Universities as Radically Moderate Cartographers

A lightly edited version of remarks made at the 2024 Heterodox Academy Conference in Chicago for the panel "What do universities owe the liberal project?"

*As always, the opinions expressed below are mine and mine alone and do not necessarily reflect my employer’s position (or anyone else’s).

What are Universities For?

I struggled a bit more than usual over this talk because I was overthinking the theme of the panel. After much back and forth I realized that I didn’t really know what universities owe anyone because I wasn’t quite sure what it means to be a university in the 21^st century. I’m not sure a lot of other people in academia do either.

It’s hard to answer the question of what universities owe the liberal project if we don’t really know what universities are for.

This is exacerbated by the deeper problem that we don’t really know what truth is for or at least we can’t agree on what truth is for. I hope to use a model I’m developing on moderation to answer both of those questions, but first let’s start with universities.

The people who are confident about what universities are for often talk of universities as though they are monoliths – a single kind of institution, usually envisioned as the standard liberal arts university of the past that educated a small and relatively homogenous set of students in civic virtue while seeking to expand knowledge. While we might appeal to that vision, it’s largely gone.

Today, 72% of college students attend public institutions, which range from small regional publics to large national universities with giant enrollment. These are, by and large, institutions that serve a range of stakeholders, face an increasingly conflicting set of incentives and disincentives, and that face existential threats from cultural, political, demographic, regulatory, and economic forces that are largely outside their control.

Most universities have mission statements, but what that breaks down to in terms of principled positions on a range of subjects ends up being fragmented by the other incentives and disincentives the university faces. Universities are increasingly tuition-driven, meaning that we focus on students and parents as consumers. We emphasize workforce development as a way to justify increasingly high tuition costs while many universities are themselves employment powerhouses. My own university employs 3000 faculty and staff and the pressures our salaries and increasingly expensive benefits packages place on the university are felt in every decision administrators make. Add this to growing concern about how to stay afloat given declining enrollment, greater scrutiny of tuition costs, and growing competition for a declining student population. And that’s before we even mention increasingly complex mental health needs and students entering college ill-prepared for higher education or adulthood intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically.

Meanwhile the increasingly competitive job market for the glut of PhDs, alongside the growing importance of college ranking for both funding and tuition dollars, means that universities can demand more and more research, regardless of whether that research is high quality or not. As a result, universities broadly have seen an increase in predatory journals and, some scholars argue, rampant research misconduct.

As though that’s not enough, universities are also operating in a period of growing affective polarization, where every step seems politically and socially fraught and where competing incentives of pleasing students, parents, administrators, trustees, and donors all pile on.

And that compounds on the other challenges facing scholarship, including a growing distrust: in elites, in university education, and in scientific and social scientific scholarship.

With all these competing pressures, there’s a growing feeling that universities in general no longer know what they’re for. Are they there to provide jobs or to teach students or to make the board of trustees happy or to pursue knowledge?

I will admit, we’re not in a great place right now. But we could start seeing improvements with some basic reorientation around what universities are meant to do.

Universities and the liberal project

It would be easier for universities to reorient themselves if they knew what purpose they served. Some, like religious colleges, do of course.

But if the liberal project broadly is to create free and flourishing individuals and communities and that’s largely the goal of much of social scientific exploration as well, we start seeing a clear overlap between the purposes of universities and what innovation and career preparation and limiting student debt and knowledge generation and employee benefits and all the other seemingly conflicting demands point toward.  

Universities and Radical Moderation

What does any of this have to do with radical moderation? A lot, as it turns out.

In general, the liberal project requires balance of various kinds. Balance by itself is not moderate and its definitely not radically moderate. One could envision a situation in which a dictator carefully balances various groups to maintain power. But at its heart, all social living requires balancing claims to different goods by different groups. The better we can balance those claims without conflict the better we’re able, usually, to help people be free and flourish in their own way. This is, in essence, the liberal project.

A few years back I was trying to think about ways to explain the way policies at different levels of government create impacts on patient care. A reader in a manuscript workshop suggested I find a metaphor to help guide the reader through the tangled policy process where federal healthcare policies interact with state, local and hospital policies to impact patient care. On the way home from DC, I realized that what I was really describing was a kind of watershed, where decisions upstream fundamentally affect the options people – in this case patients – have downstream.

This metaphor was enormously powerful for my work in healthcare and I gradually started expanding the concept to think not just about policy watersheds but about other kinds of landscapes that humans navigate in their social, political, and moral lives. This then became central to my current work on moderation.

It turns out there are other people thinking in these terms as well. Dave Schmidtz discusses justice as a landscape, while scholars like Ryan Muldoon have been doing work on epistemic landscapes and modeling how we learn about the world itself.

