At last December’s Congressional hearing on campus antisemitism, three university presidents drew widespread condemnation for their legalistic answers to questions about whether their speech policies allowed “calling for the genocide of Jews.”
But amid questions about whether phrases like “From the river to the sea” were permitted was another line of questioning: How many conservatives do you have on your faculty?
When each president replied that their universities did not gather such data, the congressman who posed the question, Representative Joe Wilson, Republican of South Carolina, was scathing.
Universities, he said, have been overrun with “intolerance and bigotry.” And the root cause, he said, was “blatant discrimination” against conservatives — something that they might want to “look into” next time they ask for government funding.
The warning was not new. About two and half months earlier, the committee’s chair, Virginia Foxx, Republican of West Virginia, had suggested that America’s universities fix themselves — or else.
“Have institutions, including the university system,” she wrote in an op-ed in The Washington Examiner, “been so thoroughly captured by anti-American and illiberal ideology that the government must step in to restore viewpoint diversity, free thought and free expression?”
Criticism of universities as hotbeds of liberal elitists and tenured radicals is nothing new. But more than a decade after conservatives turned “free speech” into a rallying cry, they are increasingly championing another concept: “viewpoint diversity.”
The innocuous, bureaucratic-sounding term has its origins within academia itself. But as battles over higher education heat up, it has been taken up by politicians who promote it as a counterpart — some would say a counterpunch — to efforts to promote racial and ethnic diversity.
Calls for viewpoint diversity have been written into education laws proposed or passed in at least seven states, including Florida and Texas. In March, Indiana passed a law that curtailed diversity, equity and inclusion programs, while mandating that professors be regularly evaluated on whether their courses promote “intellectual diversity.” Failure to do so can be a firing offense, even for tenured faculty.
At first glance, calls for viewpoint diversity would seem to be hard to object to. The idea that the pursuit of knowledge rests on the unfettered exchange of a broad range of ideas is a bedrock principle of the university. It has also undergirded arguments for race-based affirmative action, which under the 1978 Supreme Court decision in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke was permissible if it enriched the overall learning environment for everyone.
But for many who advocate it — and certainly for many who are wary — viewpoint diversity boils down to one thing: the need for more conservatives on syllabuses, in the classroom and, perhaps most important, on the faculty.
Many in higher education see that demand as part of escalating right-wing attacks on the political independence of universities, and a cynical effort to weaponize one of contemporary academia’s paramount values — diversity — against itself.
Still, few would deny that conservative professors are scarce, and getting scarcer. And it’s not just conservatives who worry about a narrowing of debate.
“There are plenty of people in and around academia — people in the center and even many on the left — who do think you need to broaden the range of political discourse on campus,” said Neil Gross, a sociologist at Colby College and the author of the book “Why are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?” “And that is combining with the efforts of folks on the right who have been going after higher education for a long time.”
Some of those critics speak of “ideological diversity” or “political diversity.” But viewpoint diversity may be a particularly effective rallying cry.
“It’s is a very ambiguous term,” Gross said. “And that gives it a little bit more power.”
A ‘Liberal’ Profession?
Academia has been seen as a liberal profession since the early 20th century, Gross writes in his book. Today, he says, it employs a higher percentage of liberals than nearly any other profession. While results vary by discipline and type of institution, most surveys suggest that only about 10 to 15 percent of faculty across the country are conservative.
The conservative movement has long used critiques of higher education, and the out-of-touch eggheads and anti-American subversives who supposedly dominate it, to build support. William F. Buckley Jr. famously declared that he’d rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the Harvard faculty. Criticisms of “tenured radicals” and rampant “political correctness” were staples of the 1990s culture wars.
But the roots of the current conversation about viewpoint diversity, scholars say, lie partly within scholarly debate itself — specifically, within the social sciences, where some have long argued that the overwhelming liberal tilt of researchers compromises the ability to produce scientifically valid results.
In his influential 1994 paper “Political Psychology or Politicized Psychology: Is the Road to Scientific Hell Paved With Good Moral Intentions?,” Philip E. Tetlock argued that the field was in danger of simply reproducing (or being seen as reproducing) favored political talking points. Too many researchers, he argued, were blind to the ways their biases were baked into their methodologies and premises, and the ways dissent was discouraged.
In an email, Tetlock, who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, described how in 1986, as a young professor, he published a paper questioning the assumptions behind some research into “symbolic racism,” defined by researchers as abstract forms of prejudice that fall short of overt racism.
“At a conference that year, a leading symbolic racism researcher asked me, slightly menacingly, ‘Do you have tenure yet?’” Tetlock recalled. “Of course, this is not Gulag Archipelago repression but it is enough to keep many academics in line.”
Tetlock is among the scholars who have questioned the validity of the Implicit Association Test, a widely used measure of unconscious prejudice. More recently, new research has challenged a widely cited earlier finding: that conservatives have a higher “negativity bias” — that is, they are more reactive than others to perceived threats and other negative stimuli.
That idea may give liberals the warm and fuzzies. But as Tetlock warns, “Be skeptical of all empirical claims but especially skeptical of those that make your community of co-believers feel good about themselves.”
Some prominent scholars have argued for the need to actively counter ideological imbalances. In a widely noted 2011 speech at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt argued that social psychology had become a “tribal moral community that actively discourages conservatives from entering,” and called on the society to commit to having conservatives make up 10 percent of its membership by 2020.
