One view of a new social contract between academia and America

Talking to Danielle Allen about her piece in The Atlantic

As I said in Monday’s post, science and higher education in the United States are beginning to engage in a discussion about how to find a way to adapt to the new realities imposed by the actions of the Trump administration. These realities are that (i) the government has a lot of leverage (even if the legality of using it is questionable) in the amount of money it provides, (ii) the American public is still strongly in favor of biomedical research but wants to see at least reform of the institutions, and (iii) while Trump did not win in a landslide, he was able to tap into a disconnect between civil society institutions and the American people that needs to be repaired. Once all of the legal challenges have played out, science and higher education need to decide what adaptations, if any, are needed to win back some of the lost public support.

Discussions about how to do this are becoming more possible. The fact that some sitting presidents are now standing up to the administration has brought more cohesion with the campuses to make room for the idea that admitting our shortcomings and talking about how to change is not universally equated with complying with the administration’s every demand. One of the pieces about this that I really liked was Danielle Allen’s piece in The Atlantic about the need for a new social contract between universities and America.

I sat down with Danielle to talk further about her ideas. I’m out with a new editorial summarizing some of the high points. The full conversation is below.

This got newsier after she participated in a debate with right-wing blogger Curtis Yarvin who favors the US becoming a monarchy. Our interview was before this happened, but she talks below about why this is important. I’m glad Danielle did this, but she is much better qualified and suited to this than a lot of academics would be, so I don’t think many of us (including me) should agree to such an event.

A conversation with Danielle Allen (also posted on Science Editor’s Blog)

The Trump administration’s effort to dismantle the nation’s institutions of higher education has shown no signs of easing up (see the Editorial). In her essay last month in The Atlantic, Danielle Allen of Harvard University addressed what is at stake and suggested that a new relationship is needed between universities and the American people. Here’s the full text of our discussion about her view. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Holden Thorp:

You talk about 9/11 and that you decided to teach instead of being glued to the TV. The situation now seems similar. What advice do you have to detach from the news and keep doing the academic work that we have to do to prove ourselves?

Danielle Allen:

An important element of getting through this moment is going to be resilience for the activities that are our core mission. There's a lot of work to do to protect universities in this time and an aspect of protection is keeping the work going. Finding the inner conviction to do the work and prove its worth is necessary.

Holden Thorp:

You talk about gratitude for life of the mind. Some people might be cynical about this and say that it gives too much leverage to the people who are attacking us. What do you say to colleagues who don't quite buy this gratitude thing?

Danielle Allen:

It's important that I'm communicating my gratitude to the American people. And I think it's important that all of us in higher ed recognize that this is not an attack coming from the American people. Yes, we have lost confidence of the American people in many ways in recent years, but fundamentally the American people do understand what colleges and universities have done for this country and I believe continue to have aspirations for the value of colleges and universities to our society. I think it's important that all of us in higher ed connect horizontally to the American people.

Holden Thorp:

You say that the Vannevar Bush social contract has already collapsed. Why do you think we didn't address this earlier?

Danielle Allen:

The lights have been flashing for a long time. Why do people ignore warning lights? It is a story about human nature. Change is hard and it's easier not to change.

Holden Thorp:

You talk about how the Vannevar Bush contract gave us unbridled growth. It gave leverage to the feds, but you also say it caused universities to refuse to accept responsibility for the social impact. Why do you think that refusal was a logical outcome of the contract?

Danielle Allen:

This is just from some reading I've done about the history of this period, so this is not a terribly original argument on my own part, to be honest. But at any rate, for scholars to fend off the problem of interference, there’s a very strong assertion of academic freedom, and rightly so. But the kind of accidental entailment of that strong assertion of academic freedom is that academics don’t need to think about the social impact for their work because they’re going to do theoretical stuff and basic science. Who knows what the implications are? We'll let other people figure that out. It was a strategy for self-protection. It's not a crazy strategy, but it does have this accidental by-product of cultivating a habit or an ethos of not taking responsibility for downstream consequences of choices that we’re making.

Holden Thorp:

Do you think that is a consequence of the way universities are set up now? Or was this built in from the beginning? Because I could make the case that universities don’t like bad publicity, they have an army of public relations people and lawyers, and they don't engage, and so that's why we're not accepting responsibility. But are you saying that there was something baked into it from the beginning?

Danielle Allen:

Yes—I'm saying that a paradox is that the strategy for protecting science and discovery knowledge work had, as a by-product, a walling off from considering downstream consequences. That makes sense as a strategy, but it does mean that your muscles for understanding the relationship between what you're doing and the broader social implications atrophy, and that leaves you vulnerable.

Holden Thorp:

Is institutional neutrality another way of dodging responsibility?

Danielle Allen:

I think that institutional neutrality is a good thing. It is a concept that people are overapplying. It should apply to the leadership structure of the university, which should establish a platform for wide-ranging and hard-hitting debate. Those responsible for creating that platform can’t put their thumb on the scale. For us not to be simply insisting on the value of our expertise without it being fully tested, it’s important that we create structures for adversarial engagement around ideas. That’s what institutional neutrality supports. The problem is that it’s been pushed so far down through institutions that even parts of the university that have responsibility for subject matter, and therefore have a view about their subject matter, are being expected to withhold their scholarly and considered views on subjects of expertise. That's a problem.

