Book Review: “Viewpoint Diversity”

The new book Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It and How to Get It offers an important set of voices for campus conversations about diversity. Co-edited by Heterodox Academy president John Tomasi and Heresy Press founder Bernard Schweizer, it’s the first book that grapples with viewpoint diversity from a wide range of perspectives. I’ll address Tomasi’s essay in a future column, because it deserves a more extensive analysis. But the rest of the book includes many thought-provoking ideas, although some of them are deeply flawed.

In his essay “Viewpoint Diversity Can Kill Zombie Ideas” (which is an attitude directly contrary to everything viewpoint diversity should stand for), Jesse Singal asks, “What conceivable downside could there be to introducing more political diversity to the process, some way or another? Could it possibly make things any worse?” The first rule any libertarian like Singal should know is that it’s always possible to make things worse. In particular, attempts by government officials and administrators to impose “diversity” in faculty hiring almost invariably make things worse, particularly when “some way or another” is the mechanism imposed.

Singal’s careless indifference to the potential for political repression of higher education would be awful at any time, but coming in the midst of the Trump administration’s actual political repression, it reveals his breathtaking indifference to censorship.

Yet Singal avoids having the worst essay in the book thanks to New York Times columnist Bret Stephens, who argues, “There’s a line between an iconoclast and a crank, a skeptic and a cynic, a gadfly and a hater. That line isn’t always easily drawn. But it’s the responsibility of university presidents, provosts, deans and department heads to find and enforce it.” It’s rare to see any prominent figure pretending to be a free speech advocate who demands that college administrators should “enforce” rules to fire professors for the crime of being a “crank,” a “cynic” or a “hater.”

Stephens’s embrace of repression goes much further: “When they are working as they should, universities will not admit Hamas apologists any more than they might admit Holocaust deniers.” And it appears that Stephens has a very broad definition of these “Hamas apologists” who should be banned from all universities: “Praising Hamas as a ‘liberation’ movement is, if not ignorant or stupid, nakedly disingenuous.” But Hamas certainly is a liberation movement, even if, like some liberation movements, it’s guilty of committing horrible crimes.

Stephens’s desire to deplatform goes far beyond those he imagines are “Hamas apologists.” According to Stephens, the concept of a one-state solution, with Jews living as “equal citizens with Palestinians in a binational state,” is “not a position that deserves a stage” because it “invites the destruction of the Jews.”

Incredibly, Stephens concludes his appalling call for censorship by praising himself for his own “viewpoint diversity,” since he feels divided about whether he personally should “expose” the evil of these ideas while calling for their deplatforming, or refuse to debate anyone who believes in that Palestinians should be “equal citizens.”

It’s ironic that just a few pages later, Mark Bauerlein notes, “The dogmatists share a righteous premise: Why should offensive opinions be granted a platform?”

There are many reasonable contributors who reject the repression supported by Singal and Stephens. Nadine Strossen rightly condemns the Trump administration’s attempts to exert ideological control over faculty hiring using “viewpoint diversity” as the excuse. Eboo Patel encourages colleges to “use your programmatic powers instead of your coercive ones.”

But the book too often evades the crucial question of who should determine what viewpoint diversity looks like.

When administrators or politicians try to manipulate the ideological distribution of faculty, it creates enormous threats to academic freedom and violates standards of institutional neutrality and intellectual merit. A president who decides that more conservatives should be hired is taking (and imposing) an ideological stand, one that overrules academic experts for political reasons. And while viewpoint diversity is often presented as a matter of simply adding more views, the reality is much different. Hiring more conservatives requires discriminating against leftist applicants—which for many politicians and advocates is the true goal.

When framed in its vaguest terms, viewpoint diversity is a wonderful idea. We should urge scholars, students and everyone to be more tolerant of dissenting views. But putting teeth into the concept of viewpoint diversity is when the trouble really begins.

Academic freedom and tenure are by far the most important structures in higher education that promote viewpoint diversity, but this book almost entirely ignores these ideas. Tenure allows faculty who have proven their merit to dissent from campus and disciplinary orthodoxies without putting their jobs at risk. Academic freedom defends all faculty against punishment for expression of their views, allowing for diverse viewpoints to be spoken without penalty.

Expanding protections of academic freedom and tenure would do more to expand viewpoint diversity than anything proposed in this book.

The book also completely omits one of the most important tools for expanding viewpoint diversity in the running of universities: shared governance. Shared governance brings diverse faculty voices into the campus discussion about important policies and helps prevent the kind of administrative groupthink that results from a hierarchical bureaucracy lacking academic freedom.

The book is also flawed by its narrow ideological perspective on viewpoint diversity. The authors all seem united in thinking that viewpoint diversity exclusively means adding conservative voices to an exclusively left-wing campus ideology. But the fact that academia leans to the left does not mean that every field at every college overrepresents leftist views. Why doesn’t viewpoint diversity include adding socialists to economics and business departments? Among 18- to 29-year-olds, 62 percent have a favorable view of socialism, and 34 percent have a favorable view of communism—concepts that are rarely advocated and almost always denigrated by business professors.

According to a massive study of millions of college syllabi, business is by far the largest field at colleges—with more than 10 times as many syllabi as anthropology. If you look at the top 100 books assigned in business classes, is there even one that seriously could be considered as opposing capitalism? This is 100 percent pro-business ideology being uniformly assigned in the largest field in higher education. If viewpoint diversity is truly a neutral concept, then business schools should be urged to hire more professors skeptical of corporate America and assign critics of capitalism in courses and invite them to campus. But you’ll look in vain for anyone in this Viewpoint Diversity book who even raises this idea as a possibility. Viewpoint diversity for thee, but not for me.

Beyond encouraging faculty to seek out and hire and invite and debate professors who disagree with them, I don’t have an easy answer for expanding viewpoint diversity. The idea of administrators and politicians imposing their view of ideological “balance” on faculty hires should alarm everyone. Colleges can seek to bring together faculty with different views, but once viewpoint replaces merit in scholarly hiring, it’s a threat to intellectual freedom rather than a benefit.

The best way to expand viewpoint diversity is an approach largely overlooked by this book: extracurricular activities. Komi Frey’s essay offers one of the rare pieces of helpful practical advice: “Law schools should proactively organize discussions of controversial topics themselves.”

Attempts to impose viewpoint diversity in faculty hiring will always raise dangers about academic freedom and can actually narrow the range of ideas by discouraging the hiring of controversial faculty with left-wing views. But extramural speakers pose no danger to academic freedom. Faculty hires are a scarce commodity that must be allocated according to academic merit rather than preferred viewpoint. However, outside speakers pose no problem of a zero-sum game. No one is silenced if someone else gets to speak, and no college faces a shortage of rooms for events.

What we need is a principled and liberating vision of viewpoint diversity—viewpoint diversity for all and without having it imposed by repressive means. We need to support viewpoint diversity not because we believe that ideas we support are underrepresented, but because we recognize the value of different viewpoints even when our values are dominant.

At a time when viewpoint diversity is commonly being invoked to suppress academic freedom, its advocates must acknowledge and address the danger of having this concept abused to silence critical views. Unfortunately, this book largely omits left-wing views and critics who worry about the threats posed in the name of viewpoint diversity. The book provides a valuable addition to the debate, but it needs more viewpoint diversity.