On Viewpoint Diversity

For many years now, conservative and centrist critics have claimed that elite American universities suffer from a lack of “viewpoint diversity.” Even as these institutions made recruiting women and underrepresented minorities a priority, the charge goes, their faculties remained almost exclusively liberal and progressive (which is not true for all academic disciplines but certainly applies to the humanities and most social sciences). Don’t students deserve exposure to the political opinions endorsed by so many of their fellow citizens? Doesn’t political groupthink distort and hobble the research enterprise? When the Trump administration froze federal research funding to Harvard last spring, it demanded, as a condition of restoration, that the university introduce viewpoint diversity into its faculty hiring. Meanwhile, several public universities in red states have created centers for “civic education” whose curricula center on the traditional Western canon and which have recruited prominent centrists and conservatives to their faculties. Many of the most prominent critics themselves signed up as part-time faculty at the new “University of Austin,” although several subsequently resigned when it became clear that the institution was itself becoming tendentiously political.

Nearly all these critics reflexively dismiss “woke” scholarship as political claptrap. They don’t read seriously the people they are criticizing, and they don’t look seriously into the question of why the humanities and social sciences have developed such a strong left-wing political profile. I find most of their arguments weak and unpersuasive. But this doesn’t mean that there are not some better arguments to be offered.

It’s worth noting that the push for viewpoint diversity, as most often formulated, has three separate components that sit uneasily with each other—indeed, that potentially contradict each other. The same critics who excoriate university professors for leaning left also blast them for “politicizing” higher education. But if an explicit call to hire more conservatives isn’t “political,” then what is? The critics also associate viewpoint diversity with instruction in the traditional Western canon, which they accuse “woke” scholars of forsaking. But, to a very large extent, that canon is the very source of the “leftism” they decry. I could put together a syllabus that included James Harrington, Rousseau, Babeuf, Fourier, Marx, Bakunin, Lenin, Sartre and Althusser. Nothing could possibly be more “Western” (or white male…) but it wouldn’t exactly be conservative. In short, “viewpoint diversity,” in its cruder forms means hiring political conservatives who draw conservative lessons from the Western tradition while denying that they are being “political.” Even an excellent scholar like James Hankins has fallen all too easily into this trap in his recent excoriation of Harvard (his former scholarly home, which he has now left for a new center at the University of Florida).

Left opponents of these calls for viewpoint diversity often start from the Foucauldian idea that the production of knowledge is inherently political. They point out that “traditional” and supposedly “apolitical” curricula that centered on the Western canon not only excluded minority and dissenting voices, but reinforced an image of certain (white, male) subjects as “rational” and “civilized” by marking their difference from “irrational,” “uncivilized” sexual and racial others. I’m old enough to remember the sneering disdain with which certain crusty old (and not so old) male historians greeted the very idea of “women’s history,” or insisted that the Haitian Revolution was not a “real” revolution. It took enormous effort to correct these blinkered—and deeply political—views. Joan Scott, in a 2022 article for The Chronicle of Higher Education written in response to an article of my own, insisted that politics, “understood as struggles for power,” is a fundamental dimension of history-writing. I have issues with this stance (more on this in a moment), but it is powerfully reasoned and cannot be dismissed out of hand.

These are some of the reasons that I don’t find most conservative calls for viewpoint diversity very persuasive. And it’s worth adding a further point. The Republican Party in its current, Trumpian incarnation is overtly, defiantly, proudly anti-intellectual. Its leading representatives, including especially the President of the United States, talk about serious learning with scorn, and defend their policies with arguments which fail elemental tests of logic and truth-telling. Why should any self-respecting scholar vote for this party? In the America of 2026, academia’s overwhelming preference for the Democrats (which is of course not the same as “leftism”) doesn’t look so much biased as self-evident. It’s worrisome that one of the most prominent recent critics of academia’s leftward tilt, Hankins, seems all too ready to endorse at least one Trumpian conspiracy theory, claiming that Harvard oppressed him by forcing him to wear a mask while teaching during COVID. Sure, the requirement arguably remained in place too long, but the university was operating in a dire emergency, doing its best to continue instruction while protecting its personnel and students from a potentially fatal disease. The policies in no sense amounted to what Hankins called “tyrannous invasions of private life” in the name of “The Science.”

