Daniel Diermeier
Chancellor, Vanderbilt University
Author, Mission and Margin
Universities are where society reflects upon itself. That’s not just academic—it’s a deeply practical responsibility. Because so many of our future leaders are shaped here, how we teach, lead, and live our values matters immensely.
Summary
In this episode of Leadership Matters, Alan Fleischmann sits down with Daniel Diermeier, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, for a wide-ranging and deeply personal conversation about leadership, resilience, and the evolving role of higher education in society. Throughout their conversation, Daniel reflects on his formative years as a first-generation college student in Germany, his early love of philosophy, and the life-changing experience of witnessing the fall of the Berlin Wall. He shares how these moments shaped his academic journey and his commitment to democratic institutions and civil discourse.
Daniel and Alan spoke about his career ,from teaching at Stanford and the University of Chicago to becoming a leading expert in crisis management, corporate reputation, and institutional trust, and now, Chancellor of Vanderbilt University. As Chancellor, Daniel has championed academic freedom, institutional neutrality, and inclusive dialogue. In the interview, he shares the university’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, its approach to recent campus protests, and the importance of grounding university leadership in purpose, not politics.
Mentions & Resources
Mission and Margin: A Practical Guide to University Finances by Daniel Diermeier
Reputation Rules: Strategies for Building Your Company’s Most Valuable Asset by Daniel Diermeier
Institutional Neutrality: A Guide For The Perplexed by Daniel Diermeier
Guest Bio
An internationally renowned political scientist, management scholar and visionary leader, Diermeier is Vanderbilt’s ninth chancellor.
Vanderbilt named Diermeier chancellor in late 2019 after an extensive search by the Board of Trust. In May 2024, the Board of Trust extended Diermeier’s contract until 2035 “as a demonstration of our confidence in Chancellor Diermeier’s leadership and to support the realization of his long-term vision for the university.
Upon stepping into his role in July 2020, Diermeier immediately committed to safely and successfully bringing students back to campus during the COVID-19 pandemic, making Vanderbilt one of a very small number of the nation’s best universities to do so. Today, in the spirit of Vanderbilt’s motto, Crescere aude, or “dare to grow,” Diermeier leads an ambitious program of expansion and improvement, driving efforts to create a culture of radical collaboration and personal growth and to increase Vanderbilt’s presence and reputation both nationally and globally. During a time of unprecedented criticism of higher education, and with society facing urgent and even existential challenges, Chancellor Diermeier has been nationally recognized as a leader in free expression and civil discourse on college campuses and has eloquently made the case for the social value of universities and their unique role as engines of innovation, exemplars of civil discourse and educators of tomorrow’s leaders.
Since Diermeier was named chancellor, Vanderbilt has become a destination for the most promising students and faculty, attracting a record number of admissions applications, posting its highest percentage of admitted students attending and expanding financial aid through Opportunity Vanderbilt. It has topped the $1 billion mark in external research funding and set a university record for licensing revenue—surpassing traditional innovation leaders Stanford and MIT. Vanderbilt’s endowment has grown from $6.9 billion to more than $10 billion since Diermeier’s arrival and, in 2023, Vanderbilt launched a record $3.2 billion fundraising campaign, including Vandy United, a $300 million effort to re-imagine Vanderbilt athletics.
In 2022, the university launched Discovery Vanderbilt, a multimillion-dollar investment to ignite and expand the university’s capacity for innovation and discovery across disciplines. Clinton Global Initiative University selected Vanderbilt as its host in 2023, the same year the university launched a landmark celebration of its Sesquicentennial. In 2024, Vanderbilt announced it was a establishing the College of Connected Computing, its first new college since 1981.
Beyond campus, Chancellor Diermeier has spearheaded efforts to increase cross-sector collaboration and employ Vanderbilt’s innovative capacity to expand Middle Tennessee’s innovation economy. In the summer of 2024, Vanderbilt and the office of Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell established the Nashville Innovation Alliance, which aims to bring together public, private, civic and education institutions to collaborate in improving the region’s ecosystem for innovation and research. Diermeier has also grown partnerships and collaboration with the U.S. military and national security agencies. He has driven development of the annual Vanderbilt Summit on Modern Conflict and Emerging Threats and established the Vanderbilt Institute for National Security. He led development of the Vanderbilt Project on Unity and American Democracy and, in the fall of 2023, oversaw the launch of Dialogue Vanderbilt, a multifaceted initiative to promote civil discourse on campus and affirm Vanderbilt’s long-standing commitment to free expression.
In 2024, Vanderbilt introduced Nashville Vanderbilt Scholars, a partnership with Metro Nashville Public Schools that covers the direct costs of attending Vanderbilt for any MNPS students admitted to Vanderbilt through the early decision process who also qualifies for a Federal Pell Grant or whose parent income is $100,000 or less.
In addition to his role as chancellor, Diermeier is University Distinguished Professor in the Owen Graduate School of Management and Distinguished University Professor of Political Science in the College of Arts & Science. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Guggenheim Foundation. He has published five books, with a sixth forthcoming and more than 100 research articles in academic journals—mostly in the fields of political science, economics and management, but also in linguistics, sociology, psychology, computer science, operations research and applied mathematics.
Throughout his career, Diermeier has proven to be a bold innovator, combining excellence as a leader, researcher and teacher with an entrepreneurial mindset. Before arriving at Vanderbilt, Chancellor Diermeier served in leadership roles at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and at the University of Chicago, where he served as dean of the Harris School of Public Policy. Chancellor Diermeier also served as director of the Ford Motor Co. Center for Global Citizenship and, in 2007, received the Aspen Institute’s Faculty Pioneer Award, called “the Oscars of the business school world” by the Financial Times.
A first-generation college graduate, Chancellor Diermeier earned a Ph.D. in political science from the University of Rochester. He also holds master’s degrees in political science from the University of Rochester and the University of Munich, and he earned a master’s degree in philosophy from the University of Southern California.
Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
Welcome to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Alan Fleischmann.
Today, I’m joined by a leader who is showing how higher education institutions can navigate the uncertainty and complexity of the current moment to prepare students for what’s next and advance life-changing innovation.
Daniel Diermeier is the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University, where he has brought a bold and innovative vision to higher education. Born and raised in Germany, Daniel’s academic curiosity led him to study philosophy and political science, eventually earning a PhD from the University of Rochester. He has held distinguished positions at Stanford, Northwestern, and more recently, at the University of Chicago, shaping future leaders in political science, business, and public policy. Beyond academia, he’s also been a sought-after advisor in corporate strategy, reputation management, and crisis leadership.
Under Daniel’s leadership, Vanderbilt has embraced academic freedom, strengthened civic engagement, and navigated the challenges of higher education with a commitment to both tradition and transformation. He’s also the author of the upcoming book Mission and Margin: A Practical Guide to University Finances, which gives an insider’s guide to the university and the way it’s funded.
Today, we will explore Daniel’s personal journey, his thoughts on the future of higher education, what it means to lead with integrity and authenticity in an era of rapid change and controversy, and the many lessons in leadership he has learned along the way. I know of no leader — and I get to work with so many — who comes with such crystal-clear clarity, curiosity, and humility, who has a great demand for getting things better and the confidence that comes with it, like Daniel Diermeier.
Daniel, I’m so glad to have you on the show.
Daniel Diermeier
Alan, it’s wonderful to be with you.
