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At a moment when higher education faces accelerating technological disruption and intensifying public scrutiny, Cornell Provost Kavita Bala argues that universities must do two things at once: defend their truth-seeking mission with renewed clarity, and reimagine how they teach, research, and engage society in an era shaped by AI, polarization, and declining trust.

Today, John Tomasi welcomes Kavita Bala to discuss Cornell’s approach to fostering a durable culture of open inquiry based on idea exchange, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement. Drawing on her experience as an AI researcher and Cornell provost, Bala explains how the “two-sided coin” of technology requires a university that integrates STEM and humanities to address issues like algorithmic bias and public trust.

The conversation also discusses Cornell’s recent shift toward institutional restraint. Bala explains Cornell’s approach to expressive activity and campus programs that foster dialogue, such as the Center for Dialogue and Pluralism (CDP) and a new Arts & Sciences course on Disagreement.

Episode Transcript

John Tomasi: Kavita Bala, welcome to Heterodox Out Loud.

Kavita Bala: Thank you so much for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here.

John Tomasi: You're the provost of Cornell. And as I mentioned to you before we came on, we've had a number of presidents on the show. You're the first provost. We're really delighted to have you. And I just want to tell you that, you know, we're especially happy to, I'm especially happy to have you here because there's a lot of HxA connections to Cornell. And I just wanted to share with you that, personally, I visited Cornell for the first time when I was, I think, 18 or 19. And I'll never forget at the graduation, where at a certain point, I think it was the School of Hotel Management, they'd all hidden champagne bottles in their robes. They took them out. They shook them up. And on cue, they burst the champagne, like this huge thing coming from the whole side of the stadium. And so, you know, I spent the afternoon walking along that gorgeous campus and the gorgeous. So I just, it's a really special place for us. And so for all those reasons and more, we're just really happy to have you here. I'll say one more thing just about you and about your president. I visited Cornell to give a talk. I think it was the winter of 2023, maybe this, maybe winter 2024, just shortly after the Hamas attacks. And Cornell had been struggling, kind of famously struggling to make a statement. They made, I think, four statements in six days. It was a difficult time. And I was on the campus to give a talk. And I often go to campuses in those days giving talks. But what was interesting and unusual about my Cornell visit was that Mike Kotlikoff, who at the time was the provost, he reached out to me to say, I heard you're coming to campus, can you come talk? And now we're in an environment, as you and I will be discussing, where so many university leaders are thinking about open inquiry and that we're finding at HxA that we're invited all the time to campuses and the presidents always want to talk now, whereas in those days they didn't. But Mike did. And he called me to his office and talked about institutional neutrality. Cornell had not adopted a policy yet, but was thinking about it. So I gave him some advice. He also asked about viewpoint diversity, how to hire for it. And so I just want you to know that when we heard that he was named the president and that you were named the provost, we've opened champagne. We had our Cornell moment because we're just really delighted and just admire the work and the attitude that both you and he bring to this work. So that's just done.

Kavita Bala: I appreciate that. And I will agree. Yeah, I agree. It's a pleasure working and an honor, a privilege working with Mike. But these ideas are something that we've been thinking about for a long time. It's not just a response to the current moment.

John Tomasi: Yeah, we see that. We've been following it. It's really interesting. So let's begin, if we can. I'd just love to have you share with our listeners a little bit about who you are and about your story. You were born in Mumbai, I believe.

Kavita Bala: That's right. Back when it was called Bombay.

John Tomasi: Oh, okay.

Kavita Bala: Still Bombay.

John Tomasi: And you studied at MIT and then you found your way to Cornell. Can you just tell us a bit about your journey?

Kavita Bala: Absolutely. So I, as you said, I was born and raised in Bombay and I moved here even before while it was still called Bombay. The name changed actually the year after I left. And I came to graduate school to MIT. I was in, I did, I'm a computer scientist. I did computer science and engineering in the Indian Institute of Technology at Bombay. I was the only woman in my computer science class.

John Tomasi: I heard that.

Kavita Bala: I came to MIT.

John Tomasi: How big was the class?

Kavita Bala: The class is, so it's- In the cohort, you mean?

John Tomasi: The cohort in Bombay.

Kavita Bala: There were about 40 computer scientists and it was the only one.

John Tomasi: Were any of your teachers women?

Kavita Bala: One, yes.

John Tomasi: Interesting.

Kavita Bala: There was only one then. Came to MIT and I remember one of the first things, we had a little group, three of us, who used to work on homeworks together. And the other two women were from universities, Yale and Princeton, and they were complaining about how few women they were. And I'm thinking, there's three of us. That's so much more than I'm used to. This is amazing.

John Tomasi: So, you know, different perspectives, certainly, all in one place. I want to talk about, I'll move to the conversation now about open inquiry at Cornell. You know, we are at a moment and are across the country now where universities are under a lot of pressure regarding issues of open inquiry. As you know, there was an important study from a Gallup poll a couple of years ago showing that public trust in universities had cratered over the past 10 years. With the elections of Donald Trump, we've seen a much more aggressive posturing of the government towards the university than we've ever seen in my lifetime, maybe historically. I just wonder if you could say a little bit about how is Cornell approaching these issues? What do these issues mean to you? I mentioned at the start of the show that when you guys, when we heard that you and Mike were named the leaders to leadership positions, we opened champagne. But what makes you interested in open inquiry? And then, you know, what is Cornell doing? We'll dig into the Cornell part especially, but is there anything, how did you come to these issues and why are they important to you?

