After a decade of “viewpoint diversity” work by a growing number of faculty, staff and administrators associated with Heterodox Academy, the concept has emerged in the American culture wars.
What does that mean for this nonpartisan effort to promote open inquiry and ideological diversity in higher education?
Braving the sauna-like Manhattan weather, scholars and administrators from across the country gathered this week in New York to take stock of a national higher education landscape that the president of Heterodox Academy, John Tomasi, acknowledged was “confusing” — with “certain dangers that are new, arriving on the scene” and another moment in history with “great disruptions.”
Attendees discussed whether forceful government responses by conservative legislators, governors and the White House to promote viewpoint diversity on campus constituted excessive interference — or a long-overdue intervention into an institution that’s experienced collapsing trust over the last decade.
JD Vance on ‘viewpoint diversity’
On June 3, Vice President JD Vance told the American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala in Washington, D.C., that “universities have become almost quasi theocratic or quasi totalitarian societies.”
Acknowledging that no one knew how Harvard’s faculty voted in last year’s presidential election, Vance said, “My guess is that at least 90% and probably 95% of them voted for Kamala Harris.”
If 80% of the people voted for one candidate in another foreign country’s election, Vance continued, “you would say, ‘oh, that’s kind of weird, right? That’s not a super healthy democracy.’”
If 95% of people voted for one party’s candidate, he added, “you would say, that’s North Korea, that’s totalitarian, that is impossible in a true place of free exchange for that to happen.
“I think the ideological diversity of universities has to get much better,” Vance concluded.
Done in the name of ‘viewpoint diversity’
For universities to fulfill “their core truth-seeking mission, they must promote viewpoint diversity,” agreed Nadine Strossen at the Heterodox Conference in New York City this week. (The term “heterodox” signals a pushing back on the academic status quo by expanding open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement on campus.)
However, Strossen, an emeritus professor at New York Law School, is concerned at how often the Trump administration has “invoked” these concepts to justify vigorous executive moves on universities.
An April letter to Harvard by administration officials, for instance, demanded “viewpoint diversity in admissions and hiring.” Strossen said, “the stated rationale for many of Trump’s measures is to promote free speech.”
“To be sure, targeted universities have themselves violated academic freedom and free speech principles,” Strossen continued. “But that problem is hardly justification for government-imposed measures that violate those very same principles.”
Strossen cited an essay from Wesleyan University President Michael Roth, which said, “Having worried about the soft despotism of shared opinion, we now have to contend with the hard despotism of ideological tests from Washington.”
As author Jonathan Haidt told the Deseret News at the conference this week, “the threat to academic freedom has traditionally come from the political left — and now it’s also coming from the political right.”
“We’re in a very pivotal moment,” said Nicole Barbaro Simovski, director of communications at Heterodox Academy. “Power can come in many forms and from many angles. But if we do not wield our power as scholars with careful intention, it might soon be wielded instead by whatever party is in power.”
With new pressure on higher ed coming from the political right, more liberal campuses are being forced to ask hard questions about federal funding that religious conservative campuses have grappled with for years.
University drift
Are these increasing government interventions in higher education an understandable response to institutional drift or excessive interference?
During a university presidents panel, Heterodox Academy board member Frank Lauken asked whether there could be some justification for the government wanting to do something right now to nudge universities in the right direction.
Universities do have to “own” problems taking place on their campuses, several presidents agreed, with University of Denver President Jeremy Haefner asking, “how do we address the divisions implicit in some of our approaches, perhaps in the DEI space? (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion)”
There was little debate among presenters that many universities struggle to live up to their missions. While acknowledging that “concerns and criticisms of universities have been exaggerated for political reasons,” Heterodox Academy President John Tomasi noted that “there’s something in the critiques that rings true.”
“Instead of being places for free inquiry,” Tomasi said universities have “increasingly become comfortable monocultures. Instead of protecting scholarly virtues of pluralism, they have become too often engines of conformity. ... And the humble search for truth has often been displaced by tendentious forms of political activism or crass careerism.”
“The idea of an institution is to be a place where people interrogate ideas and push each other,” said Dartmouth President Sian Leah Beilock. She argued that institutional neutrality across university departments was a key mechanism designed to help this happen.
“For example, our English department is not supposed to issue a statement about something unrelated to their field. … I don’t want a student who maybe has more conservative leanings to not want to go study English because they feel that the department is seeking a political stance in another direction.
“The idea is to open up the aperture for dialogue and debate.”
Collapsing trust, sparking legislative action?
Haidt described the dramatic “collapse of trust” in higher education that occurred over the last 10 years among the American public — citing Gallup and Pew data from as late as 2015 showing that universities were “very highly respected,” including among a slight majority of Republicans.
“If you have two-thirds or three-quarters of the country souring on your brand, and then you have a president who’s attacking you, well, who’s going to support you? You’ve alienated most of the country.”