Alan Fleischmann
This is going to be really fun. I was at a dinner last night, and I talked about how there was a time I was wondering whether education and higher education would be valid in a new world order, especially with AI and other things. So we’ll get to that. But I learned from you that it’s never been more important. I was describing to people at this dinner last night, it goes back to your own leadership and your background—how you encourage debate, discourse, disagreement, all kinds of deliberations — all D-words. But you do it in a way that also makes sure that there’s a level of civility, respect, and safety so that people can feel comfortable to speak their mind. But do it in a way that reaches, hopefully, cooperation, and collaboration.
But before we go there, let’s talk about your early life in Germany. What was life like around the home? Tell us a little bit about your parents and siblings, anything that was special. Because I know you kind of chose your own path, and I’m sure there are a couple mentors along the way that discovered you. So I’d love to hear a little bit about them as well.
Daniel Diermeier
Happy to do it. So I was born in Berlin, in the western part of the divided city. Of course, for those of us that are old enough, we’ll remember that this was really the dividing line between the East and the West — the Cold War, the place where a lot of the Cold War drama played out. I have very vivid memories of that. We moved later to Munich when I was nine or ten years old, but growing up in West Berlin had a profound impact on me.
I’m the first of my family to go to high school. So I’m a first-generation in that sense. My sister is a little bit younger than me — she didn’t go to university either, didn’t go to high school. So there was really nobody around me that could provide some advice and mentorship. They were all loving and supportive, but they didn’t know about the world of colleges, high schools, and what that can mean for somebody.
And for me, school was fantastic. I loved it. I was the kind of kid that couldn’t decide between physics, and Latin, and history, all sorts of things. So it was like an all-you-can-eat buffet, and you want to try every one of the dishes. That was a very profound experience for me.
In retrospect, you notice that there were crucial mentors, teachers along the way. One of them was when I was fifteen or sixteen years old in high school, who started an after-school philosophy discussion group. I knew very little about philosophy, but I had read a couple of articles just by chance in popular magazines, and I participated. And there was love at first sight. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I wanted to be a philosophy professor. That was my goal in life — to the great astonishment of my parents, as you may imagine. But they let me do my thing. So I then received a fellowship from the German government. I had started studying philosophy as an undergraduate, and then was able to have a year abroad at the University of Southern California. I arrived, literally with two suitcases and $1,000 at LAX, immediately got lost on the freeway — as you should — but fell in love with the city and with the country and with the American universities.
I had a fantastic year at Southern Cal. I talked my way into the PhD program — I actually didn’t have a BA at the time, it’s a complicated thing. Then they told me I had to have a master’s. So we got that done. So I thought at twenty-three I was all set. My life’s dream was satisfied, and I started my PhD program. And then I realized very quickly that this was not for me. I didn’t want to be a professional philosopher, even though it had been a dream for me for years.
So I went back to Germany with my master’s from USC in hand to finish my German degree. And then the Wall came down. The Wall came down when I was in Germany, and I was in Berlin at the time. I was there when the Brandenburg Gate opened. I was on top of the Wall — unbelievable experience. I think to me, it’s still one of the highlights in my personal journey. But also, I think one of the wonderful moments in human history. I was on top of the Wall. I saw François Mitterrand, President Bush, Chancellor Kohl like a few yards away from me. Beethoven’s Ninth was playing — unbelievable.
And what I learned from that — I had been to East Germany before, in East Berlin, but after the Wall fell, you could go without any passport controls. And the same border guards that gave you such a hard time before were now the nicest people you ever were going to meet. And so that triggered a deep interest, I think, in political institutions and how important constitutions and rules and democracy are. I already had that experience living in West Berlin — how can you not, when you are so close to a totally different political system? You have to think about it. But it made it real in a very personal way for me. So I then switched over. I became interested in political science, a technical version of political science with game theory. I got my PhD in the United States, and that set me on my journey.
Alan Fleischmann
I love that. We were actually just a few feet away from each other and didn’t know it. I was there when the Wall came down and I had exactly the same observation. The very people that you would have been most frightened of just a couple of hours and days earlier, who were there with weaponry to stop anybody from doing anything, were the nicest and warmest people just a few days later — letting people go on the Wall, turning their heads at the beginning, and then letting people through the border. It says so much about what’s wrong and what’s right that divides us. At end of the day, when we are all human beings and can smile at one another, there’s an opportunity there.
Since you have such a fabulous perspective on so many levels — what is higher education like in Germany versus the U.S.? I mean, there’s a big difference, I know, that you have to decide your fate so early in Germany — what you want to study, what you want to pursue. It’s a little different, obviously, in the US; you have opportunities later. But I’m curious what the big differences are.
Daniel Diermeier
So in school, there were — and certainly at the time it was very important — big differences between the north and the south. The school system in Berlin was very different from Munich, and we moved when I was in third grade, towards the end of the school year. I was the best, the top student of my class in Berlin. I got a fantastic report card, all great. And I still have it, because we moved so late. Then I was in Munich and was the worst in my class, because the Bavarian school system was much more demanding. It was basically a year ahead of where the kids in Berlin were. I mean, literally the worst of my class. I couldn’t even understand what they were talking about.
The critical thing is that in fourth grade in Germany, you get sorted. You get sorted in three categories. The top 20-25% go to what’s called gymnasium, which is high school. Then the next segment goes to what they call middle school, where you graduate after ten years and you usually take some kind of white-collar profession, like a clerk at a bank. And then the third, which they call main school, that’s usually a skilled trade. My sister, for example, graduated from middle school after ten years. Then there’s some additional kind of continuing education, probably similar to community college that comes after that.
I was the worst in my class when I was in third grade. In fourth grade, I had to be in the top segment in order to go to university, in order to go to high school. And to the great credit of my parents, over the summer, my dad did math with me. My mom did German — spelling and things like that. And over the summer, I had caught up. Had they not done that, I would be a very unsuccessful plumber today. It’s not impossible to kind of switch between these different school tracks, but it’s hard to go to the next higher one.
It’s another example, just like the teacher that exposed me to philosophy, that there are these people in your life that, in retrospect, had a huge role. This was also true for the fellowship that I got from the German government — I met somebody who said, in a seminar for high school students, “You may want to try that.” Having that in your life is absolutely essential. For many students, that’s their parents or family member. But if you’re first-generation, you rely on somebody else to play that role. Not because people are not supportive, but because they just don’t have the experience, the knowledge, or the access to opportunities.
Alan Fleischmann
What I love about that is, also, it shows how your parents were not pushing you because they saw that as your future, but because you saw it as your future. How amazing about you, being so young and figuring this out, but also wonderful that your parents, who didn’t pursue any of this, would actually be so supportive.
Daniel Diermeier
They were wonderful and very loving, but absolutely not involved in my schooling after I was twelve. I mean, basically nobody ever went to a PTA meeting, and nobody checked my homework. I was totally on my own. It could have gone the other way too, but I was just enthralled, I think, by the whole experience of school, by learning. I very quickly became part of student government and was the president of student government for two years. So I was very involved with school affairs right away. I was politically interested, I was interested in all sorts of things.
They were supportive. They were not really deeply engaged, the exact opposite of a helicopter parent.
Alan Fleischmann
But during crucial moments they dove in, which is so wonderful.
