Additional Info:
A non-partisan collaborative of more than 2,500 professors, administrators, and graduate students committed to enhancing the quality and impact of research — and improving education — by promoting open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement in institutions of higher learning. In order to address society’s most intractable problems, learners must weave together the best ideas from a range of perspectives. In many fields, scholars’ backgrounds and commitments are insufficiently diverse. As a result, important questions and ideas may go unexplored, key assumptions can go unchallenged, and the natural human tendencies towards motivated reasoning, confirmation bias, and tribalism can go unchecked. As a collaborative of academic insiders, we are deeply committed to the continued flourishing of colleges and universities — and deeply concerned about the current state of affairs, which is not sustainable. We aspire to help chart a different path forward by:
• Increasing public awareness of these issues, to spur action among faculty, staff, students, alumni and donors;
• Conducting, disseminating and facilitating research to better understand the nature of the challenges facing institutions of higher learning — and how they can be effectively addressed;
• Developing tools and resources that professors, administrators, and others can deploy to assess and then improve their own pedagogical, disciplinary and broader campus cultures;
• Identifying and celebrating institutions that make progress on these matters.