Daniel Diermeier
Subject: Encouraging Competing Viewpoints Among College Students
Bio: Chancelor of Vanderbilt University
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast that covers economics, politics, and history. Today’s episode is Encouraging Competing Viewpoints Among College Students.
Our speaker is Daniel Diermeier who is the Chancelor of Vanderbilt. I want to hear from Daniel about how the administration can build a culture of political neutrality on campus. I want to learn about creating a university culture that encourages free speech and allows for debate without shaming the opposing perspective.
Daniel, can you please begin with six minutes of opening remarks.
Daniel Diermeier:
I’m the chancellor of Vanderbilt University. There are key institutions that are at the root of the success of our societies, whether that’s businesses or democracy, and rule of law. But, the trust in these institutions has plummeted dramatically. The main reason is that they’re complicated and often don’t operate in a way that’s easily for people to follow. So, if we are not able to explain clearly what the benefit of what the university is, we’re going to lose the trust of the American public.
The second important piece, is that these institutions have a particular purpose. The moment we deviate from that, then we lose the fundamental reason for why we exist and what the benefits are; we eroding trust as well. My concern is that universities have done both of these. They have not clearly stated what the purpose and benefit is for universities. And secondly, that they have drifted away from the purpose of creating and transmitting knowledge towards taking positions on a whole variety of political issues. University leaders need to address these challenges.
Larry Bernstein:
You’ve talked about keeping political ideology out of the classroom. Why is that problematic? Why does that create distrust? And how can the administration remove politics from the classroom, research, and tenure decisions if the faculty isn’t on board?
Daniel Diermeier:
Great research universities are about creating an environment for pathbreaking research and a transformative education. You want students to leave with knowledge in their particular area, whether it’s computer science or history. You want to prepare them for a meaningful career. And, you want to make sure that they can function as educated citizens in a free and democratic society. Now in most areas that works. The education is great in the sciences and the other areas. But what we’ve seen is that in some fields there are real problems where society reflects upon itself.
Those are the humanities, the qualitative social sciences, sociology, anthropology. You need to be exposed to the fundamental perspectives that are relevant. Let’s say you take a class on criminal justice and some people have argued persuasively or provocatively that the criminal justice system is biased or that it has the consequences of suppressing minority communities. You need to have both of the perspectives that are germane to the field and you then need to be discussed.
They need to be present in a syllabus. If that’s not the case, you’re only getting one side of the argument and then this particular class is not doing its job. To me, this is not about left/right balance so much than it is about the subordination of scholarly standards.
Larry Bernstein:
I did a podcast recently with John Shields who is a professor at Claremont. He looked at college course syllabi and found that there was faculty bias in the choice of what reading material was assigned. What did you think of John Shields’ analysis? See this link for my podcast with Shields.
Daniel Diermeier:
Their recent study looked at three issue areas that are domains that tend to be very controversial: criminal justice, the Israeli-Palestine conflict, and abortion. Now, in the case of the criminal justice class, they focused on a controversial but widely read book, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander, which is a complicated argument that argued that the mass incarceration related to the war on drugs had the consequence of suppressing African American communities.
Now there was a lot of criticism of that as there would be when you have a provocative book like that, that people took issue with the analysis and the data of the argument. What they found is that when they looked at syllabi on this particular topic, 94% would only assign the New Jim Crow. The students would never hear the other side of the argument. That’s problematic because now students have an impression that that’s the state of scholarship in this area even though it is not.
That point of view is not driven by scholarly concerns but by a political agenda. This is not a case about balancing left versus right. This is a case about teaching a particular area of study in a way that it should be taught.
Larry Bernstein:
John Shields argued that the politics of the professor shows up in the syllabus and whether it’s by design or not, the fact is that you have a leftist author in this example, Michelle Alexander, combined with a second author who’s even much further to the left and that there’s no book assigned from the center, center-right or the right.
Daniel Diermeier:
I’m a little worried about framing the entire issues a left versus right and take the example of Michelle Alexander’s book and you have a devastating critique written by somebody who is center-left.
