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What makes a university essential to a democratic society?

Political theorist, classicist, and author Danielle Allen joins John Tomasi to explore the deep connections between democracy, disagreement, and higher education.

Drawing on her new book, Radical Duke, Allen traces the origins of modern constitutional democracy to a network of radical thinkers in eighteenth-century Britain who fought for free expression, political transparency, and popular sovereignty. Their struggles, she argues, offer important lessons for the challenges facing democratic institutions today.

The conversation then turns to the modern university, Allen and Tomasi examine whether universities occupy a unique place in democratic life. They discuss why disagreement is essential to both truth-seeking and self-government, how institutions can create space for productive conflict, and what responsibilities colleges and universities have in preserving the civic capacities on which democracy depends.

In This Episode:

• The forgotten British origins of modern democracy
• The Radical Duke and the fight for political transparency
• How Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine emerged from the same intellectual movement
• Why free societies depend on disagreement
• Ruth Simmons' vision of the university as a place of "quarrel and opposition"
• The relationship between democracy and open inquiry
• Scientific consensus, dissent, and truth-seeking
• Why universities need spaces for constrained disagreement
• How institutions shape civic culture and democratic norms
• The unique role of higher education in sustaining a free society

About Danielle Allen:

Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard and Director of the Allen Lab for Democracy Renovation and the Democratic Knowledge Project. A political philosopher and tech ethicist, she is a contributing columnist for The Atlantic and the 2020 Library of Congress Kluge Prize recipient for her work in political theory and civic education.

Her current work focuses on democracy renovation through institutional redesign and civic empowerment. She has authored several books, including Justice by Means of Democracy and the widely acclaimed Our Declaration. Her upcoming biography of an 18th-century reformer, Radical Duke, is scheduled for release in 2026.

Beyond academia, Allen co-chairs the American Academy of Arts and Sciences' Our Common Purpose commission and leads the board at Partners In Democracy, advocating for a more inclusive social contract and robust democracy reform.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Danielle Allen, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Danielle Allen: Thank you, John. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm glad to have the chance to have this conversation with you.

John Tomasi: As you and I both know, though you're here in New York for the podcast and for the panel tomorrow morning, that's not the only thing that brought you here. It's also the case that this week is the launch of your exciting new book, Radical Duke. Congratulations.

Danielle Allen: Thank you. It's exciting — it's always exciting when a new book comes out, but this one was especially fun.

John Tomasi: We're all pretty excited about it too. And you and I were saying before we came in that you're giving a talk this evening at the New York Public Library.

Danielle Allen: Exactly. I'm going to have the pleasure of introducing the Radical Duke to people. This was somebody named Charles Lennox, third Duke of Richmond. He lived from 1735 to 1806. He was a British politician who was a fervent supporter of the Americans. He was the first member of Parliament to recommend acknowledging American independence. He introduced a bill for universal manhood suffrage in the House of Lords in 1780 —

John Tomasi: A hundred years before.

Danielle Allen: More than that. Britain started widening the suffrage in 1830, based on the kind of reform foundation he had laid. It took until the early 20th century before Britain achieved full universal male suffrage, and then a decade after that, universal suffrage. So yes, he was a visionary, really ahead of his time. And pertinent to our themes: he was part of a network of radical writers who had to write secretly, because dissent was so powerfully suppressed in Britain in the 1760s and 1770s. As they fought to get their views into the public sphere, they also fought for important kinds of openings. For example, at the beginning of the 1760s it was illegal to report on the proceedings of Parliament — to report speeches and so forth.

John Tomasi: It wasn't just Chatham House rules. It was completely illegal.

Danielle Allen: Exactly. You were not supposed to report anything outside the walls of Parliament. But some members of these radical groups had really excellent memories, and they would go sit in Parliament and listen, and then record almost verbatim transcripts of what had occurred and secretly circulate them. They did this enough, and there was such an appetite for it, that eventually the government could not hold out against the cry for transparency in parliamentary proceedings.

John Tomasi: That's fascinating. And this Duke brought together in his circle people like Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine. Say a little bit about that.

