From DEI to DSI: Handling the Neofascist Trumpist Turn to “Discourse Safety Initiatives”
We need a guide to how to deal with the new rounds of escalating weaponized cancel-culture to the max. But only a fool would trust the New York TImes to help think these things through, as here it is once again dealing from the middle of the deck…
Wait!
Alex Bronzini-Vender says he is writing about what is wrong with Harvard.
And yet his two concrete examples are from Northwestern and Texas A&M?
The most concrete thing he says about Harvard as an institution is that Harvard does bad by (a) pointing to IHRA and (b) saying that the university “considers the examples that accompany the IHRA definition [of anti-semitism] to the extent that those examples might be useful in determining discriminatory intent”?
You see the problem here?: NU. TA&M. might. If all ya got is that Harvard said something you object to “might” be useful, something from TA&M, and something from NU, then ya got nuthin:
Alex Bronzini-Vender: At Harvard and Elsewhere, the New Campus Orthodoxy Is Even More Stifling <https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/29/opinion/harvards-campus-speech-trump.html>: ‘That’s not how it’s playing out. Under federal pressure, Harvard and other universities around the country now police academic inquiry according to murkier standards of fairness. The goal, it seems, is to avoid offending anyone, anywhere, across an ever-expanding matrix of identities and standpoints. Rather than dismantling the excesses of the woke era, the new Trump-friendly programs and policies simply repurposed them to serve a different ideological agenda. The result is a new orthodoxy even more stifling than the last…
Now I would be eager to hear from Ryan Enos and from Steve Levitsky—who are quoted in seeing significant problems with Harvard’s current institutional position. But I want to hear from them in full context. Not what we have here.
And so, once again, I find myself in the same position I find myself with respect to, say, The Free Press. I very hard to see the New York Times editors as working in good faith here.
(Alex himself is, of course, young and a student—and so the appropriate attitude to take to him is to urge him to sharpen and stress-test his arguments.)
OK. What, then, you ask, should we in universities be doing?
We should be doing our jobs. We should not be entering into any transactional “compacts”, but simply do our jobs. And we are deserving of support to the extent that we do our jobs well.
As my brother-in-law Paul Mahoney, still Interim President of the University of Virginia for one more day, wrote in the letter that—in my reading, which could be wrong—made the MAGA Regents of UVA bounce him out of the job tomorrow:
October 17, 2025
The United States Department of Education
Washington, DC 20202Dear Secretary McMahon, Ms. Mailman, and Mr. Haley,
Thank you for your letter inviting comment on the proposed Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education. We wholeheartedly agree that “American higher education is the envy of the world.” We also agree with many of the principles outlined in the Compact, including a fair and unbiased admissions process, an affordable and academically rigorous education, a thriving marketplace of ideas, institutional neutrality, and equal treatment of students, faculty, and staff in all aspects of university operations. Indeed, the University of Virginia leads in several of these areas and is committed to continuous improvement in all of them.
We seek no special treatment in exchange for our pursuit of those foundational goals. The integrity of science and other academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship. A contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education.
Higher education faces significant challenges and has not always lived up to its highest ideals. We believe that the best path toward real and durable progress lies in an open and collaborative conversation. We look forward to working together to develop alternative, lasting approaches to improving higher education.
Sincerely yours,
Paul Mahoney
Interim President
University of Virginia <https://news.virginia.edu/content/community-message-interim-president-paul-mahoney>
“Academic work requires merit-based assessment of research and scholarship”, and so any “contractual arrangement predicating assessment on anything other than merit will undermine the integrity of vital, sometimes lifesaving, research and further erode confidence in American higher education”.
But what is our job? It is complicated. A university is different from the public square. A university is a place in which its members have duties:
to speak,
to listen,
to think,
to learn,
to support one another in those first four duties.
That means that members of a university have academic freedom, not public-square 1st-Amendment free-speech freedom. The idea is to generate, improve, and evaluate ideas; and then to disseminate those ideas; and to create and maintain a community that those who want to take on those duties find a safe, welcoming, and supporting place to do so.
How to arrange an institution and a community that does that best is, as I said, complicated.