So what matters is not so much that we balance left versus right, that we have the relevant perspectives in a particular class on a particular area that are represented. Now sometimes these people’s research will be motivated by their beliefs and that by itself, it’s just that’s who we are as humans. That’s the great German philosopher later taught in the United States, Hans Reichenbaum always made the following distinction. He called the context of discovery and the context of justification. Context of discovery, we have ideas for why we engage with research. Some are political, some are personal, some are theological, some are moral.
But once we enter the world of justification where we have to put our research and now it has to be criticized, to be open to criticisms no matter what people’s point of view. And in a teaching context, we need to faithfully represent the particular area of research that is relevant to this area. So you can have very intense debates on economics, on regulation or crime and people are like, it’s 80% on one side, but people are interested and committed to figuring things out. They’re not putting blinders and restrictions on themselves saying, “You can’t ask that question because it’s inconsistent with my political belief.
I want to emphasize the commitment to scholarly rules here. Universities tend to limit this debate., Many areas in the humanities, for example, like how we interpret pieces of art where we have the same problems, but they don’t naturally map onto a left/right ideological spectrum. And these fields are just as problematic, it’s just as important that we are committed to rigorous scholarship and the norms and standards that support that.
Larry Bernstein:
How did the university system become so partisan?
Daniel Diermeier:
I would say 85% of the faculty now just want to do their work. Your typical mechanical engineer want to be 14 hours in the lab and be left alone. They may tend to vote Democrat on average, but their politics is not central to their work or who they are, but they tend to vote Democrat. That’s the vast majority of faculty. That is not problematic that’s working well.
The sciences, engineering are working really well. Then there’s another smaller group. These are faculty members that fundamentally believe that the world is structured in an unjust fashion, that we understand this injustice as systemic and foundational, that our responsibility is to dismantle these structures of oppression and that this struggle and this commitment become central to who they are as scholars, as researchers, and as teachers. These faculty tend to be concentrated in certain fields: humanities, qualitative social sciences, sociology, anthropology, and adjacent fields. It’s important to the way they view their role and their purpose in the context of the university. They have a very clear idea what the university should do. It should be part of the struggle and they’re organized. As a consequence of that, they tend to dominate certain departments. They sometimes dominate issues of institutional self-governance.
You have a scattered group on the conservative or the traditional liberal John Stuart Mill’s free speech group and you have an organized group on the left and the radical left. I don’t mean moderate left, I mean radical. And so as a consequence of that, university presidents have to navigate that in an environment, which it’s difficult because you constantly get pushed from one side. Some presidents like my former boss at the University of Chicago, Bob Zimmer, was very clear about the principles the University of Chicago stands for, but many presidents don’t want to deal with any drama on campus.
Muddling through and then the ship drifts for 20 years and over time it drifts in a radical direction. That’s what we’re seeing in certain fields.
It manifested itself first in the free speech controversy. So, this was like when we had speech codes like this inviting a certain speaker. We had the Halloween controversy at Yale.
That’s better now because we have a clear set of Chicago principles and groups like FIRE played an important role to put some pressure on universities to improve the free speech environment. Chapter two was institutional neutrality. That of course was critical after October 7th. And again, we had principles and then we had pressure
from alumni, also like the Jewish community. And again, universities moved in a good direction by adopting standards of institutional neutrality.
The third chapter now is what happens in the classroom, in research, and in professional associations and that’s a much more complicated problem because it needs to be done consistent with academic freedom.
Fundamentally you need to look at what’s happening in these departments, who is hired, under what circumstances, what are the principles? You have to ask yourself, are we producing the next generation of scholars? And then you have to look at institutions of certification. These are professional associations, journals, prizes, all things that be prestige and recognition of faculty. There have been problems there as well. The whole system of research, teaching, how do we educate the next generation of scholars need to be looked at and presidents need to lean in one by one to get this set back to the original purpose of the university.
Larry Bernstein:
How do we depoliticize our universities?
Daniel Diermeier:
Well, there are formal principles and then there’s informal aspects and culture. The formal side is this commitment that leaders of universities will not take positions on policy or political issues unless they’re directly and material connected to the core purpose of the university.