Danielle Allen: Yeah. People forget that in the 1760s and 1770s there was this universe of radical Whigs — Whigs because they were associated with the great Whig aristocratic political families. Those families had been dominant in politics throughout the 18th century. They didn't have a particular ideological flavor through the middle part of the century, but then in the 1760s and 1770s the impact of Enlightenment philosophy really hits. They imbibe the philosophy of natural rights and popular sovereignty and begin to have a theory of politics that counters the standard monarchical view. So working men like Burke, who trained as a lawyer, and Thomas Paine, who was originally a corset maker, were part of the same philosophical conversation. Together these radicals forged modern conceptions of constitutional representative government, popular sovereignty, and ultimately constitutional democracy. It's not until the French Revolution that you get Burke and Paine parting ways — the one going right, the other going left. So the father of conservatism and the father of liberal radicalism were both radical Whigs in the 1760s.

John Tomasi: Fascinating. I'm at the stage with your book that I describe as the pre-read stage, so I'm reading all the reviews that have come out. I read The New Yorker piece, which was great, and a great piece in The Wall Street Journal that I'm sure you saw. One of the ideas the Wall Street Journal picked up — an overarching idea — is that most of us think those radical revolutions happened at the American founding and at the French Revolution, but there's a suggestion that the germinating ideas came not from the US alone, not from France alone, but in fact from Britain, in those conversations.

Danielle Allen: Very much so. This is not to say that America didn't matter, or that France didn't matter — they did. Adam Gopnik's description of my book the other day somewhat overstated the argument I actually make. But yes, the radical circles were thinking and arguing and writing in the 1750s and 1760s in England, and they were tightly connected to the Americans. Benjamin Franklin was a particular link in the chain, going back and forth across the Atlantic. Many of the things we associate with the movements toward revolution here in the colonies have their precursors in England. For example, there was the stamp tax and the riots against it — but several years earlier, England had had riots over the cider tax. We think of the Boston Massacre as a critical moment, but several years earlier in London there had been the St. George's Fields Massacre, when soldiers shot into a crowd gathered to protest ministerial actions and killed some people. So those dynamics were really quite homologous on both sides of the Atlantic.

John Tomasi: It's fascinating. I want to move to some topics in higher education, and the bridge I'm going to invite you to cross with me is a convocation address by a president at Brown University. Her name is Ruth Simmons, the first Black woman president of an Ivy League university — a woman who, as you may know, had a remarkable personal story, growing up in real poverty and rising to become an extremely idealistic leader, first here at Smith and then at Brown. When she arrived at Brown, it was a time when there had been a lot of racial tension on campus the previous year. There was a discord across the campus of an unhealthy kind — a sense that people could not talk to each other, maybe should not talk to each other, that loyalty was more important than community. Ruth Simmons came in to give a convocation address in 2001, and she said something in it that struck me so much I memorized it. I've carried it around in my head all the time, and I invite you to as well, so I'll just say it. She said that while other types of communities devise covenants so as to avoid conflict, at the university our covenant is rooted in quarrel and in opposition. We freely allow ideas to collide in the service of learning; no idea is out of reach or out of bounds. It's the first part of that I wanted to invite you to talk with us about. She says the covenant of a university is rooted in quarrel and opposition, unlike other forms of constitutional or political covenants. What do you make of that general idea? How does your work — your most recent book, or your earlier work — bear on that set of ideas?

Danielle Allen: Well, it's a beautiful formulation, so I can see why you listened, heard it, memorized it, and carried it around. I appreciate the power of it, and I agree with its basic argument that the university is defined by being a space of disagreement. I think Alasdair MacIntyre also spoke eloquently about the university as a place for constrained disagreement. So I appreciate that formulation. And the word "covenant" is, of course, an interesting word — it does suggest a contract, an agreement to come into consensus around something. I wouldn't want to suggest, though, that the covenant that founds a democracy is about a community coming to a robust agreement. It's rather a community that's come to a kind of minimal agreement, and the minimal agreement is to prosecute their disagreements peacefully through institutions, rather than with arms or physical conflict. In that regard, James Madison in Federalist 10 famously said that freedom generates diversity of opinion. So if you're going to protect freedom, you will have disagreement. A political covenant, from my point of view, depends just as much on recognizing that you're protecting the space for debate as a university covenant does.

