Campus Leaders Can’t Avoid Viewpoint Diversity in Pursuit of Open Inquiry
The 2025-6 academic year opened with college presidents across the country affirming their commitment to building cultures of open inquiry on their campuses. To restore public trust in universities, many of these leaders declared that they planned to embark on internal reforms, effectively bringing their campus cultures more in line with the ideals of knowledge-seeking that HxA has long championed.
In my visits to campuses across the country this Fall — including Berkeley, Cornell, Furman, and UNC — I can attest that the early-semester pronouncements are increasingly being backed by action. Many colleges are adopting programs to teach students the principles of free expression, including the rationale for time, place, manner rules, and it’s now hard to find a campus that hasn’t launched some version of “bridge-building,” “dialogue-across-differences,” or “constructive disagreement” programming.