Kavita Bala: Thank you. So I'll start off by just saying I started as provost on January 1st. And it is an incredibly consequential time to be provost when you think about the changes that are coming in higher ed. But I've been at Cornell actually since 1999. And when I came into the role as provost, I'm a professor of computer science. My area of research is artificial intelligence, computer vision, and computer graphics. And I came in recognizing that we are, I'll come to the current moment, but we are in a time of tremendous change. There's actually, you know, incredible opportunity. So AI and tech is driving new kinds of medicine, new kinds of medical breakthroughs and discoveries, better health, better transportation, interplanetary travel. I mean, when you think about the kinds of things we are trying to do as humanity, it's astounding. And it's also a time of deep challenge, the loss of public trust. So that is one piece. Deep polarization in society, isolation, mental health issues, which we're seeing across the board when students come to campus. And they're, in the case of tech, they're two sides of the same coin. The same technology is driving actually both the great opportunities and the great challenge. So one of the reasons when I took on this role, one of the reasons I took on the role, I was excited to think about how should universities reimagine themselves given this really rapidly changing landscape. And that's actually another piece. The pace of change is so relentless. We're not able to get ahead of it. We're not able to design the laws, the public policies, the social norms even of the technologies fast enough to stay ahead. And so I was thinking that we need to reimagine what the university teaches, what kind of research we do, how we engage with the world because of these kinds of changes. And then additionally, there were these two other disruptors that sort of made me stand up this committee that you just referred to. And the two other disruptors, you already mentioned one of them, is this loss of public trust in higher education, but actually in all public institutions. And that's the part that we need to really worry about in governments. In every aspect of public engagement now that society engages in, there's a loss of public trust. I think tech plays one role in that because of the online polarization, et cetera. But that's only one part of the puzzle. So how do we, we've lost the public trust. It takes decades to build and we've lost it in a few years. How do we bring that back? And I'll say public trust is about different pieces. Viewpoint diversity, you know, those opinions, polarization, that's one piece. One of the things that has been very surprising to me as a scientist is the loss of trust in science.

John Tomasi: Yes.

Kavita Bala: That has been, that is one I would not have predicted. Some of these I would have predicted, that one I didn't see coming. And so we are seeing this backlash where in this time of, you know, the anti-vax movement is gaining huge momentum. Conspiracy theories about all parts of, you know, scientific discovery are rife. And so this loss of public trust is the other major disruptor. And the third one, which really unfolded this year, was this renegotiation of the relationship between the government and higher ed. And so this has been a longstanding relationship, 80 years, or even longer if you go back from the founding of Cornell, for sure, in 1865. So given those three disruptors.

John Tomasi: Cornell, of course, is founded as a land grant university. And it's often thought of as the flagship example of a land grant university because it does so much outreach in agriculture and other areas as well.

Kavita Bala: That's a great, yes, exactly. Thank you for mentioning that. Right. So we're a land grant university. We're the only land grant Ivy. We are in every county of New York state and also across the country and the world, actually, because of our land grant mission of engagement and bringing the mission of the university out to the public.

John Tomasi: Can I just say a word on that, if you don't mind? Just to share something with you. We often talk about a mission of the university being to search for knowledge and to disseminate knowledge. And the way people often talk about that is universities have professors searching for knowledge and then they disseminate knowledge to the students. But land grant universities think of dissemination in a much broader way. They think about disseminating knowledge to the community, to people. I spent an afternoon this summer with a friend in Idaho who spent his life at the UNLV Extension School doing, bringing hydro, he works in hydraulics. And he was talking about how water systems work. And he spent his whole life taking the knowledge that was built at universities and bringing it to people, farmers and other people. So at Cornell, that idea of dissemination as a land grant university, dissemination is not just to the students. It's disseminating into the fabric of society and the fabric of the economy in a really striking way.

Kavita Bala: Thank you. I just want to mention that. That's a great point. And I want to actually say another realization that we've been having increasingly is that dissemination is bi-directional. Yes, we disseminate, but we learn from the communities we're in. We learn what problems they're facing. That drives the kind of research that we do. If you're working with farmers in every county, you hear the problems that they're struggling with. I think that's an important part. It's not a one-way. It's a bi-directional flow and engagement that enriches us in our understanding of the problems facing.

John Tomasi: Oh, that's good. That's great. That's for me. I love that. Part of what I'm thinking is that good teaching, really good teaching, often involves a professor learning things from the students because they ask a question in a new way that you hadn't thought of before. So we're all familiar with that experience, but you're saying the same thing.

Kavita Bala: That's exactly. And it influences, it really seeps through while we have the colleges, the contract colleges and some of them, the land-grant mission is really across the whole university on every side because exactly, we engage with our stakeholders, which is the whole citizenry of America and beyond. And then we learn about what kinds of things should be important to a university. I think that does change the nature and the kinds of problems you solve, you know, in your research and scholarship and in your educational mission.

John Tomasi: I want to dive into the questions about open inquiry on the Cornell campus. And at HxA, we think of, we're interested in working with campus leaders such as you and Mike to help you, if anyone can, to build a whole culture of open inquiry on campus. And by whole culture, we mean a culture that has three components all kind of working together. The free exchange of ideas, constructive disagreement, that is the ability to listen to those ideas constructively. And something like viewpoint diversity, a variety of these ideas being in the mix actively on the campus. So that's our idea on campus, which we call it Open Inquiry U, has those three principles up and running. Let's start talking now about Cornell. You know, Cornell, like most schools, was very wrapped up in DEI. I understand there still are some DEI requirements regarding, or I'm not sure you call them DEI, but there are still some requirements regarding statements and hiring, I believe. Is that right?

