Editor’s Note: Below is the keynote address of Dr. Scott Atlas at the Chicago Thinker’s 2026 American Identity Summit. Dr. Scott Atlas MD is an American radiologist, health policy scholar, and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution affiliated with Stanford University. Atlas served as a Special Advisor to President Trump and was a member of the White House Coronavirus Task Force in 2020.
Good morning! It’s great to be here at my training ground, my medical school alma mater, the University of Chicago—the highlight of my academic background. It’s great to be here among many friends and colleagues and to see the students here to talk about reforming higher education. The Thinker has some of the boldest students who are committed to freedom, regardless of pressure from their own professors and peers. It is true—this is the generation that is going to save the country.
And it’s exciting to see a common theme emerging all over the country, including outside the United States: the need to reform institutions. Several months ago in London, Jordan Peterson’s Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference invited me to address the broader topic, “Can Institutions Be Reformed?” As many of you know, ARC is bringing together voices from all over the world to discuss how to reinstate and preserve the institutions and best values of Western heritage, particularly the West’s unique commitment to freedom.
The sudden emergence of this theme is also something to ponder. Why, at this moment in history, is it particularly important to consider how America’s institutions—here, colleges and universities—should be reformed, or whether they can even be reformed?
After all, for decades we have been aware that our institutions were failing: editorialized, dishonest journalism; wasteful, corrupt government; and colleges and universities increasingly abandoning their essential purpose of fostering the free exchange of ideas and critical thinking in favor of agenda-driven social advocacy, particularly advocacy unbalanced toward the left.
My answer? The tipping point finally came in 2020. COVID—the pandemic—fully exposed the massive institutional failure that could not be denied: the most tragic, the most blatant hijacking of freedom and breakdown of leadership in free societies in our lifetimes.
Yet, oddly, the pandemic fiasco—the spark of this heightened focus on institutional reform—remained invisible at that weeklong ARC conference, unmentioned by dozens of speakers except for me. It was the elephant in the room, just as the truth about the death and destruction from the lockdowns remains missing from virtually all of America’s political discussions, including those in this administration and on university campuses today. Why has the page been turned with no accountability? Something to contemplate.