In 2018, a prestigious American university came out in favor of “viewpoint diversity,” a term that is at the center of a billion-dollar-wide chasm between the Ivy League and the Trump administration.
In a report entitled “Pursuing Excellence on a Foundation of Inclusion,” members of a task force said that “Academic freedom protects participation in the intellectual enterprise; inclusion makes the value of academic freedom real by ensuring that all voices gain from its protections.”
They also wrote, “Our community also benefits from a diversity of sexual identities, political viewpoints, and religions.”
The university? Harvard, which is now the focus of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to infuse higher ed with worldviews more compatible with its own and those that stretch into other conservative corners.
Now, as in that report of 2018, Harvard’s leadership maintains that viewpoint diversity is important.
“We need to ensure that the university lives up to its steps to reaffirm a culture of free inquiry, viewpoint diversity and academic exploration,” Harvard President Alan Garber wrote recently.
So why, seven years after a task force comprised of Harvard faculty members, staff, students and alumni argued for greater ideological diversity on campus, is this still an issue? Was it “moss-covered error" — a phrase from Harvard’s alma mater, “Fair Harvard” — that led it and other universities to this point?
The questions may be moot now, as Harvard tries to salvage more than $2 billion in federal grants and contracts that President Donald Trump has said he will cancel if Harvard does not comply with the administration’s requests, while also rising to its new role as a face of resistance to the Trump administration.
But however much Harvard may want to have viewpoint diversity, it’s almost impossible to achieve in academia, a range of scholars say. That doesn’t mean it’s not a worthy ideal, not only in higher ed, but in many other professions (including journalism with its liberal-dominated newsrooms) and in our own personal exposure to ideas.
Why viewpoint diversity is in the news
While the phrase “viewpoint diversity” is largely used in conjunction with universities right now, it’s increasingly an issue in media, as Trump’s popularity has forced news organizations to assess their blind sides that kept them from foreseeing his election, both in 2016 and 2024, and from understanding his supporters. Newspapers such as The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, for example, have sought to add more conservative voices to their opinion pages, while television networks such as NBC have tried to do the same.
But a dearth of viewpoint diversity affects other professions — Nadine Strossen, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me that it’s even a problem among librarians.
The country as a whole has plenty of viewpoint diversity, she noted, given that “we seem to have pretty close to a 50-50 split between the two major parties and have very divided debates on all contentious issues.”
“The bigger question is,” she said, “why do we have less debate in particular institutions? ... In major elite liberal arts colleges and universities, which should be the cauldron of promoting and discussing a wide range of viewpoints, why is there so much ideological conformity there, and in other elite cultural institutions, journalism, publishing, librarianship.”
Research has shown that young Americans, in particular, demonstrate less of a commitment to free speech, hearing different points of view, and engaging in civil discourse.
But even people who champion free speech and viewpoint diversity, “can still strongly disagree with the methodology (the Trump administration) is using to achieve those goals,” she said, and also have concern about similar efforts by states, like Indiana, which passed a bill mandating “intellectual diversity.”
Heterodox Academy is one of the most vocal proponents of viewpoint diversity, but it recently published a statement expressing concern about Trump’s strategy. “We believe that replacing one set of political litmus tests with different political litmus tests would be the wrong approach,” the statement said.
What Trump wants from Harvard
The Trump administration maintains that viewpoint diversity is needed not just in the leadership and faculty at Harvard and other universities, but also in student populations. That’s not an unreasonable wish given the lopsided ideological tilt of professors — in one survey three years ago, more than 80% of Harvard faculty self-identified as liberal or very liberal.
Not every conservative student who goes to an Ivy League college comes out a liberal — Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, for example, was educated at Yale University and Harvard Law School —but a prevailing view among conservatives is that liberal universities turn out progressive young adults, and this idea has contributed to increasing distrust of the institutions of higher ed.