Kavita Bala: We have actually, those are optional, not required.

John Tomasi: Okay. I didn't realize that.

Kavita Bala: Yeah.

John Tomasi: But just generally, I'd like to have you sort of talk a bit about, like many universities, Cornell was very focused on DEI issues at a time when the country was having a racial awakening and was trying to find ways forward there. Some ways that now, in retrospect, seem perhaps overdone and were done in ways that were maybe in conflict with some of these principles of free speech and open inquiry. Can you talk about where Cornell is now? What steps have you guys taken since you've come into authority? What do you see? What obstacles are you facing? What achievements are you most happy with? What do you see coming? That's a lot of different questions. There's a lot of different questions in there. Would you like to start with some initiatives that you've done? Like, for example, I understand that since I visited and had a conversation with Mike two years ago, you have adopted, Cornell has adopted an institutional neutrality statement. How did that come about? And were you a part of that? Was that before you arrived?

Kavita Bala: No, this is very much during my, you know, in this year. So let me, there are many, many things you've packed in here. So let me see which ones of these I can start off with. So first, Cornell, the motto of Cornell is any person, any study. That has been true since 1865. That's a great motto. And I think that's critically important to understand in our DNA. You know, the land-grant mission is fundamental to our DNA. Any person, any study is fundamental to our DNA. This does mean, you know, we were one of the first universities to have Jewish students, to have women, to have black students back in the 1800s, not in where most other Ivies were actually, you know, sometimes even within the past few decades. For us, it's been a longstanding commitment.

John Tomasi: Well, I'll just add that the last Ivy League school to graduate, only started graduating women in 1987.

Kavita Bala: Right. And Cornell was way ahead of that curve.

John Tomasi: Exactly. In the 1890s, I believe it was.

Kavita Bala: I think that's right.

John Tomasi: Or 80s. And I should look that up. It may have been 100 years before that.

Kavita Bala: Yes, that's exactly. It's, I think, about nearly a century. It's remarkable. So, that commitment remains. That will not, that is fundamental to our DNA and will not change. That is embedded in every aspect of how we approach the kinds of engagement we have on campus. So, I want to talk a little bit about, we've always had that commitment. And though in the past few years, it has gotten very complex, how it's executed on, etc. So, you packed in a lot of things there. Let me see which ones. I can talk about the institutional neutrality piece first.

John Tomasi: Choose the ones that interest you.

Kavita Bala: Since you led in with, you know, there were many statements around, over the past couple of years around controversial topics. This was one of the task forces we stood up around institutional neutrality. There's the famous Kalven Report, which, of course, has been, you know, a blueprint for many universities. We've thought about, you know, the notion of neutrality. Neutrality itself is complex. So, we've arrived at a place of institutional restraint. Because when there are things that affect our mission, and our core mission is about, you know, we do scholarship, we do research in a broad range of areas. And in this very complex time we're in, there are topics that we do want to take leadership on that are related to the values of the university and the work that we do. But restraint within that context, so that it's not coming from top down, that the president takes a position, the provost takes a position. In fact, I have a very strong position, personally, of institutional restraint. So that the voices that speak from Cornell are the voices of the faculty and the experts on their areas of expertise.

John Tomasi: That's right.

Kavita Bala: So, we stood up a task force. It's actually out there that clarifies these kinds of principles. We want to make sure that all voices, the diverse voices on campus are heard. And the faculty can express their points of view without it becoming constrained by the top down, any authority figure taking a position on the issues that faculty may want to take diverse positions on. That is one piece of our task force. The other piece, though, which I've seen the importance of, I'll say, just to share with you, is it's also clarified how departments should approach the diverse voices within their department. So, often there's a temptation for a department to maybe take a position on a topic that sometimes is directly related to their area of research and they have every right. This is their domain of expertise. Sometimes it's not necessarily related to their area of research and it's on a world topic, which doubtless is very important. But whether or not the department should take a position on it is a little more complex. In these, what we've tried to clarify principles, like when you engage, if you do such a thing, you report the vote of the faculty or if it's a faculty vote, then you actually report, was it, if there's a majority voice and a minority voice, then report both points of view. Interesting. Report and do it in a way that protects their privacy, but allows the opportunity for a minority report, for dissenting voices. Because, I'll tell you, and you know you were in the faculty, faculty don't agree on anything. You know, if you try to get them to agree on what we order for faculty lunch, you can spend endless time and it will not be whatever you offered as a first set of options. That diversity of, that intellectual diversity is exactly what faculty are famous for. We should make sure it applies on all issues. And it, you know, I've heard from faculty, there will be a department getting very worked about, worked up about an important topic. And I'll hear from a senior faculty member with tenure. So then there's the junior faculty or untenured who are worried about their, their, their positions in this landscape. But a senior faculty member says, they want to sign this petition and I don't want to sign this petition. That's the kind of thing we want to allow freedom on through this task force on institutional voice.

