Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published on the National Association of Scholars on May 6, 2026. With edits to match Minding the Campus’s style, it is crossposted here with permission.

Lightning rarely ever strikes the same place twice, so the fact that higher education is experiencing yet another case of self-awareness is a miraculous occurrence. 

The Harvard Medical School (HMS) released a report on April 21, 2026, following an assessment of the state of open inquiry and public discourse at HMS. This yearlong assessment began in May 2025 and was led by the HMS Open Inquiry Working Group (OIWG), culminating in a 40-page report that offers 11 key recommendations to “serve as a roadmap for fostering and advancing a culture at HMS that is dedicated to open inquiry and respectful discourse.”

Over the course of eight months, the 16-member OIWG committee met 17 times, including key HMS community members and other members of HMS educational and research communities in their discussions. Also worth noting is that six of the HMS OIWG are Heterodox Academy members, including the committee chair, Jeff Flier, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor and former Dean of Harvard Medical School.

The report seeks to address how HMS can enhance open inquiry and constructive dialogue on campus. To achieve this goal, the committee concludes that HMS “should encourage the articulation of informal ‘social compacts’ that express and embody critical elements of a healthy environment for open inquiry and constructive dialogue—both inside and outside the classroom, clinic, office, or laboratory—and in other venues across the medical school in which faculty, students, trainees, and staff interact.” These social compacts are value-driven, with the intent to build trust and foster interpersonal interactions across all aspects of life on campus and beyond. As an example, below are two of the five suggested social compacts in the report—these were adapted from the Heterodox Way:

1. Individuals should make their case with evidence and logic, citing credible sources and acknowledging reasonable contrary evidence. 
2. Individuals should be curious and intellectually charitable, engaging the strongest version of an opposing opinion and considering fresh possibilities.

To bring about these social compacts, HMS will need to develop and deploy materials and programs to support the desired changes, as noted in the second recommendation of the report. When it comes to addressing open inquiry at Harvard, OIWG is most concerned with issues specifically related to medicine and HMS. An excerpt from the third recommendation of the report addresses concerns over open inquiry and biomedicine at HMS, and some potential solutions: 

Faculty should be especially aware of these challenges in courses that address societal issues and their relationship to health care and should employ a pedagogy that supports and develops critical thinking abilities, including but not limited to the ability to assess the quality of data, familiarity with the concepts underlying cognitive biases, and the ability to reason inductively from core principles to formulate hypotheses. Preparatory material for classes, particularly for topics that are socially and/or politically controversial, should seek to present an appropriately diverse array of viewpoints, analyses of problems, and proposed solutions. Faculty should refrain from pedagogical approaches that misleadingly present complex and actively debated scholarly topics as settled facts or stifle students’ voicing of diverse perspectives on such topics by setting the expectation that there is only one ‘acceptable’ view.

Ultimately, the HMS OIWG report is a starting point for the program and hopefully the university at large to make necessary changes, but it will require continued oversight and clarification by leadership to effectuate them, as noted by the committee. But in all likelihood, outside accountability by education reformers and those concerned with the state of higher education will be needed to make sure things happen. 

As I pointed out in my assessment of Yale University’s own internal report, it remains up to these schools to implement the changes they deem are necessary—or if these reports are merely lip service. Regardless, the professors on the Yale committee and the HMS committee should be commended for their investigations, being bold enough to peek their heads above the mire polluting higher education to give, to the best of their abilities, a frank assessment of the current state of affairs and what needs to change. 

Restoring trust in higher education will take monumental effort by colleges and universities to roll back years of ideological influence, tuition inflation, corruption, and failure to rein in disciplines undermining education. Even Yale, with its fairly extensive internal assessment and promises to change, is now being scrutinized for rebranding its “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) programs after claiming to end them in June 2025. As of 2026, the Buckley Institute reveals that Yale still employs 208 individuals who currently or used to have roles supporting DEI efforts on campus. The university simply rebranded job titles, doing away with obvious DEI terminology, along with rebranding nine DEI offices in a similar manner. One notable example is that the Office of Diversity and Inclusion was renamed the Office of Employee Engagement and Workplace Culture. Was DEI always an HR degree and job mill? While the bulk of DEI staff are university-wide, some have remained in specific divisions, like the School of Medicine, which has 26 DEI personnel employed, and the School of Public Health with 13 employed. 

Failing to follow through on completely ridding Yale of DEI after claiming to do so cheapens the university’s claim that it wishes to restore trust in higher education. Perhaps another committee investigation is warranted to ensure Yale’s administration does follow through on its commitments. 

Regardless, the recent reports from Harvard and Yale still do offer hope that higher education has the potential to recognize its issues and chart a path toward reform. So, for now, kudos to the professors heading these committees and to Yale and Harvard for publishing their reports. 

Hopefully, more institutions will follow and follow through.