John Tomasi: So you're saying that free institutions — for example, institutions that allow for freedom of association, church groups, other groups where people can form deep understandings of themselves that are unlike other groups in their community — combined with other liberal freedoms, such as freedom of speech and freedom of the press, generate the materials of friction in an ongoing way.

Danielle Allen: Exactly.

John Tomasi: It's not just something that happens, so we're going to try to avoid the conflict through institutions. The institutions themselves perhaps create it.

Danielle Allen: They create it, they support it, they produce a container for it. That's why MacIntyre's phrase "constrained disagreement" is so important — it is disagreement within the bounds of peacefulness. You're committing to put down arms. And we have to remember that liberal democracy is really a creature born from the conflicts of religious wars, when people wanted to find a path to religious toleration and religious freedom. So there is a thing people agree on, and it's that we have methods for how we're going to engage in our disputes and disagreements. I think that's the same between a university and a liberal constitutional democracy.

John Tomasi: You say it's the same. Let me push there a little, because I love that quotation so much — I've been carrying it around for 25 years, and I'll continue to. But you're helping me see some limitations to it, and I want to push back on one piece. I think what she's doing is saying there's something special about the kind of discourse and the kind of disagreement at a university. You might not agree, but I'll play it anyway: there's something about the university's covenant — and I think she's using sacramental language intentionally, to say you're doing something important here — something almost sacramental about the disagreements, because they're so essential to the search for knowledge and understanding and to personal growth. That separates the disagreements we have at universities from the disagreements we have in, let's say, well-functioning democratic politics. Is that just confusion on my part? Nostalgia for that day?

Danielle Allen: I think there is a difference in the nature of the disagreements, and also in the terms of the agreement we have for how we debate them, between universities and the political sphere. Let me first say one further thing about the concept of covenant, which is sacramental, as you say. In that regard, perhaps the first distinction President Simmons was trying to direct us toward was between a religious community and the university. A covenant in a religious community surely is an agreement on doctrine — there's the credo, "I believe," and here's the list of things I believe. That's a powerful distinction. So I would put religious communities in one place, and then universities and liberal democracies in another place. But then, in terms of the parameters and institutional norms for how debate is handled, I would invoke Plato for understanding the difference between universities and the political sphere. The political sphere is often a sphere of judgment under conditions of uncertainty, when action must be taken. It's a sphere where prudence is the reigning virtue, and the best you can do is make fallible, defeasible judgments. In a democracy, you've also decided that the majority will win — so you're not actually insisting that you're looking for truth, you're looking for a stable decision that will carry popular support with it, in order to maintain the legitimacy of institutions over time. That would be anathema to the decision-making basis inside a university, and that is probably partly where our problems come in: in universities, we too often want to port that majoritarian orientation of the political sphere into decision-making. Inside the university, decision-making needs to be guided by norms of truth-seeking — quality of argument, quality of reasoning, quality of evidence, and so forth. So that's a sterner standard than the one the political sphere uses.

John Tomasi: And yet within the university, as you search for truth within a discipline, I gather we hope there would be some convergence of people's thinking toward at least broad parameters in some area — otherwise we'd be all over the place. Some people talk about this strange feature of academic freedom: that it has a conservative element and a funky, radical element. The conservative element is that we want our graduate students to learn all the arguments there are, so they can go out to the frontier knowing everything they need to know. And at that point, beyond the conservative memorization, we value the idiosyncratic twist, the next move, the great idea that adds something. So there's a strange tension there.