In what follows though, I’ll focus on Dave’s work, because I really like the characterization he provides in his book Elements of Justice as well as his newer book Living Together.

For Dave, when we look at justice as a landscape, we see pits, valleys, and peaks. Sometimes, people are stuck in pits and can’t get out. That’s a kind of injustice that we can see clearly and don’t really have to argue that much about.

Dave’s point is that the liberal project can and should focus on getting people out of the pits. Whether they end up scaling peaks or not is nobody’s business but their own. But for liberals broadly, people who are stuck in pits – pits like grinding poverty – are neither free nor are they flourishing. The liberal project, going back to Locke and Hobbes, is to a certain extent about minimizing areas of conflict and coercion in people’s lives by focusing on the low but solid project of getting people out of pits.

Adam Smith’s work, for example, is not a high and mighty defense of excellence, though he himself embodied that ideal (and he doesn’t neglect it entirely in his work). But Smith’s liberal project is about how we can ensure that even the poorest among us has access to the basic goods and services they need to survive. The contrast between the wealth a European peasant has in contrast to an African king is for Smith a contrast in the goods that those different societies can offer. Wool blankets and access to beer might not be much, Smith notes, but they’re better than nothing.

Low but solid.

Dave follows on this point, arguing that one thing we’ve done poorly as a society is that we get torn between conflicting sets of high level values, taking our eyes off those pits. If we refocus on getting people out of pits, we’ll be much better off than if we spend all our time arguing about what ideal justice looks like or whether it even exists.

And that’s because what justice is at one point or another will differ somewhat depending on where you are located on the landscape itself. If you’re stuck in a pit, justice looks very different from the justice someone might desire or even demand as they walk along a level path. This is what some people call privilege.

There’s obviously a lot more to Dave’s argument, but I’m going to use this metaphor of landscapes that we’re both playing with to make a much broader claim about the liberal project generally and the role of universities in it.

In my current work on moderation, I argue that we’re going about things all wrong in our current extremist and polarized world. And that’s in large part because we’ve been operating with an awful map. The map we’re using is essentially one dimensional. It doesn’t help us identify where there are pits or peaks or anything else. It doesn’t help us see clearly how people move about the landscape in different ways.

It's not actually a map at all. It’s just a single line. And instead of helping us understand our shared landscape, the map we’re using  creates false binaries, binaries between left and right, between government and markets, between individual responsibility and structural explanations.

What we really should care about is not fitting our ideas into these binaries on one side or another, but instead on getting right the crucial question of what the overall shape of our landscape actually is and how we can come to an agreement to make it easier to navigate for everyone.

This is, effectively, a primary goal of the scientific project. Physical sciences map the existing physical landscape and the laws that govern that landscape of the physical sciences. Meanwhile, social sciences map the (admittedly more complex) social, political, ethical, and economic human landscape and the laws that govern that.

What this means is that universities are and should see themselves primarily as cartographers.

In their role as cartographers, universities have two primary jobs, neither of which they’re doing terribly well at the moment, at least in the liberal arts.

Universities as Cartographers

The first job of universities is to support scholars as they explore and describe the landscape of the physical, social, and political world as accurately as possible. Universities need to support people exploring epistemic landscapes, complexifying the human social, political and moral worlds, and exploring different parts of the landscape in different ways with different disciplinary lenses.

To do this well, we need to be asking the right questions, have the right incentives to support high quality research, and we need to avoid manipulating our map to meet our own ideological commitments. We also need the right kinds of structures for research. Cory Clark gave a wonderful talk Wednesday on the rationale behind the adversarial collaboration project at Penn. This is just one example of getting the structure right to make sure we’re really double checking each other’s work.

Getting the map right is also why we need viewpoint diversity in all kinds of scholarship. There are lots of benefits to viewpoint diversity in practice and in the abstract, but the major benefit I see is that you need people who come from all over our shared landscape in order to get a comprehensive view of it. Different people have seen different parts of the landscape in action or they know about specific pits that we didn’t even know exist.

We all bring our own intimate knowledge of our particular corner of the landscape to the table, but any single individual understanding doesn’t have enough local knowledge to create a map, let alone a useful one. To create a map, you need a lot of people exploring and poking and measuring, with lots of different tools, all in and from different parts of the landscape. That’s how you get a complete picture and that’s how you encapsulate and catalogue all the different needs, desires, and goals of the people moving around the landscape, both backward and forward in time.

And let me be clear: having an accurate map is fundamentally important.

