Sadly, this analysis is very much on point. Too often, we have let the loudest, most intransigent voices (among both faculty and students) dominate the conversations, set policies, and establish norms on campus. But I have found that my students, particularly the ones entering college in the last couple years, are hungry for an education that challenges them rather than one that simply reinforces their pre-existing beliefs. I had one student in my Southern history class this semester who said it was “refreshing” to read a wide variety of primary sources, rather than just ones that toed a particular ideological line.
Very few right leaning people or even centrists ever consider going into teaching at any level. So what do you expect. I graduated with 500 engineering majors and one was headed to teaching.
It's kind of ironic that the side that is obsessed with "systemic" racism and injustice is oblivious that the concept could apply to political affiliation.
True- though in humanities and most social sciences they would never be encouraged to by professors, nor would they be accepted to the best grad schools, nor if they did would they be likely to get tenure track positions afterwards.
Ask anyone who attends the final rounds on campus for PhD admittance in a humanities subject. Very easy to go around the room, hear the research interests and guess who is going to admitted and funded and who will not be. The guy focused on Roman military and foreign policy on its borders (Persia, anyone?)or the gal focused on women slaves in Roman society? The climate scientist critical of the IPCC?
Just graduated from the environmental school at Duke. Folks there love their ‘bubble’ and grumble if forced to interact with the greedy law and business students. Here’s to hoping the tide is turning! I’m worried being non-conformist to Progressivism will hurt my career chances in my field….
There is no such thing as center and right, except in the dyadic mindset of the Leftist, who styles himself as "us" to all the rest, "them." We who are not Leftists must not succumb to the mindset that classifies our views in their terms, placed into their boxes.
Every human being is a unique individual. There is no linear scale from left to right where individuals can be pegged into herds for easy analysis and manipulation, because there are as many worldviews as there are people. Individuals can and do associate with like-minded people, but in billions of combinations susceptible to few, if any, characterization that matters. Leftists can not abide by complexity. They do not see individuals. We do.
There was no left, center and right to the founders of our great country, because the scourge of Marx had not yet arrived here. In the present day, Americans who are not Leftists ought to understand the vitiated shorthand of this dichotomy and abandon its usage once and for all.
I was in a meeting the other day to discuss dialogue initiatives on campus and when I mentioned the importance of viewpoint diversity and making space for ideas that counter the prominent narratives, the first comment was "I'm all for viewpoint diversity but we're not bringing Turning Point USA to campus" - it was wild...and very disheartening.
Per my comment I just wrote, "making space for ideas that counter the prominent narratives" - Do you mean you want to make space for ideas such as that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by Democrats via massive voting fraud using illegal aliens? Because a huge number of Republican believe it! If not that, why not?
How many Republicans would need to believe that the Holocaust didn't happen before you'd want to make space for that as "viewpoint diversity"?
These are not purely rhetorical questions. I want a basis for rejecting ideas, otherwise you'll end up with raving right-wing lunacy.
For me, facts, evidence, logic are good tools for rejecting bad ideas although I sometimes get it wrong. I prefer not to have someone tell me in advance who I am allowed to listen to. It sounds like you believe that most people are incapable of evaluating arguments on their own and will become raving lunatics if allowed to think for themselves.
Repeating what I wrote in another comment: As a free-speech supporter, I don't believe it should be illegal to deny the Holocaust happened. But I also think it would be wrong for "viewpoint diversity" to mean that history faculty would need to have professors who deny the Holocaust happened. Hence, I keep asking, (and not getting a good answer) what does it mean?
Maybe I'm making too much of it, but the sheer number of left-bashing comments here, as opposed to dealing with the simplest issues, tends to convince me that these claims are just a smokescreen for right-wing craziness. As in, if they get their way, we'll end up with stuff like "Professor of Biblical Biology" and "Political Science Chair Of Democrat Election Fraud" and similar.
As a society, we are already paying the price for this lopsided influence on our most educated young people. I attended a STEM school so did not see this as much in my generation, but it's clear that this has been ongoing for decades. Perhaps it is the last price of the Vietnam War.
Check out the American Library Association. President Sam Helmick (they/them) is focused on "banned books" and intellectual freedom, meaning that she wants Gender Queer shoved in kids' faces in every public library. The ALA also changed the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award because of her work includes “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values.” Does FIRE condone this? More details here: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/sam-helmick-they-them-american-library-association
Also, why didn't FIRE defend Douglass Mackey when he was persecuted by the Biden administration over a meme?
I suspect you don’t spend much time at your local library. I have kids, so I’m there regularly. Sometimes the children’s section has a display of LGBT books, usually around Pride month. But there are other displays that change frequently throughout the year and that feature different things: winter holidays, first day of school, picture books, American history, cookbooks, crafts, sharks, airplanes, mysteries, poetry, computers, etc. etc. Maybe you don’t want your kids to read the gay books, maybe other parents don’t want their kids to read the Hannukah books or the craft books (too messy, especially the ones with glitter, ugh). Why should the library ban any of these books? If our priority is free speech, then it’s more important for libraries to have controversial books, not less important.