John Tomasi: Can't find that. That's just fascinating to me. So at HxA, we're, we're very interested in the Kalven report, of course, the famous report. And as, as you noted, there, there's this wonderful line in that report where they say that the university is the home and sponsor of critics, is not itself the critic. So the idea of neutrality and the Kalven formulation is that, it's just what you're saying, is that the university wants to platform the voices of the students, student groups, professors, voices that will say, you know, things we might like, personally might like, might not like, but that's what the university is meant to be, a place for that kind of ideas. But if I may continue, what I'm really struck by is the way you're doing at Cornell, you're, you're doing something that we just, we, we see so often and we really admire. And that's that universities need to find their own way. There's not the case that there's a, a golden rule of neutrality handed down to us from anyone that is always going to be completely correct at every place. And in fact, the Kalven report itself, if you read the, on the charge to the committee, it does not say the charge was not develop an account of a speech, university voice for all universities everywhere. Rather, it says very explicitly develop a report for this particular college in our particular history and that's what the Kalven report does. Of course, it's a model that many follow, but I wanted to mention that I hadn't heard this idea that you guys are doing about the more local units like departments. If they weigh in on something, they need to report what the, what the dissenting voices said or what the numbers were. And we have, we have a report called extraordinary you, which is a, an updated version of the Kalven report that we're always building on and building off different, different ideas and different pathways that universities can use as a model. We're going to build in yours. I didn't, I'll reach out to you after this is over because we're constantly working on the report to learn from, to learn from our allies and partners out there, you know, what do they find at their university? So that when other, some of the presidents considering developing a neutrality principle or a restraint principle, they can look through the models and they can think, oh, look what Cornell did, this little angle. Another, another angle, for example, at Johns Hopkins, we say something like it's okay to express, unlike Kalven, we think it's okay to express concern at certain moments if the concerns expressed, it directly affects people in the community. Johns Hopkins shifted that. They said, you can express concern if it directly affects your community, but it's best to express that concern to the particular group in a localized way. So again, we're all in this kind of learning process together. And I just, you just gave me another idea we didn't know about from Cornell. So we're going to be adopting that to our, to our growing reports.

Kavita Bala: Happy to share that.

John Tomasi: That sounds great. You know, something you said to me, I just want to just check, check back out something about your, your, your coming from India, coming to the United States. Does that, I always wonder why some university leaders are so, so clear as such moral clarity on some of these issues, like free speech. Is that the case from your, does your experience as coming from India to the US inform the way you approach these issues?

Kavita Bala: Absolutely. I, I, I think, you know, that it's coming to America was liberating. And I'll say that I already- How old were you when you came? 21.

John Tomasi: Yeah.

Kavita Bala: And, you know, it's a, it's a perfect age to actually, and, and I'll tell you, I was the only woman, as I said, in computer science. And there was this expectation then, and it's changed a little bit, but not enough, I'll say again, that you kind of have to remember your place and not speak out of turn as a woman in a tech community, for example. And coming to America where, you know, there is, it is the land of the free. And I think that's what immigrants who come to this country, immigrants like me come because it is a chance for us to be free. I think the country draws the best and the brightest from the world, because if you're the kind of person who wants to do work that is truly boundary breaking, and that's what a university enables is research and scholarship that pushes the boundaries of knowledge. You can only do that if you're truly free. And to me, America is that beacon of hope to all, to everybody in the planet, really, to come to pursue the truth with no boundaries, no taboos. And it's not only the legal landscape, of course, the First Amendment enshrines a lot of freedoms that we enjoy, but it's also the cultural landscape of freedom, where there is no expectation that you have to match cultural norms. There are many countries that legally have the right rules, but culturally put a lot of constraints. And I will say, so to many of the immigrant scholars who come to this country, it's that freedom and that ability to pursue the truth, no matter where it takes you. That's what brings us here.

John Tomasi: Yeah, that's fascinating. I wonder if you could share with us some thoughts you might have about the importance of free speech and open inquiry in STEM in particular. So people often think, well, yeah, clearly in the humanities, we need this. Of course, obviously, as provost, you're overseeing humanities departments and the whole university. But I'm just wondering if you wouldn't mind just sharing. I'm sorry. What role did you play at Cornell before you became provost?

Kavita Bala: I was the dean of the Bowers College of Computing and Information Science and the chair of the computer science department.

John Tomasi: Of course, I remember that now. Do you want to say, Kavita, is there anything you'd like to share about the importance of these values of open inquiry in the STEM field?

Kavita Bala: Absolutely. I think that actually, even 20 years ago, there was more of the STEM and there's the humanists and they're separate. That's actually completely changed, I would say, over the past 20 years for a few reasons. Important STEM topics are fundamentally part of the open inquiry debate that's going on right now, whether it's where you land on climate change, whether it's where you land on vaccines, whether it's where you land on gender and sex in biology. All of these are STEM fields that have big questions around, that are being asked around whether or not we can actually do open-ended thinking in those areas. In my field, so I'm an artificial intelligence and computer vision, questions around whether or not there is bias in algorithms, whether or not you're preserving privacy. All of those questions have resulted, in my opinion, STEM students who are much more informed and much more attuned to the notion that they need to be open, to a certain extent. I will say some universities do a better job of educating those STEM students to think about these questions. And some universities actually do think of it as, oh, STEM, just they do their own thing. Is the humanists who worry of these things? I think a good university really merges those and brings that kind of thinking. I'll talk about, we have a course called Choices and Consequences, started by Jon Kleinberg and Karen Levy. 700 plus students take it once a year. That talks about these questions of the choices you make in tech when you're building tech and the consequences of those choices. And those kinds of very tricky, controversial topics are discussed in that course, in a very large course, in a constructive manner.

John Tomasi: And I'm sorry, so is this a computer science course? It sounds like a philosophy class or a public policy class.

Kavita Bala: It's actually in the computing and information science, but it's more of an information science course, but cross-listed in all of these disciplines.

John Tomasi: Fascinating.

Kavita Bala: And we're now in the process, this is one of the courses in it, we're constructing an AI in society minor. And it's that piece. It's not about the technical aspects of AI, but the societal aspects of how artificial intelligence is going to play out, which involves really grappling with very controversial topics in a constructive manner.

John Tomasi: Yeah, it's interesting. I remember there's a classic book by C.P. Snow called The Two Cultures. If you remember that book, it was based on a lecture he gave at Oxford in, I think, in the 60s or something. I read it as an undergrad, which really described the campus as being divided into these two different, not just sets of disciplines, but actually different cultures, different kinds of norms, different ways of dressing. I think the computer science, the scientists drank coffee, the literary people drank tea, whatever, there were all these cultural differences. But you're saying that in many ways, these two cultures in the contemporary university are much more blended than they were perhaps when C.P. Snow was writing decades ago.

Kavita Bala: And I think there is a generational aspect to it. The generations that are coming in, they are much less just siloed in their thinking. They bring in these sensibilities that are much broader. So I personally feel it's not as siloed as it used to be. But you will still meet STEM faculty who say, oh, that's that side of campus. So I don't question that you will meet people who believe that. I think they're not listening as carefully to the students who are coming to their classrooms, who I think are actually much more informed and much more interested in broader questions.

John Tomasi: Interesting. I'd like to talk with you about viewpoint diversity. And I guess at Cornell, I think we have to talk about it in the background of President Kotlikoff's commitment to merit, merit and hiring, merit all the way through in terms of all these things. It's almost like the Shils report, which is the great Chicago report on merit, seems to be alive at Cornell in that way. He talks about merit as being a fundamental norm. I believe recently you changed the undergraduate admissions to include the SATs. Is that right?

Kavita Bala: We have actually, it's interesting. During COVID, we made it optional in some of our schools. And some of our schools, so Cornell is a very decentralized structure. We have schools and colleges that each of them makes their own rules. I actually really love that, that there's a lot of freedom even within it.

John Tomasi: I thought you were trying to stomp it out.

Kavita Bala: No, I know. As provost, I have these incredible deans who are each leaders in their disciplines and who are very entrepreneurial because they have the freedom to be so. This right combination, by the way, of top down and bottom up is what makes a great university in my opinion. And so you don't want to stamp out that kind of, so we actually currently have, I believe half our colleges require the SAT and half don't. And we're actually looking at what the implications of that are. We're going to collecting data on that. We haven't yet gotten to the point of actually having enough data yet to reason about whether or not that, you know, the SATs are so crucial. So we do have, yeah, it's an experiment that's actually actively going on right now.

John Tomasi: We came across something as we were prepping for this conversation in the Office of Faculty Development and Diversity's Best Practices of Faculty Recruitment. And one of the really striking things we found in there is that at Cornell, the official guidance on faculty recruitment acknowledges intellectual and political viewpoint diversity as one of the important factors. And I'll read a line from it that I was really struck by. It advises search committees to consider, quote, all aspects of diversity, including geographic regions, style of work, and intellectual or political points of view, close quote, when evaluating candidates. So merit and excellence is the foundation, the driver, of course. I shouldn't say of course, but it is that way officially at Cornell. But then it also encourages at their recruitment level to be thinking about these other issues, including viewpoint diversity. We just find that really interesting. And again, one of these kind of, you know, novel ways of going about problems that many universities are trying to solve. Do you want to say anything about Cornell's advice to hiring to think about viewpoint diversity along with other kinds of diversity?

Kavita Bala: Yeah. So I'll comment actually, go back in history at Cornell. I don't know if you know about Carl Becker. Carl Becker, professor of history. I know a bit, but please. He's done a lot, you know, and has some of his speeches were a foundation on many of the things that the AAUP now uses. Carl Becker has always talked about freedom and responsibility and that they go hand in hand. And I've actually, I'm going to read out directly from what Carl Becker says related to diversity. I want to get his words right. So he said, it's characteristic of Cornell to permit a wide diversity in departmental organization and procedure, but also in just every aspect of who we are, where any person, any study, any study means any discipline. This very diversity derives from the Cornell tradition, which allows a maximum of freedom and relies so confidently upon the sense of personal responsibility for making a good use of it. Freedom and responsibility, he says, are the salient qualities which have given Cornell University its peculiar character and its high distinction. And then he expressed the hope that Cornell in the future, whatever its gains, whatever its losses, may hold fast to its ancient tradition of freedom and responsibility. Freedom for the scholar to perform his proper function, restrained and guided by the only thing that matters, that makes such freedom worthwhile, the scholar's intellectual integrity, the scholar's devotion to the truth of things as they are, and to goodwill and inhumane dealing among men. It's beautiful, 1940. And, you know, nearly coming to a century, but still true and drive. So we are, we hold fast to this vision of Becker's notion of thinking about, yes, you want full freedom, you need it for inquiry, but you do have to balance it with the responsibility you have of integrity and of doing things, I think, in good faith. I think that's the important part.