There is nothing more important than having a reasonably accurate map of the shared human landscape. Accuracy matters not only for epistemic reasons, but also for human flourishing.

When universities support or incentivize scholars to manipulate the map in favor or one or another ideological commitment or just by incentivizing sloppy research, we create real and serious harm:

1. Mismatches between the map and the landscape increase the chances that people will fall into pits (real normative harm). There are lots of examples of mismatches between the map and the landscape from the Great Leap Forward to the COVID-19 response. In all of these cases, the result was human suffering.

2. Mismatches between the map and the landscape increase the chances that we introduce additional mistakes down the road, a kind of epistemic harm. This means that future scholars are starting from the wrong place or looking in the wrong direction because we’ve messed around with the map to suit our own political ends. That harms their pursuit of truth and slows down the progress of knowledge more broadly.

3. Finally, messing with the map undermines public trust in what universities do as neutral cartographers, which further underscores polarization and distrust of elites broadly. When Fauci told the public that masks had no effect on COVID 19 he knew that wasn’t true. The information he was giving to the public to help them navigate an unpredictable situation was faulty and he knew it. He thought he had good reasons for doing so, such as preventing a run on PPE equipment that would leave healthcare workers more vulnerable. But in the long run his decision to manipulate the map in favor of a political end led people to not trust the rest of the map and its guidance on things like vaccines, which was actually pretty accurate.

You wouldn’t buy a map from a cartographer who doesn’t believe in mountains and that’s increasingly what universities are asking the public to do.

The big picture point is that in order to use a map to make human life better the map has to be accurate. We can’t dodge truths or harsh realities because we’re worried they’re politically unpalatable.

So what we really need to be is really careful and really neutral cartographers of our shared human landscape.

This neutral cartography is the purpose of the university.

And it’s why academic freedom, freedom of speech, and disciplinary and interdisciplinary rigor are all so important.

All these things together help us describe and then accurately map our shared landscape. We can’t be good cartographers if we don’t allow people to criticize our methods or analyze our data or question our premises. We also can’t be good cartographers if we refrain from exploring certain areas because we’re scared of what we might find.

Maps of the same landscape of course will differ. Some of us will be interested in relative differences between the people in the pits and the people outside of the pits (which we can measure) while others like Schmidtz will be more interested in the absolute number of people in pits and how to get them out. Others like Patrick Denneen may be more interested in how many people scale the highest heights.

These are all important approaches and important considerations. But none requires that we hide or obscure aspects of our landscape to make the map prettier or fit our priors. In orienteering no one benefits by pretending a crevasse doesn’t exist. That’s how people die.

Notice one another crucial benefit of viewing universities as cartographers: by taking a low but solid approach of simply mapping the landscape as it exists across a range of disciplines with different lenses and different goals, we don’t need to worry about making sure all those messy and loud stakeholders I mentioned earlier agree on any particular values writ large, other than the ones required to be good cartographers of our shared world. I don’t need to ensure the board of trustees agrees with my view of justice or goodness or truth. I just need them to support me and/or leave me alone to explore the landscape and document what I find.

By focusing on a low but solid goal that is nevertheless absolutely critical to the functioning of liberal societies, we generate agreement instead of conflict and harmonize the interests of a pluralistic and otherwise cacophonous group of stakeholders. Will it work perfectly every time? Of course not. But we’ll get closer that way than we will by fighting over first principles or by giving up on a purpose altogether.

This low but solid purpose also defangs most of the polarization that ails us today. Exploring our shared landscape allows for a range of different goals and values and doesn’t pit right against left or progressive against conservative. The progressive might ask different questions, but the conservative can be cheerfully exploring her own part of the landscape while the progressive works in his. And as those people explore their shared landscape they’re likely to find that they have much more in common than they realized initially, starting with the recognition that there are people in pits who need to get out.

Universities as Orienteering Guides

The second job of universities is to help humans learn how to navigate that shared landscape.

And this is where social justice and scholar advocacy may have a place. Where social justice concerns are inherently dangerous is at the map-making stage. At that stage, you just need an accurate representation of what’s going on. If we get that wrong, everything else afterward is garbage too.

But we do have lots of space for what people might call social justice work: scholars can use the accurate maps they’ve made of the human landscape to help students and the public navigate their landscape more easily. Scholars can use what they know about a particular pit to help develop policies to pull people out. Or they can build bridges to connect people from one part of the landscape to another, which is what the political scientist Krissy Trujillo is exploring with urban-rural populations.

In my own work in healthcare, after my book came out I was approached by midwives and other healthcare workers in New York State to help them navigate the policy landscape for maternity care.

