Trump says higher ed is too liberal. Tufts launched a center to tackle that issue
The Trump administration has scrutinized and attacked higher education for lacking "viewpoint diversity," describing it as too liberal or "woke."
Addressing this issue was central to the federal government's demands at Harvard University, as it threatened billions of dollars of federal funding. The demands included an overhaul of its leadership structure, admissions and hiring.
Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University, said he had already been working and thinking about the issue of viewpoint diversity for years — and has been grateful to the federal government for its increased attention to it.
"I'm not endorsing the tactics that the Trump administration is using, but I think their engagement with this issue might have some really positive changes if schools can recover that spirit of open inquiry," Hersh said in an interview with MassLive.
On Wednesday, Tufts University launched the Tufts Center for Expanding Viewpoints in Higher Education , which will be led by Hersh, to help the university and higher education reduce viewpoint homogeneity.
The center is based in the Office of the President at Tufts, reporting directly to Tufts University President Sunil Kumar.
It isn't in response to any government demand, Hersh made clear. It is the university's "own innovation."
Hersh, who describes himself as a moderate conservative in the mold of former Massachusetts governors Charlie Baker and Mitt Romney, wants the center to be a place where students can engage openly across perspectives.
"Like many campuses like Tufts it is somewhat of a lopsidedly progressive secular bubble. Part of the goal here is exposing students to different viewpoints on the more conservative or religious side," Hersh said.
"But, it's also about just ... training our intellectual muscles to take in information from all sides and process it effectively and be able to have a conversation with people with wildly different worldviews," he said.
What will the center do?
When Hersh attended Tufts as an undergraduate, he saw the campus as having a vibrant mix of political diversity.
Since becoming a professor at his alma mater eight years ago, he sensed a shift. He attributes it to more of a prevalence of people being targeted for taking up a policy position.
He also thinks that the kind of conservatives that were once on college campuses are the kinds of people who have perhaps moved to the left because of the party's support of President Donald Trump.
In order to address the idea that certain viewpoints are not being represented in higher education, he wants to create a culture at the center where all sides of arguments can be expressed, and the campus is one of "empathetic and open debate."
"This kind of spirit of open inquiry is meant to not just help students become competent citizens and workers, but also help scholars be better at their jobs, too," Hersh said.
"We want just a very positive, open environment where people are always debating and discussing ideas and not afraid to discuss those ideas for fear of being canceled," he continued.
The center will focus on three main areas. The first focus area is that it will be a "think tank for curriculum," helping faculty teaching on politically sensitive material to incorporate a variety of perspectives and learn how to teach the material effectively. It will be for college professors and hopefully expand to high school teachers as well.
It is an "opt-in" model; no faculty will be forced to engage with the center, Hersh said.
"We're not trying to coerce professors to change their syllabi. Professors are rightfully protective of their intellectual freedom to teach the way that they want to teach. What I imagine us doing is providing resources and support to faculty that really want to prioritize viewpoint diversity in their teaching," he said.
The second area of focus will be creating cultural experiences, such as reading groups and speaker series, to have a wide spectrum of viewpoints represented on campus.
The third will be aimed at "recovering science" by discussing and evaluating research topics that might not be of a dominant viewpoint and have "disciplinary biases" that may be discounted, Hersh said. It could be on anything from climate change to vaccines, he said.
"We want to make sure that we're not leaving really good research questions on the table because of whatever the biases of disciplines, we also want disciplines to do a really good job dealing with dissent in their fields," he said.
The university established an advisory committee made up of 11 faculty members from different parts of the institution to help provide leaders with their perspectives on how the center is doing.
The university also hired a full-time associate director and is hiring another position that will be more focused on student fellowships and programs. The center will also aim to announce a postdoctoral program to start next year.
What inspired the center?
The idea for the center was born out of how many Tufts students, who were majority left-leaning, hadn't been exposed to conservative viewpoints in high school and in college.
In response, Hersh created a class in 2022 called American Conservatism, a public policy course that focused on debates among conservatives.
Topics range from capitalism to affirmative action to LGBTQ+ rights to religion in public life, he said.
The course was unique, in Hersh's mind, because it was contemporary and focused on public policy — and ultimately wasn't an "outsider's look into a conservative movement, oftentimes in a very disparaging or negative way."
It was a major hit at the university, growing from 40 students in his first year to around 100 most recently.
"The idea was ... to get a sense of, if you are an American conservative, what's your value system? What would lead you to this or that position? What are the sorts of fights about what conservatism means?" he said.
Hersh wanted students to leave a classroom discussion and understand what conservatives might think about a topic, something he felt students weren't getting exposure to in other classes.
After the success of the course, Hersh started pitching to the university in 2024 to build a center that focused on exposing students to a variety of perspectives.
In a tense environment that has played out across higher education campuses in response to the war in Gaza — leading to protests and encampments — Hersh said it is important to learn amid differences of opinions.
He has spent the summer meeting with faculty at Tufts to help them understand the center's mission, aiming to be "very attentive to building trust and respect among the faculty."
"I mean, that's what the center is in some ways about, is recovering that spirit that we have lots of different people with lots of different values at this school and we don't want them to just clash in competing protest movements. We want them to be reading exciting material together, debating together, learning together. And that's what makes universities great," Hersh said.
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Read the original article on MassLive .