The key dilemma is how to support those who are here to listen and to learn, and to weed out those who are not here to listen and to learn (and to encourage them to their proper place(s) go) without discouraging the speaking and the thinking. And here my go-to guru is the most learned Jacob Levy:
Jacob Levy (2016): Safe spaces, academic freedom, and the university as a complex association <https://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2016/03/safe-spaces-academic-freedom-and-the-university-as-a-complex-association/>: ‘“Academic freedom”… is not… freedom of speech… not the freedom to lie, to commit research fraud, to submit plagiarized work…. It’s not the freedom of a professor to stand in front of a class and say “have you heard the word of God as I best understand it? Let me preach to you for an hour”. Or “you all really need to vote for Bernie Sanders, his is the one true way for politics.”…
The scope that a professor has… [is] constrained by the subject matter of the… class… the… institution… [and the] identity… [of the] discipline…. [It] is the freedom of both professors and students (researchers and those pursing knowledge), to be judged only according to what they do in the classroom or as researchers and only according to the standards of the discipline…. [That] excludes… evaluat[ing] students, or for the university to evaluate us at all for our political or religious opinions expressed off campus…
And:
Jacob Levy (2024): Campus culture wars are a teachable moment in how freedom of speech and academic freedom differ <https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-campus-culture-wars-are-a-teachable-moment-in-how-freedom-of-speech/>: ‘Academic freedom… [is] the freedom to follow arguments and evidence where they lead, according to scholarly methods… the freedom to teach, within the confines of the scholarly mission of the class… and, finally, freedom from evaluation on non-academic grounds, of which the traditionally most important are political and religious grounds….
The university has to protect not only the safety of its other members but also the security of its academic functions. It can’t rule against the language on a sign, but it must intervene to prevent violence between students, or occupations and blockades that would prevent a class from meeting, or an invited speaker from speaking…. Escalation, overreach and the chilling of legitimate protest are all constant dangers…. Police helicopters and billy clubs on campus are always a sign of failure…. These are genuine problems… but many universities have probably erred too far in the direction of the shrug, letting the belief grow that classes may be disrupted or speakers blockaded without consequence….
In the autumn of 2023… members of university… conspicuously did not all sympathize with the same cause…. [So] universities often fell back on… institutional neutrality. But critics… said the institution had shown that it didn’t take it seriously either…. [Plus] the rule that the university shouldn’t take any interest in the rhetoric that’s used in a protest or on social media was harder to take seriously in an era of hate-speech rules, restrictions on exclusionary speech, and a discourse around “safety” that treated hostile language as violence….
The best time to have started to do the right thing was yesterday, but the second-best time is today…. Recommit to academic freedom, freedom of extramural speech, and institutional neutrality, starting now…. A firm defence of the right of pro-Palestinian students to protest non-disruptively; a clear stand against professors using their classrooms as political platforms; a refusal to adjudicate and police the meaning and intent of extramural political slogans or social-media posts; and the discipline to avoid adopting institutional political platforms on foreign, political or social policy. With those rules in place, they can provide the site and space for students and faculty alike to study, explore, discuss and debate, to celebrate, mourn and protest, even the most divisive questions in political life…
Plus MOAR, for example: <https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9789633866542-003/html> ; and <https://digressionsimpressions.substack.com/p/on-academic-freedom-and-institutional>.
As I put it in the past:
Brad DeLong (2017): “Any Community… Flourishes only When Our Members Feel Welcome & Safe…” <https://web.archive.org/web/20170926230940/https://www.bradford-delong.com/2017/09/any-community-flourishes-only-when-our-members-feel-welcome-and-safe.html>: ‘A university has three goals: 1. A university is a safe space where ideas can be set forth and developed. 2. A university is a safe space where ideas can be evaluated and assessed. 3. A university is a safe space where scholars can develop, and gain intelligence and confidence. Speech whose primary goal is to undermine and defeat one or more of those three goals does not belong on a university campus. If you come to Berkeley, and if your speech is primarily intended to—or even, through your failure to think through what you are doing, has the primary effect of (1) keeping us from developing ideas that may be great ones, (2) keeping us from properly evaluating and assessing ideas, or (3) driving members of the university away, your speech does not belong here. There are lots of people who want to take advantage of free speech week to neither: 1. develop ideas that may be great ones, 2. thoughtfully and rationally evaluate and assess ideas, nor 3/ make the university a welcoming place for young scholars. Some will want blood in the streets. Some will hope to take advantage of blood in the streets. Somebody may wind up dead, or maimed, as part of a game of political-cultural dingbat kabuki largely orthogonal to the three proper missions of the university. It is a serious concern.
This is still, today, a hill I will defend—but I will listen to reasoned arguments against it, and try to think and learn. For others disagree. Noah Smith for example: