‘Viewpoint Diversity’ Is Not the Answer

Our society is intensely polarized. Some think that higher education is to blame. Many think that we should do something about it. One common suggestion is that we should do a better job of respecting viewpoint diversity in the classroom.

Professors often react to this suggestion with indignation. We see in the suggestion a commitment to the kind of “bothsidesism” that would have us legitimizing the abhorrent or wasting time on silliness. We think that we are being asked to treat white nationalism as a respectable political position or the book of Genesis as a serious scientific text.

This response rightly gestures toward the immensely difficult problem of determining which among mutually exclusive views are rationally worth considering. However, this response also misses the point, though mainly because the suggestion itself does.

By focusing on viewpoint diversity, we risk getting the nature of the college classroom wrong in a way that limits our ability to address the problem that viewpoint diversity is supposed to solve. We encourage people to see the classroom as a debate stage. On this model, students enter the class with firmly held opinions, and the professor’s job is to ensure that these opinions are all respected as they clash with each other in discussion. But while debate certainly has a role in the classroom, it is secondary. Our job in a college class is first and foremost to figure stuff out together; that we might determine a “winner” among views that students held beforehand is incidental. College classrooms are places for collective inquiry, not partisan competition.

Realizing this is crucial for tackling the problem that viewpoint diversity targets. That problem is dogmatism, which viewpoint diversity is supposed to solve by leading students to realize that other people do not share the dogmas that they bring to the classroom.

However, the debate model likely only produces dogmatists who respect each other. Surely, dogmatists who respect each other are better than those who do not. But we should set the bar higher—at the elimination of dogmatism.

To achieve this, we must do more than encourage students to respect others’ opinions and then hope that this makes them less dogmatic about their own as a side effect. Instead, we should challenge students directly to be less dogmatic about their own opinions. In other words, rather than asking whether our classrooms present every respectable viewpoint, we should be asking whether our classrooms foster the development of the right kind of attitude toward intellectual inquiry in the first place. This attitude is curiosity.

The notion that curiosity drives the search for explanation and understanding is familiar. But curiosity can also drive the search for justification. In philosophical parlance, curiosity is just as appropriately directed at reasons as it is causes. We should be encouraging students to be as curious about the reasons why abortion might or might not be morally permissible as they are about why the moon and stars do not fall on our heads or about what it’s like to be a person different from them. Doing this does not so much require getting them to respect opinions that they might not hold as it does getting them to forget temporarily that they themselves even hold one.

So how can we promote curiosity? Our classroom personae do more fundamental work than course content does. Once we have met the bare minimum requirement of not treating our classrooms as cathedrals to whatever moral and political views we happen to hold, how we carry ourselves matters far more for our students’ sense of intellectual freedom than whether we explicitly entertain whatever views they happen to hold.

We can do much damage to this sense with the wrong expressions on our faces or tones in our voice. The jokes we make, the examples we use and even the random stuff we display in our offices can all act as powerful silencers. If we want our students to feel comfortable openly thinking aloud in the way that the truly curious do, avoiding these kinds of mistakes should be among our core concerns.

I am not saying that we must check our own moral and political commitments at the campus gates. But I am saying that we must reflect regularly on which of these commitments to express in which contexts and at which moments, as well as on how we express them when we do so.

We should also model to students that smart people often do not know right away what to think about moral and political matters. We should teach things about which we are sincerely puzzled, so that students can see us as co-investigators into reasons for and against certain views. There should be moments in which students see us struggle as we think things through. Taking seriously viewpoints that we do not hold can certainly help with this. But we must remember that the real pedagogical point is to demonstrate normative curiosity. Viewpoint diversity is merely a tool for achieving that end.

The problem we face is that while many people believe, advocate and defend, they do not also entertain, inquire and assess. In other words, not enough of us, enough of the time, think. To solve this problem, we need more thinking, not just more thoughts.