I have never seen any mention of the ALA president at the library, not in all the years I have gone there. Why does it matter that Sam Helmick prefers they/them? I looked it up—the ALA has elected its next president, term to start in July 2026, who uses she/her pronouns. I don’t expect my library’s collection will change when the pronouns do.
For the record, I was disgusted when the ALA renamed its Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal. I thought that was an idiotic decision. But I believe that organizations get to name the awards they give out. (I also believe people will still call it the Wilder medal, just like we still call it the Sears Tower.) I don’t speak for FIRE, but I’m surprised you think FIRE would oppose the new award name on “free speech” principles.
You are right on the money, both about the situation and about why it is a problem. The idea that universities are indoctrination factories, while titillating, has little evidence backing it. No, it is the narrowing of what constitutes permissible inquiry that is the problem, and it is a far more subtle problem. By shaping what questions are asked and what data is published, you control knowledge itself. Paper by paper, reality begins to take on a liberal bias, if I may twist the popular saying. Nor is any grand conspiracy needed; it occurs largely by the rational action of the majority, prodded along in the right direction by the ideological minority. Who needs indoctrination when all available evidence points in the direction you favor? Best of all, the problem is defined by absence, so it is nearly impossible to detect, much like post-publication censorship gets orders of magnitude more attention than informal pre-publication censorship.
This is an important piece but I think it misses something major: the changes in the economy in the decades that saw faculty’s radicalization. In short, new, far more lucrative fields opened up for the educated elite and sky rocketed (tech, finance etc). Meanwhile working conditions in academia stagnated and worse. In relative terms academia is a far less appealing prospect today than in 1980 in every respect, both financially and in terms of prestige etc.
under these conditions the type of people who will be willing to make the huge financial sacrifice and go to academia rather than tech consulting etc must be a different subset than those who went to academia in the past- unsurprisingly people disproportionately at odds with mainstream ideas about our capitalistic system. Moreover the terrible experience of working in academia - a field in decline, would naturally make one more skeptical of “the system” than one working in a prosperous and growing field.
The ideological break up by field suggests this strongly. Note the two outliers: engineering and businesss. Precisely two of the newest fields (neither exited as such in 1980) and most closely linked to the prosperous development in the economy in the last decades
The upshot is that although all your proposed reforms are great, I am skeptical they can go far on their own. Unless academia somehow regains its former prestige it’s going to be tough to recruit enough “normies” so long as highly intelligent people have far easier and more lucrative career paths.
P.S. the “feminization” of academia is a parallel development from the same forces since men on average prioritize prestige and income more than women. Women are also on average to the left of men, a confounding factor probably explaining some (although surely not the most) of the shift.
I don't doubt that 27% of faculty donated to political campaigns, and that most donations went to progressive candidates. What about the 73% who did not donate? And surveys, many well-documented issues with them too. If you survey business, medicine, engineering, etc. you will find plenty of very right-leaning faculty, all of whom are convinced that their colleagues are left-leaning, particularly those colleagues in other departments who they wouldn't recognize if they bumped into them on the sidewalk. And most schools are nothing like Berkeley or Columbia.
Even if you think those numbers are impressive, what remains unproven is the notion that these findings bear any meaningful relationship to what is being taught in the classroom. Most classes just do not have time to address 21st century American politics, or CRT or DEI or whatever the latest bogeyman is.
You know what will drive faculty to the left, though? Appoint a couple of clueless crypto bros to slash research funding. Ban books from the library. Meddle with the curriculum. Vilify the poor schmoes who are just trying to teach algebra or early American literature or astronomy. If there's a problem, the "solutions" being imposed on universities are going to make the problem worse.
Imagine you’re an atheist working in an evangelical church in Fort Worth. Yes, people will mostly be friendly, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a dominant culture that you’re not a part of. That’s exactly what it’s like to be a non-progressive in these spaces. I know exactly what it’s like because I lived in DC for a decade, got an MA in Anthropology, and all my friends have always been progressive.
It sounds like it’s a little invisible to you, and that’s fine, but it’s very real to us who don’t subscribe to that worldview. It’s the water everyone is swimming in, and progressives are unaware that it’s water.
I completely believe that worldview exists, and even that it predominates in fields like anthropology. What I haven't seen is evidence that there's a political current in most classrooms, much less that it degrades higher education generally.
An argument could be made that swimming against the current strengthens you, even if it isn't as comfortable as going with the flow.
You're not wrong on that second point. Haidt has shared research that shows conservatives are more aware of liberal viewpoints than vice versa, which makes sense if so many of our shared institutions lean left. It's easier to avoid explicitly conservative spaces than it is to avoid liberal ones.
Yeah, I mostly agree with your first point. It's true that most people in these spaces aren't interested in discussing politically contentious issues. However, the norms are that it's okay to make jokes about RFK Jr., Trump, etc. I hear it often, and I have to pick my battles.