Danielle Allen: There is. And there's also a tension in the notion of "scientific consensus," which matters to us — what is the scientific consensus about something? We use that phrase, I think, because we acknowledge that it's when people come to agree with an argument that it gets anchored as one of those building blocks we then want to pass on to our graduate students. So there's a funny blend in that phrase, "scientific consensus," of the epistemic principles of truth-seeking individuals and a certain community-oriented, majoritarian element. I think that's exactly what we have so much difficulty navigating in academic contexts. When heterodox views emerge that are counter to the scientific consensus, we struggle to know precisely when to open up the consensus and when to try to maintain it.

John Tomasi: And one answer is that we open it up so long as the person can present the ideas in ways that follow the methodological requirements of that discipline.

Danielle Allen: Right, exactly.

John Tomasi: So if you're invoking horology and astronomy, we're saying that's not the right kind of argument. But if you can bring us some new, astronomically acceptable arguments, then we'll listen to you. It doesn't mean we'll agree, but we'll meet you with arguments.

Danielle Allen: And that's the requirement — to listen. I think that's so important and distinctive in the context of the university. Coming back to the ancients, because they thought about this intensely: Plato and Socrates were trying to carve out a different kind of space for discourse from the political sphere. One of the ways they captured the difference is that Socrates said, in the Theaetetus, "Don't ever make me speak to the water clock." The water clock was the jug that ran out water to tell the time in the courtroom. His point was that politicians are always obliged to speak to a clock — a decision must be made. The defining feature of true academic discourse is that it is not bound by time. If somebody brings an argument meeting methodological standards, then we have an obligation to listen, and even time itself should not limit our patience with hearing those arguments.

John Tomasi: I want to move to a distinction you make that I think is really fertile and extremely interesting — close to the center of a lot of your work — between political science as something descriptive and democratic design as a kind of craft. You were recently on the Democracy Works podcast, in April of this year, and you made a pointed claim about higher education that struck me. As I heard it, you said something like: the future of the university has to involve reviving the science of democratic design. I wonder if you could begin by saying a bit about the distinction between political science as descriptive and democratic design as a craft, and then about reviving that craft in the university. Take it any way you like.

Danielle Allen: Okay. There are many directions to extend from that. I've spent a lot of time working on how we might redesign our political institutions here in the United States to escape some of the pathologies that have accrued. For example, we have reduced access to a meaningful vote. Sixty million Americans no longer have a meaningful vote in federal elections — that's a quarter of the electorate.

John Tomasi: Meaningful because of the way districts are drawn.

Danielle Allen: Exactly — because of gerrymandering and closed primaries and things like that. In some states, the only way you can have a vote in a decisive election is if you participate in a party primary for a party you don't actually agree with — so, compelled association, under First Amendment considerations. That's one kind of limitation. In the process of doing all this work, it's become very clear to me that we don't actually have the intellectual resources inside universities to assist with it in any particular way. That's because political science is a descriptive discipline — it focuses on how things work. There is the law school, where you have constitutional lawyers who think about constitutional design, but constitutional design is really just a small layer of the overall set of design questions pertinent to how democratic institutions operate. When you go back and read the Federalist Papers, you realize they were deeply steeped in design thinking about institutions, and they educated themselves for it by reading history and geography and anthropology. Jefferson's library had books about every kind of system for organizing human society that existed around the globe — not just European formal political systems, but also the different political operating systems in farther-flung parts of the world. The same was true for the radical Duke; he had an equivalent kind of library. They were really thinking like engineers, or like designers who would go to one of our design schools. They wanted to know: how does this work when you do that? If I change this, then what happens? That's the kind of expertise we just plain don't capture any longer in our academic disciplines, and don't teach. So the argument about the university is twofold. One: a democracy needs to preserve its capacity for civil discourse and debate to be healthy, and there are no institutions to steward that capacity other than universities. And second: a democratic society needs to constantly evolve and redesign its institutions, and again, there is no institution able to steward that expertise other than colleges and universities. So inside a democratic society, colleges and universities have this supreme responsibility to steward those two capacities — the one for civil discourse and dialogue and debate, and the other for democratic design. But we're not really doing either much these days.

John Tomasi: Can I give an example and get your reaction? It starts with an observation I came to very recently. If you think about the design structure of universities and what people hope for when they want to see a university change — let's say the way HxA wants them to change, to have more open conversations with a wider range of views, seriously looking for truth together as part of a community of imperfect learners — how do you design an institution that way? What most people look for, I think, is the virtuous president. They're waiting for the next president to arrive who will be virtuous, and then that virtuous person will bring us there. Our founders knew that if you rely on virtue alone to protect the liberty of the many, it's probably not going to work out too well, for all kinds of reasons — they were very skilled about incentives and other reasons too. So they set themselves the task of design: how do we make this work so that if virtue flagged or wavered, we'd still have a strong country? Is something similar at play at universities? I think we're still at the stage of hoping for the virtuous leader all the time.

Danielle Allen: Absolutely. I think that's really well diagnosed.

John Tomasi: What would it look like? How would it begin to change?

Danielle Allen: Well, I think every university has to consider its own design questions. For example, at Harvard, something I've been advocating for is that in tenure decisions we should have a formally assigned devil's advocate inside every departmental meeting around a tenure case. Why? Because I think the way we process tenure decisions is at the heart of the institution's intellectual standards, choices, and commitments. Over my career — I'm long in the tooth at this point, I've been many places and seen a lot of different things — I've seen huge variation in the quality of debate that actually unfolds when you're debating that all-important, basically marriage decision: do we stay with this person for the rest of their life? I think that process would be vastly improved if we had a formally assigned devil's advocate.

John Tomasi: So the idea is that we might look through various pieces of the university and ask: how could this existing set of practices be redesigned?

Danielle Allen: Exactly.

John Tomasi: Do you have any thoughts about more general governance design questions at Harvard? There's always this question about how Harvard is governed. Generally speaking, at most universities we have a structure of trustees and presidents. Any other design that's striking or interesting?

Danielle Allen: I'm deeply involved in governance questions at Harvard. I say to people, democracy renovation starts at home — you can't really do it far away if you're not doing it at home. So I'm doing it at Harvard, and I'm doing it in the state of Massachusetts. But again, universities are idiosyncratic in their structure and modes, so one has to ask these questions in place-specific ways. I don't think anybody can say, "Here's the answer for all of higher ed." At Harvard specifically, I've been among the groups of faculty working very hard to build a faculty senate. Harvard does not have a university-wide faculty senate. Faculty senates come in many different shapes and flavors; some succeed and some don't. So if you're going to make the case that faculty responsibility for governance should be better supported and better integrated into the governance work of the university, you also have to have a clear, design-thinking view about what makes the difference between successful and unsuccessful senates. We've done a bunch of work studying senates around the country, and we have some views. The size of the senate matters — it can't be too big; it needs to be at that sweet spot where it counts as representing a wide swath of the faculty. You need a selection mechanism structured so that you're really bringing in different sections of the faculty and not getting dominated by any given subset. You need standards for how you organize deliberative procedures, including, for example, rules on the use of time and speaking time — that's one of the most basic and most important things for high-quality deliberation. We can look at Chicago, Duke, and Stanford; they all have quite high-functioning faculty senates that are a positive asset to university governance.

John Tomasi: I love that. And I wonder if we could — like the American founders, and perhaps the radical Duke and his friends, whom you would know better than I — look to previous examples of people who tried things, even if they didn't fully succeed. I'll give one example you probably don't know about, and I think my listeners might not either. At Brown University, when they founded the university a long time ago, they were very much working in the wake of Roger Williams, and so they had a rule when they created the university and its governing trustee board: that the board had to be pluralistic by religion.

Danielle Allen: Oh, wow, that's fascinating. They literally required it.

John Tomasi: Over time that changed, but it was an interesting idea. Is there something in that idea about trying to decide what diversity of views we're going to have on a governing board, on some dimension of diversity? That's an old one. Here's a more recent one, which has been experimented with — or at least toyed with — at the University of Austin (UATX) in Austin. I'm not sure they actually put it through, but there was an idea there for a while that really struck me. They were concerned about the virtuous president being the only thing that would keep the university virtuous through time, so they had the idea of something like a bill of rights of academic freedoms — for students, for professors, for teaching, research, writing, and speaking — and then an external judicial body that could hear complaints from any student or professor, complaints presumably against the administration, to adjudicate whether they had a right or not. What interested me about that model — you can see it immediately — is that it's saying we're going to have some external body do this, following the founding generation of the US in separating powers. Any thoughts about either of those?

