easy as many of our universities are currently experiencing because they’re not doing the viewpoint diversity part well enough. Manners matter, but the university is sometimes rough and tumble, and that’s what it means to have a really, truly vigorous exchange of ideas.
🌪️If the political winds change in 2028, will the initiative to reform campus speech cultures lose steam when there’s less political pressure?
That’s a serious concern, at least insofar as these reforms we are seeing nationally are being driven by political expediency. We know power changes hands in Washington and state legislatures very often, and even when it doesn’t switch hands, embedding cultural change in a complex institution like a university doesn’t happen fast. Deep and lasting cultural change happens effectively only when it is built from the inside. You can have outside agents pushing to make things happen, and that can be helpful. But to have change be authentic and enduring, we think you need to have faculty members. Faculty members are there to stay. Students come for four years. Presidents come and go. But faculty are there for the long run. They have the opportunity through time to affect the culture of a place, which is why HxA really focuses on discovering faculty, recruiting them, and developing their understanding.
Politically speaking, HxA is trying to think through which elements that are being encouraged now are going to be taken away in two or three years. How can our movement endure beyond that and still make progress? We’re thinking about how to make great strides and recruit faculty during this three year window while the vibe shift is in the air. It’s also complicated by the fact that the Trump administration is pushing the Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education, which we see as being a mixed bag. The fact that the phrase viewpoint diversity is now being associated with the Trump administration makes our job harder in many ways. Nonetheless, it’s a principle that we believe in.
🔄Are any universities really turning it around from having serious problems to a healthy culture of open discourse?
We’re still waiting to see about the turnarounds. There have been some places that were really bad where there are promising efforts at reform. I’m thinking, for example, of Columbia, which was one of the places where campus culture was at its worst and the anti-Semitism was explicit. They haven’t turned it around yet, and they have a long way to go, but there’s a very large and active group of HxA members on that faculty. There are also trustees who are in communication with us about things that can be done there.
There are also places that have been doing remarkable things for a number of years, because the presidents and the trustees sincerely believe in the principles of open discourse. Vanderbilt is the name everyone brings up, because Daniel Diermeier is such a great spokesperson for these things. Chicago, of course, has a strong tradition of true academic freedom. But there are also some surprising places. The University of Denver is a remarkable school where their chancellor, Jeremy Haefner, has been working on this stuff for five years or more. Long before it became fashionable to talk about open inquiry and constructive disagreement, he was building out specific programs for the freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors. He was measuring viewpoint diversity on campus and toleration for various ideas.
The University of Virginia has some really interesting initiatives going on as well. The interim president is an HxA member, and we have a big cohort there–I think 85 HxA members on the faculty. They do a huge number of events, including creative things like “disagree with a professor,” where they have a whole room of professors sitting at tables. Students sit down with the professors and the professor has to make a statement about something they believe, and the students criticize them for what they think. These kinds of things build those muscles that think through disagreements.
With all these initiatives happening around the country focused on constructive disagreement, we distinguish the campuses that are serious from the ones that are less serious primarily by asking: “Are they measuring these things?” If you commit to measuring open discourse indicators, then you get some longitudinal data. Without that you could just be doing an initiative because you’re doing it, and next year you might not do it anymore. But once you start measuring, then you can measure again when the administration changes or when the president changes. Measurement is really one of the key factors we think about in a healthy university environment.
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