The Volokh Conspiracy
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How Viewpoint Diversity Can Help Protect Academics from Themselves (and Perhaps Help Heal Our Civic Culture Too)
The lack of intellectual pluralism undermines the truth-seeking function of the university.
Ohio State Professor Michael Clune, who caused a bit of a stir in academia with hhis December 2024 essay "We Asked for It," has a new essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education responding to a recent critique of the push for heterodoxy and intellectual pluralism on campus. The essay, "Professors Can Be Ignorant. That's Why We Need Viewpoint Diversity," begins:
It's hard to succeed as an educator when you don't know what you're talking about. And yet many professors of the humanities and social sciences — teaching and writing on topics such as capitalism, police reform, and sexuality — fail a simple, classic test. To understand your own position, you must be aware of, and be able to respond to, objections to that position. We need greater diversity of political and social views in academe not because diversity is a higher value than truth, but because academics' intellectual isolation has compromised their capacity to pursue truth.
In an academic environment in which objections to the reigning political, social, and cultural assumptions are castigated as beyond the pale of academic discussion, professors find themselves dangerously isolated, ignorant of how their students and fellow citizens view their behavior. Discussing faculty posts on social media about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a student at the University of Texas at Austin writes: "I've learned that there are people on my college campus who would cheer if someone like me, a young person who openly expresses my traditional Christian beliefs and right-wing political views, were murdered."
This is not the lesson most faculty members intend to teach, but many professors simply don't know how they appear to nonacademics and don't know how to respond appropriately to ideas that differ from their own. Professors in many fields tend to think that disagreement with their disciplines' consensus (on, say, police reform, capitalism, or gender) is equivalent to Holocaust denial, or, as Lisa Siraganian puts it in a recent essay in Academe attacking viewpoint diversity, denying the double-helix model of DNA.
As Clune discusses (and those of us with heterodox views in academia often experience) the lack of intellectual diversity in many departments and disciplines produces an epistemological failure and undermines academic inquiry, and this is particularly problematic in the humanities and social sciences.
the best case for intellectual diversity is a pragmatic one. While the sciences have hardly been immune to ideological distortions, not all fields suffer equally from a lack of different political perspectives. Some fields may not suffer any epistemological consequences at all. The goal of the university is the pursuit of truth; the pursuit of intellectual diversity is best seen as a means to that end. Physics or civil engineering may not be seriously compromised by ideological conformity; whether a biochemist is conservative or liberal may well have no effect at all on her teaching and research.
But I have come to believe that the questions asked by historians, literary scholars, and political scientists — which necessarily touch on matters of intense political controversy — cannot be adequately posed or answered in an atmosphere of ideological closure. . . .
The social sciences may well survive widespread epistemological failure and ideological closure, but the humanities may not be so lucky.
I fear that colleges' response to the political distortions of humanities disciplines will be to further marginalize and defund these disciplines. But the very feature of the humanities that renders them vulnerable to distortion by ideological conformity is also the source of their immense value to the educational enterprise. We are, ultimately, after human truths — the meaning of happiness, the nature of revolutions, the right way to organize a government, the best way to interpret a text or to judge a work of art. Our work engages passions and values that animate everyone's lives.
To see beyond our passions, to step outside our prejudices, to suspend our most powerful commitments — this is a discipline, and a difficult one. It is the humanities' proper discipline, and at this moment it requires welcoming new perspectives and voices into our classrooms and lecture halls. The creation of spaces in which the humanistic pursuit of truth can truly flourish may also be what this violent and divided nation most needs from higher education.
One way to address these concerns may to take Professor John McGinnis' advice and focus more on teaching students to disagree productively. This will help universities combat epistemic closure, and perhaps help heal our civic culture as well. In theory, law schools already do this, but the lack of meaningful ideological diversity hampers such efforts from being more effective.
An educational system should aspire to make citizens pass an "ideological Turing test," demonstrating the ability to present the strongest case for views they reject so persuasively that an examiner cannot infer their own. A person who can do so earns rapport across the aisle by grasping the full force of the arguments that motivate opponents.
Sadly, education at all stages today hinders the ability to pass this kind of test. . . .
Universities can still bend the civic arc if they return to their first vocation: truth-seeking through contestation. A democracy only functions well if its elites model respectful disagreement. That kind of respect is the first step to creating a political atmosphere free from fear and threat. This atmosphere is itself conducive to the willingness to compromise on which pluralist democracy depends.
