On "Ideological Diversity"

In recent years, “ideological diversity” has become one of the principal demands made upon American academia, not only by the yahoo right but also by many moderate conservatives and centrists. The former rarely manages to rise above crude insults of the “all professors are communists” variety, as it applauds the Trump administration’s brutal assaults on academic institutions. Unfortunately, while the latter are much more thoughtful, they often make a very misguided case. There is an argument to be made for ideological diversity—a surprisingly simple, and also limited one. But it involves giving more credence to the academic left than most critics are prepared to do.

A classic example of the case wrongly made is the report recently released by the chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington Universities and written by a distinguished group of academics (including two Princeton colleagues). It is nuanced and careful, takes a mostly moderate tone, and certainly doesn’t deserve the label “diabolical” that some have attached to it. But it also falls into some predictable traps.

Its basic arguments are as follows. Positions in the humanities and the humanistic social sciences today are held overwhelmingly by academics on the left. These academics, especially those who define themselves as “scholar activists,” too often let political goals drive their work, thereby betraying the core mission of academia, which is disinterested inquiry. They discriminate against people who do not share these political goals. And this politicization is both inspired and justified by “relativist” post-structuralist theories that deny the very idea of objective truth.

Let’s take these points one by one. First, yes, the report is obviously correct to state that academics lean very strongly to the left. But this fact by itself says nothing about how left-leaning scholars actually function in the academy or the work they produce.

The second point is much more complicated. What does it mean for scholarship itself to be “political,” or “politicized”? You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool Foucauldian to acknowledge that the production of knowledge is always, in some senses, implicitly political. Scholars, like everyone, exist within structures of power whose operations influence their conduct in ways seen and unseen. Feminist scholars did more than simply expand the scope of scholarly inquiry by bringing new attention to women, gender and sexuality. They showed how earlier generations of scholars, by not treating these subjects as even worthy of attention, participated in largely unspoken practices of exclusion. This point should not be terribly controversial. Nor should it be controversial that many past schools of scholarship that presented themselves as disinterested and objective were clearly driven by strong political motives. Just think of the “Dunning School” of American history that celebrated the southern “Lost Cause” and sought to discredit Reconstruction.

Acknowledging these points in no way means erasing the distinction between scholarship and propaganda—and contrary to widespread views on the right, this erasure has not taken place. One can accept that scholarship is implicitly political while also insisting that its production properly requires adhering to rules of evidence, and to making logical and well-supported arguments. I have been a professor for thirty-five years and have taken part in a very (!) large number of hiring decisions, promotion and tenure decisions, editorial decisions for journals and presses, personnel decisions for scholarly societies, and the like. I have occasionally seen these decisions made badly, because of personal animus, or incompetence. For what it is worth, I have never seen them made on an explicitly political basis, and very rarely even on an implicitly political one. In almost all cases, the principal criteria invoked have been classic scholarly ones: the strength of evidence, the strength of argument, the innovative and engaging qualities of the work as a whole.

Do academic fields discriminate against conservatives? It is certainly true that conservatives will not feel welcome in many fields of the humanities and social sciences. This is particularly the case for fields born out of the liberation movements of the 1960’s, such as Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, or African-American Studies, where many scholars still define themselves in relation to the goals of these movements and proudly call themselves “scholar activists.” An opponent of abortion or affirmative action will not find these fields congenial places. But in my experience, at least, the absence of conservatives in them is almost entirely the result of self-selection, not discrimination. That element of self-selection may itself be problematic, but it does not call for the same sort of response that active discrimination would.

