I understand the resolution—a university should be an open society—in the sense made famous by Karl Popper in his influential book, The Open Society and Its Enemies, rather than in the sense of George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, where the phrase is given a quite different and, I believe, un-Popperian meaning.

　　As far as I understand Popper’s positive argument in The Open Society and Its Enemies, a society should be open with regard to the various means it employs to achieve—or, more carefully, approach—the stable end of promoting human happiness or flourishing. A society should seek to “engineer” its way, in a piecemeal manner, to the maximal satisfaction of its citizens. It should try out various combinations of rules, mores, traditions, institutions, and laws, sustaining those that advance society toward, and jettisoning those that detract society from, the unchanging goal of human flourishing. In effect, Popper’s open-society concept involves the application of his philosophy of falsificationism, Popper’s method of conjectures and refutations, to society.

　　In other words, a Popperian open society is not a “free-for-all.” It is not the case that “all bets are off” in Popper’s open society. Indeed, at any given time, such a society may even appear rather “closed,” constrained both by the permanent goal of promoting a thriving citizenry and by the bundle of rules (etc.) that prevail at the time.

　　In the Soros-ian sense, however, it seems that an open society should indeed be a free-for-all, unbounded by either prevailing traditions and mores, or by any particular goal(s). Whereas Popper’s open society aims at human flourishing as an ultimate end that, realistically, may only be approached, but never fully realized, Soros’s open society regularly achieves chaos, undermining all prevailing rules and institutions and denying conventional social goals as some combination of quaint, archaic, and intolerant.

　　Popper’s open society is liberal in the classical sense of the term, but Soros’s open society is anarchic in one of the worst (are there any good?) senses of the term.

　　I would like to suggest that what is really problematic about contemporary American universities is not per se that they are either too open or too closed, but that they tend toward hypocrisy, asserting their commitment to Popper-like classical liberalism, while in fact being rather closed or, perhaps worse, anarchic, governed only by the blowing winds of progressive politics.

　　This hypocrisy manifests in several different ways.

　　First, there is the well-known fact that many prominent American universities ostensibly committed to free speech only selectively respect the speech rights of their students and faculty. This hypocrisy was obvious in the license granted to pro-Hamas protestors on several American campuses in the spring of 2024 to disrupt classes, squat in public spaces, occupy administrative offices, and threaten violence against their Jewish classmates, all in contravention of these universities’ explicit commitments.

　　Second, the hypocrisy of modern American universities is apparent in their near-total lack of intellectual diversity. Although ostensibly committed to the sorts of open discourse and free exchange of ideas that should produce both an ideologically varied faculty and lively classroom debate across political lines, in fact, American universities today hire faculty almost exclusively from the port side of the academic vessel and actively discourage any in-class discussion that threatens to right the ship.

　　In their relentless efforts to promote university education for its economic value, American university administrators are resting on laurels due to an educational model they have in fact rejected.

　　Third, while paying lip service to the principle of academic freedom, today’s universities tyrannize professors to conform to administrators’ whims both in the choice of research topics and the assignment of student grades. Indeed, American academics are systematically tyrannized both from the top-down, through multiple layers of college presidents, vice presidents, deans, and department chairs, and from the bottom-up, via their students. Professors who choose to investigate topics outside the bounds of political acceptability, as determined by administrators, are unlikely to receive tenure, regardless of how well they’ve met ostensibly objective tenure criteria (I speak from personal experience here). What’s more, over time, in virtue of decisions taken by university administrators, professors’ prospects for promotion and pay rises have become ever more tightly bound to student evaluations of their teaching. Students recognize this. They know that they can ensure a better grade for themselves by threatening to write a negative evaluation of a professor’s class, and they do. Anyone curious about the causes of grade inflation at American universities need look no further than the administrators of those universities, who have gleefully handed over the keys to the asylum to the inmates and left the guards defenseless.

　　Fourth and finally, somewhat related to the latter point, American universities propagate the myth that their product pays for itself in respects intellectual, moral, and economic. American university students are conditioned to accept the misleading, if not outright false, notion that they will graduate smarter than, morally superior to, and, therefore, better prepared for career success than their peers who opted to enter the workforce after high school. While it appears to remain the case that college graduates can expect to earn more than non-graduates, on average, over the course of their careers, it is not obvious how much of this premium on college education is a relic of the reputation that American universities earned under the repudiated model of strict standards, intellectual rigor, and the pursuit of truth. In their relentless efforts to promote university education for its economic value, American university administrators are resting on laurels due to an educational model they have in fact rejected. Whether the new model of inflated grades, mental laxity, and the denial of truth adds value over and above that of a high-school diploma remains to be seen.

　　This hypocrisy, a failure to keep to the university’s stated values, leads to me to think that American academic reform requires not that universities be more open or more closed, but that they be more honest about the principles, whatever they may be, that actuate their respective intellectual missions. What we need is not necessarily more open universities, but a more open university system, in which individual academic institutions might be as open or as closed as they like—provided they were honest about the principles guiding their pedagogy—and, in effect, compete on the talent, knowledge, and skills of the graduates produced according to various sets of principles.

　　In such a system, different institutions would operate and teach according to unique sets of values. We might have more open universities that emphasize classical-liberal values, traditional principles of freedom of speech, open inquiry, and civil discourse, competing against more closed universities governed by, say, postmodernist or cultural Marxist, Zionist, or radical Islamist principles. Then the graduates of such schools would compete in the open labor market. Those graduates better prepared for success in their chosen fields would eventually find the best jobs, while those less well-prepared would, compared to their more talented peers, struggle to achieve professional success.

　　We would then be in a position, in good Popperian fashion, to build more of the successful, talent-producing universities and fewer ineffective universities that produced graduates prepared only for the dole.

　　The goal of American university education is and should remain to produce graduates best prepared to succeed in the American economy and lead the next generation of citizens. The means best suited to this goal have not been determined in advance. We should be willing to try out different, more or less open, pedagogical approaches and let the results tell.

　　That I have tied my cart to the University of Austin, a university that openly and honestly elevates the principles of civil discourse, open inquiry, the free exchange of ideas, and the pursuit of truth come what may, should tell you the kind of university that I think most likely to win in an open competition.