John Tomasi: And so that's the idea about the responsibilities at HxA, you won't be surprised to hear, we very much believe that. On the wall here, we have the HxA way, make your case with evidence, be intellectually charitable, be intellectually humble, be constructive, and be yourself. And these aren't rules that people have to follow, but they are responsibilities, we think, that academic, that students have in their classrooms, that professors have in our research and in our teaching. So we think those ideas that there are responsibilities attendant to their freedoms, we think that's fundamental. It's just really interesting for me to hear you point to that line. And let me just push on an example and see what you think about this. There are some people who think, and some organizations that think that the First Amendment and freedom of speech is what you really need on campuses, and that should be the guiding rule of what can and cannot be said. At HxA, we believe that the First Amendment and the time, place, manner restrictions should be known by students. They should be educated in the reasons why you need to have rules of the road to actually have true free speech. It's like having, if people could drive on both sides of the road as they chose, if you had no rules saying everyone would drive on the right, you couldn't get anywhere in your car. So to a free speech, if there was no time, place, manner restrictions, for example, you could never have speech have its function. Nonetheless, we think that free speech on a college campus comes with responsibilities. It's not that people don't have the right, they still have the right to invite in anyone they want and to say what they want. But we think it's important for universities to explain to students and to faculty alike that when they enter the university walls of the campus, they're now in a special, almost sacred terrain where responsibilities for searching for truth together are really what's most important. It doesn't mean they won't be sometimes rude to each other. You can have deliberation down and dirty. That's how it is sometimes. Nonetheless, we think that free speech is not the most, it's not the only thing that guides speech, there's also these responsibilities. Do you want to speak to that? And what I'm really interested in, I think our listeners would like to hear, sort of to bring our conversation a little bit closer to the policies at Cornell. Are there initiatives underway on campus this year or recently or currently that are helping students see what their responsibilities are towards, as free people who are also searching for knowledge together?

Kavita Bala: Right. So this is a great set of questions. Again, a lot to unpack. So let me see. I think of them as there are at least two C's and there's a third C, which I'll talk about later. But the two C's are the country and communities. And they're different. For the country, the First Amendment is exactly the right thing. That's how you have a truly free people. In my opinion, I truly believe that even with hate speech and everything that that brings. But when you're in a community, you have to think about the impact of those words. Hate speech with your lab partner, who you have to meet with every day and work with collaboratively to solve problems, is not the smart way to communicate with your lab partner. So there's lots of C's in the words that come up. Constructive dialogue is critically important. So we think I really do think of that as while I am a very firm believer that the First Amendment is exactly the right thing for the country, for a community, you have to think about the responsibility of your speech without being silencing. And that's the hard part. Navigating that so that you're having an honest discussion done in good faith should not result in any silencing of views. And your free speech should also allow free inquiry for every other person there too. And that's the time, place, and manner to aspects of, you know, so we have a new expressive activity policy this year that clarifies the time, place, and manner that says you have every right to your free speech, but not at the expense of others' right to actually have their open inquiry and their free speech.

John Tomasi: Can we pause on that for a moment, if we may? So I'm just interested to hear how you see the situation at Cornell. There were encampments there. There were some difficulties regarding the protests about Israel's actions in Gaza. How are you conveying these new policies to students, if they're new policies? How are you conveying this information to students? Is it at freshman orientation? What do you do specifically?

Kavita Bala: That's a great set of questions. Firstly, the expressive activity policy was developed with a lot of community input this year, and it's rolled out this year.

John Tomasi: Including students?

Kavita Bala: Including students? Yeah, including students, students on the committee, and then lots of student, also engagement in the process and development, and faculty and staff. It was a very wide community. It was a very extensive process. Lots of meetings and a lot of town halls to incorporate into our expressive activity policy.

John Tomasi: And Kavita, this began while you were provost?

Kavita Bala: No. The policy became the policy during my time, so this year, but it actually had started last year. So it was a very extensive process. But I want to actually go to the other piece of how you get to students. We have a beautiful program, the CDP, the Center for Dialogue and Pluralism, that we've actually had for a few years that works with first-year students to teach them how to work constructive dialogue is the goal of CDP. And I will tell you, like one of the first things, and Adi, she's really great, she's the person who leads these programs, will tell you, the first thing we want to convince people, it's not a debate, it's dialogue. You need to, you don't have to win. You have to try to actually hear, and you have to try to communicate, and it fits with your things, make your case with evidence, listen with humility, and all of those parts. So we've done that with the CDP for many years, and it's a beautiful program. The pluralism part is another important piece of that, is think about, there are different viewpoints, and they may stay that way. That's why it's not about winning, it's about engaging constructively to understand the different viewpoints. What we have found, though, we do that the first year. We're worried that they lose their muscle memory on this, as they, you know, there are a lot of things that happen in your first year on campus, and you don't remember most of them. So we are trying to actually develop now a multi-year program that the CDP builds out to allow deeper engagement with students with these concepts of pluralism, constructive dialogue, and actually democracy, civics, et cetera, across multiple years. We also have a new course, the Arts and Sciences is rolling out a course called Disagreement, which aims to take a controversial topic, have two sides of the argument, and model how you would debate the two of them in a classroom. So this is actually going to be one of the freshman courses we're offering starting in spring. We start as a pilot, and then it'll become, we hope, a normal thing on campus. And we are bringing in speakers to come and have civil disagreement and debates. And then we hope to model to the students, then that's how you should engage on controversial topics.

