SEPTEMBER 22, 2026, NEW YORK, NEW YORK — Heterodox Academy (HxA), a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that advocates for open inquiry in higher education, today welcomed Cornell University's Report of the Committee on the Future of the American University, a year-long study whose first of five commitments calls for rigorous deliberation and engaged discourse, and which recommends building structured disagreement into scholarship.

The Committee was launched by Cornell's Office of the Provost in September 2025 and drew on input from more than 6,000 faculty, staff, students, alumni, trustees, parents, and government and policy leaders, across hundreds of meetings and town halls. Its report runs more than 200 pages.

The Committee consulted HxA directly, alongside the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Cato Institute, the Progressive Policy Institute, and other organizations. Three HxA members were among the 18 members of the committee, and HxA research is cited in the report’s bibliography. Cornell is home to one of HxA’s 89 campus chapters. HxA President John Tomasi gave a public talk on campus as a guest of the Committee in November 2025 and Cornell Provost Kavita Bala appeared on HxA's Heterodox Out Loud podcast in January 2026. 

Several of the Committee's conclusions are consistent with points in Open Inquiry U, the four-point reform agenda HxA published in 2025:

• The report calls on Cornell to make differences of opinion, perspective, and ideology "not only tolerated but embraced," and says hiring, admissions, and programming decisions should keep real differences present in the community. HxA's agenda calls on universities to "expand the range of perspectives on campus" and to "welcome pluralism, and actively cultivate it."
• The report recommends adversarial collaboration — pairing scholars with opposing hypotheses to test them together — and urges departments to adopt formalized constructive critique more systematically. HxA's agenda calls on universities to "make disagreement a core academic skill" by incorporating "structured disagreement into classrooms, research collaborations, and campus life."
• Stakeholders told the committee that fear is what most often stifles campus encounters, and the report concludes that self-censorship is real and confined to no single political position. HxA's agenda calls on universities to "address systemic incentives toward conformity" by reforming "systems and norms that promote self-censorship or discourage dissent."
• The report calls academic freedom the university's central animating principle and argues that embracing it is fundamental to confronting the crisis of public trust. HxA's agenda calls on universities to "defend intellectual freedom" and to "protect the scholarly rights of faculty in teaching, research, and public expression."

"Cornell has asked what a university is for, and its answer is to form people capable of sound judgment," said John Tomasi, President of Heterodox Academy. "The report's idea of academic civics treats everyone on campus as a citizen of an intellectual community, with obligations to one another and to the truth. That ambitious vision can't be realized without open inquiry."

The report arrives as universities face sustained public scrutiny over cost, access, and whether campuses can still host real disagreement. Cornell's Committee concluded that those pressures will not resolve themselves, but require action at Cornell and universities across the nation. 

About Heterodox Academy

Heterodox Academy (HxA) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit membership organization of faculty, staff, and graduate students committed to fostering a culture of open inquiry on college and university campuses. Through a combination of grassroots membership efforts and direct engagement with institutional leaders, HxA equips campus stakeholders to advance viewpoint diversity, constructive disagreement, and the free exchange of ideas — values essential to higher education's role as a truth-seeking, knowledge-generating enterprise.

Press Contact

Joseph (Jake) Klein, Communications Content Manager, press@heterodoxacademy.org