Academic Freedom Requires Viewpoint Diversity | John Tomasi

Who owns the university? And who gets to say whether it's doing its job? In this closing keynote from the Heterodox Academy Mountain West Regional Conference at the University of Wyoming, HxA President John Tomasi builds what he calls a "grand unified theory of academic freedom," and he builds it straight from the source: the AAUP's landmark 1915 Declaration. A university isn't owned by its donors, its president, or even its faculty. It's a public trust. That's what gives professors their remarkable freedom to decide what they research and how they teach. But those freedoms come with duties, including the duty to give students genuine viewpoint diversity. When professors don't fulfill those duties, Tomasi argues, there's nothing to infringe, and someone has to judge whether the duties are being met. According to the AAUP itself, that someone is the administration, answerable to the public. Tomasi connects the argument to HxA 2.0, the shift toward pairing HxA's bottom-up campus work with a new top-down partnership with provosts and deans, and to the recent Washington University and Vanderbilt report on the state of the humanities. The talk closes with a lively Q&A. Chapters 00:00 Introduction: John Tomasi and HxA 03:58 Arriving late to the party: HxA 2.0 06:30 A public trust: who owns the university? 10:00 Academic freedom and the 1915 AAUP Declaration 14:30 Freedoms come with duties: the case for viewpoint diversity 19:00 Who judges the professors? The administrator's role 23:00 Getting solid information into administrators' hands 28:32 Q&A begins 28:43 Can big research universities be structured for this? 36:19 The Wash U and Vanderbilt report, and the AAUP pushback 42:01 How is this different from DEI curriculum review? 47:31 Where will HxA and higher ed be in five years?