Danielle Allen: It's a good question, and certainly an interesting experiment. This is where we get to the real challenge of all these questions. Madison famously said — you were alluding to this — that if men were angels, we'd have no need of government, and hence we designed checks and balances and the like. But he carried on in the same set of arguments to make the point that laws can't guarantee things either; you do still need character. So you need both. You can't get out of it just through institutional design and incentives. You have to maintain a culture of commitment to free inquiry. And at the end of the day, one could easily imagine an excessively litigious culture that itself blocked and chilled all modes of expression. So that method for UATX might work, but it might also over-bureaucratize and chill through a structure of litigiousness.

John Tomasi: Right. But these are exactly the kinds of questions we'd be asking if we were doing the art of design.

Danielle Allen: Right.

John Tomasi: We'd be thinking that through, proposing it. And there's a community process that becomes unleashed when you're doing that, because you're being asked to say, "Let's talk together about what we're trying to achieve here. How do you see it? I'll learn from you about what I'm wrong about, or what I'm right about."

Danielle Allen: And to do the design work, it depends on actually starting with some clarity about the design principles — what are you actually trying to achieve? That's where you get that shared understanding of the mission, of what kind of container for intellectual work you're trying to build. I think that's quite important.

John Tomasi: It'd be fascinating to do a project — maybe HxA should do this with our new research and development team — about historical attempts to govern universities well for these virtues. Get a catalog.

Danielle Allen: That would be a great project. I would endorse your doing that.

John Tomasi: Something we might do another year — once your book is out. I thought you might help us with it. But let me go on. Civic education has been central to your work forever — the Democratic Knowledge Project, Educating for American Democracy. I wonder what you make of the wave of civic centers that have been growing across the country. HxA did a report on them recently. We distinguished two big categories: ones based on civic thought, and ones based on something like civic commitment or civic practices — bridge-building, you might say. What do you make of this explosion of civic centers across universities? They're often arising in the midst of a culture war and are often thought to be part of that culture war. What do you make of their rise?

Danielle Allen: I'm generally pretty excited about it. I think it's a pretty positive thing. In my observation, there's a variegated landscape. There are many that are motivated by genuine intellectual concerns and the desire to include questions and bodies of knowledge that have fallen out of favor in recent times. I endorse the idea that ensuring students have a chance to learn about constitutionalism, American political thought, and so forth are very valuable things, so I welcome that return of those themes to the curriculum. There are some that perhaps tend more in an ideological direction, where the ideological impact is the point, and I would warn against that. But there are many very good examples. The University of Tennessee at Knoxville has a very fine center that is doing a good job thinking about the whole campus and integrating its intellectual work with the broader campus — Arizona as well. Where you see the successful ones, you also see bipartisan support for them in the state legislature. That's an indicator that what they're succeeding at is reknitting the positive relationship between the university and the broader community.

John Tomasi: I'm sure you know the work of Jenna Storey and Ben Storey on this topic. What I like about their work — they're very involved in the centers themselves, which I find fascinating — is that they've also been making the argument that there is this thing, civic thought, which should be a discipline with disciplinary credentials. They make the argument from an academic perspective about the kind of ideas and standards a set of ideas would need to satisfy to launch itself as a discipline. They've been approaching civic thought not just as a matter of creating a center here and there, but as filling in a lacuna similar to the one you described — a lacuna of design, of craft, and of history.

Danielle Allen: Yeah.

