viewpoint diversity revisited

Jennifer M. Morton:

Conservatives have criticized identity-based affirmative action because, they suggest, it imposes an expectation on students of color that they will represent what is presumed to be, say, the Black or Latino view on any given issue, which discourages freethinking. Admitting students for viewpoint diversity would turn the holding of conservative ideas into a quasi-identity, subject to some of the same concerns. Students admitted to help restore ideological balance would likely feel a responsibility to defend certain views, regardless of the force of opposing arguments they might encounter.

For professors hired for their political beliefs, the pressure to maintain those views would be even greater. If you had a tenure-track position, your salary, health insurance and career prospects would all depend on the inflexibility of your ideology. The smart thing to do in that situation would be to interact with other scholars who share your point of view and to read publications that reinforce what you already believe. Or you might simply engage with opposing ideas in bad faith, refusing even to consider their merits. This would create the sort of ideological echo chamber that proponents of viewpoint diversity have suggested, often with some justification, leads to closed-mindedness among left-leaning professors.

I think this argument is exactly correct: I have often said that if I were offered a job because I represent a certain position I would ask, “What happens if I change my mind?”

But the argument is also a useful strategy for ensuring that the academic humanities remain an ideological monoculture. Morton’s view is: It’s okay if all the professors are progressives as long as they assign some non-progressive books. And if you find that convincing, then turn it around: What if all the professors were rock-ribbed conservatives but told you that that’s fine, since they assign Marx and Fanon?

So, acknowledging the validity of Morton’s warning, I still think that seeking more ideological diversity among faculty is less bad that her plan to keep things just as they are. To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, every progressive becomes profoundly conservative once they’re in power.

And while we’re on the subject, I like this from Justin Smith-Ruiu:

One great difference anyhow between the diversity statements of the past years and the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era is that the McCarthyites were accommodating enough simply to force you to sign their oath; the DEI offices, by contrast, forced you to write your own, and then to sign it…. It is in some sense a shame that the diversity statements they were coercing out of us until recently met their demise at the moment fully functional LLMs hit the market — there was an instance, if there ever was one, where it really did make sense to outsource our writing tasks to the machines. I hope that if the Trumpists succeed in their efforts to impose viewpoint-based scrutiny of our job applications in the coming years, AI will likewise rise to the occasion and enable us to say whatever it is we are supposed to say, simply in order to be able to make a living, without having to waste any of our precious human cognitive energy on it.