A course correction might have not just political, but practical value to universities facing declining enrollment. According to NPR, enrollment at colleges and universities declined 15% between 2010 and 2021, and the Ivy Leagues are not exempt. Eric Spitznagel reported for The Free Press last year that “an unprecedented number of students are gravitating away from Ivy League universities and looking to Southern colleges that wouldn’t have been on their radar twenty years ago” — in part because of “their dominant progressive politics.”
In recent years, increasing shares of Republicans have said that American universities are having a negative impact on the country.
And yet, in trying to effect change by withholding federal money and threatening Harvard’s tax-exempt status, the Trump administration has made even some critics of higher education’s progressivism uneasy, since “viewpoint diversity” is an amorphous idea. The FCC’s “Equal Time Rule” is meant to ensure that no political party or candidate dominates the airwaves, but an equivalent rule would be impossible to enforce in a classroom, and the range of political viewpoints is broad.
On Substack, legal scholar Cass Sunstein explored the problem, asking:
“Should a biology department be expected to offer courses showing that Darwin was 100% right, and also 100% wrong? Should a history department be required to hire Marxists, or people who think that the Holocaust did not happen?
“... Should a law school be required to hire people who think that Brown v. Bd. of Education was wrong? Who reject Marbury v. Madison? Who think the U.S. Constitution is terrible? Who believe in slavery? Who deplore capitalism? Who love capitalism?”
He concluded that, “The range of ‘viewpoints’ is very wide, and in deciding which ones are required by a commitment to ‘viewpoint diversity,’ any government overseer will have to discriminate on the basis of viewpoint.”
In other words, any conservatives rejoicing over the Trump administration’s actions should beware the political pendulum.
How viewpoint diversity might work
But Harvard professor Tyler J. VanderWeele, writing for The Crimson last year, proposed a framework in which a commitment to viewpoint diversity seems achievable.
In research, for example, universities would be wise to recruit faculty who hold “disfavored or controversial views when those views are held by a large portion of the population, have not been clearly refuted, and influence culture and policy.”
“If this principle were applied consistently, I could imagine faculty searches being conducted in sociology or in public health on marriage and health; in psychology, on character and virtue assessment; in philosophy, on Thomas Aquinas, whose philosophy (not just theology) continues to exert major influence on the Catholic Church and its 1.4 billion adherents. More controversially, a school of public health might consider hiring a pro-life scholar of women’s health,” VanderWeele said.
Doing so, he added, “might allow us to find some common ground on divisive issues. It would certainly improve the quality of argument and scholarship on both sides.
Walter K. Olson, a senior fellow at the nonpartisan Cato Institute, wrote that he hates to see conservatives and libertarians cheer Trump’s actions against universities despite their history of “resisting Washington’s heavy hand in university governance.”
“No civil rights law on the books requires ‘viewpoint diversity’ in university admissions or hiring or creates a protected class of students or faculty based on ideological views,” Olson said.
But hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, a Harvard alumni who has been sharply critical of the school’s response to student protests, maintains that the administration’s actions are justified.
“When a university goes from being a university to becoming a political advocacy organization, it doesn’t deserve nonprofit status,” Ackman said on CNBC.
Viewpoint diversity and DEI
Danielle Allen, a Harvard professor who co-chaired the task force that produced the 2018 report, later wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post, in which she expressed regret that three points of the report were largely ignored in its implementation: “our focus on academic freedom, on the need to make space for religious identity and on the need for greater political diversity on our campus.”
“Bringing out the best in all of us — to achieve a sum greater than the parts — is possible only if we cultivate a culture of mutual respect," Allen wrote.
Had DEI initiatives focused as much on political ideology or religion as they had on race, perhaps they would have been more broadly respected, instead of being subsumed into the culture wars. But Strossen said that it would be wrong to think that this issue will go away after Trump leaves off.
“Every administration is damaging to free speech in its own way,” she said. “Before we had Trump invoking Title 6, we had Obama and Biden invoking Title 9 to crack down on free speech and due process on campus …. "
But that doesn’t mean nothing good will come out of the current debate. “All of the public concern is very positive,” Strossen said, adding, “Universities now have much more of an incentive to engage in constructive self-reform.”