John Tomasi: It combines all kinds of interesting pieces of social science and thinking about collecting data, but also straight-up reading Plato again. I want to move on, because our time is short. One of the reasons civic centers have been started in some universities is a concern to increase viewpoint diversity. In some instances, the centers have been containers that could house newly hired faculty, or bring in faculty for joint appointments, as stimulators for diversifying the faculty. Of course, there's more than one way to increase viewpoint diversity on a campus. You can do it by bringing new people in; you can also do it by adjusting existing practices, encouraging current professors to teach in broader, new ways and helping them find ways to do that. I just wonder if you can say something about viewpoint diversity. HxA exists in large part because a group of professors, about 10 years ago now, became worried about the quality of the research coming out — especially in social psychology, but other areas too. They worried that the lack of different views was bending research experiments before they even got started. What do you make of viewpoint diversity? It's also caught up in the culture wars, of course. What's your sense of the state of it? You can talk about Harvard if you like, or just across the academy — whichever you prefer.

Danielle Allen: Sure. Why don't I start by sharing my definition of viewpoint diversity, and I'd be pleased to know what you think about it and how it connects to yours. I didn't take the time to go back and check how you define it, but from my point of view, one of the responsibilities of any academic institution is to ensure that, for every discipline or area of inquiry, you are hearing the maximum spread of possible views within the parameters of standards of evidence and methodology. In that regard, one should always be seeking to maximize disagreement — again, within those parameters of excellence — and that's true across every single discipline. Now, when you come to disciplines that are also very closely connected to human subjects and to contemporary policymaking, then that space of disagreement is also likely to track underlying ideological orientations. So the element of ideology is contingent on the discipline and its proximity to human questions. But the principle of maximizing disagreement should apply to every discipline; and then in some disciplines — like my own, political science, or history, economics, and so forth — when you maximize disagreement, what you're also getting is ideological spread. That's how I think about viewpoint diversity, and I think of it as something necessary for a healthy functioning university, and also to fulfill our responsibility to students in the human-touching, social disciplines. I don't see how we can consider ourselves to be preparing young people to function well in this world if they have no exposure to the actual debates of this world. So I too have found the relative viewpoint homogeneity of college campuses distorting of our educational mission as well as of our research mission. In that regard, I take us all to have a kind of obligation to engage in a corrective project to increase the aperture of disagreement.

John Tomasi: So I hear you saying there's something like a frontier of positions that could be defended within any discipline according to that discipline's own methods and standards, and that viewpoint diversity would mean maximizing the range of options kept open.

Danielle Allen: Yep.

John Tomasi: That's a version of what I argue for too. I think they need to be kept open in what I call a lively way — which doesn't mean anyone needs to hold the view, or that the view gets a free pass simply because it's different. They have to be met by arguments.

Danielle Allen: I accept the "lively way" amendment.

John Tomasi: I did a conversation recently with Cass Sunstein on what viewpoint diversity is, and one of the things we worried about with that definition — I worried more than he did, perhaps — is that it seems too disconnected from the society we're in and the time we're in.

Danielle Allen: Well, I recognize that. It's a bit abstract, of course. And this is the challenge, because universities are disconnected from society — even when they have clarity about their social responsibilities, they are necessarily disconnected, precisely because we actually live by a different set of standards than, say, the political realm lives by. So I think that disconnection is necessary. Then you have the second problem: given the disconnection, how do we communicate effectively across the town-gown line? I don't think the fact that there is a town-gown line means we should give up on the need to describe our work to ourselves in terms aligned with the standards of our context. We can't give up on that. But what we have to do then is figure out how to make those specific standards — and the reason for articulating them that way — accessible to people who are in fact inhabiting a very different kind of space.

John Tomasi: So — just to make sure I understand — accessibility of the academic findings is a requirement?

Danielle Allen: No, that's not quite what I mean. I'll put it this way. I often have conversations with people where they say, "Well, why can't you people at universities protect the First Amendment?" And my response is to do the very annoying and pedantic thing of explaining the difference between academic freedom and the First Amendment. Usually, honestly, it works out pretty well. They're like, "Oh, okay, I didn't really understand that before." So what I mean is taking the time, in plain-language ways, to make visible, accessible, and understandable the principles that actually organize intellectual and academic life — their justifications — and then where they overlap with, and how they relate to, the plain-language understandings of debate and discourse that we take from the political sphere.

