Vanderbilt Chancellor Daniel Diermeier has emerged as one of the rare university leaders willing to say obvious things out loud. In an era when most college presidents perform elaborate rhetorical gymnastics to avoid offending anyone, Diermeier's message in an interview in City Journal is refreshingly straightforward: Universities aren't political parties. They shouldn't take stances on issues unrelated to their core mission. Civil discourse requires both freedom and structure. When students violate codes of conduct, they face consequences.
This is all correct. And in the current climate, where campus leaders routinely capitulate to activist mobs or parrot fashionable pieties, Diermeier's principled restraint deserves recognition.
But Diemeier does not go far enough.
Diermeier champions three pillars: open forums, institutional neutrality, and civil discourse. These are necessary conditions for a functioning university. But they're not sufficient. Because there's a fourth pillar he doesn't name explicitly, yet which his entire framework depends upon:
Truth.
Harvard University's motto since 1643 is "Veritas" - Latin for "truth." Yale's motto is similar: "Lux et Veritas" - "Light and Truth." In 1940, the American Association of University Professors stated defended academic freedom but it put it in context: "Academic freedom is essential... and applies to both teaching and research. Freedom in research is fundamental to the advancement of truth. "
The goal of the university is not diversity of ideas or unlimited free speech. They are all tools in the true purpose of academia - the pursuit of the truth.
Not "your truth" or "my truth" or "lived experience." Actual truth - the kind that corresponds to reality, can be tested against evidence, and withstands rational scrutiny.
Without that shared commitment to truth, open forums become pointless noise, institutional neutrality becomes moral abdication, and civil discourse is a waste of time when all ideas are considered equally valid.
A registered student organization has every right to invite a flat-earther to campus. A university committed to free inquiry should protect that right.
But does that mean the flat-earth theory deserves equal time in a geology course? Should it be treated as a legitimate alternative hypothesis in the "marketplace of ideas"?
Obviously not. If a flat-earther speaks on campus, the ideas would be properly mocked.
Because the Earth isn't flat. That's not a matter of opinion or perspective. It's not culturally relative or socially constructed.
Some ideas are simply false. That doesn't mean we censor them. But it does mean we treat them accordingly: as discredited theories, failed hypotheses, or historical curiosities — not as worthy contributions deserving respect merely for existing.
Now consider something more sophisticated than flat-earthism but no less problematic: Marxism.
Marxism presents itself as rigorous analysis of history, economics, and justice. It divides society into two fundamental classes - the proletariat (workers) and the bourgeoisie (owners) - locked in inevitable conflict. It demands that the workers revolt, violently, against the owners. Its entire moral framework rests on the claim that upward mobility is either impossible or represents betrayal of one's class.
Yet like flat-earthers, this framework is built on assumptions we know to be empirically false.
First, most people are neither purely proletariat nor bourgeoisie. The modern economy includes a vast middle class of people who are simultaneously workers and owners, employees and investors. Marxism has no meaningful category for them - so it either ignores them or tortures the definitions until they fit.
Second, people can and do move between economic classes. Jews provide a particularly clear example: despite facing systematic barriers throughout history, Jewish communities achieved remarkable upward mobility through education, entrepreneurship, and mutual support. This historical reality doesn't fit Marxist theory, so Marxism either dismisses it as anomalous or reframes success as complicity. (And, I posit, this is a reason for Marx's own antisemitism. )
Third, Marxism treats agency as betrayal. If a poor person becomes successful through their own efforts, the framework doesn't celebrate that achievement - it accuses them of abandoning class solidarity. That's not analysis. That's ideology demanding conformity.
The result is a theory that denies complexity, erases individual human experience, and justifies violence in the name of liberation.
Marxism shouldn't be banned from campus - it absolutely should be studied and engaged with. But it shouldn't be treated as morally or intellectually equivalent to frameworks that actually correspond to observable reality.
This is where many universities go wrong. In their panic to avoid appearing ideological, they have abdicated the pursuit of truth. The result is a kind of neutral-but-empty institutional culture that protects speech without caring whether that speech bears any relationship to reality. And, like Marxism, some of these ideologies are dangerous, justifying violence in the name of philosophies that fall apart under even cursory examination of their core assumptions.
Diermeier is right that universities shouldn't be political parties. But neutrality about partisanship is not the same as neutrality about truth.
Every university policy, department, or initiative should answer: Does it help the institution discover and transmit truth? Or does it prioritize other goals - comfort, inclusion, political messaging, social justice, career advancement - over truth? If the answer is anything other than "yes, it serves truth," then the policy fails the university's core mission, regardless of how noble its stated intentions.
This doesn't mean universities should be cold or callous. Truth-seeking requires treating people with dignity, creating environments where intellectual risk-taking is possible, and supporting those who challenge orthodoxies. But these are instrumental values in service of truth - not in competition with it.
Daniel Diermeier deserves credit for defending open inquiry and institutional restraint at a time when many university leaders lack the courage to do so. His framework provides essential structural protections against ideological capture. But he seems to have forgotten the entire purpose of the academy. And without truth, all the other goals are meaningless.
Diermeier has articulated the tools to protect intellectual freedom in the academy. Now the academy needs to remember what that freedom is for.
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