No Two Minds Alike

Dr. William Inboden began serving as executive vice president and provost on August 1, 2025. He also holds the William Powers Jr. Chair and a joint faculty appointment with the Department of History and the School of Civic Leadership. As the University’s chief academic officer, he leads UT Austin’s academic mission and ensures the excellence and continued innovation of research and teaching endeavors across campus.
These responsibilities cover academic programs and initiatives across the University’s 19 colleges and schools, which serve more than 52,000 students and support more than 3,000 teaching and research faculty. Most recently, Dr. Inboden served as director of the Alexander Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education at the University of Florida and Peterson Senior Fellow with the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Before that, he spent 13 years at UT Austin, including as founding executive director of the Clements Center for National Security, associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, Distinguished Scholar at the Strauss Center for International Security and Law, and founding editor-in-chief of the Texas National Security Review. He previously served as senior director for strategic planning on the National Security Council at the White House, at the Department of State as a Member of the Policy Planning Staff and a Special Advisor in the Office of International Religious Freedom, and as a staff member in both the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. He also served as head of the London-based Legatum Institute, and as a Civitas Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. In addition, Dr. Inboden has served as an associate with the National Intelligence Council, a member of the CIA Historical Advisory Panel and State Department’s Historical Advisory Council, and a Senior Fellow with the Trinity Forum.  He is a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. 

John Tomasi is the inaugural president of Heterodox Academy. Prior to joining HxA, Tomasi held the position of Romeo Elton 1843 Professor of Natural Theology at Brown University and taught and wrote about political theory and public policy. At Brown, Tomasi was twice awarded university prizes for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He founded and directed the Political Theory Project, an independent research center at Brown that supports scholarship and encourages political dialogue on campus. Tomasi earned his bachelor’s degree from Colby College and did his graduate work in political philosophy at the University of Arizona (M.A.) and Oxford University (B.Phil., D.Phil.). He has held positions at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton, the Department of Philosophy at Stanford, and the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard. Tomasi is the author of Liberalism Beyond Justice: Citizens, Society and the Boundaries of Political Theory (Princeton University Press, 2001), in which he proposes a reconception of contemporary liberalism that takes the diversity of views more seriously, leading to less emphasis on the public aspect of society and developing a liberal conception of nonpublic life. Tomasi’s latest book, Free Market Fairness (Princeton University Press, 2012), draws simultaneously on moral insights from defenders of economic liberty such as F. A. Hayek and advocates of social justice such as John Rawls. Free market fairness is a new theory of liberal justice, committed to both limited government and the material betterment of the poor.

Ramsey White is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with a degree in Journalism and Mass Communication. White worked in the development departments at the Morehead-Cain Foundation and at the University of North Carolina. She is now an active volunteer focused specifically on children’s causes, both with her children’s schools and her community broadly. She has co-chaired the chief fundraising event at Landon School, Durham Academy and University Presbyterian Preschool, two times each in the last decade. Currently, she is an active volunteer at Landon School and Holton-Arms School in various roles. Additionally, she and her children served as an Area Coordinator with the inaugural chapter of Familes4Families, pairing local volunteer families with carefully vetted nonprofit partners to deliver groceries and other essential items monthly to families.