John Tomasi: Can you say very briefly how you see this distinction between the First Amendment and academic freedom?

Danielle Allen: Sure. Basically, the First Amendment is a right we hold against governments. It's very simple, and therefore it's a right we formally hold only against public universities, which are public-sector actors. There is no actual First Amendment right in private universities. Private universities can protect First Amendment rights as a matter of noblesse oblige, but that is roughly what it is. At the same time, across both public and private universities, there's a strong norm of academic freedom, which is built into what it takes for those institutions to succeed at their job of truth-seeking. That is to say, you've got to protect the expression of all views within these parameters of excellence — but protecting those views doesn't mean people get to say anything they want anytime they want, because sometimes they say things that are wrong, and you give them an F on their paper and hope they'll never say that thing again.

John Tomasi: You give them an F at Harvard?

Danielle Allen: Well, these days — these days, maybe a B minus. All right. And you hope they'll never say that thing again. That's not what you do with First Amendment rights. You don't ever get to give anybody an F, or a B minus, on a First Amendment claim.

John Tomasi: Right. So there's something with the truth-seeking function that's really going to be central here.

Danielle Allen: Correct. Academic freedom is as much about making judgments — that conservative element you mentioned — as it is about enabling people to speak. It's the speaking and the judging together. The First Amendment is just the speaking.

John Tomasi: As we come to the end of this — and that was a lovely definition, a great definition — I just want to return to the radical Duke. I want to ask you: if your radical Duke could see American democracy today, and could see the American university here in 2026, what do you think would alarm him, and what might give him hope? You can do it on the political side, the university side, or some of both — whatever you like.

Danielle Allen: Sure, I'll do a bit of both. I think he would say, "Gosh, this place is starting to look an awful lot like the 1760s," in two ways in particular. First, that you've allowed yourselves to give up legislative supremacy — you've accepted an overreaching executive that's been building for decades; it's not just a new phenomenon — and in doing that, you're actually abandoning freedom and self-government. How can you give up everything that it took centuries to build?

John Tomasi: So that parliamentary element that the Duke was eager to reform — he'd be saying he's very concerned about that.

Danielle Allen: Exactly. He'd be saying, "You guys have the same problems we had." And with universities, he would say, "Oh my gosh. When I was a young man, I didn't go to university — I was not one of those university-educated people, and the university people were so condescending to me. And my gosh, it looks like you're doing the same to the people who are not university educated. But look — can't you see what kinds of contributions I was able to make from outside the university? So can't you now also find the people who are doing fresh thinking who happen not to be inside universities, and find ways to open up your discourse to them?"

John Tomasi: Let me make sure I understand that last point. The Duke was a very privileged person with incredible power, highly educated in a certain kind of way. He didn't go to what we would call public schools — Oxbridge. He did not, right?

Danielle Allen: No, he did not go to Oxford, which was quite a big deal for him — basically, he flunked out of going to Oxbridge.

John Tomasi: When you say we should be more open at the universities, can you say a little more? What kind of openness do you mean?

Danielle Allen: Just the most basic thing. If you go anywhere outside the Northeast, you'll find people who very quickly express frustration with a certain kind of condescension that emanates from Northeastern universities. Some of that came up in the debate around Covid, for example — the reliance on data-driven decision-making. There's a whole lot of decision-making that is actually about choices of values, and you can get all the data in the world and it won't solve the question for you if you don't let people debate the question of values. So there's a way in which we inside universities tend to structure an account of what public decision-making should be like that rules certain ways of engaging out of court from the get-go, and that's a mistake. I think that's partly why we see so much social division. It's why, in my field — political theory and so forth — a lot of academics have ended up having jobs in think tanks, not inside universities. We've really allowed people who have great capacity to do good intellectual work and generate important ideas that should be given consideration — we've not made space for them inside universities, and they've had to build alternative channels of communication and engagement.

John Tomasi: Thank you. It's been wonderful having you on the show. Great talking with you, as always.

Danielle Allen: Likewise. Thank you so much.

John Tomasi: Thank you so much.

Danielle Allen: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.