I'll give an example. Yesterday, my wife was catching up with her friend on the phone, who just had a baby and is trying to navigate how to handle her neighbors not vaccinating her kid. Fair enough. But then she said something along the lines of "this person didn't even get a COVID vaccine!" It's stuff like this all the time, other people assuming that you see the world the way they do. It's not intentional, which is why I invoke the "This Is Water" analogy. But anyway, good chat, nice to read your perspective.
"This is a series of intellectual and professional hurdles that keep out dissenters and defectors from the orthodoxy..."
That's settler colonialism after fifty years of settling and colonizing by the professional Left. We used to hear, in the 60s and 70s, an occasional mention of the Committees who served as appraisers of candidates for professorial positions in those august Universities. Little murmers of bias against Republicans, or later anyone with conservative leanings. And as time passed, those Committees themselves rejected any candidates who appeared insufficiently intolerant of viewpoints to the right of center. If one wonders why his children comes home from school full of slogans and resistance and experiences of 'protest' gatherings, and indifference to reading, writing et al, he need look no farther than that 50-year period of indoctrination from the top down by those settler colonists.
I'll repeat my basic query for these types of article: What is the reference base for "viewpoint diversity"? At least the progressive "diversity" has a simple reference - population gender, race, etc - even if, even if, even if, I know, that has problems. But is the goal based on e.g. "Democrat/Republican/Independent" Party registration statistics? Party registration statistics? Or what?
WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING LIST IS NOT OK AS "*VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY*":
Do we need academic historians having diversity over if the Holocaust happened?
Do we need academic biologists having diversity over Evolution vs Creationism?
Do we need academic geologists having diversity over Earth not 6,000 years old?
Do we need doctors having diversity over whether vaccines cause autism?
Do we need sociologists having diversity over whether women should vote?
On and on. And I haven't even gotten to less stark cases such as having diversity that lighter-skinned races are not genetically superior to darker-skinned races.
Tell me why, even those these views are disturbingly common in the total population, "viewpoint diversity" should not be a goal for them.
Bluntly, in the face of the Trump administration having an anti-vaccine lunatic as Secretary Of Health, and putting utter ideologues into position of power over science, I'm getting really tired of reading these hand-wringing blame-the-victim type of attacks claiming it's supposedly the fault of intellectuals. If a significant part of the population is right-wing nuts/religious fundamentalists who think evolution is the devil's work, and vaccines are poison created by Jews, etc. etc, and Republican pander to them, then YES, ABSOLUTELY, academia will lean very heavily "left"!
Criticizing academics in a "right-wing-lite" manner has got to be some of the easiest punditry around, forever. My challenge is to address this issue taking into account the enormous hordes of racist, sexist, know-nothing, religious fanatics, etc. who will immediately be crying "diversity" as a strategy to sanewash their horrors.
If quality evidence exists for a view, yet that view is ignored in research and teaching, then I'd say it qualifies. I don't believe that even one of the examples you listed meets that fairly low bar. If, somehow, quality evidence existed that supported those positions, would you still argue that they should be excluded?
Who determines what is "quality evidence"? That just rephrases the question. Now, YOU may think those examples don't meet that fairly low bar. But, for example, the current *Secretary Of Health* has a "different" view about the evidence on vaccines. And I suspect you haven't seen some of the more sophisticated Holocaust Denial material, which involves some very long - completely wrong, but quite complex - engineering arguments. But again, someone is going to need to make that determination, and anyone who loses out is going to be proclaiming political bias, echo chamber, cognitive capture, etc. And perhaps finding a sympathetic hearing among "centrist" pundits.
Well yeah, we're not talking about mathematics here. I doubt that it's possible to avoid human judgement. Do you object to the status quo as well, given that it too relies on identifying quality evidence?
People already claim political bias, echo chamber, cognitive capture, etc. That doesn't strike me as a novel issue.
As for the last bit, your argument is that we need to protect centrist pundits from flawed arguments, lest they be fooled? Given that these theories already exist, is your concern that universities will be unable to identify their flawed nature and mistakenly hire their progenitors?
My overall argument is that people who write posts like this should address the most blatant problems, rather than just doing academia-bashing. The issue here is a bit like the anti-free-speech argument for prohibiting "hate speech". When the free-speech person asks, who decides what qualifies as "hate speech", one reply is that we can't avoid human judgment and they believe a free-speech system is bad in that it encompasses Nazis, KKK'ers etc. It is often considered a killer argument on the free-speech side that the anti-free-speech person won't get to determine what's "hate speech". Then why this credulity about who will get to determine "viewpoint diversity"? The problem is made even stronger by ignoring all the actual cases of right-wing nonsense which have been trying undermine science, e.g. the Creationists and now the anti-vaccine lunatics.
My remark about "centrist" pundits was a bit of snark that there's a type of writer who desperately wants to be "in the middle", even if it's between sanity and insanity.
Fair enough, although since Greg is explicitly opposed to a quota system and is instead in favor of non-ideological solutions such as institutional neutrality and greater due process, I wouldn't say he's making an argument akin to one in favor of hate speech prohibitions. I do see your point though. I think that'd be a very real risk with using a quota system or something similar. My perspective is that the realm of respectable academic inquiry has become so circumscribed that it could safely be expanded via non-quota means without even approaching kooks.* The distance between arguing that Affirmative Action was counterproductive and Holocaust denial is vast.
*Right-wing ones anyway. Kooks who believe in things like the Labor Theory of Value are already well within that circle, unfortunately.)
Ah, but note parts of the post like "Courses on contested topics should include scholars who genuinely disagree."
What I keep challenging is: What does this *mean*? For example, do Biologists need to include Creationists, who "genuinely disagree" with evolution? I don't think this is an unreasonable question, since there was an explicit right-wing slogan about "teach the controversy" to advocate for putting Creationism in biology classes. And who counts as a "scholar" anyway?
Now for "But boards and presidents are responsible for the health of the institution. If universities become politically homogeneous environments ..." - just what do you think will happen if "boards and presidents" are given more power over faculty? Any belief that this'll be simply some moderate intellectual conservatism strikes me as severely out of touch.
Note, someone in favor of banning hate speech could say there's a vast difference between prohibiting Nazis parading down a street in a Jewish neighborhood, and sending all wrongthinkers to the Gulag.
I get the complaint, that there are annoying academics who are quick to accuse racism, sexism etc. Even many of them. I wouldn't ever deny it. But the blame-the-victim way this is used to sanewash the sheer barking gibbering lunacy which is right-wing politics is just too much for me these days.
This is a total red herring comment. It has nothing to do with the author’s arguments and proposed solutions.
I’d like to know which of his proposals you disagree with: university neutrality? real due process? the elimination of ideological litmus test? having student engage in serious disagreement?
Are all of these proposals bad for the university and its student?
It is addressed to the latter part of the author's post, not the initial part. It specifically is a response to portions of the author's arguments and proposed solutions such as:
"Another important intervention is making serious disagreement part of the university curriculum. Students should not graduate from elite universities having encountered only cartoon versions of arguments held by half the country. ...
Courses on contested topics should include scholars who genuinely disagree."
WHICH disagreements? Vaccines? Creationism? Holocaust? Age of the Earth? etc.
I think this is a reasonable question to ask, especially given the Creationists, the anti-vaccine Secretary of Health, rising anti-Semitism, etc.
"Sometimes that means co-teaching. Sometimes it means better reading lists. Sometimes it means bringing in visiting speakers. Sometimes it means creating programs specifically designed to expose students to serious arguments that their departments have filtered out."
WHICH arguments, see above.
"Importantly, university presidents and trustees also need to stop pretending they are powerless. If a department has spent decades narrowing the range of acceptable opinion, it makes no sense to ask that department to be the sole judge of viewpoint diversity. That is like asking a cartel to write antitrust law. This does not mean donors or politicians should dictate conclusions. They should not. But boards and presidents are responsible for the health of the institution. If universities become politically homogeneous environments where dissent is chilled and students are protected from serious disagreement, leadership has failed."
As I just wrote: what do you think will happen if "boards and presidents" are given more power over faculty? Any belief that this'll be simply some moderate intellectual conservatism strikes me as severely out of touch.
There's only so much space and time, so I'm staying focused on this aspect for my point, not other aspects of the article (where I have different thoughts).
I want people who talk about "viewpoint diversity" to give answers about when one can say right-wing lunancy is right-wing lunancy, even if it's common and politically powerful. An answer of "never" leads to madness.
“Sometimes it means creating programs specifically designed to expose students to serious arguments that their departments have filtered out."
I agree with you that people need to specify WHICH arguments. But I’d also like to see evidence that serious arguments have been “filtered out.” Where does this happen, in which schools and in which classes?
Some of the classes my own college-aged relatives have taken lately: dialogue editing & voice processing, criminal evidence & procedures, Chinese calligraphy, history of the English language, western civilization I/II, intro to music theory, computer science “senior design project”. I have no idea of the political leanings of those teachers, though I would guess the former police officer teaching criminal justice leaned right.
Most college classes are like these—not political. So who cares what political donations their faculty make? Maybe it’s true that the music theory teacher who donates to Marianne Williamson also shortchanges her students; in that case, show me the evidence.
We can see in this very thread that people firmly believe colleges are throttling right-wing perspectives, even when their own lived experience contradicts that belief. Somehow they are the lucky few who encountered left-wing beliefs and survived with their degrees and common sense intact.
Repeating, the faculty making the choice was already strongly rejected in the post above, as "like asking a cartel to write antitrust law". And to be fair, that follows logically from the premise - which is a reason why I keep asking about how this is supposed to work in practice.
Regarding safe/unsafe, as a free-speech supporter, I don't believe it should be illegal to deny the Holocaust happened. But I also think it would be wrong for "viewpoint diversity" to mean that history faculty would need to have professors who deny the Holocaust happened. Hence, I keep asking, (and not getting a good answer) what does it mean?