I’m curious, though — you didn’t have that example of anybody around you with advanced degrees, but you had a thirst for knowledge and people and were filled with curiosity. What made you even know that you should pursue an advanced degree? I mean, you were the first from the gymnasium, then you were the first to go to college, but you went even further.
Daniel Diermeier
This is very interesting. So I think there were two aspects to that. One of them were people — mentors that basically say, “You want to try this.” They’re advancing you, right? Supporters, people that encourage you.
But there was something else that, now, is actually getting a lot of play in the academic literature, which is these neighborhood effects. There’s some very strong evidence that if you take a family or a student that comes from a challenged neighborhood, and the family moves into a neighborhood where everybody is going to go to university, there’s more social and human capital — the students do much better.
This is something I never realized until a year or so ago, when I started reading about this. My parents, for unknown reasons — my dad was a tailor originally, and then became a fashion designer, and my mom did the drawings and paintings, but basically stayed at home, was a homemaker — moved into this neighborhood, into a suburb of Munich, which was the place where the Siemens research labs were, along with another big other research facility. So the whole neighborhood was full of scientists and engineers. All my fellow students, their parents — especially their dads at the time — were all scientists and physicists. So it was normal for people to talk about what you’re going to do after college, or what are you going to do after high school. And when I was invited to lunch or dinner at their houses, I picked it up. That became the expectation, and that was a possibility.
So I know how critical this is when we’re thinking about students that are joining Vanderbilt or a highly selective university. One crucial barrier to access is financial barriers and all of that. But even if you take care of them, you have to have the aspiration — that you see this as a path for yourself. If there’s nobody in your life that can point you in that direction, it’s very difficult. I was lucky enough to have friends whose parents were university-educated. It was just a normal thing.
So that, I think, played a hugely important role. And then the other thing — I just loved the material. I loved the reading, I loved the learning. There was a deep pleasure in that for me. Even later on, when I was an academic, I think the experience that you understand something, that your mind expands, it’s just fantastic.
Alan Fleischmann
As you went along, did you imagine yourself one day being chancellor? Or did you think of yourself, “I’m going to be teaching at the business school at Stanford, and I’m going to be an expert at leadership, but I’m not going to be the actual principal”?
Daniel Diermeier
No, that was never a part of it. Originally, when I was studying philosophy, I thought the height of my ambition was that I would be some kind of lecturer, or maybe teaching continuing education, have a one-room apartment with a radio and a bunch of books. That was my dream. Then later on, after I got my PhD, it became clear that being a professor… I wanted to stay in the United States. I loved the system there. I thought it was much superior to the German university system. That became a real possibility. I went to a program that was on the rise and I was doing just the right type of work. So that was a real thing. But I wanted to be a faculty member, I wanted to be a professor. I wanted to teach and do research. That was the extent of my aspiration. I had no desires for leadership roles whatsoever.
And then, as life goes, over time you discover new opportunities and see that this is actually really suitable, something that you’re passionate about and that you enjoy doing. But that was another moment of discovery that came much later in life.
Alan Fleischmann
But in many ways, that makes you a better leader, right? Because you were discovering others as you were going along, from private, public, and civil society. So you actually learned a lot. Most leaders don’t get to do that. They don’t actually spend time — as they should, probably — looking at other people’s examples.
Daniel Diermeier
And there was one thing there, I think the self-discovery part is hugely important. When I was a faculty member, basically what that meant is you do your research, you write your papers, you teach. I loved all of these things, but there was always a little element that was about leadership, about being engaged. I did consulting at this point, engaging with the world of business. I also did some work with nonprofits and governmental organizations. So there was that aspect of my life that wasn’t really fully realized.
I had that when I was in high school. I was president of the student government at the time, which was a really quite terrible decision when you’re trying to finish your high school and you’re trying to get as good grades as possible, to have this whole other activity there. But I was passionate about it, it did me enormous good in my personal development. But at the time, it felt like almost a distraction. But that piece — that focus on leading, on creating something, on building something — had always been part of me, and it had never really had a proper outlet.
When I became a dean, then a provost, then a president, I realized that I had missed this for twenty years as a faculty member. I’d had small outlets — I had created institutes and programs — but the leadership component that I now really enjoy and I’m so fortunate to have had opportunity to realize was not really articulated. It was kind of dormant, or it was implicit. I had to discover that later in life.
Alan Fleischmann
Looking back now at all that you did in business, building up corporate understanding and expertise, being a student of politics too — that all led to university leadership. Because you are straddling between private, public, and civil society. How does that actually assist you now?
Daniel Diermeier
Oh, this is hugely valuable. I’m glad you picked that up. When you’re a university president or chancellor, it’s really three jobs. One job is, you’re an academic leader. You have to be clear and worry about the values that drive the institution, its purpose. You have to think about, how do you think about curricula? You have to think about providing support for the faculty. Where do you want to invest? Where are things going? What’s your point of view on AI in the classroom? All these types of things. So that’s one part.
The second part is, you’re basically the CEO of a mid-sized company. In our case, it’s about $2 billion in annual activities revenue at Vanderbilt. But we also have an endowment, it’s kind of like an asset management business. We have a corporate real estate thing. We have the academic side. We have college athletics. In many universities, you run a medical center. In our case, it’s technically independent, but I sit on the board. You are also the mayor of a small town. So there’s the business side that, I think, you really have to take seriously. And I take it very seriously.
And then the third piece is, you have to be a politician too. It’s like you’re a public official. So you’re the mayor of your community, with all the excitement and challenges that come with that. But you have to have partnerships — with the mayor of Nashville in this case, with state government and state leaders, and of course, the federal government as well. So you have to worry about everything that you would have as a public official, including communication and making sure that you’re navigating the political environment appropriately. All these things are needed.
A great university president will be able to do all three well. Depending on what time you’re in, one is more important than the other. Right now, of course, the political side is hugely important.
In retrospect, I think the fact that I had so many broad interests — I had this passion towards philosophy, I studied music for one semester very early in my career. So I have the whole humanities piece, but I love the social sciences, I love business, but I also was interested in the natural sciences. I had this experience of being in a business school and doing consulting, building a couple of boutique consulting outfits. So I had all of that. And I had this deep interest in politics, at least going back. So I was fortunate that I had the opportunity throughout my career to develop some skills and some familiarity with these different areas.
Just one example: twenty years ago now, I had co-created a program with two board members in Chicago called CEO Perspectives. This was a leadership program for C-level executives, and many of them became CEOs. The key component of this program was that there were CEOs in the room with participants — sixty minutes, ninety minutes, thirty participants — a very candid discussion about leadership. So I had, unbeknownst to me at the time, a fifteen-year master class from some of the country’s leading CEOs about how they lead. And I have taken so much of that and used it in my current environment.
Then I was fortunate enough when I became provost to have worked with President Zimmer, who was the country’s leader, I think, on free expression. That taught me about principles, the importance of articulating them, and making them real in a university.
So there were many different aspects to this that were very helpful. I’m just as excited to talk to an astrophysicist as I am to an economist, as I am to somebody in history, because all these were parts of my life that were very important and relevant to me.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s also so important. We’re going to get back to what you said, because it became such a powerful specialty and authenticity for you to deal with the faculty, when you became chancellor. The fact that this is what you as an academic were dealing with — it kind of made it so that the professors couldn’t say you were just the administrator. You could tackle them intellectually, because you were taking on something that you knew inside and out. That happened to be a pretty urgent specialty, not in the normal job description, a few years later.