I will take a position as a university president on things like research funding because it’s directly connected to the university, but will not take positions on foreign policy or the Dobbs decision. Why? Because we don’t want to create a chilling effect where certain things can’t be talked about or whether we have an institutional orthodoxy. And secondly, if we do a statement, particularly if we do it in haste over the weekend, we are supposed to be the places of expertise and careful work that looks at the complexity of the world in a methodologically rigorous fashion and making a statement over as complex an issue as the conflict in the Middle East is exactly the opposite of what university should do.
Now the important thing is it’s not just about the speech by presidents. It is also about divestment. The university endowment is there to support faculty and students. It’s not there to be an op-ed page. We’re not in the business of boycotting because they have a connection with Israel. Departments should not make statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the same reason that they create a chilling effect and an institutional orthodoxy and that is particularly pernicious for junior faculty that rely on their senior colleagues to get recommendations for promotion and tenure or for graduate students or even for undergraduates. So that should just be off limits.
That’s institutional neutrality, and the second part is the informal aspects that there’s certain things you just can’t talk about or you’re going to be ostracized. It is not appropriate to shun somebody that is a great scholar just because they have a political position that disagrees with the majority of the department. That is not acting as a scholar. The fundamental principle should be is that we are hiring scholars because of their scholarly competence not because of their political orientation.
The moment you hire people or promote them because they’re in line with particular political position, you have deviated from scholarly norms and that is not okay.
Larry Bernstein:
I did a podcast on the demise of small colleges in New England like Hampshire College. We’ve seen prospective students drift away from smaller colleges towards the major universities in the United States. Students are now at Vanderbilt, the University of Chicago, UPenn and the University of Texas. These schools have exploded.
Daniel Diermeier:
Our applications in early decision went up by 20% last year. We took like 2.8% of our regular decisions. This is off the charts.
Why are students and families looking for this environment? The reason is that we’re living in the age of technology. AI is front and center for everybody, but the same is there’s similar revolutions going on in biomedical and engineering, quantum and so forth. The knowledge base in these areas turns over extremely rapidly. So, if you want cutting edge AI research, I think the estimated knowledge base turns over in like three to six months, very similar in biomedical engineering and all the areas that are core to the innovation economy, which also means that’s where career opportunities are for students.
Students want to be exposed to that. Not all the students, but many want to do that. To teach this at the frontier of knowledge, you need to have it taught by active researchers. That is not true with the traditional areas like philosophy or history or English. Yes, there are advances, but the speed is not as profound and age and experience may make you an even better teacher of Plato. The problem for local arts colleges is that it is very difficult to teach these fields at a level that is at the frontier of knowledge because you need researchers for that, but to have researchers that you need a research infrastructure, which means you need labs and federal research grants and all of that.
A related point is that a rural location is not an innovation center. An urban environment is attractive to students because many of them want to get engaged sometimes in startups, in projects, in internships, all these types of things and that is easier if you are in a large research university in a thriving metropolitan area. Those are the reasons for why there’s success.
Larry Bernstein:
The price of education has gone up significantly in real terms, it grows faster than inflation and takes a greater percentage of our economy. It’s a combination of entertainment and education and that’s why kids want to be on campus but being on campus is expensive versus online.
Daniel Diermeier:
When you look at the net tuition that students pay after financial aid, in real dollars it has gone down at least at Vanderbilt over the last 15 years. And that’s because of the very substantial financial aid commitments that we make, particularly for low-income students, but it’s on a sliding scale. I think that’s not appreciated and it’s an important thing to keep in mind. That’s an important social mission that we engaged in as university is that for no student should the financial barriers to access prohibit them from going to Vanderbilt.
The second comment I think is, isn’t there a cheaper way of producing this type of education. Isn’t there a better way to do this?
I went to a German public university and that was much cheaper. It was funded by the state and I was first generation and I got a fellowship, but that was just for my living expense because the university was free. And the problem is that the quality is much worse. The classes are totally full. If you have a TA session, there were like 90 people around. There was no career support. There was no mental health support at all. There was no extracurricular activity at all. If you are first generation students and you have no support, the dropout rates are very high.
If you are admitted to Vanderbilt and you graduate and you come from a very wealthy background and you come from the toughest background in the country these two students graduate from Vanderbilt have the same lifetime expected income. They have the same life chances irrespective of their income, of the income of their parents. That is an astonishing accomplishment and that is what we do. But in order to support the students, there has to be a lot there.