The only reason I was even moderately useful to them was because I had an accurate map to start with. If I had started with my own ideological commitments and then tried to lead them through the swamp of New York healthcare bureaucracy, they would have realized quickly that I was not only a fraud, but a dangerous fraud at that. I’ll also add that most of these midwives and doulas held political beliefs that were likely at odds with my own, at least on some important issues. But our political labels were completely irrelevant to the question of how to get pregnant women out of pits in New York state. In that situation, we ignored right and left altogether and picked up metaphorical ropes and shovels and got to work.

This kind of social justice work is more like orienteering: working with the person or group in front of you to understand their goals, providing whatever map you have, and then equipping them with the tools they need to navigate their landscape, whatever their goals in doing so.

Universities, Cartography, and Radical Moderation

How does any of this relate to moderation, again, you might ask? Well, a truly radical moderation asks us not to locate ourselves halfway between two options on a false binary or to choose a mealy mouthed compromise between whichever groups are screaming loudest. A truly radical moderation asks us to accurately map and therefore complexify the world by exploring our landscape in all its four dimensions. Once we start seeing things in four dimensions, a range of principles follow: an appreciation for complexity and the varied and pluralistic lives that humans are able to lead and share, humility and toleration as fundamental virtues precisely because the landscape is so complex and our own particular view of it so limited, and an optimism that the more we learn about our shared landscape, the more we’re able to improve it and make people’s lives better.

It's not an accident that these are fundamentally liberal virtues, but they’re also the virtues at the heart of the scientific process and the virtues that should be at the heart of every university.

Why Truth Matters

One final note before I close out: the landscape model isn’t just a sort of helpful metaphor. It also helps us explain – to ourselves and skeptical others – why the truth matters. I know that probably seems weird in this audience, but I’ve run into a lot of students and even faculty like Fauci who argue that the truth has to be weighed against the need to protect people from whatever it is that we fear most in the moment. We all know that’s indefensible, but just screaming over and over again that the truth is important for some unclear Platonic reason doesn’t really reassure those people who have genuine and sometimes even legitimate concerns about unintended consequences. 

But when we think about the role of academic research and the university broadly as a cartography exercise in truth-tracking, it makes more sense. Maps exist to be accurate – albeit diverse – representations of a landscape. The purpose of a map is to track the truth. When your map doesn’t track the truth, people get lost or they fall into pits. The overall sum of injustice in the world tends to increase. Everyone from every political stripe (except maybe actual fascists) is better off and better able to achieve their goals when we have a more accurate map of the world.

And that truth will be a truth that exists in four dimensions. It will be complex and it will be moderate, in a radical sense. The radically moderate truth will also remember and in fact reinforce that the map we make of our shared landscape exists for human beings and not the other way around. Humans matter, first and most fundamentally.

So how do we reorient ourselves toward our role as human cartographers, whether we’re scholars, teachers, or administrators:

1)        Avoid binaries. Complexify whenever you can. The more we as academics fall for the false binaries the media and politicians try to force on us, the more our maps fail to reflect the real landscape, the less people trust us, and the less we can help improve the world.

2)        Scholarship should improve the world first and foremost by creating accurate maps. Scholar advocacy is great, as long as your scholarship is driving your advocacy and not the other way around. One way to check whether your own scholar advocacy isn’t reverting to scholar activism is by asking people from other disciplines and other political and social perspectives to check your work. This can be hard to do because we’re often siloed in our own disciplines and political spaces, but it’s work that’s worth doing because it’s the only way to get an accurate map.

3)        Develop research, pedagogical and administrative structures that encourage the creation of accurate maps:

• Researchers can use adversarial collaboration in research

• Instructors can use tools like the Open Inquiry Toolkit in their classes

• Scholars and instructors can explore initiatives like Mercatus’s Pluralism Lab

• Student services staff and faculty can bring anti-polarization and intellectual courage training to your campus with Braver Angels and BridgeUSA

• Administrators can encourage and support all these initiatives while also serving as a role model for truth-tracking in practice.

4)        Create incentives for high quality interdisciplinary research. The more tools and methods we have for exploring our shared landscape and the more we communicate between and across those tools and methods, the more likely we are to get it right. Unfortunately, right now the incentives for high quality interdisciplinary work are not good. Interdisciplinarity isn’t primarily desirable for its own sake. Disciplines do important things and we don’t want to lose those. Interdisciplinary work is really important because it’s the final touch we need to make sure we do in fact have a rich and accurate map. And that means assessing that map through a range of lenses.

5)        Finally, join HxA and help it grow because the goal of HxA is also to make sure our map our shared landscape matches what’s actually going on so we can help people live better, more peaceful, and freer lives.

Thanks!

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