Daniel Diermeier
I think that’s a very important insight. Particularly when you’re leading one of the great research universities of this country, it’s really difficult to do this if you’re not a faculty member, and you’re not a faculty member at a level that they respect. So you need that — that they look at you as a peer. If you don’t have that, it’s really, really challenging.
And there’s always this debate: should we have presidents that come outside of the academy, or why not? But it’s a little bit like if you’re the managing partner of a law firm — if you don’t understand that, if you don’t know this in detail, it’s really, really difficult to get the respect of your colleagues; in this case, of the faculty. And if you don’t have that, it’s really challenging. It’s a hyper-specialized industry with very unique characteristics. If you’re not intimately familiar with it, and if you don’t get the people, it’s challenging. I’m not saying it can’t be done, but my sense is that it’s very challenging to do that well if you come from outside the academy. If you’re thinking about the leadership development for people that want to become presidents or chancellors, a better way is to develop the administrative and business skills, but make sure they have solid academic standing in their community.
Alan Fleischmann
The credibility part is enormously important, more now than ever.
You’ve got very strong perspectives on what needs to be rebuilt and built. But before we get there, I want to ask you a couple of things. You’ve written some pretty interesting books. I mentioned the one that’s coming, Mission and Margin. But there’s also Corporate Reputation and Social Activism, which also is an example of your extreme relevancy right now as a leader regarding strategic interaction, behavior, and social welfare. Then there’s Reputation Rules as well. Tell us a little bit about those.
Daniel Diermeier
So my original work was quite technical. I was trained as an applied game theorist and I had applied that to political institutions, basically trying to understand the effects of, let’s say, parliamentary and presidential democracies, questions like that. My first job was at Stanford Business School, and I went there, really, because the research group was the best in the world. I didn’t know much about business schools, didn’t know much about business. But very quickly, I liked that kind of interdisciplinary environment. I liked teaching MBA students. It was great. Then I was recruited to Northwestern to build a program there.
Then, over time, I started teaching executives. And in order to teach business schools and executives, it has to be relevant to them. You can’t just come in and try to convince them that what you’re doing is super interesting. So the original thing that I taught was business and politics, if you will. Then it became clear that the areas they were most interested in, especially senior executives, was when they had a crisis. So, together with a colleague of mine, we developed this curriculum on crisis management, and that became super successful. It became a very successful class for executives, but also for MBA students. We developed curricula around that.
So my first book, Reputation Rules, was really putting all of that together. It was a very practical book. It was a book for executives. How do we think about how to manage these crises? Because most executives are not, through their background, prepared for this. For example, how do you deal with a crisis that involves the media? How do you deal with exposure? How do you make decisions under pressure? All these types of things were part of what we were trying to develop there.
There was a very important component, also, of what I would call the moral dimension of business. I don’t mean business ethics here. I mean that people very often evaluate business decisions from a moral point of view. They think something is fundamentally unfair or unjust. We all remember the financial crisis, of course, where these aspects played a very important role. And that had not really been, I think, fully appreciated, at least in this area.
After I did this first book, I was then interested in doing more rigorous work on that. And so I spent the next ten years or so developing a variety of research programs that looked into that. They used multiple approaches, from experiments to what’s now called AI, which at the time was called text analytics, processing large text data sets, to understand this.
That led to two follow-up works. One is called Reputation Analytics, which is a much more rigorous approach to think about this. That came out a couple of years ago. The other one was… I was very interested in understanding the role of social activists in business. Things like Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network, the whole issue of what was then called corporate social responsibility, what’s now mostly referred to as ESG — though they’re not quite the same thing. I was very interested in how this worked, because I could see that it had a tremendous impact on business practice and was growing.
So the second strand of that was trying to understand how this works and what the challenges were for leaders in this environment. So it was good preparation for me to operate in hyper-politicized and polarized environments.
Alan Fleischmann
Which is quite stunning, actually. No one has the background, really, to do what you’re doing, and you really have it. When people say, “Oh, the job description of a president or chancellor has changed so dramatically. Who could be prepared for it?” The reality is, there’s a reason why Vanderbilt is doing so well. You are prepared for it — with your natural leadership skills on top of it.
Tell us a little bit… You’re very fond of your experience, I know, as provost at the University of Chicago. There were some great things you did there. Tell us a little bit about that, and then how the chancellorship came to be at Vanderbilt: what drove you to see something in Vanderbilt that has allowed you to take a lot of that life leadership experimentation and bring it to this great school with a great tradition.
Daniel Diermeier
So I had been approached by headhunters to be a dean of a business school — that was natural. And I had a couple of conversations over the years, and I was ready at this point to try something new in my life, but nothing really fit. Then I became the dean of public policy at the University of Chicago, the Harris School. I’d been multidisciplinary in the world of politics, business, policy. So that was natural. Wasn’t a big step for me.
But what really sold me on taking this role, which was a big surprise to many people, because most people thought I would end up as a business school dean, was the president, President Bob Zimmer, who tragically passed away a couple of years ago. It was one of these meeting moments when you’re kind of skeptical when you walk in, and when you walk outside, you’re like, “I have to do this.” It was the combination of ambition, tremendous intelligence, and really being grounded in a set of values. So I took this job at the Harris School. It was bit of a turnaround job, which they told me and which I wanted to do, and we made great progress there.
So after two years, I was appointed provost. And provost, for the non-academics, is kind of like the chief academic officer. All the deans report up to you, which is a challenging environment at the University of Chicago. It’s a very rigorous place, very proud place, and people love to argue about everything. When people want to know what it’s like to be an administrator at the University of Chicago, I would always say: You leave your office and you walk across the quad with the sun shining. You run into a faculty member and you say, “Good morning.” And then they say, “What’s the evidence for that?” That’s the University of Chicago. Everything is contested, everything is debated. It’s an exciting place, but it’s also a challenging place.
So what happened during this period… If you recall, we’re talking around 2015. I started in 2016 and was provost four years. That was the time on free speech. There were controversial speakers on campus, you had the Halloween costume controversy at Yale. So there was a question about, how do we think about free expression and free speech? There were debates on trigger warnings, safe spaces, all of that stuff. That was the challenge there. The University of Chicago had a long tradition on that, really going back to its founding, and was very vocal on that. There was a famous report that was written around that time, later known as the Chicago Principles. And Bob Zimmer really was a wonderful voice for these principles. He was a huge proponent and became the public voice for that.
But there was a critical moment that really taught me a huge amount. A letter sent from the Dean of Students Office welcoming students and it became a big deal. It was a feisty letter that had statements like, “This is a place of no intellectual safe spaces,” and “We have no trigger warnings.” I would say it was a feisty letter. And overnight, it got like 300 million social media mentions. It just exploded. It came from inside the organization, it wasn’t supposed to be a big deal, but it totally exploded.
We had to make a decision of how to handle that. We got advice from consultants that said, “Oh my God, you got to retract the letter. It’s so controversial.” And President Zimmer and I thought about it, and we both agreed that that’s not true. We’re going to go with it. What we realized is that, even though there were aspects of the letter that were problematic, the principles were real. They were very much University of Chicago principles. And this is a moment where everybody is paying attention. And when you pay attention, you leave an impression, you leave a lasting impression. So if you’re in a moment like this where your values are tested and you can live up to your values, it is a wonderful opportunity. So don’t think about this as some big threat. Think about this as an opportunity — an opportunity to leave an impression that people remember what you stand for.
