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As the president of Heterodox Academy (Tomasi) and as co-founder of the organization (Haidt), we are delighted that the issue of viewpoint diversity in higher education is now being so widely discussed. We just wish the most prominent antagonists on the right and on the left understood why viewpoint diversity is essential to the mission of a university—and thus how it can, and can’t, be brought about.
As Heterodox Academy has argued since our founding in 2015, the truth-seeking function of universities does not work properly without the presence of diverse viewpoints. This is especially true when it comes to contested social and political questions. As Haidt wrote in our very first post, “We academics are generally biased toward confirming our own theories and validating our favored beliefs,” and that’s usually fine. With a culture of review and debate among scholars, “the field will gradually sort out the truth. Unless there is nobody out there who thinks differently. Or unless the few such people shrink from speaking up because they expect anger in response, even ostracism."
Over the past decade, that’s exactly the pattern we have seen, especially in the social sciences, humanities and some of the professional schools. Taboos, blind spots, groupthink and the politicization of scientific standards haven’t just made academic research narrower and worse, these trends have alienated the general public and reduced public confidence in higher education since 2015, not just on the right but across the ideological spectrum. Unsurprisingly, the increasing ideological conformity of the professoriate is reflected in the decreasing range of ideas that students encounter in the classroom. A recent national study shows a narrow range of perspectives included on undergraduate syllabi on such controversial topics as the conflict between Israel and Palestine, racial bias in the criminal justice system, and abortion.
To advocate for viewpoint diversity is not to take the absurd position that every possible claim should be represented in the academy. It’s to recognize that monocultures are toxic to scholarly research and to responsible teaching alike. Professional training does not make professors immune to ordinary human biases. Today’s cohort of scholarly experts remains vulnerable to the same “tyranny of public opinion” and “uncritical and intemperate partisanship” that the founders of the American Association of University Professors in 1915 warned academia to resist. This means that today’s arguments about viewpoint diversity must be considered and judged in their historical and political contexts.
On the left, writing for the AAUP’s Academe, Lisa Siraganian’s recent essay against viewpoint diversity denies any possibility that academia has lost, or even could lose, a necessary heterogeneity. By a circular logic, whatever (and whomever) a discipline rejects as “intellectually unsuitable” must be so, because the members of the discipline are the ones who set disciplinary standards. By this reasoning, even when a discipline rapidly changes its scientific views, or politicizes its standards for admissions, hiring and publications, it could not be because they have lost a healthy amount of internal contestation, or have turned self-selection and self-governance into ideological capture. The professors are the experts, after all. Whatever they decide must ipso facto be correct.
This view of academia is naïve, ahistorical and strangely uncritical. Is there any other human institution that academics would approach with such deference to the status quo, as if aspirational norms are reality and no competing biases or incentives could ever be at play? Yet this approach is not even consistent with the AAUP’s own account of academia: When it comes to racial and gender diversity, the venerable guild sees no conflict between disciplinary truth-seeking and the inclusion of a broader mix of perspectives. Viewpoint diversity here but not there. If this seems inconsistent or evidence of implicit political bias, do not be alarmed: They will be the judge of which, when and where. After all, they are the experts!
From this politicized perch, it is predictable that Siraganian would dismiss calls for a greater diversity of scholarly viewpoints as “a MAGA plot,” as she recently did in The Chronicle of Higher Education. And the Trump administration, for its part, has been working hard to cement that impression. Its new compact with higher education reflects some ideas about viewpoint diversity that we agree with, including the idea that university leaders should take stock of where their intellectual cultures may have become narrow and intolerant. But the compact’s approach to viewpoint diversity is deeply flawed in many ways. We’ll mention two.
First is the thicket of constitutional, legal, policy and practical problems with attaching this compact to federal funding. Without statutory justification, or clear definitions of its key terms, the compact would impose a broad set of policy preferences on universities nationwide, using vague but substantial penalties that will chill free expression and open inquiry. This approach—“Be open and tolerant toward conservative ideas, or else!”—is not the path to fostering a deep and enduring culture of open inquiry on campus.
Worse, by pitting viewpoint diversity against intellectual freedom in a zero-sum manner, the compact validates critics’ worst fears, all in the service of an executive action that is unlikely to withstand legal scrutiny. In this, the Trump administration allows apologists for the status quo such as Siraganian to present themselves as defenders of the scholarly high ground—even though they long ago abandoned it.
A second problem is the compact’s notion that universities must not purposely “belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas.” This is safe-space culture on the right. It is a flavor of political DEI that all academics should reject. Feeling that one’s ideas have been belittled is a common experience on campus and one that everyone—including conservatives—must accept as a consequence of intellectual freedom (and, often, as a learning opportunity). Of course, institutions should never leave students vulnerable to true threats or physical violence. But the vague notion of “sparking violence” only invites today’s conservative students to conflate ideas and violence in ways that have proven so dysfunctional on the left (as Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have long argued).
Siraganian writes, “Those of us who want good ideas to win and bad ideas to lose should understand that viewpoint diversity will not get us there.”
The opposite is true. If we are to have any hope that good ideas will win and bad ideas will lose, we need a wider range of viewpoints to be kept open at our universities. Viewpoint diversity is not an end in itself. It is an essential means to our highest end: the pursuit of truth. Our goal at Heterodox Academy has never been to maximize the total quantity of such diversity. From our opening post, we have said that viewpoint diversity is valuable because it disrupts the greatest historical enemy of free inquiry, orthodoxy, which intimidates dissenters into silence.
Fortunately, those who appreciate higher education’s viewpoint diversity problem don’t have to choose between self-satisfied denialism and unconstitutional mandates. Nor need they wait while those two partisan sides fight it out. Reform-minded university leaders are already taking stock of their policies, programs and priorities, to consider where a broader range of views could add intellectual life and vitality, and how that can happen without compromising open inquiry and academic freedom. That can include new investments in overlooked fields and subfields, the elimination of ideological litmus tests unrelated to scholarship, and sober self-appraisal of academia’s cultural norms.
We at Heterodox Academy—and our 8,000-plus academic members—are proud to play a role in this change, because engagement with diverse viewpoints is vital for the long-term health of our universities, and of our society, too.