The political right rejects expertise, so why do you expect / desire universities to employ those on the right or believe these ideas create knowledge?
A few examples of the rejection of expertise:
- Ukraine invaded Russia
- Foreign countries pay tariffs to the US government
- Tax cuts always result in higher tax revenue (see Brownback's Kansas experiment)
- the US government deficit is due to spending increases not tax cuts - approximate level of net tax cuts since 1980 is $5-7 trillion
- Vaccines are more dangerous than letting disease run through populations
- "regulations" hamper economic growth and should be eliminated. This is often/always stated without identifying specific regulations to be undone nor acknowledging that regulations are typically a response to a market failure
So if one attends a university class on foreign affairs, economics, finance, biology, or civics and is taught these things, is "knowledge created," or is it quashed?
Sadly, this analysis is very much on point. Too often, we have let the loudest, most intransigent voices (among both faculty and students) dominate the conversations, set policies, and establish norms on campus. But I have found that my students, particularly the ones entering college in the last couple years, are hungry for an education that challenges them rather than one that simply reinforces their pre-existing beliefs. I had one student in my Southern history class this semester who said it was “refreshing” to read a wide variety of primary sources, rather than just ones that toed a particular ideological line.
Very few right leaning people or even centrists ever consider going into teaching at any level. So what do you expect. I graduated with 500 engineering majors and one was headed to teaching.
It's kind of ironic that the side that is obsessed with "systemic" racism and injustice is oblivious that the concept could apply to political affiliation.
True- though in humanities and most social sciences they would never be encouraged to by professors, nor would they be accepted to the best grad schools, nor if they did would they be likely to get tenure track positions afterwards.
Ask anyone who attends the final rounds on campus for PhD admittance in a humanities subject. Very easy to go around the room, hear the research interests and guess who is going to admitted and funded and who will not be. The guy focused on Roman military and foreign policy on its borders (Persia, anyone?)or the gal focused on women slaves in Roman society? The climate scientist critical of the IPCC?
Just graduated from the environmental school at Duke. Folks there love their ‘bubble’ and grumble if forced to interact with the greedy law and business students. Here’s to hoping the tide is turning! I’m worried being non-conformist to Progressivism will hurt my career chances in my field….
There is no such thing as center and right, except in the dyadic mindset of the Leftist, who styles himself as "us" to all the rest, "them." We who are not Leftists must not succumb to the mindset that classifies our views in their terms, placed into their boxes.
Every human being is a unique individual. There is no linear scale from left to right where individuals can be pegged into herds for easy analysis and manipulation, because there are as many worldviews as there are people. Individuals can and do associate with like-minded people, but in billions of combinations susceptible to few, if any, characterization that matters. Leftists can not abide by complexity. They do not see individuals. We do.
There was no left, center and right to the founders of our great country, because the scourge of Marx had not yet arrived here. In the present day, Americans who are not Leftists ought to understand the vitiated shorthand of this dichotomy and abandon its usage once and for all.
I was in a meeting the other day to discuss dialogue initiatives on campus and when I mentioned the importance of viewpoint diversity and making space for ideas that counter the prominent narratives, the first comment was "I'm all for viewpoint diversity but we're not bringing Turning Point USA to campus" - it was wild...and very disheartening.
Per my comment I just wrote, "making space for ideas that counter the prominent narratives" - Do you mean you want to make space for ideas such as that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen by Democrats via massive voting fraud using illegal aliens? Because a huge number of Republican believe it! If not that, why not?
How many Republicans would need to believe that the Holocaust didn't happen before you'd want to make space for that as "viewpoint diversity"?
These are not purely rhetorical questions. I want a basis for rejecting ideas, otherwise you'll end up with raving right-wing lunacy.
So are we supposed to be ok with today's left wing lunacy?
This does not address my question. It's a deflection. Ironically, speaking of Turning Point USA:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/charlie-kirk-professor-watchlist-free-speech-college-campus-rcna231448
"How Charlie Kirk’s Professor Watchlist reshaped free speech on campus
Experts say the project laid the groundwork for subsequent attempts to limit what professors and teachers say in the classroom."
What would we do without experts?
For me, facts, evidence, logic are good tools for rejecting bad ideas although I sometimes get it wrong. I prefer not to have someone tell me in advance who I am allowed to listen to. It sounds like you believe that most people are incapable of evaluating arguments on their own and will become raving lunatics if allowed to think for themselves.
Repeating what I wrote in another comment: As a free-speech supporter, I don't believe it should be illegal to deny the Holocaust happened. But I also think it would be wrong for "viewpoint diversity" to mean that history faculty would need to have professors who deny the Holocaust happened. Hence, I keep asking, (and not getting a good answer) what does it mean?
Maybe I'm making too much of it, but the sheer number of left-bashing comments here, as opposed to dealing with the simplest issues, tends to convince me that these claims are just a smokescreen for right-wing craziness. As in, if they get their way, we'll end up with stuff like "Professor of Biblical Biology" and "Political Science Chair Of Democrat Election Fraud" and similar.
