“One-sidedness has always been the rule . . . many sidedness the exception”
—John Stuart Mill, “On the Freedom of Thought and Expression”
September 14, 2025—I want to begin by saying how grateful I am for the invitation to speak this evening, and also to Pine Crest School and their President, Dana Markham, and to Vanderbilt and Chancellor Diermeier—and their respective teams—for convening this conversation and bringing all of us together this evening. It’s wonderful for me to be here with so many colleagues.
I want to offer—as a way of getting this conversation going—a few provisional reflections on intellectual diversity in schools, but I’ll zoom out for a brief moment and describe to you the Framework for Schools, which, as I think you know, was published last May with the support of the Edward E. Ford Foundation.
Its somewhat clunky title is, in full, Thriving in a World of Pluralistic Contention: A Framework for Schools.
In it—to summarize very briefly—we make the case for what we call academic pluralism. The idea of academic pluralism rests on two assumptions: First, that teaching and learning are distinct from political advocacy, activism, and movement politics. That’s the academic part: the idea that schools are first and foremost places of study, inquiry, curiosity, wonder, and exploration.
The second assumption is that schools serve diverse populations across a broad spectrum of backgrounds, political orientations, religious beliefs, and personal values, and that this fact is a source of tremendous strength, if properly harnessed. That’s the pluralism part.
More concretely, the Framework advances three principles—and six norms—in support of academic pluralism: the ideal of educating for expressive freedom, which it defines across the axis of 1) courageous, 2) tolerant, and 3) conscientious expression; 4) disciplined nonpartisanship as both an institutional posture, and (5), an instructional aspiration on the part of teachers; and, lastly, 6) intellectual diversity as a design principle for programming and curriculum.
We wrote the Framework, first of all, as a provocation—as way to spark conversation about mission and defining purposes. We wrote it in response to what we saw as the creeping politicization of schools which, I believe, represents a threat to our public standing and authority. And we wrote it as a defense of what the author and free speech advocate Jonathan Rauch has memorably called the “constitution of knowledge,” those largely unwritten norms, rules, and habits that, taken together, give direction and shape to the truth-seeking enterprise.
Since its publication, a lot has happened, to say the least—within institutions of learning and beyond them.
More and more schools and universities have adopted forms of disciplined nonpartisanship—or what Vanderbilt has called “principled neutrality”—as an essential precondition for securing openness of debate.
Renewed attention has been given to the professional duties that define our interactions with young people and our lives as teachers: what it means to teach—and teach well— during a moment of pronounced political partisanship and ideological rancor.
Schools and universities have also instituted formal programs—campus forums such as Dialogue Vanderbilt, and new centers, like Vanderbilt’s think tank—The Future of Free Speech— designed to foster free and open debate and actively teach constructive disagreement. The number of new initiatives in this area is both astounding and welcome, and Vanderbilt stands out with the clarity of its vision, ambition, and the comprehensiveness of its efforts.
There is also, particularly among independent schools, a movement afoot to re-pluralize student life and more effectively lever religious, political, and cultural diversity on our campuses: in how we shape residential life, organize and empower student associations, and—particularly at secondary schools—regulate the baleful impact of new forms of technology on the social, civic, and intellectual lives of our students, which is a topic for another day, but one of tremendous importance.
So, a lot of great things are happening at both the secondary and the university level, and especially here at Vanderbilt. Taken together, these efforts to promote civic dialogue, educate for expressive freedom, and reorient our missions toward inquiry strengthen the pluralistic infrastructure of our campuses.
As important as these initiatives are, they sometimes exist on the periphery of the student experience—in elective courses and speakers series, as add-ons (as centers and or programs within the university) or one-offs (training and orientations around expressive norms), and they are, for that reason, easy for students to avoid or opt out of.
If we hope to foster open inquiry, deep and searching dialogue, and civic debate on our campuses, these priorities need to sit at the very core of the student experience: in the academic program. In the classroom. And until we bring these efforts from the margins to the center of student experience, our efforts will likely falter, or at least be uneven, reaching some but perhaps not all students. I think that secondary schools have a particular obligation here. How that obligation is brought to life is a daunting—and exciting—undertaking.
Which brings me to the third pillar of the Framework: the idea of intellectual diversity.
The idea here is simple: a curriculum built around the Millian premise that truth-seeking is collaborative, dialogic, social, and sometimes, as Mill’s language often emphasizes, adversarial, and that curriculum should take its shape from that essential insight, particularly within the humanities and social sciences, where the study of human values takes center stage.
