Update: Daniel B. Rodriguez (Northwestern; Google Scholar), Viewpoint Diversity in Law Schools, Once Again
Following up on last week's post, New York Times Op-Ed: Why Hiring Conservative Professors Could Backfire On Conservatives, by Jennifer M. Morton (Penn):
New York Times: Conservative Professors, by Jeff Sovern (Maryland; Google Scholar):
Dr. Morton fears that professors hired for their conservative views will feel pressure to adhere to those views to preserve their job security. But if they get tenure — a device to protect the expression of unpopular views — their job security would be, well, secure.
Professors do change their positions over their careers. But in my experience, it’s not common. If it happened more frequently, wouldn’t we see more conservative academics, simply because liberals would move across the spectrum?
New York Times Op-Ed: What Do Conservatives Offer Universities?, by Ross Douthat:
Last week The Wall Street Journal reported that Harvard University, searching after greater ideological diversity, is considering creating some kind of institute with a mandate to hire faculty members with nonprogressive perspectives on the world.
Around the same time the novelist Joyce Carol Oates published a post making sport of these sorts of efforts, whose argument I will reproduce in full:
[M]ost universities & colleges surely have faculty members who are contrarians? liberals & progressives are always quarreling with one another; “the left eats its own”; hiring conservatives per se will result in very lopsided résumés especially in the sciences. really, research universities should hire physicists who disbelieve in modern physics? anthropologists who believe that “Aryans” are the master race? poets who believe in Rhyming? philosophers who are staunch Thomists, or believe in the Creation? historians who don’t acknowledge slavery in the US? what a clown show, a sort of campus “Book of Mormon.” …
[T]he first part of the post asks a question that deserves a serious response. Why don’t academic contrarianism and quarrelsomeness alone suffice to introduce students to diverse perspectives on the world? Why can’t we just rely on the intelligence and curiosity of good professors, even if almost all of them happen to lean leftward, to deliver a complete portrait of intellectual debate?
the first part of the post asks a question that deserves a serious response. Why don’t academic contrarianism and quarrelsomeness alone suffice to introduce students to diverse perspectives on the world? Why can’t we just rely on the intelligence and curiosity of good professors, even if almost all of them happen to lean leftward, to deliver a complete portrait of intellectual debate?
Of course, nobody wants to imagine himself to be boringly orthodox in every way. But even an impulse toward open-mindedness and heterodoxy still tends to be constrained and channeled into safe territory.
Oates’s post suggests one way that this happens. “‘The left eats its own,’” she writes, describing the climate of fervent enmity that often exists within left-wing factions that seem from the outside to basically agree. But of course, it’s precisely that agreement that makes it feel safe to have the angry arguments. You can play the contrarian and the heretic, even develop blood feuds and ruthless personal rivalries, without straying too far outside the safety of received opinion. The interpretive battle rages fiercely, but the normative perspectives remain carefully constrained. …
An academic world that lacks serious political diversity will generate, first, a stultifying degree of conformity on contestable contemporary issues and, second, a contrarianism that even at its best still struggles to fully escape the dominant paradigm.
For a full escape to be on offer, you would need either a deep shift in human nature or more plausibly, more people involved in the academic project who start from outside its existing orthodoxies. Cultivating contrarianism is healthy; teaching controversies from a neutral standpoint is an important aspiration. But by far the easiest way to give students a sense of the diverse perspectives of the world is just to have people who actually hold those perspectives teaching on your campus.
Whether Harvard or any other liberal university can really pull off such a diversification is a different question, suited to a future newsletter. But that these schools would benefit from such a change seems obvious. Arguments carried out exclusively among liberals and leftists can be stimulating, engaging, important, revelatory. But they will always be insufficient to the professed task of the university, the understanding of reality in full.
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