This partly explains why so many legislators are taking action. In a discussion about the removal of sociology from general education requirements in Florida, four U.S. sociologists on another conference panel considered whether there is an appropriate “role of government intervention in situations where an academic discipline has experienced ideological capture” (excessive control by a particular ideology in a way that interferes with academic excellence).
Rachel Altman and Alexandra Lysova, both from Simon Fraser University, spoke about “using the law to restore the purpose of Canadian universities.” In other remarks about vigorous government intervention in Florida, Mark Bauerlein, who was appointed by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to the board of trustees of New College of Florida amidst intensive reforms, said that public dissatisfaction and “alienation” toward universities is what best explains government feeling compelled to step in.
“None of this,” Bauerlein argued, would have happened if universities hadn’t sunk “so low” in public esteem, noting the approval rating had gone down to the low 30s. “This wouldn’t have been politically possible. No politician, even in Florida, would have taken this on.”
“This is an expression of the popular will taking place.”
Grappling with government actions
Colgate University President Brian W. Casey recounted what it was like for the administration to process federal government “threats” this spring, which he said “were really a confusing, amalgamation of documents and statements.”
“We did what many universities did. We started looking at our webpage. We started looking at our policies — policy by policy, struggling."
“On the one hand, that was good,” he said, in the sense of “let’s look at what our policies are.”
“But it was also somewhat excruciating, because we were anticipatorily considering what might come …. what words would get us in trouble."
Here we are, Casey reflected, saying “we must be a place of free speech,” but also saying “don’t use that word.”
“And I have to say, with our board, we had some of the most emotional meetings we had. To have a board member say, ‘let’s stay away from the fray.’ But then to have another say, ‘no, the fray is what we do.’”
“It can get really dispiriting,” Casey continued, referring to the continuing messaging from the White House. “You can crawl down in a hunkered down shell of yourself. It’s important to get up every day, and remember that a lot of what we do on campus is deeply good and deeply important.”
The why of ‘viewpoint diversity’
It’s these kinds of pressures that lead many attendees at the Heterodox Conference this week to believe the work of promoting viewpoint diversity is as important as ever.
Organizers acknowledged many wonderful examples of fostering scholarship — recognizing four different exemplary scholars with awards: Musa al-Gharbi, Stony Brook University; Abigail Saguy, UCLA; Anna Krylov, University of Southern California; and Western Michigan University for “providing a national model for constructive dialogue in higher education.”
But does cultivating diversity really matter in the same way at a religious university? And could a welcoming of heterodoxy be rightly seen as a threat to unity around any particular religious teaching (aka, orthodoxy)?
“In faith-based settings, some might associate the term heterodox with matters that oppose orthodox theology, since being unorthodox typically denotes opposition to orthodoxy,” said attendee Dawn-Marie G. Wood, associate teaching professor at Brigham Young University.
“But to be heterodox is to recognize the value of difference, including viewpoint diversity, which takes nothing from unity.”
She went on to reference teaching from a Latter-day Saint apostle that “unity and diversity are not opposites,” and that in her experience, “truth-seeking at BYU couples the worthy pursuit of unity with a celebration of diversity that allows for the peaceful, productive coexistence of different ideas.”
Part of the problem?
Roth, of Wesleyan University, argued that concerns raised over the last decade about viewpoint diversity have now “found resonance within an authoritarian push to control our spaces.”
Putting out a recent video titled, “How can we fix our universities without burning them down,“ Roth agreed with the need in earlier years for “heightened awareness about the political biases that undermine faculty hiring, that undermine classroom sessions, that undermine the education we want to offer” — stating that “the lack of intellectual diversity on our campuses undermines the work we do at missions.”
But within the current political climate, Roth asserted that those who worry too much about ideological balance in certain departments are unwittingly fueling something that’s taken on authoritarian tones.
His argument was met with pushback among the other participants. “It’s really a problem to say just because the (Trump) administration is suggesting something, inherently means it’s wrong,” Beilock said.
“Two things can be true at the same time,” she added, emphasizing the importance of university independence from government dictates, alongside their need to continue working as institutions to “reform ourselves” — “going back to their mission where educational institutions were not political institutions, were not social action institutions.”
In a Guardian interview a few weeks ago, Haidt himself describes being asked, “how do you feel about what’s going on with Donald Trump? Did your championing of this issue (viewpoint diversity) provide ammunition for the current war against academic independence?”
“While I have always stood for the value of viewpoint diversity, so I think President Donald Trump is not wrong to call for it,” Haidt responded, “I’ve also always stood against government micromanaging what universities do.”
Haidt underscored that the president was “using the power of the federal government and the Department of Justice to harass and harm his enemies … this is the most shocking transformation of America I’ve ever heard of.”
Tomasi cautioned against universities deciding that “better messaging” was mostly what was needed, in order to “correct the narrative” and make the public “understand who you really are.”
“Universities are truly facing a crossroads,” he said. “If things are this epic, if the threat is that existential, all the more reason for us to have serious conversation.”