I think we can make a strong case for the value of intellectual diversity in curricular and course design as a way of inducting young people into the norms of serious, rigorous, inquiry.
For his 2001 book, Making the Most of College: Students Speak Their Minds the researcher Richard Light interviewed hundreds of Harvard undergraduates to identify the most impactful learning experiences. Again and again, students mentioned the instructional value of what Light came to call “structured disagreement.” Light discovered that courses structured around open-ended, complex questions and including readings, arguments, and texts from disparate, often conflicting, sources do a number of things: they excite curiosity; sustain intellectual engagement; promote dialogue among students; foster openness to divergent views; and require thoughtful, informed judgment. In short, it is a powerful means of intellectual formation.
Subsequent research (from Diana Hess, Emily Robinson, Jonathan Zimmerman, among others) has also found that curriculum and courses organized around issues—and big questions—supported by carefully curated source materials, promotes civic understanding by providing students opportunity to practice the skills of deliberation and democratic problem solving.
A recent study by two researchers in clinical and applied psychology suggests that these kinds of intellectual experiences are also important for the healthy growth and development of young people. Interviews with almost 1500 students at the University of Michigan and Northwestern found that 80 percent had submitted classwork that misrepresented their views in order to better align with those of their professors, and that students routinely self-silence and mispresent their views with peers. The resulting split between outer presentation and inner conviction arrests healthy development, since, the researchers argue, healthy “identity formation requires disagreement: debate, dissent, and exposure to divergent perspectives.”
In short, a curriculum structured around disagreement and divergent perspectives is an intellectual, civic, and developmental necessity.
So how are we doing? Are we effectively introducing our students to a diverse range of ideas and arguments? To be honest, I’m not sure we actually know—more study and research is needed, especially among secondary schools. But a new working paper, drawing on college and university syllabi from a repository of some 27 million course reading lists organized by the Open Syllabus Project, suggests we have work to do.
This study sought to answer two questions:
First: “How well are our colleges and universities introducing students to the moral and political controversies that roil modern democratic life?”
And second: Are students being “exposed to a broad range of intellectual perspectives that give shape to these controversies and illuminate the complexity of the issues at stake?”
They examine how three controversies are taught: racial bias in the American criminal justice system; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; and the ethics of abortion.
Their findings? On the whole, they write, “professors insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreement that shape these important controversies,” screening students “from intellectual disagreement or presenting contested points of view as if they were orthodoxies.” This confirms John Stuart Mill’s claim that in matters of the mind, “one-sidedness has always been the rule . . . many sidedness the exception.”
They end with a paradox, noting that, while it’s often claimed that universities have become too political, in some ways they aren’t political enough. “The irony,” they write, “is that we can only temper the current political war over [higher] education by politicizing our courses . . . by building more contention into them.”
That strikes me as a worthy goal for secondary schools, colleges, and universities. So let me end with a few thoughts and questions:
- How can we make the case for intellectual diversity as an educational good and curricular design principle? There is an important role here for Boards and school leaders—not to dictate matters of curriculum or encroach on the work of faculty, but to affirm important principles of learning. There may also be a role for accreditation bodies.
- How can we study intellectual diversity in our schools, particularly in terms of curriculum? We certainly have a strong model in the Open Syllabus Project.
- Can we convene academic leaders and teachers—in summits like this one—to identify the most salient conversations and debates across humanistic study and to surface, share, and publicize the most effective practices, designs, and courses that support intellectual diversity in our schools?
- And lastly, how can we draw on the resources of our great universities? There may be opportunities in the areas of teacher education, college admissions, and, of course, curriculum. Experiments such as the Schoolhouse Dialogues, though imperfect and provisional, are welcome. Schools can also take inspiration from a number of promising initiatives in higher education: renewed efforts, across many colleges and universities, seeking to define and teach the civic canon; the “teach the conflicts” school of thought first advanced by Gerald Graff and lately taken up by scholars such as Mark Edmundson; the revival of great book efforts in the tradition of Robert Hutchins “great conversation;” and the case study approach, pioneered by law and business schools, and newly applied to questions of democratic decline and resiliency in, for example, David Moss’s work at Harvard, among many others.
There are many opportunities for us, and working together, perhaps we can identify the most promising—or least do our best to ask the right questions. So, I wanted, once again, to thank Vanderbilt and Chancellor Diermeier for supporting this summit, and perhaps most importantly, for the vigor, clarity, and creativity of Vanderbilt’s leadership. It is a challenging moment for educators at all levels, but gatherings like this one—bringing together students, faculty, trustees, and heads of schools—inspire me with excitement and hope.