That’s what we did, and that became hugely successful. President Zimmer really became the national spokesperson, I think, for free expression as a consequence of that. And I learned from that that you got to be clear about your principles and values. You have to act accordingly. And then when you do, don’t be afraid to talk about it.
I think that’s a big difference. Many universities have the tendency, when things get rough or there is media exposure, to try to calm the waves, calm the waters. But if the issue is about something that you feel strongly about and you think that you have the moral high ground, you have got to lean in. That’s what we did, and that was a very important lesson for me.
So at any rate, I did this for four years, and then after about three years, people knocked at the door and they said, “Hey, you want to be president or chancellor?” Chancellor is just another word for president. My mom loves it, so she is happy that she has a chancellor as her son. And what I wanted… I wanted to be at a university where I felt that I could write the next chapter, that there was real, unrealized potential. I didn’t want to be at a place where they write on my tombstone, “He didn’t sink the ship.” I like to be in a place where you can see yourself having some impact — in partnership with everybody else, but where what you bring to the table can make a difference. That was very quickly clear at Vanderbilt. It was a great university, the board was ambitious and courageous. I felt that Nashville was fantastic, at the beginning of another growth spurt. There is tremendous opportunity in the South for economic development. All these things turned out to be correct, but they became even better than I thought.
So I decided, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go to Vanderbilt. I had no connection with Vanderbilt whatsoever. I had been to a conference at the law school years before, given a paper, had some hot chicken, saw a great guitarist, thought this was a fun place to be, but that’s all I had. And they took a chance on me. Because Vanderbilt, for example, is a big athletic school. And I come from the place where fun goes to die, where they shut down one of the biggest college football programs in the ’40s, the University of Chicago. That was a big, courageous thing to do for the board, and I loved that. That was important to me, that this would be an important environment, one with the possibility for real impact. That’s when I took the role.
Alan Fleischmann
Tell us a little bit about Vanderbilt’s tradition and transformation. You’ve been very respectful of this extraordinary tradition at Vanderbilt,I’ve heard you talk about it. But you’ve also been leaning in heavily on its consistency, commitment to innovation, and also community.
Daniel Diermeier
100%. So, Vanderbilt plays an enormously important role in the community in Nashville and in Tennessee — really, the whole region of the Southeast. A bigger role, even, than places like University of Chicago or Stanford or Berkeley. For every Stanford there’s a Berkeley, and for every Chicago there’s a Northwestern, but we are such a singularity in this environment. So that was very clear and important to me.
Now, what I saw was… I loved the values. I loved what they stood for, but I also felt that they needed to be sharpened, more clearly communicated and operationalized. Here’s what I mean by that: our nickname, which we don’t like but I’m going to go with that now, is “the Harvard of the South.” It’s very interesting to see how this changed over the years. We’re 152 years old now, and in the first, I would say, 125 years, “Harvard of the South” meant you’re the best university in the South. We can have debates whether that’s true or not, but that was the positioning, and it had a strong regional flavor. It had a sense that, if you wanted to send your sons and daughters to a great university, but you didn’t want to send them to the Ivies — because God knows what they’re learning there, they may stay in New York and never come back — you send them to Vanderbilt. So it was a destination for people from the South that wanted a strong academic institution, but with a clear sense that it was reflective of the region and people would stay. That’s what we were. And there are a couple of other universities across the country that had similar positioning.
Then about 25 years ago, the board and the president decided we want to be a national university, in large part because the competition for talent and resources became more national. This kind of regional model was not really viable anymore. I think that was a great, very courageous decision. So that’s what they did. Naturally, then they looked at other universities. They looked at other models and took what worked, whether it was Ivy League universities, or Stanford, or other universities. There were a whole bunch of other universities that were role models. So “Harvard of the South” then meant something like, “Well, kind of like Harvard, but in the South.” It’s a different positioning. You’re benchmarking now against the great national universities, that’s your inspiration. That was really important. That set the aspiration and did many wonderful things, but we lost a little bit of the original sense of who we were. There was too much looking over the shoulder.
What I noticed in the first faculty meetings that I was in — people would say something like, “Well, but at Yale, they’re doing this.” This was considered an argument. At the University of Chicago, if somebody says, “Well, at Yale, they’re doing this,” that is a reason not to do it. People are very proud of their identity, they feel strongly about it, and they’re not benchmarking against anybody. So Chicago taught me the importance of being utterly clear about who you are, what your values are, and really lean into that. So we had pivoted with a lot of great things, but we were too much benchmarking against others.
When I came in, I said, “We’ve got to be ourselves. We got to be proudly ourselves. We got to lean into our identity and our values, but do it at a level that is world-class.” Not with the sense that we can’t compete with the world’s best universities, but do so in a way that was commensurate and expressive of who we were and what was unique about us. That was critical. Then we tried to articulate that, and that has been hugely successful for us. There is a unique identity that Vanderbilt has that is different from most universities. Articulating that, and living those values day to day, has been enormously important and extremely beneficial for us.
Alan Fleischmann
I mean, since October 2023, we’ve seen a lot of disruption and extreme debate on campuses all over the world. But at Vanderbilt, we’re seeing discourse.
Of course, you’ve had moments there that’s called for your leadership. But how would you describe what’s happening across the country and globally? And then, how are you doing it differently? We’re hearing a lot right now why, but I want to see how you’re applying that to Vanderbilt.
Daniel Diermeier
Why don’t I start with how we thought about it, and then I’ll broaden it out.
So, everything we try to do is based on our sense of purpose and our sense of values. We’re very intentional about this. For example, I started on July 1, 2020, during COVID. We have one pillar of our education, which is really critical to us, which is that we want our students to grow academically, but also as whole people. The second pillar is that we believe that that’s best done as members of a community that’s supportive and challenging. That becomes real for undergraduates through our residential education model, where we really believe in a living-learning community and there are lots of opportunities in the residential colleges to work together, learn together, develop together.
You can’t do this online. So that purpose, that commitment to a particular type of education that emphasizes not only the academic side, but if you will, the emotional and social side, the whole person side — that’s very important to us. That student life is very difficult to replicate in an online setting.
So we basically never said, “Should we go online or in person?” If you ask that, you go online, because obviously the risks are smaller. So we didn’t do that. We said, “On the contrary, what do we do to make sure that we can bring students back onto campus, as many as possible, and to create as much of a residential experience, a living-learning community, as we can under those circumstances?” Our staff and our faculty worked literally 14-16 hours a day to make it work. It was super difficult, but we invited all our undergraduates back on campus. The fall of 2020, 85% were there. Everything was turned into a classroom. We had one-way walk paths and roundabouts, all sorts of complicated things, but we got it done. It wasn’t the perfect experience. It wasn’t as good as it usually was, but it was the best that we could make possible in that environment. Our students knew it, and they recognized it.
So that’s how we always want to think about it. What’s our purpose? And then, how do we translate this to the challenges of the situation?
After October 7, the key questions for us were: How do we have pathbreaking research? How do we think about a transformative education, and how should we think about free speech and free expression under those circumstances? We had thought about this before October. As a matter of fact, I had talked about it in my inaugural address, because it’s really central to have a point of view on that. And I said, “Okay, there are three pillars at Vanderbilt.”