As a society, we are already paying the price for this lopsided influence on our most educated young people. I attended a STEM school so did not see this as much in my generation, but it's clear that this has been ongoing for decades. Perhaps it is the last price of the Vietnam War.
Check out the American Library Association. President Sam Helmick (they/them) is focused on "banned books" and intellectual freedom, meaning that she wants Gender Queer shoved in kids' faces in every public library. The ALA also changed the name of the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal to the Children’s Literature Legacy Award because of her work includes “includes expressions of stereotypical attitudes inconsistent with ALSC’s core values.” Does FIRE condone this? More details here: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/sam-helmick-they-them-american-library-association
Also, why didn't FIRE defend Douglass Mackey when he was persecuted by the Biden administration over a meme?
I suspect you don’t spend much time at your local library. I have kids, so I’m there regularly. Sometimes the children’s section has a display of LGBT books, usually around Pride month. But there are other displays that change frequently throughout the year and that feature different things: winter holidays, first day of school, picture books, American history, cookbooks, crafts, sharks, airplanes, mysteries, poetry, computers, etc. etc. Maybe you don’t want your kids to read the gay books, maybe other parents don’t want their kids to read the Hannukah books or the craft books (too messy, especially the ones with glitter, ugh). Why should the library ban any of these books? If our priority is free speech, then it’s more important for libraries to have controversial books, not less important.
I have never seen any mention of the ALA president at the library, not in all the years I have gone there. Why does it matter that Sam Helmick prefers they/them? I looked it up—the ALA has elected its next president, term to start in July 2026, who uses she/her pronouns. I don’t expect my library’s collection will change when the pronouns do.
For the record, I was disgusted when the ALA renamed its Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal. I thought that was an idiotic decision. But I believe that organizations get to name the awards they give out. (I also believe people will still call it the Wilder medal, just like we still call it the Sears Tower.) I don’t speak for FIRE, but I’m surprised you think FIRE would oppose the new award name on “free speech” principles.
That's a good reply to "When all you have is a hammer, everything becomes a nail."
You are right on the money, both about the situation and about why it is a problem. The idea that universities are indoctrination factories, while titillating, has little evidence backing it. No, it is the narrowing of what constitutes permissible inquiry that is the problem, and it is a far more subtle problem. By shaping what questions are asked and what data is published, you control knowledge itself. Paper by paper, reality begins to take on a liberal bias, if I may twist the popular saying. Nor is any grand conspiracy needed; it occurs largely by the rational action of the majority, prodded along in the right direction by the ideological minority. Who needs indoctrination when all available evidence points in the direction you favor? Best of all, the problem is defined by absence, so it is nearly impossible to detect, much like post-publication censorship gets orders of magnitude more attention than informal pre-publication censorship.
This is an important piece but I think it misses something major: the changes in the economy in the decades that saw faculty’s radicalization. In short, new, far more lucrative fields opened up for the educated elite and sky rocketed (tech, finance etc). Meanwhile working conditions in academia stagnated and worse. In relative terms academia is a far less appealing prospect today than in 1980 in every respect, both financially and in terms of prestige etc.
under these conditions the type of people who will be willing to make the huge financial sacrifice and go to academia rather than tech consulting etc must be a different subset than those who went to academia in the past- unsurprisingly people disproportionately at odds with mainstream ideas about our capitalistic system. Moreover the terrible experience of working in academia - a field in decline, would naturally make one more skeptical of “the system” than one working in a prosperous and growing field.
The ideological break up by field suggests this strongly. Note the two outliers: engineering and businesss. Precisely two of the newest fields (neither exited as such in 1980) and most closely linked to the prosperous development in the economy in the last decades
The upshot is that although all your proposed reforms are great, I am skeptical they can go far on their own. Unless academia somehow regains its former prestige it’s going to be tough to recruit enough “normies” so long as highly intelligent people have far easier and more lucrative career paths.
P.S. the “feminization” of academia is a parallel development from the same forces since men on average prioritize prestige and income more than women. Women are also on average to the left of men, a confounding factor probably explaining some (although surely not the most) of the shift.
But donors are generally ideologically extreme. Are faculty donors more extreme than the average democratic donor of similar amount.
I don't doubt that 27% of faculty donated to political campaigns, and that most donations went to progressive candidates. What about the 73% who did not donate? And surveys, many well-documented issues with them too. If you survey business, medicine, engineering, etc. you will find plenty of very right-leaning faculty, all of whom are convinced that their colleagues are left-leaning, particularly those colleagues in other departments who they wouldn't recognize if they bumped into them on the sidewalk. And most schools are nothing like Berkeley or Columbia.
Even if you think those numbers are impressive, what remains unproven is the notion that these findings bear any meaningful relationship to what is being taught in the classroom. Most classes just do not have time to address 21st century American politics, or CRT or DEI or whatever the latest bogeyman is.