That didn’t happen. And the field, Haidt said in an interview, has only gotten “more politicized.”
In the meantime, Haidt has moved from concerns with research to ones about the broader campus climate. In 2015, Haidt, with two colleagues, founded Heterodox Academy, a cross-campus group that promotes “open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement.” In their 2018 book “The Coddling of the American Mind,” Haidt and Greg Lukianoff connected the narrowing of campus discourse with broader shifts in American culture that have encouraged students to see themselves as fragile, easily traumatized people who need “safe spaces.”
That book became a New York Times best seller, and turned Haidt in to a leading public voice in debates about politics and higher education. But for years, he said, convincing liberal colleagues there was a problem felt like a losing battle. “We were seen as apologists for the right,” he said.
In the meantime, as recent surveys have shown, trust in higher education has plummeted across the political spectrum over the past decade. “When universities have lost the trust of centrists and moderates,” Haidt said, “you can’t blame it on the right.”
Last December’s congressional hearing, and the dismal performance of the university presidents, were a rock-bottom moment, he said, and also the beginning of a possible turnaround.
“There is now much greater interest on campus in getting this right,” Haidt said. “For the first time, we are seeing wide and deep and sincere interest in having more viewpoint diversity, in training students to engage in dialogue.”
Many schools have created initiatives promoting “dialogue across difference” (or “DxD,” in the jaunty lingo of administrators). There are also a growing number of cross-campus groups dedicated to viewpoint diversity, “bridge building” and the like.
At the same time, some question whether some of those groups are less interested in dialogue than in promoting their own views.
“Instead of saying, ‘We’re a libertarian advocacy organization,’ it goes down easier to say, ‘We are encouraging viewpoint diversity,’” said Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University and a former research fellow at Heterodox Academy. Some involved with these efforts, he continued “are not particularly interested in engaging in charitable, deep ways with views they disagree with. When you ask about, say, critical race theory, they’ll say they haven’t read it, and don’t want to.”
Al-Gharbi, the author of the forthcoming book “We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite,” said that many advocates of viewpoint diversity are too quick to dismiss the value of racial diversity. But progressives, he said, also need to acknowledge an uncomfortable paradox: that the brand of politics that reigns on many campuses may actually make them less welcoming to the very people they seek to include.
“If you create a climate that’s hostile toward socially conservative and religious views, with the goal of helping people from marginalized backgrounds feel included, the people most at risk of being excluded, censored and alienated are people from underrepresented backgrounds,” he said.
‘People on the Left Thought I Was Crazy’
Michael Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, is one of the few prominent liberal leaders to embrace the need for greater viewpoint diversity (although he prefers the term “intellectual diversity”). Over the past decade, he has tried to raise the issue with liberal colleagues, while still trying to guard against what he sees as bad-faith attacks on higher education.
It hasn’t always gone smoothly. In a 2017 opinion essay in The Wall Street Journal, he argued that what overwhelmingly liberal institutions like his needed was “an affirmative-action program for the full range of conservative ideas and traditions.”
That line lost him some friends. “People on the left thought I was crazy,” he said.
What might affirmative action for conservative ideas look like? At Wesleyan, Roth has recruited military retirees as teachers, and veterans as students. While they are not necessarily conservative, he said, the veterans tend to be older, with different perspectives and experiences than those of traditional students.
The dearth of conservatives on the permanent faculty, and even in the hiring pipeline, is much harder to address. But how much do the politics of a professor really matter in the classroom?
Lynn Pasquerella, a former president of Mount Holyoke College who now leads the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said that calls for viewpoint diversity too readily play into caricatures of professors as wild-eyed radicals seeking to indoctrinate students.
“It is a central component of what I think is a false narrative around colleges and universities as bastions of liberal progressivism that are pushing a particular ideological agenda,” Pasquerella said.
When it comes to shaping students’ politics, professors may have little influence compared with family, fellow students or social media. Earlier this year, Gross conducted a survey of undergraduates at a variety of four-year schools across the country. Nearly 60 percent felt their professors did a “very good” or “pretty good” job of managing class discussion when students took opposing sides on political subjects. And 90 percent reported that professors discussed their personal political views “rarely,” “never” or “occasionally.”
As for expressing their own political opinions in class, respondents said they were more worried about negative repercussions from other students than from professors.
Since Roth’s 2017 article, the deepening polarization of American politics makes talking about viewpoint diversity harder. Most liberal academics are loath to take up a cause also endorsed by figures like Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
Roth said those calling for viewpoint diversity also need to speak more forcefully against external political threats to the university. He recalled this year’s annual Heterodox Academy summit, where he challenged Haidt’s claim that the progressive left had “taken over” academia. Meanwhile, Roth said, Haidt said nothing about Donald Trump and the threats to academic freedom his movement poses.
On a panel the next day, Roth began by saying, “I have not been in a room with this many aggrieved white men in my life.” Later, he contacted Haidt to apologize for being a “rude guest.” Haidt, he said, was gracious, saying: “‘That’s why we are called Heterodox Academy.’”
Roth said it was important not to allow the idea of viewpoint diversity be defined as solely a right-wing idea. Showing that universities are truly open to all people and all ideas, he said, is crucial to restoring public trust and ensuring their survival.
“I think we’re walking into the bull’s-eye if we don’t take it seriously,” he said. “We’re not doing our jobs as academics if we don’t take it seriously.”
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