Pillar one: free expression. Free expression for us means that we want to be a place where ideas can flourish and where students can explore ideas, no matter where they take them. The same is true for faculty. So we call this open forums — we actively want to lean in, this is an open forum of ideas. What this means in practice is that our students, registered student groups, can bring any speaker on campus whatsoever, and so can our faculty. This goes back to the ’60s. Starting in ’64, our students organized a symposium. In 1967, they had Strom Thurmond and Stokely Carmichael on campus, which was enormously controversial. They organized it and the chancellor at the time supported them. That’s our tradition of open forum. So we had it, but it had to just be articulated.
The second pillar, which also goes back to the ’60s, was a tradition of institutional neutrality. That means that we will not take a position on controversial political or policy issues. We will not take a position on foreign policy, for example. Why? Because we want to create an environment where there’s no party line, where there’s no institutional orthodoxy. Where you can explore ideas freely. Where there’s no chilling effect that makes it less likely that you want to say something that will not be accepted by everybody, or even by most people on campus. So that’s the second piece: institutional neutrality.
The third pillar, we call civil discourse. Civil discourse means that we never forget that we are members of one community that came here to live and learn together. We’re going to treat each other with respect. We’re going to listen. We use arguments and fact-based reasoning to convince the other side, not to shout them down. Now that’s more of a cultural thing, and it was very important to us that this became part of the student culture in particular. So when our students arrive on campus, we have an enormous amount of programming on that, which we call Dialogue Vanderbilt. It really starts the moment you set foot on campus. We talk about it during admissions.
One example of that: our students, when they arrive on campus as freshmen, they sign a Community Creed, which is kind of like a promise to each other…
Alan Fleischmann
A social contract.
Daniel Diermeier
It’s a social contract. The important piece is that they sign it and it embodies those values. Because we want the students to be owners of this culture and they are now. So we work very hard at that. There are student ambassadors that do that. There are activities among themselves. Some things we organize, some things we do not.
As an example, before the presidential election… We have a vibrant Democratic chapter on campus. We have College Democrats, we have College Republicans. They had a joint debate on campus, which does not happen anymore on many university campuses. All self-organized, with questions by the student newspaper editor. There were 180 students there. The topics were immigration, abortion, and the size of the federal government — not exactly softballs. It was wonderful, and everybody walked away having learned something about the other side. And that’s our culture on campus.
So fast forward now to October 7. So October 7 happens, and the first three to four months, our students did fantastic. Everything that we wanted them to do, they did. They were engaged seriously. They had serious conversations. Some people were protesting on Alumni Lawn, which is an important part of campus. We had one display with images of the hostages. We had another display with civilians that were killed by airstrikes. They were passionately making their case, but everybody got room for the other side, and we used arguments, and we used evidence. It was really good.
Then in late December, we had a more radical pro-Palestinian group forming, kind of taking the playbook that you could see at other universities. And they were very clearly asking us to denounce Israel for genocide and stop all sorts of collaboration with academic institutions in Israel, but also divest from companies that have ties to Israel, boycott their products and so forth — what’s called the BDS movement: boycott, divestment, and sanctions.
If you go back to our values, that’s inconsistent with our values. Our values say we are not going to take a position on foreign policy conflicts, because we have a commitment to institutional neutrality. I said that very clearly. We will not participate in a BDS movement. We will not take a position on one side or the other.
That was done in January. This group was not happy with that, and made it clear that they disagreed with those values. They then occupied my building — or a subset of them, 27 students. There was still some construction going on in there and it was closed, but there were already people working in there. Anyway, they forced their way into the building, ran over a security guard who was injured, tried to get into my office, couldn’t get in, then sat down in front of the foyer and occupied the building.
We basically said, “Look, you’ve violated rules, a whole bunch of rules. You used false pretenses to get into the building. You injured a security guard, and you’re engaged in trespassing. So that is not consistent with our values, that’s not consistent with our rules, so you have to leave.”
So we cleared the building within twenty hours, and a couple of students were arrested. Everybody was interim suspended. We then had a disciplinary process, which is the same process we use all the time. Took about three-and-a-half weeks. We had three students expelled, we had some suspensions, and we had some long-term probations. So our point of view was, these are our values, these are our rules, but if you break the rules, there are consequences.
Alan Fleischmann
And the articulation of that was with extreme clarity. The lead-up work that you did and cultural work that you did — the leaning in on discourse was something that you also brought to leadership. It was part of Vanderbilt’s tradition, but you enhanced it completely. That authenticity you mentioned becomes even more important.
Daniel Diermeier
This is very important. think this was something that I had learned from Chicago.
That was a big deal. That was a big deal, and there was a lot of media interest. I then decided to write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal to basically explain our decision, what we did, why we did it, and what the values were.
Again, most universities’ instincts would have been, “Well, let’s hope that the headlines go away, let’s hope to get out of the headlines as quickly as possible.” We didn’t think, that because we felt we were doing the right thing. We had acted according to our principles, and because of that, we should be able to talk about and explain that in public clearly. So I wrote that op-ed piece, and the response was incredible. I mean, it was one of the most positive things I’ve done in my career. Very positive response from alums, very positive response from parents, but also from students and from faculty. Not from everyone. Some people thought that we should have handled this differently. That’s okay. But the overall response was very positive.
Then basically, I followed up with that a little bit, and I had a couple of other pieces. The key point that I tried to make during this period was the crucial importance of institutional neutrality. That universities would lose their core purpose, or drift away from their core purpose, if they take positions on political issues. If they, as an institution, tell people what the right thing to do is. Our view was always, that’s not our job. That’s the role for faculty and for students. So it is not our job to criticize the Supreme Court. It is the job of our law school faculty and other faculty to have a point of view on Supreme Court decision-making, or foreign policy, or what have you.
To my great surprise, this has now had a significant positive impact. We saw some of the first universities last summer adopt the principle of institutional neutrality; now, we just had a report coming out by the Heterodox Academy that showed 140 universities have now adopted this. Now, not exactly as I would do it, with some modifications, but the trend is very clear. I think universities are now realizing, more and more, that it is a really important thing to be neutral on. To be a platform for where ideas can be discussed, rather than trying to get the answer on this topic or the other.
Alan Fleischmann
I know one of your colleagues that you seem to be very much in sync with and you worked together — she was your vice provost — is Sian Beilock from Dartmouth. She talks about institutional neutrality and institutional restraint. Are they similar? Is there a difference between the two?
Daniel Diermeier
So, this is now really deep inside the weeds, but it’s an important thing. The way we think about institutional neutrality is really as a prohibition on position-taking on issues that are beyond the core purpose of the university. So you have to take a point of view and say, “On the core purpose of the university, we will be advocates.” So for example, on free speech, on research funding, on Pell Grants, we will be advocates. That’s why it’s super important to be clear about the core purpose. For us, the core purpose is pathbreaking research and transformative education. Fundamentally, it’s about creating knowledge and then transmitting it to the next generation through education. That’s our purpose.
