Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that Harvard University, searching after greater ideological diversity, is considering creating some kind of institute with a mandate to hire faculty members with nonprogressive perspectives on the world.
Around the same time the novelist Joyce Carol Oates published a post making sport of these sort of efforts, whose argument I will reproduce in full:
most universities & colleges surely have faculty members who are contrarians? liberals & progressives are always quarreling with one another; “the left eats its own”; hiring conservatives per se will result in very lopsided résumés especially in the sciences. really, research universities should hire physicists who disbelieve in modern physics? anthropologists who believe that “Aryans” are the master race? poets who believe in Rhyming? philosophers who are staunch Thomists, or believe in the Creation? historians who don’t acknowledge slavery in the US? what a clown show, a sort of campus “Book of Mormon.”
I love, indeed adore, the idea that “poets who believe in Rhyming” and students of Thomas Aquinas — two categories distinguished by their unusual rigor, in my experience — are from the Oatesian perspective the equivalent of Aryan supremacists and some imagined set of “historians who don’t acknowledge slavery.”
But the first part of the post asks a question that deserves a serious response. Why don’t academic contrarianism and quarrelsomeness alone suffice to introduce students to diverse perspectives on the world? Why can’t we just rely on the intelligence and curiosity of good professors, even if almost all of them happen to lean leftward, to deliver a complete portrait of intellectual debate?
The simplest answer is that contrarianism is quite unnatural to human beings, and only slightly less unnatural among people theoretically trained in rigorous intellectual work. Indeed sometimes a life spent in intellectual work can make conformity seem more natural. After all, if everyone around you is a professional scholar and everyone tends to agree about certain crucial questions, shouldn’t you be deferential to this shared expertise?
Of course nobody wants to imagine himself to be boringly orthodox in every way. But even an impulse toward open-mindedness and heterodoxy still tends to be constrained and channeled into safe territory.
Oates’s own post suggests one way that this happens. “‘The left eats its own,’” she writes, describing the climate of fervent enmity that often exists within left-wing factions that seem from the outside to basically agree. But of course it’s precisely that agreement that makes it feel safe to have the angry arguments! You can play the contrarian and the heretic, even develop blood feuds and ruthless personal rivalries, without straying too far outside the safety of received opinion. The interpretive battle rages fiercely but the normative perspectives remain carefully constrained.
Another way that contrarianism constrains itself is by showing a certain intellectual curiosity about the distant past, a territory in which forbidden authors or dangerous ideas can be encountered from a purely historical perspective — and then returning to the safety of conformism once it comes to deal with the controversies of today.
That’s what you see at work in the syllabus of Columbia’s core curriculum, which I wrote about last year. The assigned readings for the world before the 20th century represent a reasonable diversity of worldviews and opinions. But once you reach contemporary controversies, the core’s perspective narrows to a frankly insane degree, with almost exclusively environmentalist, de-growth and anticolonial texts assigned to help students understand “the insistent problems of the present.”
There are certainly left-leaning teachers and intellectuals who manage to do better than the Columbia core, who actually try to do real justice to contemporary controversies, who are willing to give not just centrist or classically liberal but even conservative and reactionary ideas their due. But in the current academic landscape, even the successful teaching of controversy still tends to confirm progressivism as a default perspective.
For a sense of how this works, it’s worth reading a working paper from three academics at Claremont McKenna College and Scripps College, who use a database of college syllabuses from around the English-speaking world to assess how frequently contrasting perspectives on high-profile issues are assigned in college classrooms.
One of their examples is Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow,” a famous and influential but also highly contestable interpretation of mass incarceration and racism in America. In the database, it appears on over 5,000 syllabuses — more than “Hamlet” or “The Federalist Papers.”
Then the authors look at the most prominent critiques and alternative perspectives on the subject, works by academic authors like James Forman Jr., John Pfaff and Patrick Sharkey. These appear on just a few hundred syllabuses; in an overwhelming majority of cases, “The New Jim Crow” is assigned alone, without a countervailing perspective. At the same time the leading alternatives are almost never taught alone; they enter the discussion as “conversation-wideners” but they aren’t presented as potential defaults in their own right.
So two things seem to happen when college students encounter debates about crime and race and prison. Most of them are given only one perspective: that of Alexander’s book and the received wisdom that took shape around its argument. Then a lucky minority are actually taught the controversy — but even there the teaching mechanism gives them to understand that there is an orthodoxy and a heterodoxy, a consensus and critiques, rather than offering a completely different starting place.
Obviously a database can’t capture what happens in a classroom, where a teacher can introduce debate in discussion as well as through the reading list. And not every text the authors analyze shows as lopsided a result as “The New Jim Crow”; for instance, they look at Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous pro-choice essay “A Defense of Abortion” and find more attempts to teach the controversy — mostly because it’s almost always assigned in philosophy departments, which (the authors argue) have a stronger commitment to moral debate than other areas of the humanities.
But there’s still a baseline reality on display here: An academic world that lacks serious political diversity will generate, first, a stultifying degree of conformity on contestable contemporary issues and second, a contrarianism that even at its best still struggles to fully escape the dominant paradigm.
For a full escape to be on offer, you would need either a deep shift in human nature or more plausibly, more people involved in the academic project who start from outside its existing orthodoxies. Cultivating contrarianism is healthy; teaching controversies from a neutral standpoint is an important aspiration. But by far the easiest way to give students a sense of the diverse perspectives of the world is just to have people who actually hold those perspectives teaching on your campus.
Whether Harvard or any other liberal university can really pull off such a diversification is a different question, suited to a future newsletter. But that these schools would benefit from such a change seems obvious. Arguments carried out exclusively among liberals and leftists can be stimulating, engaging, important, revelatory. But they will always be insufficient to the professed task of the university, the understanding of reality in full.
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Ross Douthat has been an Opinion columnist for The Times since 2009. He is also the host of the Opinion podcast “Interesting Times.” He is the author, most recently, of “Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious.” @DouthatNYT • Facebook
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