For example, they have to meet each other. They have to be networks. Living together is really valuable for social capital. The system delivers on that, but it doesn’t come cheap.
Larry Bernstein:
When I was applying to college, Vanderbilt was a sleepy Southern school. Today it’s reputation and its educational offerings are world class. What happened? How did Vanderbilt rocket ship to become one of the top universities in the world?
Daniel Diermeier:
We’ve seen a tremendous increase in interest over the last few years. It is a place that values academic rigor, but combines this with a commitment that the students would grow as a person. It’s part of who we are. We set up the residential college model all the way down to the importance of extracurricular activities and the way we provide opportunities for students outside the classroom. The second piece, we’re a very collaborative place. We say students learn best, grow best if they’re members of a community that’s supportive and challenging.
It’s a sports analogy, it’s hard to make the team. When you make the team, we want you to be the best first baseman you can be and we want to be the best person you can be and your teammates are there to support and challenge you and your coaches are there to guide you. That’s the educational model. We sharpen it. We improved it. We did more in residential colleges. That’s pillar one.
The second thing that happened was really October 7th. We talked about in the last podcast together (about expelling students who misbehave), but we took a very principled stand on that. We were very clear that we would not tolerate harassment of Jewish students on campus. When we had problems with protestors, we acted according to our principles. And then when there were violations of rules, we took a properly disciplinary action. We did exactly what we said we would do and we lived up according to our values. Because we were an outlier on that among universities, there’s a lot of media interest in that.
That positioned us as a place that’s principled, that’s committed to creating an environment on civil discourse on campus where students can explore ideas, where they’re taught how to think, not what to think, and where we treat each other with respect, we don’t demonize each other just because we have different points of view.
It particularly resonated with the Jewish community because of the stark contrast for what they saw at other universities. I was honored by Chabad International, the Lamplighter Award, and from the White Rose Society in recognition for the environment that we created for Jewish students over the last two years.
Our last Passover Seder, we celebrated in the football stadium, 600 students were there. They had a great time. They brought their non-Jewish friends along. It was fantastic. That puts you on the map.
If you were like a family three or four years ago and you were saying, “Okay, where am I going to send my sons and daughter?” And you have a student that can go anywhere, let’s say, Penn, Harvard, Stanford.. Once you’re a viable alternative, now the differences matter. Se have seen a dramatic increase in interest from families from the Northeast, especially New York and California and especially from Jewish families that are saying, “This is a place where my son and daughter can thrive.” Something right about our culture. We invest a lot in the student culture of civil discourse. When students come on campus, they sign a pledge, we have a program which we call Dialogue Vanderbilt that is how we do things around here and where it becomes a habit for the students to engage with respect and by using arguments and not demonizing each other. And when people visit on campus, they see that and when they talk to the students, they see that. In the current environment that alternative is striking to people, that’s why we see the increase in interest.
Larry Bernstein:
What makes you optimistic about the university?
Daniel Diermeier:
I am optimistic that things are moving in the right direction. I’ve been on politicization of universities for about four years. We had the drama with October 7th and then the conflict with the federal government. Seeing things like the Yale report, the Harvard report, the principles that the AAU put out, these are all movements in the right direction. I think people recognize that these are great institutions, but certain things need to be fixed.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Daniel for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast, it was How AI will Change Law Schools, Law Firms, and Users of Legal Services.
Our speaker was Polk Wagner who is the Deputy Dean of Penn Law School who has been charged with figuring out how to adapt the law school curriculum to the AI revolution. Polk discussed how law schools will adapt as their graduates’ jobs will no longer focus on document creation but will instead require complex legal analysis.
We also talked about how AI will change the structure of law firms since the by-the-hour billing practice will end and what will replace it.
In addition, we chatted about how consumers of legal services will use AI to negotiate contracts, to comprehend complex legal agreements, and to help draft documents that previously would have been delegated to their attorneys.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
I am Larry Bernstein with the podcast What Happens Next.
Check out our previous episode, Curing the New Ebola Virus, here.