Then there are things that are clearly outside the purpose. So for example, how do you feel about Israel? Or, how do you feel about any other kind of foreign policy issue? Along with many other other policy issues, but that’s, I think, the clearest one. So we will not take positions on foreign policy, for example. We will also not take positions on the Dobbs decision by the US Supreme Court. Now, our faculty will have all sorts of points of view on that. Some will say it’s a terrible decision. Others say it’s a great decision. Others will say, “Well, I really think there should be... As President Clinton used to say, ‘access to abortion should be safe, legal, and rare,’ but the Supreme Court decision to derive this from a right to privacy, was not well-reasoned. So it should be done by Congress or by the state legislature.” People can have all sorts of points of view on that, but we do not believe it’s appropriate to say that the Dobbs decision is inconsistent with university values. That would be violating institutional neutrality. So that’s institutional neutrality.
Institutional restraint is a position that has been adopted by, most prominently, Princeton, but a couple of other universities — Dartmouth as well, Yale has done something similar. That’s a little different. So they’re saying, “Well, we want to have a presumption against position-taking, but there are cases where we may.” The problem that I have with this position is, well, what are the criteria for that? What’s the justification for that? And what does it say about your purpose? If you take positions outside of your core — on abortion, on foreign policy — aren’t you implicitly deviating, ever so slightly perhaps, from your core purpose? That’s my concern with that. I like that everything should come from the purpose. If, for example, you’re saying, “We’re divesting from, let’s say, private prisons,” what does that mean about your purpose? What does that have to do with anything and what you stand for as a university?
So it’s important for us that, when we talk about institutional neutrality, we don’t just mean speech. We mean actions. We mean no restriction on research funding. We mean no divestment, no boycotts. Our endowment is not used for position-taking. But many universities are engaged in divestment: on climate, on private prisons, on whatever particular foreign policy issues. We just don’t think that’s appropriate, because our purpose as a university is to be a platform for ideas, if you will. We want to encourage ideas. We don’t want to settle them.
Climate policy or energy policy are heavily contested issues. People have all sorts of points of view on that, and they should. These ideas need to be debated, but we shouldn’t be going and telling you we have to think about it this way.
Alan Fleischmann
It’s a brilliant move. It’s a wonderful way to keep the focus on the mission and purpose of that university, rather than on whatever is hitting you, whatever is in the news, whatever is coming your way. It makes everyone stop and pause; to ask the question, “What are we here for? What are we seeking and what are we achieving?” rather than, “How are we responding? How are we reacting?”
Daniel Diermeier
Exactly. I think it’s important to say… One thing is your statement, right? This is like a mission statement, statement of purpose. But the other thing is, whenever you act in a particular way, you are defining your mission implicitly. It’s like precedence. You’re adding to that. Then it’s very difficult to dial that back.
And my sense is that one of the reasons, not the only reason, but an important reason for all the drama that we’ve seen post-October 7, is just that. Universities were drifting away from their core purpose of research, creation of knowledge, transmission of knowledge, education; they were more and more treating and thinking about themselves as being an adjudicator of important political and policy issues. That’s just inconsistent with their mission and creates all sorts of unintended side effects and problems down the line.
Alan Fleischmann
So are you optimistic about the future of higher education for those who get it right? You’ve shown evidence that, if there’s such a thing in the world as supply and demand for universities, the demand for Vanderbilt is going through the roof. Understanding of Vanderbilt’s culture is becoming very clear. Obviously, your leadership has everything to do with that clarity. You’ve also got a sharp faculty and a very diverse student body. Are you bullish about the university?
Daniel Diermeier
I mean… I’ve said this before and I talk to my board about it too. I kind of live in two worlds. The first world is the Vanderbilt world. The Vanderbilt world is going super well. We have a thriving campus. The students are happy. Faculty is doing great work. We’re having records in terms of demand for Vanderbilt education, fundraising, research funding. Everywhere you look, we’re on a rapid upward trajectory. We are now seeing a particular influx, a strong influx of families. We always have been strong in New York, on the East Coast and the Northeast, but what we’ve seen now we’ve never seen before. It’s a lot of families, a lot of Jewish families, that are really attracted by how we handled October 7 and the values — we have a thriving Hillel, we have a thriving Chabad. We have a thriving Jewish community on campus. It’s very important to us that every member of our community can thrive here. That includes, importantly, our Jewish families. So that’s going super well.
Now, the world of higher education, of course, is on fire right now. It becomes, yet again, super polarized, like everything that seems to be happening these days. There’s a lot of problems with that. But I think there is also… You asked me, am I optimistic? I think if we do it well, it’s also an opportunity for us to reflect — with all the other drama that we have over funding and all of that, but not to forget that we also need to reflect a little bit on how we got here, what was the path.
We know — and I’ve been vocal on that over the years — that public trust in American research universities has been plummeting, on the left and on the right, for different reasons. It has been going down for quite a bit of time, more so on the right than on the left, but we’ve lost on both of them. What that tells me is, number one, we have not been able to articulate clearly to the American public how valuable the great research universities are and the tremendous benefit they’re generating for this country and for the world: on medical research, on economic competitiveness, on innovation. On all the incredible things that originated in universities. On all the breakthroughs in clinical research that are now there in cancer treatments, in how to deal with neurodegenerative diseases and heart transplants. Vanderbilt University is the biggest and most successful heart transplant center in the world. This is an enormously valuable thing that universities are doing, to be an innovation machine on so many different things. So we have not communicated that, and I think we’ve just taken this for granted.
The other thing, which as I hinted at, is that I think we have been drifting from our core mission. As a sector, we have started playing politics. We have, in some cases, taken sides. So, together with Washington University, we formulated a statement of principles which basically is a commitment to excellence, a commitment to political neutrality and free speech, and a commitment to access for students and creating an environment where they can grow. We put a big Wall Street Journal ad on that. We put them in our bylaws, and we’re talking about this with other university leaders now. Because I think that, down the line, yes, we need to be advocates for great universities. That is true, no doubt about that, and we need to be much more persuasive and much more effective. But we’ve got to make sure that we are clear about our purpose and our values, and living them every day. That is crucial. If we’re not fixing that, even if we get through this period, we’re not going to be done. The trust and the challenges for higher education will just continue.
So, am I optimistic? I am, but only if we seize this moment to re-establish trust with the American public and doing it by being much more effective communicators, but also, by fixing the things that are not right right now.
Alan Fleischmann
That’s amazing.
What didn’t I ask you? This is not a simple question — we’re trying to create community, civilization, tomorrow’s leaders, today’s big debates, and come to solutions and answers. You’re doing that. In many ways, the university is like the greatest experiment of humankind.
Daniel Diermeier
We’re a place where these types of big issues are sometimes first debated and discussed, or most fiercely debated and discussed. So there’s something special about universities. Yes, they’re great educational institutions. Yes, they’re great research institutions. Yes, they’re innovation machines. But they’re also places where society reflects upon itself. And that is a crucially important role that universities have.
I think the battles that you see playing out in society are, not for the first time, being played out on universities’ campuses with more ferocity and with higher stakes, if you will, than elsewhere in society. So as leaders, I think that means we need to be clear about what our mission is and how this relates to the broader values that we want to advocate for in a free society. And this is not just an academic, theoretical exercise. In practice — no matter how you feel about it — a lot of the leaders of this country are our graduates.
We talk about this all the time. We talk about educating leaders for the next generation. What kind of leader do I want? If somebody is coming to Vanderbilt or any one of the elite universities, what do I want them to walk away with? So many of our graduates are leaders in business and politics. We have a strong tradition in placing people in leadership roles in the military — admirals, generals, senators, and governors, and all of that.