You know what will drive faculty to the left, though? Appoint a couple of clueless crypto bros to slash research funding. Ban books from the library. Meddle with the curriculum. Vilify the poor schmoes who are just trying to teach algebra or early American literature or astronomy. If there's a problem, the "solutions" being imposed on universities are going to make the problem worse.
Imagine you’re an atheist working in an evangelical church in Fort Worth. Yes, people will mostly be friendly, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a dominant culture that you’re not a part of. That’s exactly what it’s like to be a non-progressive in these spaces. I know exactly what it’s like because I lived in DC for a decade, got an MA in Anthropology, and all my friends have always been progressive.
It sounds like it’s a little invisible to you, and that’s fine, but it’s very real to us who don’t subscribe to that worldview. It’s the water everyone is swimming in, and progressives are unaware that it’s water.
I completely believe that worldview exists, and even that it predominates in fields like anthropology. What I haven't seen is evidence that there's a political current in most classrooms, much less that it degrades higher education generally.
An argument could be made that swimming against the current strengthens you, even if it isn't as comfortable as going with the flow.
You're not wrong on that second point. Haidt has shared research that shows conservatives are more aware of liberal viewpoints than vice versa, which makes sense if so many of our shared institutions lean left. It's easier to avoid explicitly conservative spaces than it is to avoid liberal ones.
Yeah, I mostly agree with your first point. It's true that most people in these spaces aren't interested in discussing politically contentious issues. However, the norms are that it's okay to make jokes about RFK Jr., Trump, etc. I hear it often, and I have to pick my battles.
I'll give an example. Yesterday, my wife was catching up with her friend on the phone, who just had a baby and is trying to navigate how to handle her neighbors not vaccinating her kid. Fair enough. But then she said something along the lines of "this person didn't even get a COVID vaccine!" It's stuff like this all the time, other people assuming that you see the world the way they do. It's not intentional, which is why I invoke the "This Is Water" analogy. But anyway, good chat, nice to read your perspective.
Also nice to read yours! I enjoy spaces where people can exchange views that actually differ. :)
"This is a series of intellectual and professional hurdles that keep out dissenters and defectors from the orthodoxy..."
That's settler colonialism after fifty years of settling and colonizing by the professional Left. We used to hear, in the 60s and 70s, an occasional mention of the Committees who served as appraisers of candidates for professorial positions in those august Universities. Little murmers of bias against Republicans, or later anyone with conservative leanings. And as time passed, those Committees themselves rejected any candidates who appeared insufficiently intolerant of viewpoints to the right of center. If one wonders why his children comes home from school full of slogans and resistance and experiences of 'protest' gatherings, and indifference to reading, writing et al, he need look no farther than that 50-year period of indoctrination from the top down by those settler colonists.
Can’t wait to see the haters try to claim that this study confirms FIRE is just a right wing astroturfing org or whatever it is they say these days.
Great work as always!
I'll repeat my basic query for these types of article: What is the reference base for "viewpoint diversity"? At least the progressive "diversity" has a simple reference - population gender, race, etc - even if, even if, even if, I know, that has problems. But is the goal based on e.g. "Democrat/Republican/Independent" Party registration statistics? Party registration statistics? Or what?
WHICH OF THE FOLLOWING LIST IS NOT OK AS "*VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY*":
Do we need academic historians having diversity over if the Holocaust happened?
Do we need academic biologists having diversity over Evolution vs Creationism?
Do we need academic geologists having diversity over Earth not 6,000 years old?
Do we need doctors having diversity over whether vaccines cause autism?
Do we need sociologists having diversity over whether women should vote?
On and on. And I haven't even gotten to less stark cases such as having diversity that lighter-skinned races are not genetically superior to darker-skinned races.
Tell me why, even those these views are disturbingly common in the total population, "viewpoint diversity" should not be a goal for them.
Bluntly, in the face of the Trump administration having an anti-vaccine lunatic as Secretary Of Health, and putting utter ideologues into position of power over science, I'm getting really tired of reading these hand-wringing blame-the-victim type of attacks claiming it's supposedly the fault of intellectuals. If a significant part of the population is right-wing nuts/religious fundamentalists who think evolution is the devil's work, and vaccines are poison created by Jews, etc. etc, and Republican pander to them, then YES, ABSOLUTELY, academia will lean very heavily "left"!
Criticizing academics in a "right-wing-lite" manner has got to be some of the easiest punditry around, forever. My challenge is to address this issue taking into account the enormous hordes of racist, sexist, know-nothing, religious fanatics, etc. who will immediately be crying "diversity" as a strategy to sanewash their horrors.
If quality evidence exists for a view, yet that view is ignored in research and teaching, then I'd say it qualifies. I don't believe that even one of the examples you listed meets that fairly low bar. If, somehow, quality evidence existed that supported those positions, would you still argue that they should be excluded?
