I’ve known two kinds of professors: those who want to be the smartest person in the room and those who want to work with the smartest person in the room. To understand what happens when the first kind run the show—insisting on hiring only people dumber than they are—we need look no further than the trajectory of the Democratic Party tickets since 2008, with their dynamic of each presidential candidate insisting on a less talented Vice President (Obama > Biden > Harris > Walz). As a dean, I insist on taking the second approach, which explains the quality of essays in this symposium.

When I introduced the debate that led to this symposium, I emphasized the mission of the University of Austin as seeking truth through debate (veritas per disputandum, the motto of the Austin Union debate society). If professors can speak without fear of contradiction, then they can speak without the need for truth. The purpose of public debate is to disincentivize misrepresentation. Someone who knows they will be challenged by smart (or smarter) people will be careful what they say, while freedom from challenge is freedom for fancy. When you attend a talk on campus, if someone is curating the questions, then most likely the institution is curating the facts. This is the sense in which universities must be an open society: open to question, open to challenge, open to debate. A university cannot claim to be open while quashing public challenge, including challenge to the administration’s policies. (Scott Scheall’s essay in this symposium will have more on the hypocrisy plaguing contemporary academics.)

However, there is another sense in which a university must be closed. If it is to accomplish this mission of openness—the radical mission to be honest—the university must be closed to certain kinds of faculty.

James Madison’s personal motto was veritas, non verba magistri: truth, not the word of the teacher. A student must be free to follow their own mind, challenging and possibly rejecting the received wisdom of the magistri. It is helpful if those teachers do not hawk ideas incompatible with truth-seeking; it is mandatory that those faculty do not engage in coercion.

I believe the heart of the debate over a university as a fully-open or strategically-closed society is what kinds of faculty should not be hired by a university that is practicing truth-seeking? Proponents of each side of the debate should answer clearly: What characteristics of prospective faculty would cause you to not hire them? If there are none, then the university is fully open. But if we can identify any characteristics that demand exclusion from a truth-seeking university, then it is closed in an important sense.

Are those on the open side of the debate saying that they are open to anyone who is an excellent scholar and teacher, with no qualifications? Are those on the closed side willing to say the exact characteristics to which they are closed?

Nihilists? Postmodernists? Marxists? Yes to Marxists but No to Leninists (Marx plus violence)? Antisemites? Racists (the real ones on both left and right)? Identity authoritarians, more commonly known as the Woke?

My answer to several of those brands of ideologue is No, they should not be hired. My answer is that universities should be closed to those who appear to hold beliefs opposed to the mission and good humor of a truth-seeking institution. This is especially true of those committed to coercion, who will predictably coerce others to misrepresent their true beliefs.

A university should be open in process but not open to all values; the university is inclusive of all discussions, but not of all ends. (Jacob Wolf will have more to say on this distinction and the appropriate lines.) Because a university is a voluntary organization committed to seeking truth, its mission begins with the belief that truth exists. Its mission relies on the confidence that the pursuit of truth is ennobling. Can nihilists contribute to that mission by teaching that truth does not exist, cannot be found, and that its pursuit is pointless, the opposite of the organization’s core ethic?

The mission of a true university also mandates persuasion as the only legitimate means of seeking truth collectively. Can ideologues who promote violence contribute to that mission? Can the presence of antisemites, who harass some students or coerce them to hide their identities, improve the quality of education? (Except to educate students on the existence of antisemitism, which should be clear to us all in the current day without benefit of faculty.) Can authoritarian professors who will stifle dissent, punish students who challenge their narrative, encourage students to take offense, and perhaps most sinful, discourage humor? There are some things up with which I will not put, and the humorlessness of wokeness is one of them.

To be serious, universities must have confidence that faculty will grade students on brilliance and performance without awarding Ds for dissent or shifting As to Bs in response to ideological offenses.

One might ask, “Do you realize you are advocating exclusion in order to maintain truth-seeking? Which opens you up to the charge of hypocrisy?” Yes. The debate over the tolerance of intolerance has a long history, and I think an honest answer is required. To be open to inquiry means to be closed to coercion, and hence to those known to coerce.

Students who argue that they might benefit from the presence of woke faculty may not have had the pleasure. They may be thinking of liberals (who advocate for greater collectivism, economic redistribution, pacifism, secularism, or reticence to eat animals). Professors who hold left-of-center ideologies and engage in persuasion are welcome. But that is distinct from coercive ideologies like wokeness—identity authoritarianism—which is grounded in unquestionable truths about hierarchies of oppression, combined with tactics of social punishment of dissenters. Liberal as well as conservative students have been the target of ideological coercion on campus: taking offense at disagreement; unwarranted accusations of racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, etc.; giving lower grades for these offenses; attempting to block or disrupt speakers; reporting jokes to HR; correcting language; and perhaps most problematic, insisting on applying DEI preferences in admissions and hiring, even when doing so is officially banned. UATX faculty sit on the admissions committee and make those decisions. If we were to admit faculty who advocate for DEI, how could it not bleed into admissions and hiring? How could we maintain an environment free of predictable coercion and self-censorship?

I conclude that a university must be open to all students but not necessarily to all faculty. For students, admissions should be an open contest in which the most qualified—demonstrated by test scores, accomplishments, and academic record—are selected. For faculty, hiring should be a contest to find the most qualified—demonstrated by scholarship and teaching ability—but unlike student admissions, some characteristics of belief should be disqualifying. Admitted students should be the best who apply, period (regardless of demographic characteristics like race, gender, or religion). Hired faculty should be the best available, minus those who openly degrade the mission of truth-seeking.

This may strike some academics as radical, as if the university was never meant to have standards of truth-seeking or professional ethics of persuasion. As if campuses were always meant to be the coercive dens of ideological conformity they often are now. Perhaps it is blunt to say so, but the adage that personnel is policy is especially true when the personnel have tenure combined with ideology. Institutional decline is the current problem of academics, and recognizing the role of openness versus closedness on campus is a path toward rebirth.

One of the reasons for the current decline is the purposeful colonization by the identity authoritarians. Their long march through the institutions—“working against the established institutions while working in them,” as Marcuse would have it—has become a core facet of the ideological landscape. Once in place, the ideologues maneuver to hire the like-minded to the exclusion of others. We could argue that one out of ten, or two out of ten, are not enough to shift the balance, so it is safe to hire a few mission-opposed rather than mission-aligned faculty. But it may take fewer than one would think to tip the balance over time.

And even the intent to hold the gates against Leninists, post-modernists, antisemites, or identity authoritarians may fail. A goal of zero out of ten is likely to yield one by mistake. (A mistake by the university, not by the colonizer.) Openness to one out of ten—what could it hurt if only a few students are coerced?—is more likely to yield at least two. And an openness to two out of ten (20 percent sounds harmless) is likely to yield a higher proportion that may well tip the balance.

Truth-seeking institutions must not be so open that their mission falls out. Luckily for them, they operate within a free society that allows folly and principle to be sorted out in the marketplace. First Amendment liberties of speech and association within the whole society allow for specific private institutions with missions of their own. (Patrick Gray will say more about the dual layers of the First Amendment regarding speech and association.)

On the themes in this brief essay—honesty, ideology, and the necessary closedness required to maintain the needed openness—I trust that my colleagues will have more subtle and developed thoughts than these blunt ones. They know they don’t have to agree with me in their own pursuit of the truth, just as I know they are open to discussion and closed to coercion.