Viewpoint Diversity

Fighting the last & losing the next war

Viewpoint diversity

The phrase viewpoint diversity is much in vogue when discussing faculty makeup in elite higher education. The idea comes from the Kalven report, the 1967 document produced at the University of Chicago, published a few weeks before I was born. Seven faculty, including the esteemed historian John Hope Franklin who came to Duke from Chicago in the 1970s, were asked in 1967 by the President of the University of Chicago to prepare “a statement on the University’s role in political and social action.” They said (bold added by me):

“The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars. To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures. A university, if it is to be true to its faith in intellectual inquiry, must embrace, be hospitable to, and encourage the widest diversity of views within its own community. It is a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.”

Two key points about the faculty and one about the university.

• Faculty are the critics; and, we should expect diverse views among faculty because that improves the outcome of their work.

• The university’s job is to support faculty and students by protecting academic freedom.

From this statement you can easily derive the idea that we want “viewpoint diversity” among the faculty. This makes sense to me and I affirm it as a goal.

Heterodox Academy and Viewpoint Diversity

The Heterodox Academy has consistently argued for viewpoint diversity among university faculty since the original post from the organization written by Jonathan Haidt on September 10, 2015. Here is the first paragraph of that piece in full (bold added by me):

Welcome to our site. We are professors who want to improve our academic disciplines. Many of us have written about a particular problem: the loss or lack of “viewpoint diversity.” It’s what happens when the great majority of people in a field think the same way on important issues that are not really settled matters of fact. We don’t want viewpoint diversity on whether the Earth is round versus flat. But do we want everyone to share the same presuppositions when it comes to the study of race, class, gender, inequality, evolution, or history? Can research that emerges from an ideologically uniform and orthodox academy be as good, useful, and reliable as research that emerges from a more heterodox academy?

The bold portions make clear that there are some settled facts, and viewpoint diversity is not needed in all areas, topics and questions. The piece then notes in quite broad terms, several concepts, the most well-known scientific theory/mechanism/process and a discipline. Each are certainly more disputed than whether the Earth is flat, and he was wisely making a general point without being overly specific. Prof Haidt and Heterodox Academy were continuing a half Century discussion of viewpoint diversity and I think the group has been a consistent force arguing for both viewpoint diversity and freedom of speech. However, U.S. politics has greatly changed the past decade.

I was reading some of the early posts of Heterodox and also looking at the news headlines around the same time while doing research for my book, and I stumbled upon a story that grabbed my attention. On the same day that Heterodox launched its organization (September 10, 2015), CNN reported that Donald Trump was the first Republican to poll above 30% so far during that primary season. Second place was Ben Carson, with 19% and a follow up story the same day noted that Donald Trump had attacked Ben Carson for challenging Trump’s Christian faith.

Heterodox was continuing and extending a half century long discussion of viewpoint diversity, but the politics of our time were about to change fast. I certainly did not think the Republican Party would nominate Donald Trump in 2016 on September 10, 2015. Most importantly, family members who are Republicans were telling me the same thing. “No way, he is not a conservative!” Fast forward to today and the Trump Administration 2.0 has jumbled the status quo of higher education, but their approach has certainly not been conservative in any basic sense of the word if that means focus on due process, preservation of tradition and proceeding slowly.

The left (liberal) v. right (conservative) dichotomy is at least tired & maybe irrelevant

The thing I love most about substack is stumbling upon something that makes me think in a surprising way—totally unexpected. This essay is a recent example that put some words to my feeling of late that our “left v right” dichotomy of simplifying policy and cultural disagreements into liberal v conservative and democrat v republican no longer provides much clarity. Just old fights. The essay is a carefully argued piece that is worth a read, and this bit jumps out:

The labels “Left” and “Right” may still be used out of habit, but they fail to illuminate where people actually stand on this fundamental moral choice. It would be more transparent to speak in terms of particularism vs. universalism, or nationalism vs. globalism, or perhaps loyalty vs. levelling. But until such terms become commonplace, we must at least clarify what we mean by left or right in 2025. Increasingly, to be on the Left means to prioritise abstract principles of equality and global humanity over the attachments of tribe, nation, or ethnicity, even if that means, paradoxically, endorsing favouritism toward other tribes as a way to check the power of one’s own. And to be on the Right means to stand for one’s own people first, to see one’s primary moral duty as lying with the historical and cultural community that nurtured you, and to view skepticism toward mass immigration, multiculturalism, and “anti-majority” policies not as bigotry but as loyalty.