John Tomasi: So people often come to this question about viewpoint diversity from a very politicized perspective. So they hear the statistic, like the one I mentioned, that in the 60s, 70s, even into the 80s, the ratio was about, left-right was about two to one. Now they hear the ratio, and the ratio is now something like 20 to one or more. And what people often do, I think, they make a mistake, what I think is a mistake, by thinking that observation about the narrowing, the dramatic narrowing of the political, the range of political viewpoints among the faculty on campus, that itself is what viewpoint diversity is or is not. So when they try to bring more viewpoint diversity to campus, they think a politicized perspective on it, and they think what we should have is like a more equal ratio or maybe actual proportional representation across the faculty. I think that idea is confused for a lot of reasons. It's not clear. If we're a truth-seeking organization, we probably hope for some convergence on some topics. There are areas and disciplines where it's not really clear why being a Republican versus a Democrat makes any difference at all. On the other hand, there are some disciplines and some fields of study where we could say that having everyone from one political party with their assumptions on the campus and no one else on the campus probably is a worrying part in that little localized area. So this question about viewpoint diversity is extremely complicated, extremely difficult even to know what it means to ask for viewpoint diversity. There is that view I described, that sort of political representation view, which I think is clearly false. But I'm just wondering, in those areas where, sort of the non-problematic areas where I think most people agree that a greater range of viewpoints on politically charged topics, say in a public policy course or a government course or a sociology course or a history course, if we're trying to free students to think for themselves, and if you want our research to really be reflective of the important questions facing society, we want to be sure that we have a wide range of political viewpoints on the faculty to not just be devil's advocate, but actually believe it and express it full force. It's so hard to make that change happen on a faculty. You don't want to be hiring because people are based on a political party and there's autonomy of departments and all kinds of procedures for expertise. But I'm just curious, are you all thinking about viewpoint diversity on the faculty? Is there a civic center? You're thinking about some people doing it that way. How are you thinking about viewpoint diversity on the faculty at Cornell?

Kavita Bala: Many, many things are getting factored there. Let me see if I remember all of them. So first, I'll just start off by saying, just because somebody has a particular political belief does not mean that they cannot run or, and in fact, a good professor goes to their class, make sure that all points of view are well represented in the debate and the discussion. One of my deans will often comment that, you know, he's in labor, labor relations, and at the end of the class, one of the students came and told me, I still don't know whether you're on the left or the right. And he said, that's exactly right, and you never will, right? And that is what most of the faculty really aspire to. They aspire to presenting all of the facts for the students to think for themselves and arrive at their own conclusions and their own decision as to where their values fit with that. I do want to say that that is, in fact, the norm, and that is not something that is talked about much. People don't realize, and it's very hard to understand that unless you're in the classroom and you see these kinds of debates that are playing out, often the gotcha news is about the faculty member who's much more, you know, focused only on one viewpoint, and they certainly do exist, and we try to address, you know, try to not have that. But most faculty are trying to have a very fair representation of ideas in their classrooms. And I think that is true to who we are. One of the things that I've been intrigued by, one of our faculty members, Stephen Ceci, does this work, is this notion of adversarial collaboration. That's the actual phrase. I don't like the phrase adversarial, but the idea when you do research, you put together people who have differing viewpoints on that particular topic. So are women treated fairly in the workplace, for example? Some people believe they've had a teacher just fine. Some people believe they've underpaid, et cetera. You bring people who have different viewpoints, who come in in good faith, to then do research together. The paper they produce, and this is what happened with this particular group, lots of authors, they produced a paper that's incredibly thoughtful and nuanced. It actually breaks down the issue into seven different areas. Are they hired at the same frequency? Are they paid just as well as men, et cetera? And it turns out, in some areas, women do just fine. And in some areas, they do better, and some, they do worse. And so it isn't just women are discriminated against across the board. There's much more nuance to the situation. And if you understand the nuance, by the way, you can produce better policies. Because a policy addresses where there's actually a disparity of treatment, not just a blanket where always going to do certain things. So there's a lot of opportunity. I think campuses actually do this rich set of kind of thinking to bring alternate viewpoints. For civic centers, I think that's certainly something that we are thinking about. But I would really love to actually embed faculty in different departments. That's when you can have real change. So what we are trying to do is have those bottom-up conversations. So the future of the American University, this committee that I stood up, Phoebe Sengers is one of the co-chairs, Praveen Sethupathy, who's a scientist. Ariel Avgar, who comes from labor, and Adam Smith, who comes as an anthropologist. I had lunch with them when I was on campus recently. And they were just dynamic, fascinating groups. And we're bringing this big blue sky thinking on thinking about exactly how do you bring it.

John Tomasi: I saw it. I saw it was just amazing.

Kavita Bala: And don't get bound by the current way in which universities are run. How should the university position itself for the next 50 years? And I picked 50 because I figure that's the lifetime when a 22-year-old graduates, they have to redefine their careers. At least over the next 50 years, they have to redefine themselves probably every five years in this very rapidly changing world. In our generation, you maybe flipped your career two or three times, maybe. This generation is going to have to change itself much more frequently. How do we educate that generation with these ideas that require you to have a very broad perspective? Of course, critical thinking, but conflict resolution, by the way, is another big part of viewpoint diversity. You need to be able to handle things that you're not comfortable with. And those are the kinds of trainings that you want to do on campus.

John Tomasi: And I appreciate that you're emphasizing that there is this professional ideal of having a responsibility as a teacher to present ideas dispassionately, or passionately, but then equally passionately.

Kavita Bala: Passionately, but fairly. And constructively. I think that's the important thing.

John Tomasi: Good, good. I think that's quite right. And I think that that's often missed out in the public, sometimes public perceptions of universities. But still, it is nonetheless the case that even well-meaning people have biases that they're not aware of.

Kavita Bala: Each of us does.

John Tomasi: Yes, that's true. And I've known many professors in my time who aspired to teach in just the way you were describing, the elegant way you put that. And yet, I would become aware of certain things that are left out of their curriculum or out of this, because they just didn't know what the argument was. Because then they don't live that. They don't believe it. So, if you don't have people who are actually on the campus who actually see the world differently, then you can do viewpoint diversity. To the best extent that you can, but it might not be enough. It's not the deep way, right?