And it is simply a mistake to attribute the “politicization” to poststructuralist philosophy and relativism. To the extent that the alleged politicization began in the 1960’s, it began well before the heyday of poststructuralism in American humanities departments, and it has continued long afterwards. Whole generations of literary scholars have now gone through the PhD to jobs and tenure without ever reading Jacques Derrida, let alone becoming his adepts (for that matter, Derrida’s work can in no way be described as a simple denial of the idea of truth). The overwhelming majority of works derided as “woke”—at least the ones I have read—do not say that one group’s claims on truth is as good as another’s. To the contrary, they say that the claims made by a “subaltern” group are stronger and more convincing than ones generated from within an oppressive structure of power. That argument might be wrong, but it is not relativist. Jonathan Kramnick made some of these points at length in an excellent rebuttal to the Vanderbilt Report in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In sum, whatever the massive overrepresentation of the left in academia, and despite some undoubted excesses, this overrepresentation has not resulted in an illegitimate distortion of the academic enterprise, the suppression of free inquiry, or large-scale violations of academic freedom. It would be a violation of academic freedom, on the other hand, to censor or dismiss academics for such alleged infractions. The Vanderbilt report does not call for any such disciplinary actions, although one could imagine unscrupulous university overseers citing it as justification for them.

But there is one set of academic decisions where politics does often dictate the outcome in a much more straightforward sense than in the cases just discussed: decisions on which fields to hire in. Professors do not normally make these decisions. Deans and other high-level administrators do. They do so in consultation with professors and normally take into consideration academic judgments as to which fields of inquiry look strongest and most promising. But, of necessity, they also take into consideration finances, student interest, the likely availability of expertise—and politics. To take the most prominent recent example, after the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent protests in 2020, more than half of the jobs advertised in North American history the next year were specifically for specialists in African-American history and related fields such as the history of slavery. A very high proportion of jobs advertised in French were for specialists in “Francophone” literature—i.e. literature produced outside of France, mostly in colonies and former colonies. These decisions were justifiable on academic grounds, for the fields in question are vibrant ones. But they were obviously made for political reasons, above all to address concerns about the underrepresentation of people of color in university faculties. Were these concerns themselves valid? Absolutely. It can also be argued that addressing this underrepresentation brings previously neglected points of view into academic conversations. But this doesn’t change the fact that the decisions were political ones—a response to an immediate political crisis, and to political pressure.

Again, to be clear: there was nothing illegitimate about university administrators bringing political considerations to bear. Decisions on what fields to hire in are central to a university’s identity, to the sort of community it is. Politics is inescapably part of this picture.

But if there was an argument for using hiring decisions to address racial inequalities, there is an argument for using them to address ideological imbalance as well. Even if there is nothing illegitimate about the strong leftward tilt of the humanities and humanistic social sciences, it does create a large gulf between the professors and much of the American population whom they are serving. Even if there is nothing illegitimate about certain fields being dominated by self-proclaimed “scholar activists,” it discourages students who don’t share the activists’ agendas from studying those fields. A heavy concentration of academic resources in certain areas of research leaves other areas neglected, including ones that university leaders may see as central to undergraduate education. And the heavier the emphasis on shared political goals, the easier it is to generate groupthink and stifle the sort of originality universities should be placing a premium on.

Actual hiring decisions should always be made by the specialists themselves. They are the ones with the requisite expertise. Dictating whom to hire would be a violation of their academic freedom. But that freedom does not extend to faculty themselves dictating which areas to hire in.

It would not be such a bad idea if humanities and social science departments themselves took more initiatives in this direction. In recent years, much of the hiring done for reasons of ideological diversity has taken place in new academic units such as Florida’s Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education. Attempts to create positions within existing departments, going back to the Bass Family’s attempt to endow a “Western Civilization” program at Yale in the 1990s, have sometimes ended in messy failure. But placing the new faculty in separate units leaves the original fields dangerously exposed to damaging cuts, either for brute ideological reasons, or because they do not have enough of a constituency to protest when the budget axe swings for financial ones. It should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the “Western tradition” that neither the thinkers in question, nor current specialists on them, are anything like homogenously conservative—hiring in the field does not mean hiring the next Harvey Mansfield. But would it be such a bad thing to hire a few more scholars who dissent from the prevailing politics of their fields? Robust political debate is generally preferable to groupthink, after all.