But even if most conservative arguments for viewpoint diversity are put together badly, it doesn’t mean that the idea is devoid of merit.

Let’s come back to the fraught issue of the “politicization” of scholarship. Recognizing that the production of knowledge has an unavoidably political dimension does not mean seeing it as nothing but “struggles for power.” Yes, various forms of political action were needed for supposedly “woke” fields like the study of gender and sexuality to win acceptance in academia. This acceptance also happened, however, because scholars in these fields made convincing cases in a traditional scholarly way, through the marshaling of empirical evidence, the construction of strong, logical arguments, and the deployment of effective rhetoric.

But many of these fields took shape, starting in the 1960’s, in tandem with the various liberation movements of the period. Most of the scholars who developed them participated in these movements and many called themselves “scholar-activists.” Nor did the pattern change once the fields had won acceptance. Today, they still have an inescapable political profile, tied to movements outside of academia, in which many of their leading scholars continue to participate. Where the fields have won status as full academic departments, it is very difficult to imagine them hiring scholars who oppose the movements’ political goals. Furthermore, these fields have had enormous influence on the humanities and social sciences in general, shaping research agendas and employment decisions well beyond their own bounds. The political commitments most visible in these fields are commonplace across academia.

The goal of increasing diversity in faculty ranks reinforced this particular form of politicization. Thanks to Supreme Court decisions going back to Bakke, while universities can “encourage applications” from underrepresented groups, jobs cannot be specifically earmarked for these groups. As a result, universities seeking, for instance, to hire more black faculty mostly created positions in African American studies, in the expectation that blacks would dominate the applicant pool. In 2020-21, following the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter protests, US-based universities advertised 59 US-based tenure-track jobs in American History. Of these, 36 were either explicitly labeled “African American” or “slavery,” or indicated a strong preference for these subjects. Another 7 were for Hispanic or Native American History. That year was obviously an outlier, thanks both to COVID and BLM, but the numbers indicate just how strong the push for diversity could get. And it is reasonable to assume that a large proportion of the historians hired to these jobs consider themselves scholar-activists.

Let’s be clear. That label in no way invalidates their work. Despite what “anti-woke” conservatives often claim (often without reading the books and articles in question), scholarly standards still prevail in these fields. If they generate some work that is shoddy, tendentious and generally subpar—well, such tendencies are hardly limited to them, as the many recent scandals about the falsification of scientific data indicate. Furthermore, the political passion that drives scholars in these fields can motivate herculean efforts of research, as well as the sort of insight that comes from looking at apparently familiar material from new angles. Social historians of an earlier generation such as E.P. Thompson were also scholar-activists, and their political passions drove work that is now considered fundamental to many fields of study.

But at the same time, it is hard to deny that in these fields—and in the humanities and social sciences more generally—this overt politicization strongly favors the work and careers of scholars whose conclusions support the positions and goals of the associated movements, while making it harder for scholars with opposing conclusions to succeed. In some egregious cases, political pressures go well beyond the fields themselves. For instance, young historians of color who have accepted the “Dan David Prize” endowed by an Israeli philanthropist have found themselves denounced in print by colleagues in their fields and have had professional invitations withdrawn.

Given this state of affairs, the goal of introducing some additional diversity into academia is not such a bad one. The problem, though, is how to achieve it. Creating positions in “conservative thought” might seem one strategy, but are students of conservatism necessarily conservative? If an elite university created a chair in the subject, one leading candidate would surely be Corey Robin—not exactly a conservative. Endowing positions in “Western thought” or “Western culture” with the expectation of filling them with conservatives can actually be counterproductive, because it encourages the belief that there is something inherently conservative about the Western canon, and creates pressure on progressive students and professors alike to stay far away from it. And we need to resist the sort of brute, ignorant tactics the Trump administration has been using against Harvard and other elite schools.

That said, at the very least, deans and provosts should recognize that viewpoint diversity is a worthy goal. They should do what they can, without trampling on the academic freedom of the units they supervise, to ensure that candidates whose views might strike most humanists and social scientists as conservative are not penalized for these views in hiring and have a fair chance to advance in searches and promotions. They should recognize that the problem of academic groupthink is as real today as it was, in a different form, a century ago. And that the best antidote to groupthink is vigorous—even if sometimes uncomfortable—debate