On Cynicism in the Academy.
Today’s post reflects an ongoing rumination on the nature and evolution of academic freedom in the contemporary university, but it was prompted by two recent news items: first, by the announcement that Martin Peterson, currently professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, will be moving to Southern Methodist University (SMU); second the news reported in the Harvard Crimson that “Harvard Asks Donors to Endow $10 Million Professorships for ‘Viewpoint Diversity.’” (Wasn’t that what the visiting fellows program at the Kennedy school was for?) If we look more closely at the details of each episode, they point to widespread cynicism within the academy. I want to say a bit about that before I get to my main point today.
First, Peterson’s comments (quoted at the top of this digression) resonated with me. Of course, administrators are people with mortgages, have parents with expensive care needs, and have kids with expensive tuition, too. American political economy with its go-fund-mes for urgent medical care and (say) funeral costs makes individual, principled stances incredibly fraught affairs in an academic job-market that is clearly tanking, and that most certainly leaves fewer alternative opportunities than (the usually more lucrative options) former prosecutors have. (Some of the administrators at Texas A&M may well have had tenure, and so they do deserve special opprobrium.)
Second, Peterson’s words remind us that something is very broken in the academy when the people who are charged with running it — and Texas A&M is not some idiosyncratic place; it is one of the great, earlier public land-grant research universities — can’t bring themselves to even try to defend fairly basic academic freedom. (If you inform yourself of the details you will learn that Peterson was really making a basic point.) This absence of principle exhibits cynicism and only engenders erosion of the academy’s spiritual authority. I don’t mean the situation is more cynical than a President who barely pretends to care about revelation and then reads 2 Chronicles 7:14 in front of the cameras. Both exhibit what Machiavelli would call ‘corruption.’
Third, and speaking of cynicism, in its fundraising, Harvard has embraced a term, ‘viewpoint diversity,’ whose (let me adopt James Burnham’s terminology) formal meaning implies a kind of openness to intellectual pluralism, but whose real meaning means ‘people that are critics of liberalism from the non-libertarian right.’ That is to say, this is affirmative action for right-wing coded intellectuals.
As an aside, I am myself not a critic of funded centers that presuppose an ideological commitment. If the institutional embedding is properly organized, these can enrich a campus and even the disciplines in which the academic housed in them publish. (I have a soft spot for the development of ‘schools’ with distinct orientation within many disciplines.) I have myself ‘visited’ centers where the ultimate source of funding was ‘right’ coded back in the day.
Now, interestingly enough, back in the day (May 2024), Harvard University’s official guidance for a policy on university statements did not embrace institutional neutrality. So, I am not suggesting that Harvard is inconsistent with its own understanding of university speech. In fact, its “policy commits the university to an important set of values that drive the intellectual pursuit of truth: open inquiry, reasoned debate, divergent viewpoints and expertise. An institution committed to these values isn’t neutral, and shouldn’t be.” (That’s from an NYT editorial written by Noah Feldman and Alison Simmons.)
But the reason why I use ‘cynicism’ is because nobody believes that Harvard’s funding drive is designed to create intellectual pluralism at the disciplinary or methodological level where groupthink may be lurking. The fundraising goal is not a means to advance knowledge. (I have actually published on the epistemic and normative risks to society of disciplinary groupthink, so I don’t think this is a merely intellectual matter.)1 Rather, Harvard’s fundraising is patently a means to appease a hostile and dangerous administration (and the intellectuals that are partisans of it).
This administration has demanded ‘viewpoint diversity’ from Harvard in a letter (here) of April 11, 2026. And the reason why it is legitimate to be cynical about their use of ‘viewpoint diversity’ is that this is an administration that across a range of topics and institutions seems to have no interest in, say, viewpoint diversity when those views contradict its own. Most strikingly this is exhibited in the way it has sought to control public media and the way it has sought to deport foreign students who express views it doesn’t like; but also in weaponizing the judiciary in attacking its enemies (and so on).
This gets me to the real point of today’s post, which is not the manifest cynicism on display. Rather, to grapple with the following point. I have remarked before that many prominent universities are exceedingly long-lasting corporations. They have endured, in part, by their willingness to exhibit context-sensitive prudence, alas. If, say, a well-entrenched, Bonapartist government wants a certain amount of conformism to its preferred viewpoints in public institutions and universities, it will usually be obtained eventually. The departure of CEU from Budapest is fresh in memory. Many nineteenth century European intellectuals may have been spontaneously nationalist and imperialist, but the governments also nudged the universities in appointing reliable pairs of hands.
Sometimes this leads to an official purge at the official universities and the subsequent development of an ‘underground university’ as occurred in, say, Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring. I understand Zena Hitz’s Catherine project and Justin Smith-Ruiu’s The Hinternet Foundation as the building blocks of an underground university of the future.
The more intense cases occur, in circumstances where the academics and the social forces that really support them and, say, the political and economically influential elites have drifted apart, but the law has not caught up with that divergence yet. The best known and most dramatic examples of this occur in the context of civil war or separatism/revolutionary wars. For example, in the age of the English civil war, Oxford’s politics was sometimes very far out of step with the parliamentarian party. And, after the American revolution, the University of New Brunswick and the University of King’s College were founded by loyalist exiles in what came to be known as Canada.
I have used the neutral term ‘drifted’ in the previous paragraph, but as I have been noting repeatedly, echoing the diagnosis of Michael Polanyi back in the day, strategic agents including fascists and anti-liberal movements will aim to lower the trust and authority in the professions and the academy in order to make possible and consolidate their own power. So, it would be a mistake to treat ‘drift’ as pointing to a lack of agency. As regular readers know, I think universities’ vulnerable strategic position is due to the loss of their spiritual authority in wider society. And politicizing their mission — by seeking out ‘viewpoint diversity’ — is not a means to recover such authority.
MAGA and its allies want universities to believe that Stateside a regime change has already occurred and so that accommodation is the only prudent way forward for research-intensive universities. It is somewhat puzzling that while they maintain considerable freedom to shape events on their own campus, so few universities have found ways to make the case that independent education and the advancement and preservation of knowledge is worth preserving.
Elsewhere, I have argued (in Dutch) that, for example, ideological conformism is to be expected (and not without its problems) in many professions and fields, but when it occurs it is far more politically dangerous in policing and the armed forces than it is in the academy.