The German philosopher Robert Spaemann once described education as a way “to introduce one to reality.” Not just the reality of the external world around us — as important as that is — but also the reality of ourselves, of what we are and what we’re for. To be educated is to develop the capacity to see things as they really are. Or, at the very least, a desire for the truth and the means to pursue it.
But here’s the problem: None of us fully understands reality as a whole. We see through a glass darkly. Each of us grasps only a portion of the truth. We may have a firm understanding of particular truths, but we are also shaped by our experiences, biases, traditions and flaws. Human fallibility is an inescapable part of the pursuit of truth. It’s a feature, not a bug.
The Nobel economist F.A. Hayek understood this well when it came to economic life. Centrally planned economies fail, he argued, because relevant economic knowledge does not exist in a concentrated form. It exists in “dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.” No agency or committee has it all. Assuming it does is what Hayek called the “fatal conceit.” The only way to utilize this local, tacit knowledge is to leave decision-making power in the hands of those who possess it. Doing so fills the blind spots of any individual perspective and enables a level of coordination, innovation and prosperity that centralized economies cannot hope to achieve.
Hayek’s epistemological framework applies wherever human beings are trying to understand the complexities of reality, including the university. But survey data consistently reveals significant political skew among faculty and administrators, along with worrying levels of institutional and self-censorship. Syllabi on contentious issues often reflect a limited set of perspectives, a concern echoed in recent assessments of the humanities and social sciences. A 2026 Yale report identified similar issues on its own campus, all while proposing reforms to strengthen openness and intellectual inquiry.
Ideological capture represents a kind of fatal conceit in higher education. It is the belief that truth can be reliably reflected and safeguarded through a narrow range of permissible views. In practice, this produces a form of intellectual protectionism that stifles the university’s ability to discover, refine and generate knowledge. It limits students’ exposure to the wider world of ideas and their ability to navigate it. What’s worse, it can dampen both curiosity and self-reflection — the very qualities education is meant to cultivate.
The alternative is not quotas or partisan department-packing. Instead, it is intellectual diversity properly understood as the institutional practice of epistemic humility. It is the recognition of our own intellectual and moral limits; of the chance that we very well might — and often do — get things wrong. Intellectual or viewpoint diversity allows us to piece together and refine our understanding of reality and what it means to truly flourish as individuals and societies.
I’ve seen what this looks like in practice, having spent part of my career in academic programming and building spaces where students could encounter serious arguments and openly discuss and debate them without fear. We took the competition of ideas seriously, modeling it through civil disagreement.
Two colleagues of mine held opposing views on the societal effects of technological change. Both had written books on the subject. One argued that modern technology alters and erodes fundamental human experiences. The other saw technology as an engine of prosperity, with its downsides being overstated. Naturally, we put them onstage and let them hash it out before an auditorium full of students.
When I first asked one of my colleagues whether she’d be willing to have this discussion in front of students, her answer was immediate: “I’d love to. I’ll tell him why he’s wrong any day of the week.” She meant it tongue-in-cheek. They were co-workers and friends who respected each other and agreed on many important things. On this, though, they did not.
But what unfolded onstage was more than a disagreement about tech policy or economic data. It was a conversation about how to approach the question of human flourishing. Each offered a different map of what it means to live well in a technological age; a different piece of a larger puzzle.
In that sense, the spirited discussion between my two colleagues was a reminder that we need each other’s insights to see the truth more clearly. Epistemic humility is a scholarly virtue, but more importantly, it is a human one. And we need it in our institutions of higher learning.
Walker Wright is the director of programs at a Yale-based institute dedicated to promoting free speech and intellectual diversity.
This story appears in the September 2026 issue of Deseret Magazine under the headline “Intellectual Pursuit.” Learn more about how to subscribe.