Holden Thorp:

I agree with that. You point out that the fruits of us favoring the wealthy gave us the tech bros who have power now. Do you think many people in the university realize that the tuition that enables the life of the mind has this by-product of producing the very people that they’re complaining about right now?

Danielle Allen:

No, I don't think most people are making that connection. This comes to the point of the very hard work we have right now. We have to defend strongly the independence and autonomy of universities as civil society associations, the liberty of civil society associations, and the fact that civil society is the space of freedom. At the same time, we have to do internal work to improve the operations of our colleges and universities. That’s a very hard dynamic to manage—to simultaneously defend aggressively and drive change internally. We need to rethink the consequences of how we're educating and rethink our approaches to supporting research agendas. My hope is that we can keep this space open for that conversation and work even while we are saying that civil society is free.

Holden Thorp:

You said that the Vannevar Bush social contract had two things, national security and economic development, but he also had the war on disease.

Danielle Allen:

I think I was implicitly folding all the work on medicine and health underneath economic competitiveness, which is insufficient because of course they are value on their own just for improving human well-being.

Holden Thorp:

You say we need to grow the enrollment, which I agree with certainly for the small elite universities, but won’t that require us to have a greater focus on undergraduate education. We have so many faculty that are always trying to get out of teaching, so how do we convince them otherwise?

Danielle Allen:

One should avoid predictions but I'll go ahead and make one. I think one result will be an increase in teaching loads for faculty at elite universities.

Holden Thorp:

Don't you think the big public universities are already doing some of this?

Danielle Allen:

Yes, for sure. It’s a fair point, and there is a little bit of a challenge in my essay in the sense that it is titled “America and its universities need a new social contract” with the American people. But at the end of the day, the mental model I was working with in that piece is elite universities. So public universities have done a phenomenal job of scaling up and finding new ways of serving people. There is innovation in the sector, and I think private universities could take some lessons from the public universities.

Public universities are solving problems with fewer resources and with a very strong sense of the public commitment and public service of what they are as entities.

Holden Thorp:

In the piece, you advocate for getting more right-wing intellectuals - who tend to associate more with think tanks than universities - into the institutions as a way to promote viewpoint diversity. How do you propose to manage the pushback that will come from this?

Danielle Allen:

The first and most important thing to say is that breaking through the problem of our extreme polarization both politically and intellectually starts with forming relationships. People often think that the answer starts at some different level—the kind of content of ideas or something like that. I don't think that's right. It has to start with relationships. We fundamentally need to reweave a connected tissue of relationships in this country. In terms of how it works, it’s not fancy. Start with the folks who are willing to form those relationships. Those people exist. Every college campus has them. Encourage them to make that invitation and support them in finding an appropriate visiting appointment for somebody.

It’ll be hard at this point in time for some people to accept such invitations. So, there’s going to be a lot of person work—just plain human relational work to issue invitations and have them successfully accepted. So, start small and you grow. You can do it a few times. I always say to my kids, if you've done it once, you can do it again. You’ve got to get it done once and you can do it again, and then you can keep doing it and then it’ll start to grow.

Holden Thorp:

Are you making a prediction that we’ll see more of that?

Danielle Allen:

I sure hope so. I'm ready to work on it on my own campus.

Holden Thorp:

Let's discuss the business model. You talk about growing education on the medical school side. But there are academic physicians who try to get out of working in the clinic. And teaching loads would increase.

But the docs are going to say that they are doing research that is saving lives. How do you think about all of that?

Danielle Allen:

We have to be clear about the multiple values we're seeking to abide by and answer the puzzle of how to protect all these values simultaneously. We have the value of independence and autonomy of civil society organizations, particularly universities that are pursuing the truth and need academic freedom. That’s value one. We have value two of contributing to society through education, and we have value three of contributing to society through lifesaving research. The question is how to have all of them? The problem is that we put so many chips on the third that we put ourselves in the position of having to be on the cusp of sacrificing the first. What I’m talking about is rebalancing, not disregarding the value of research for saving lives, but making the point that to have stability, we need to focus on education. If we can do that, we can recover stability and independence and begin to rebuild budgets and resources to support research.

Holden Thorp:

Don’t you think faculty will say they were just responding to the incentives that the universities were giving them—is that a fair case?

I think this is like going through a divorce and then trying to get into a new relationship when you've discovered that all kinds of habits and patterns and expectations have to adjust. That’s what we’re all going to be living through for a little while.

Holden Thorp:

Some people will still say that folks who think two things can be true at once—we have to defend academic freedom, but we also have to change and admit that we’ve fallen short—are complying in advance or drawing a moral equivalence with the people who are attacking us. What’s our response to that? What’s your response to that?

Danielle Allen:

Let’s have a public debate. Let’s open up the space for discussion and deliberation. Let’s make it a real conversation. Let’s do the serious work of thinking it through together.

Holden Thorp:

When I was reading the anecdote about you deciding you didn’t want a friend who didn’t want you—you were thinking that this also pertained to the relationship between the federal government and the universities.

Danielle Allen:

These stories are just true to my life. I realized that the connection to the theme of bullying was probably not accidental. It is bullies who teach us the value of freedom. And so here we are in a position of experiencing massive bullying. I do think the story of the kid on the playground discovering that I don’t need you if that’s the kind of friend you’re going to be is a story for us right now, too.