“Higher Ed’s Most Divisive Chancellor” on What It Takes to Really Reform Higher Ed
It’s a tough time to be a college president. Free inquiry has been corrupted by ideological orthodoxy, enrollment has shrunk, and trust in higher education has plunged to an all-time low. What will it take for leaders to get their house in order and win back public trust?
On Monday, Vanderbilt University’s acclaimed chancellor, Daniel Diermeier, visited AEI to talk through his answer to that question. Diermeier has been tagged“higher ed’s most divisive chancellor” for his unsparing challenges to the sector and his insistence that its leaders work to restore foundational principles of merit, free inquiry, and academic excellence. During the fireside chat, he opened up about weak-kneed leadership, problems in the humanities, what it takes to build a culture of open discourse on campus, and more. Here are five key takeaways.
“There needs to be a willingness to take some arrows.” Diermeier was highly critical of disciplines where scholarly standards have eroded, especially in the humanities. But he argued that problems with mediocrity and politicization can be addressed by campus leaders who are willing to champion merit, promote heterodoxy, and hold the line on hiring and tenure. His stance has drawn ferocious pushback from academics, media figures, and even some of his fellow college presidents—and has earned him the sobriquet “handmaiden of the Trump administration.” Diermeier said leaders seeking to make similar changes must learn to shrug off the attacks and stick to their guns—a task made much easier when they have a board of trustees that has their back.
“What are you about? What are your values?” Diermeier said that other universities should cease worrying about what Ivy League institutions are doing and should instead lead with their own values. He allowed that it’s understandable that people pay attention to what happens in the Ivy League—as when protests on campuses like Columbia’s and Harvard’s “put the problems that we see on campus into stark relief”—but he argued that such goings-on should not shape the future of the sector. He urged leaders to “act with consonance, confidence, and alignment” based on their own institutional values and priorities.
“Academic freedom in the classroom doesn’t mean you can indoctrinate and doesn’t mean you can be incompetent.” Diermeier referenced a 2025 working paper by Claremont McKenna College scholar Jon A. Shields and his colleagues, which found a stunning progressive bias in syllabi readings across a range of contentious subjects. Whether the problem is that faculty aren’t aware of competing perspectives or are simply choosing not to assign them, Diermeier argued that it’s academic malpractice. “You can’t competently teach” a course on a subject in which you’re not well versed, he said. And if faculty are only assigning readings from a perspective that they endorse, he noted, that’s a matter of indoctrination—not academic freedom.
