How universities can build a diverse community of thought

“Be prepared to defend your point of view.” – said Harvard President Alan Garber in his convocation address to the Harvard Class of 2028 on September 2. “Be prepared to express viewpoints that are different from your own. First of all, be prepared to change your mind.

All of these changes are welcome and are no doubt made in good faith. But they are also obviously reactive. If the university rediscovers the principles of intellectual and academic freedom only amidst broken windows and scrubbed profanity on the walls, the work of dismantling the long-standing political monoculture and fostering a truly intellectually pluralistic community has only just begun.

Ensuring that higher education institutions create structures and cultures that encourage and sustain productive disagreement in pursuit of their highest purpose – the development, transmission and preservation of knowledge, requires a deeper and more intentional commitment.

Larry Jameson, Penn’s interim president — whose predecessor was impeached after equivocations before Congress about anti-Semitism on its campus — noted that “by silencing Penn’s institutional voice, we hope to amplify knowledge and voices within.”

I argue that the role of institutions is not simply to empower, but to ensure that the “voices within” are polyphonic and that everyone adheres to the basic conditions that foster truth-seeking, open inquiry, and civil discourse.

The University of Austin has enrolled freshmen this fall. These brave students are the first to enter an institution specifically designed to cultivate and sustain a culture of intellectual pluralism, an especially difficult but undoubtedly necessary task in an age of polarization and zero-sum politics.

The University of Austin was born in the crucible of debates over academic freedom, and it has faced no shortage of criticism for its mission to build an institution dedicated to dismantling the deafening intellectual binaries that seem to hold our culture, including our universities, in thrall. Our university, three years in the making, may well offer older institutions how to build a truly diverse community of thought.

Encouraging tolerance for different viewpoints and suppressing institutional opinion are helpful measures, but unless a commitment to intellectual freedom and the means to uphold it are codified in the rules and principles that govern the institution, the shadows of censorship and ideological conformism will someday emerge again.

At the University of Austin, we have formally reaffirmed our commitment to the principles of open inquiry and civil discourse. Each year, our faculty and staff gather with public sector intellectuals and outside scientists for the annual First Principles Summit, where we reflect on how we hold to our founding ideals and where we can improve. This self-assessment makes us all accountable to each other and to external stakeholders.

Our student experiences are based on dialogue and the free exchange of ideas. We insist that all views are heard, but also that all views are supported by evidence. We comply The Chatham House Rulewhich states that ideas expressed in class cannot be shared with annotations outside the classroom without the speaker’s consent, in order to alleviate the fear of malicious exposure on social media and to create an atmosphere of trust around the seminar table.

Our student-run debate society, the Austin Union, based on the Oxford Union, has already become a forum for grappling with some of society’s most vexing issues. We hope to expand this model beyond our campus by developing software at our Mill Institute that models civil discourse practices in K-12 schools, where we have already reached more than 15,000 students in 500 classrooms in 41 states and 11 countries.

Any institution, no matter how mission-driven or unified in purpose, can expect to resolve disputes. However, the hallmark of a healthy institution are the procedures it has in place to respond to such moments. University of Austin constitution includes a system of judicial review that enables any member of our community who believes that their academic freedom or spirit of inquiry has been violated to bring their matter for adjudication to an external, completely independent body. This avoids the traditional pitfalls of star chambers and oblique processes. This panel’s decision will be binding, as will the supreme court’s decision.

The University of Austin is not opening its doors this year with the intention of shutting out the hustle and bustle of the outside world. But through our commitment to open inquiry, reinforced by an institutional structure specifically designed to preserve it, we hope to show American higher education a better way to navigate the turmoil of this moment and emerge from it better prepared to serve the fundamental purpose of higher education – the relentless pursuit of truth.

Mr. Kanelos is the founding president of the University of Austin.