I am still working through this piece, am not sure if I buy the authors diagnosis, but she is clearly touching on the reality that we need a replacement for the language of left v. right description of the poles of disagreement in modern society. Viewpoint diversity remains something that I support, but I cannot help by think that it is a language of a bygone time. Of special note to me is how well the author of the piece above provides an explanation for the recent American political and cultural upheaval, but she is Australian, self-described Gen Z analyst.

University of Texas Provost and Viewpoint Diversity

Back on campus, the Provost of UT Austin, William Imboden, has been at the forefront of conversations on viewpoint diversity in elite higher ed. He was the founding Dean of the Hamilton School at the University of Florida that is an example of the “new schools or programs” approach to expanding viewpoint diversity, before returning to Austin to become Provost this past Summer. He gave an interesting interview to the Chronicle of Higher Education that was published on October 29, 2025. This is a brief snippet from Provost Imboden’s interview (Goldstein is questioner):

Goldstein: Let me ask about an area you control, faculty hiring. What are the concrete hiring practices that you support to add viewpoint diversity? Can it be done without adopting a political litmus test?

Inboden: There’s a very considerable, almost extreme, political imbalance on most university faculties, especially in the humanities and social sciences and adjacent fields. The concern is that often creates a political monoculture and squelches dissenting voices, and ultimately is an impoverishing experience for students.

But the answer to the left-wing politicization of campuses isn’t a counter-right-wing politicization. My ultimate goal, one that I think a lot of university leaders and faculty share, is to depoliticize higher ed.

But when you have a political monoculture, when everyone agrees politically, it’s very easy to lapse into taking much more explicit political stances and squelching out dissenting voices. The best way to address this in faculty hiring isn’t something as crude as: Let’s find registered Republicans with Ph.D.s and start creating special slots for them, but rather connecting this to what has also been a narrowing of a number of important fields that just happened to be ones that political conservatives are more often attracted to: diplomatic and military history, intellectual history, political history, political science, political theory, political philosophy, international relations. In literature, some of the more traditional fields of Shakespearean or Elizabethan literature. In philosophy, ethics.

Provost Imboden’s problem diagnosis:

· Political imbalance among the faculty

· Resulting political monoculture squelches dissent

· Students are harmed by this (using his word choice impoverishing as a synonym for harmed)

Most tellingly, Provost Imboden’s answer adds “left wing v right wing” as a synonym of viewpoint diversity, even as he explicitly rejects ‘tit for tat’ attempts to politically balance the “left wing” faculty with those who are “right wing.” He has a very difficult job navigating the leadership of a flagship R1 in which Republican politicians are ascendant in their control of higher education, and there are likely very few people who could have navigated as well as he has thus far. Of course, he is just 120 days into the job.

My biggest worry is that we 50 and 60 and 70 somethings in power on campus are going to spend all our time fighting the last ideological war and forgetting what our students most need from us today. Hollis Robbins makes a strong case that is ‘last mile education’ which means faculty bringing their domain expertise to an ongoing course dialogue that can only be obtained through the students and faculty engaging. An example of fighting out the last war can be found in the newest State obsession with posting course syllabi for public consumption. As Professor Robbins notes:

Across the country, states are demanding that professors post their syllabi online so the public can scrutinize what is being taught. And yet, in the age of AI, the syllabus is the most irrelevant document in higher education.

Two years ago, when perhaps 99% of course content came from the instructor, delivered via lectures, readings, course materials, the syllabus mattered. Today, over 92% of students use generative AI for coursework. What do people think that means? It’s not just writing papers. Students are prompting and reading on their own, including the stuff the politicians are screening for.

While politicians look at see what books are being assigned, we faculty need to be ensuring the value add that we are bringing to our students.