A recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education describes the current trend on college campuses of starting “civil dialogue” programs. These programs are designed to help students engage with diverse ideas in more constructive ways. This effort is commendable but the question is: Will these programs work?
“Civic dialogue” programs are a fast-growing ecosystem of initiatives, marched out under the banner of open inquiry. In my visits to campuses this fall, I’ve seen the same pattern: presidents opening the semester by announcing their intention to build a campus culture of open inquiry, backed up by real changes in policies and programming. Students are being taught the principles of free-expression and administrators are investing in “bridge-building” and “dialogue across differences” programming, and are even launching centers focused on civic dialogue.
After years of campus disruption, public distrust and a sense that universities can’t actually engage with conflict, leaders want to show that campuses can still be places of reasoned argument and scholarly decorum. This is good news: a university campus should indeed be a special place, a place devoted to the pursuit of knowledge. So if these programs help students listen more openly and ask better questions, they deserve our support.
But even as campuses embrace civil dialogue, there is a danger that some university leaders are quietly redefining “open inquiry.” And they are doing so in a way that makes campus dialogue more narrow and less intellectually demanding than it ought to be.
At Heterodox Academy, we define a culture of open inquiry as having three elements: freedom of expression, constructive disagreement and viewpoint diversity — that is, the actual presence of substantively different perspectives within the scholarly community. The first two elements are finally gaining widespread attention from college presidents. Viewpoint diversity, however, remains the third rail of academic life — perceived as so volatile that engaging it is likely to cause backlash or damage.
This is not because viewpoint diversity is unimportant to the scholarly enterprise. On the contrary, it’s because the question of viewpoint diversity forces universities to confront an uncomfortable fact: The range of ideological diversity within the professoriate has dramatically narrowed in recent years, from about 2:1 liberal to conservative in 1989 to about 7:1 in 2024 overall, with some disciplines like Anthropology showing a 42:1 ratio.
This raises some uncomfortable questions: As the range of viewpoints among the professoriate narrows, might the scholarly assumptions that dominate certain disciplines become less the product of reasoned evidence and more the result of group-think?
In conditions of increasing ideological homogeneity, might professional incentives artificially narrow the range of research projects deemed important, or even acceptable, within certain disciplines? Also, can hiring pipelines and graduate training inadvertently magnify ideological homogeneity, even among the most dedicated and well-meaning scholars?
Put bluntly: Is the main problem on campus with the students, or do the adults on campus need to do some soul-searching too?
It is easier to teach students “how to talk” about acceptable topics than to ask “what’s missing” from campus conversations in the first place. Without viewpoint diversity, “civil dialogue” risks becoming academic theater: earnest, well-mannered, but intellectually parochial.
In this way, a campus can become more skilled at civil discourse while slumbering within the comforts of intellectual monoculture.
Looking out at campuses across the country, I see the beginnings of a significant divide within the open inquiry reform movement.
On one side are campus leaders who believe that if they teach students free-expression principles and train them to engage respectfully, they have thus built a campus culture of open inquiry. In this approach, the problem is mostly tonal: a deficit of skills and norms among the students. Since the problem of a campus culture is essentially a problem with the students, add some programming to train students better and you’ve fixed the problem of campus culture.
On the other side are campus leaders who understand that the problems of campus culture run deeper. Building a campus culture of open inquiry also depends on the presence of genuine dissent and varied perspectives — and not just among students, but also especially among the faculty, who are the intellectual leaders on campus.
If the professors on campus increasingly think the same way about consequential social, political and moral questions, the culture of the campus is vulnerable to groupthink no matter how civil student discussions might become. In that environment, speech can be “free” in theory while inquiry is impoverished in practice. Fewer students will experience authentic intellectual challenges — challenges that could reveal their blind spots, correct past errors, or change their minds.
This helps explain a paradox visible in many “dialogue-across-differences” initiatives: The “differences” are often surprisingly narrow. Students may be encouraged to talk across identity categories and personal experiences — important dimensions of campus life — while being insulated from serious disagreement about underlying empirical claims, moral tradeoffs and policy implications. Dialogue becomes a technique for managing conflict rather than a method for discovering truth.
And this is where the new civil-dialogue boom risks missing the public’s deeper complaint about universities. The public worries not only that students are rude or too ready to take offense. Much more, the public worries that universities themselves have grown indifferent to genuine dissent, that their teaching and research is ideologically biased, and that they have become too entangled in moral and political signaling to serve as reliable producers of knowledge.
A university that runs dialogue trainings while its intellectual ecosystem remains lopsided will not regain trust by polishing its rhetoric. Trust returns when institutions demonstrate intellectual humility: a willingness to test their favored ideas against strong alternatives, to reward serious critique and to treat intellectual dissent as a resource rather than a threat.
None of this requires quotas of belief, and it shouldn’t. The goal is not “balance” for its own sake. It is to rebuild the conditions for scholarship: conditions in which bad ideas lose because better evidence comes to light, not because they are invisible (or unutterable); conditions in which students and faculty learn to evaluate arguments they dislike, not just perform tolerance; conditions in which disciplines remain curious enough to notice what they have stopped noticing.
Civil dialogue programs can and should be part of the larger project of internal reform. But they will fall short if they are used as a substitute for viewpoint diversity rather than a complement to it. If university leaders want to build an authentic campus culture of open inquiry, they must treat viewpoint diversity as a core institutional responsibility, not an optional add-on.
Otherwise, we will end up with campuses that speak more softly, listen more carefully, but nonetheless continue, together, to think the same thoughts.