A new academic Inquisition

A dangerous new system is quietly taking root in American universities. At first glance, it looks harmless, even noble: “Dialogues portfolios,” which are collections of conversations where prospective students prove their ability to engage in civil discussions on divisive issues. Columbia, the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, and a few others are already testing them. Supporters preset them as an innovative way to bring civility back to campus. But beneath the polite words of civility and courtesy, sits something truly sinister.

This system is not really about open discussion. It is about measurement, control, and filtering. The very act of turning human conversation into an admissions metric twists discourse into performance. Teenagers as young as 14 are told to sign up for virtual debates on abortion, guns, or the presidential election. Their words are tallied, scored, and filed into portfolios for universities to review. Civility itself becomes a credential to be displayed, like an SAT score or a GPA.

The danger, I believe, is twofold. First, conversation ceases to be authentic. When students know their every word is part of a permanent record, they will not speak from conviction but from calculation. They will adopt the tone they think admissions officers prefer, deliberately avoiding anything too raw or too honest. They will moderate their passions, restrain their instincts, and rehearse the kinds of lines that appear “civil” in the eyes of a bureaucratic system. The classroom will become a stage, and the student will become an actor reading for a part. What we’re left with is little more than a farcical facade, a ritual of compliance masquerading as conversation.

Second, it plants the seed of surveillance in the most intimate domain: thought. Grades already measure performance; essays already measure writing. Now universities want access to the way a young mind wrestles with the deepest questions of life and politics. They are not content to test knowledge; they want to observe belief in real time. What begins as a voluntary add-on can, and likely will, become mandatory. What starts as “optional” soon becomes essential, as competitive parents pressure their children to compile portfolios to gain an edge. The system designed to measure civility quickly morphs into an ideological filter, rewarding those who parrot polite scripts and punishing those who risk saying something unfashionable. In effect, universities are deputizing themselves as thought police, turning admissions into an inquisition that measures not just what you achieve, but what you think and how you dare to say it.

There’s a deeper danger still. Once admissions adopt this model, where does it end? Today, it is “dialogue portfolios.” Tomorrow, it could be mandatory recordings of freshman seminars, ensuring every student remains suitably civil. From there, the logic is simple. Extend it into classrooms, workplaces, even politics. Once institutions grow comfortable measuring discourse, they will not stop at monitoring; they will enforce. Every surveillance system begins with a small, seemingly harmless scope, then metastasizes until it governs the whole. What starts as an experiment in civility ends as a regime of control.

Civil discourse matters, of course. Universities should nurture it. But there’s a profound difference between teaching debate and demanding proof of it as a condition of entry. The former allows ideas to flourish while the latter suffocates them. Education is supposed to expand the mind, not police it.

For young people, the timing couldn’t be worse. Adolescence is already a performance, with social media forcing them to curate every gesture, every caption, every fleeting thought. Now, universities want them to curate their political conversations as well, turning even their private wrestling with ideas into a fabricated display. The lesson is devastating: never speak freely, never risk candor, always calculate how your words will be received. And habits learned young don’t stay confined to campus. They follow students into the office, into friendships, into marriage, into broader society. A generation trained to self-censor will carry that discipline for life. Instead of speaking from the heart, they will weigh optics. Instead of wrestling with viewpoints, they will rehearse them. The very spontaneity that makes conversation valuable—and democracy possible—is lost.

The irony is brutal. Universities claim to want diversity of thought, but they are building a system that rewards conformity. They claim to want honesty, but they are incentivizing the very opposite. They claim to want free expression, but they are reducing it to a line on an application form. What they will actually receive is a generation of students trained to speak carefully, blandly, and above all, strategically.

Civil discourse cannot be manufactured by portfolio. It must be lived, tested, and taught through real human interaction—not measured, graded, and submitted like homework. A culture that confuses genuine discourse with bureaucratic measurement is a culture preparing itself for the chopping block. That is the future on offer, and it’s one we must resist with every fiber of our being.