What do I want from them? What I want is that they are well-educated; not just narrowly in their specific area. That they can work together, that they understand how valuable it is to be members of a supportive and challenging community. But they need to be able to use reason, to use arguments, to understand people with perspectives different than their own. And that can’t immediately trigger a mechanism where the other side is wrong and needs to be condemned. That will not work well. It will not work well for this country, and it will not work for the leaders of this country.
You asked me about whether I’m optimistic. Whenever things get tough, all I have to do is spend some time with our students, and they’re fantastic. When I look at them and what they do, and how much they have embraced these values and make them real on a day-to-day basis… If these students run the country thirty years from now, we’re going to be just fine.
So, I think a clear point of view on what it is that we want our leaders to be for the next generation is really important. I’ll tell you one thing that worries me; we as universities have retreated from questions such as character, values, purpose. For many universities, that is not central anymore, and I think we have got to lean into that. We want to make sure that the students, that are so equipped to do anything, do things that are meaningful, that are valuable, and are done in a way that makes us proud.
We can do something about that, and it needs to be part of our mission, our purpose. It needs to be a reality in everyday life.
Alan Fleischmann
Critical thinking, critical leading.
Daniel Diermeier
And being able to… this is a pluralistic society, okay? This is what I love about the way we do admissions — you’re going to have students that go up the entire political spectrum. If you come from a side that has a strong social justice focus, you’re going to meet students here that are evangelical Christians. You may be roommates with them, and you’re going to have to negotiate that, and you’re going to have to learn from each other. And boy, that’s valuable.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, you have this other thing, I know, which is unique at Vanderbilt. You have the freshman campus, where when you’re a first-year student, students live among one another. As diverse as the student population is — both internationally, domestically and as you described just now, in backgrounds and perspectives coming in — you get to learn to live with them right away from day one, which creates, I would guess, the bedrock of that community you described.
Daniel Diermeier
100%. Community is hugely important for us. We really believe that it’s critical to development, particularly for students when they arrive on campus. So we think about it: room, floor, house, freshman commons, then the university. We’re building community step by step.
Just to give you an example of how critical this is: one of the things that we’re very worried about is that students are self-censoring. That they have a particular point of view, or they may have something in a class discussion which is challenging the majority opinion, and they’re holding back because they’re worried. That’s the big fear that students have — they may be a little bit worried about what the professor thinks, but they’re really worried about what their fellow students think. They want to avoid saying something controversial and being ostracized, cut off from their social life, which is a disaster for them. So the worry is that they’re holding back.
Civil discourse and a free speech culture requires trust, requires a sense that, when we’re in a classroom together and I say something that you don’t agree with, that I’m not immediately being ostracized. If I don’t have that trust, then I’m going to pull back.
So unfortunately, many high schools don’t do that anymore. They don’t prepare the students well for an experience, a culture of civil discourse. So we have to do that when they arrive on campus. It starts right away: when they arrive on campus, we have these small group activities, where 10 or 15 students sit in a circle and then we have a topic, something that we debate. And then, crucially, we have upperclassmen come in and demonstrate to them — you’re from one side, you’re the other side, but they’re friends. They respect each other, just like our head of the College Democrats and our head of the College Republicans respect each other. They disagree passionately, but they respect each other and they see that they’re members of one community.
So the students need to see this in action, and then they try. And that’s a culture that cannot really be legislated from the top. But it can be encouraged, it can be fostered. And you have to do this through a whole variety of different things that are crucial in order to make sure that your students really fully appreciate each other, learn from each other, so that this is a full and rewarding educational experience for them.
Alan Fleischmann
You’ve been not only been convening on campus, you’ve been convening other university leaders together as well: drawing them in, bringing forward this institutional neutrality and that vision. Tell us a little bit about that, how’s that going?
Daniel Diermeier
So we had a big event last week in Dallas where we over forty universities, I think, represented by their board chairs and a bunch of other thought leaders. It was an off-the-record conversation on how do we regain trust for American universities. It’s so important that we, as university leaders engage, in this dialogue, because we’re all struggling with similar challenges. And that we’re clear about what we need to do on our campuses, what we need to do together.
So I’ve been very active on that. And I cherish the opportunity to bring people together to be part of the conversation. I will be forceful. I will have my own point of view, then we debate it and discuss it. But I’m just delighted that I see so many universities moving towards institutional neutrality. I mean, that’s really nice. That’s great to see. We hope that the efforts that we’re doing together — to be clear about what our purpose is, clearly have this articulated, and having universities embody similar values or articulate them in a similar way — we think it’s super valuable, super important, because we’re not in this alone. The anger against higher education is pretty broad. Yes, people differentiate among different universities, but the threats to higher education operate at a sector level. Most importantly, we need to be clear about what are we doing, what are we not doing, and then be able to remind the American public why having the world’s greatest universities is such an asset.
Alan Fleischmann
Amazing.
You’ve been listening to “Leadership Matters” on SiriusXM and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I’m your host, Alan Fleischmann. We just spent the last almost hour and a half with Daniel Diermeier, the Chancellor of Vanderbilt University: a real, true leader in higher education and across public, private, and civil society. It’s just been such a pleasure to listen to you, learn from you. This has been a fascinating discussion about your experiences, your leadership, both abroad and here, and how business, academia, and the public sector can do a lot together if convening in the right way and remembering their purpose. There’s a lot here to learn and digest.
One last thing before we go: if there’s one thing that any of our listeners could do to be helpful. If you really believe in the cradle of civilization begins and ends, in many ways, by how we encourage leadership tomorrow, that character that you’re talking about, that critical thinking and leading — what can they do? Whether they’re private sector, civil society, philanthropists, inventors, investors that are listening to you right now — what would you want them to know, and what would you want them to do as we close the show?
Daniel Diermeier
I would say, don’t give up on the core values that are really at the heart of who we are. That’s a commitment to argument, a commitment to reason, and a commitment to understanding different perspectives, not to demonize the other side. Remember what we have in common and stay with it. Do it in small and large ways — do it on your school boards where you participate. Have a dinner conversation with people that are different from you.
We have to rebuild the fabric of this country and we’re seeing it in so many different dimensions. Everybody can play a role in that. Right now is a moment for everybody to stand up and be counted, to be clear about the role that we can play to help make sure that this civil society continues and is strong.
The domain where we’re operating is going to be different. Maybe it’s a workplace, maybe it’s a school board, maybe it’s a community, maybe it’s a church, maybe it’s a synagogue, maybe it’s a university. But these values are common, they’re shared, and they are at the very core of what makes this country and other countries that are committed to freedom and democracy. That’s at the core of it, and we don’t want to lose that.
Alan Fleischmann
Yeah. Well, this has been an amazing, inspiring, fabulous hour and a half. So I’m very grateful to Daniel for this. I would argue — rather, I would encourage that this is the first of many times we come back on the show where we can talk about, in an optimistic way, but in a kind of call-to-arms kind of way, what we need. How we actually build back that trust, build back that community that you’re doing at Vanderbilt at scale. It’s more important probably than ever. As we tackle things like workforces of tomorrow, AI, the conflicts and the challenges of diversity, not being a bridge to understanding, but a bridge to differences — we can overcome all of that and more if we do what you’re doing.
Daniel Diermeier
Thank you, Alan. It was a real pleasure. Wonderful conversation.