Kavita Bala: So, that's why I think this adversarial collaboration idea, also in teaching, is valuable. Bring two people with different viewpoints to teach about climate change. One more skeptical, one who genuinely believes in it, and have them together, keep each other honest, look at the data. Those are the kinds of, I think, mechanisms that will force, you're right, every single person. And on both sides of that conversation are people who believe they're right. That's why they espouse their viewpoint. So, having that, it has to be done. The thing that you need there, I love the fact about humility. You need people who are willing to come in in good faith, have their ideas potentially overturned, right? You cannot be this person whose ego is caught up in being right. And if you bring that humility, then this adversarial collaboration on teaching, I think, is also a very promising avenue. And we have some faculty who are very excited about doing that.

John Tomasi: And I'm going to say it again because I can't not say it, and that's that one still does need to have faculty with different viewpoints on the campus. And something I want to just loop back to that you just said that I find really interesting. We're talking with a number of presidents who are taking the viewpoint diversity on the faculty piece very seriously. Andrew Martin at WashU we had on the show recently. Lee Roberts, the chancellor of UNC Chapel Hill, is also doing some hiring for viewpoint diversity in a sort of deeper, deeper way. And something you just said, I think, is really instructive. You said that if a Cornell starts a civic center or some kind of a center that's meant to be in some way a spur to this kind of reform on the faculty diversity side, you said that they should be tied to departments. And I think that's a lot of wisdom in that. That's what HxA is developing a model about how we have a book. I have a book coming out in March called Viewpoint Diversity, What It Is, Why We Need It, and How to Get It. The how to get it part is actually the challenging part at university. How do you maintain excellence, academic freedom, departmental autonomy with something like steering towards diversity? But what you said, I think, is going to be a key to it. And that's that you have to find a way to bring in more diverse voices so you can have genuinely diverse conversations because people actually believe the views in ways that give full force to scholarly excellence, disciplinary autonomy. So that's the challenge, right?

Kavita Bala: And our program is actually, we have a program called the Becker Fellows after Carl Becker that aspires to bring in people. And Carl Becker always argued that we have faculty. Faculty are people who think otherwise. And that's the Becker Fellows, is people who think otherwise. And so we are bringing those fellows in. And we want to change how we think about teaching and research in a collaborative way with different voices in the room.

John Tomasi: That's really nice. We're coming to the end of our conversation. I was going to ask you, I was planning just to invite you to pick any topic from our conversation today and to discuss it if you have people remember that one thing. But I'm actually tempted to change that question and ask you, and just if you want to, to say a little bit more about that really remarkable expression from Cornell, any person, any study. And I've heard it before, of course, but sitting here with you and listening to the way you talk about it, it really has these two sides, doesn't it? It means that anyone could be there. We're not going to discriminate against people because of gender or whatever it might be. And any study means they can go where they want to go. Is that true at Cornell today? Could it be more true? Is Cornell working to realize that ideal? Do you see that as something you're already doing? Do you want to do an ideal you haven't yet reached? How do you view that ideal on your current administration's work? Can I ask you that question?

Kavita Bala: It's a great question, yeah. I'll say any person in any study is fundamental to who we are. But you're right that you have to revisit what that means, given that the world is changing so fast. And you shouldn't just sit on the laurels of that's who we used to be. And the nature, I will say, as an administrator, as a provost, and I'm also an AI researcher, the world is moving so fast and universities don't like that. They tend to, for good reason, sometimes push back against change because a lot of change is also ephemeral and you should not, in fact, respond to it. It's not actually, it's just the flavor of the day. You should ignore it. And stay true to the core mission of what a university is, truth-seeking. I think that is a critical part of what we do. But the flip side of it is if you get hide-bound in your disciplines and your silos, which is a danger in universities, then you're not doing the kind of work you need to do to meet the challenge of this. And I do see it as a brave new world that we're heading into with everything, you know, all the connotations of what the brave new world means, right? It's exciting and terrifying at the same time. So one part of that, I will say, we approach, I told you that we have technologists working with sociologists, philosophers, lawyers, policymakers, ethicists. You need to bring that mix of disciplines. That's what universities do spectacularly well. They bring all those disciplines in one place, unlike companies which will never have that property. They bring it in one place. If you don't get the benefit of them all working together, you have failed. They're breaking down the internal silos because you have every genius broad thinker on campus. Making sure they're actually working together, that's what a future university. So it's any study and making sure that all those studies are talking to each other is what I think will make the future truly great.

John Tomasi: It's such a dynamic view you have of the university, which at HxA we talk sometimes about how people often think a university is a certain thing. It's bad or it's good. We always think of universities, like all institutions, as always being in a process of becoming.

Kavita Bala: Evolving. They're constantly.

John Tomasi: Constantly. There's no stable place to be because everything is constantly changing. So the question really is, does a university have, does it embrace the dynamism of change? Does it do so in a principled way? I just want to close our conversation by thanking you for being on the show and just by saying again, you know, very frankly, that at HxA we're just really excited about the leadership at Cornell. You showed why again on this conversation just now. Thanks for making the time to come to the city to be part of this conversation. I'll look forward to seeing you on your campus or back here in the city sometime soon.

Kavita Bala: Love to have you back on campus. And I just want to say we really appreciate the vision that HxA has. And that's why I'm just delighted to be here to have this opportunity to share how we are thinking with you and hear from you how you are thinking. And please come back. We'd love to have you.

John Tomasi: Thank you, KB.

Kavita Bala: Thank you.