Who determines what is "quality evidence"? That just rephrases the question. Now, YOU may think those examples don't meet that fairly low bar. But, for example, the current *Secretary Of Health* has a "different" view about the evidence on vaccines. And I suspect you haven't seen some of the more sophisticated Holocaust Denial material, which involves some very long - completely wrong, but quite complex - engineering arguments. But again, someone is going to need to make that determination, and anyone who loses out is going to be proclaiming political bias, echo chamber, cognitive capture, etc. And perhaps finding a sympathetic hearing among "centrist" pundits.
Well yeah, we're not talking about mathematics here. I doubt that it's possible to avoid human judgement. Do you object to the status quo as well, given that it too relies on identifying quality evidence?
People already claim political bias, echo chamber, cognitive capture, etc. That doesn't strike me as a novel issue.
As for the last bit, your argument is that we need to protect centrist pundits from flawed arguments, lest they be fooled? Given that these theories already exist, is your concern that universities will be unable to identify their flawed nature and mistakenly hire their progenitors?
My overall argument is that people who write posts like this should address the most blatant problems, rather than just doing academia-bashing. The issue here is a bit like the anti-free-speech argument for prohibiting "hate speech". When the free-speech person asks, who decides what qualifies as "hate speech", one reply is that we can't avoid human judgment and they believe a free-speech system is bad in that it encompasses Nazis, KKK'ers etc. It is often considered a killer argument on the free-speech side that the anti-free-speech person won't get to determine what's "hate speech". Then why this credulity about who will get to determine "viewpoint diversity"? The problem is made even stronger by ignoring all the actual cases of right-wing nonsense which have been trying undermine science, e.g. the Creationists and now the anti-vaccine lunatics.
My remark about "centrist" pundits was a bit of snark that there's a type of writer who desperately wants to be "in the middle", even if it's between sanity and insanity.
Fair enough, although since Greg is explicitly opposed to a quota system and is instead in favor of non-ideological solutions such as institutional neutrality and greater due process, I wouldn't say he's making an argument akin to one in favor of hate speech prohibitions. I do see your point though. I think that'd be a very real risk with using a quota system or something similar. My perspective is that the realm of respectable academic inquiry has become so circumscribed that it could safely be expanded via non-quota means without even approaching kooks.* The distance between arguing that Affirmative Action was counterproductive and Holocaust denial is vast.
*Right-wing ones anyway. Kooks who believe in things like the Labor Theory of Value are already well within that circle, unfortunately.)
Ah, but note parts of the post like "Courses on contested topics should include scholars who genuinely disagree."
What I keep challenging is: What does this *mean*? For example, do Biologists need to include Creationists, who "genuinely disagree" with evolution? I don't think this is an unreasonable question, since there was an explicit right-wing slogan about "teach the controversy" to advocate for putting Creationism in biology classes. And who counts as a "scholar" anyway?
Now for "But boards and presidents are responsible for the health of the institution. If universities become politically homogeneous environments ..." - just what do you think will happen if "boards and presidents" are given more power over faculty? Any belief that this'll be simply some moderate intellectual conservatism strikes me as severely out of touch.
Note, someone in favor of banning hate speech could say there's a vast difference between prohibiting Nazis parading down a street in a Jewish neighborhood, and sending all wrongthinkers to the Gulag.
I get the complaint, that there are annoying academics who are quick to accuse racism, sexism etc. Even many of them. I wouldn't ever deny it. But the blame-the-victim way this is used to sanewash the sheer barking gibbering lunacy which is right-wing politics is just too much for me these days.
So what is a viewpoint diversity that is missing in say the field of engineering or political science ?
This is a complete list of straw men arguments. As a professor in the humanities, let me tell you what the groupthink in the academy is actually like.
1. Teaching Marxism as a valid philosophical system without mentioning the gulags,
2.Teaching postcolonial theory as true despite its similarity to the Nazi discourse of blood and soil.
3Teaching Judith Butler's denial of the reality of biological sex.
4. Introducing "social justice" as the supreme value without examining the concept of justice.
5. Removing classics from the curriculum because they are " harmful", whatever that means.
Need more examples?
This is a total red herring comment. It has nothing to do with the author’s arguments and proposed solutions.
I’d like to know which of his proposals you disagree with: university neutrality? real due process? the elimination of ideological litmus test? having student engage in serious disagreement?
Are all of these proposals bad for the university and its student?
It is addressed to the latter part of the author's post, not the initial part. It specifically is a response to portions of the author's arguments and proposed solutions such as:
"Another important intervention is making serious disagreement part of the university curriculum. Students should not graduate from elite universities having encountered only cartoon versions of arguments held by half the country. ...
Courses on contested topics should include scholars who genuinely disagree."
WHICH disagreements? Vaccines? Creationism? Holocaust? Age of the Earth? etc.
I think this is a reasonable question to ask, especially given the Creationists, the anti-vaccine Secretary of Health, rising anti-Semitism, etc.
"Sometimes that means co-teaching. Sometimes it means better reading lists. Sometimes it means bringing in visiting speakers. Sometimes it means creating programs specifically designed to expose students to serious arguments that their departments have filtered out."
WHICH arguments, see above.
"Importantly, university presidents and trustees also need to stop pretending they are powerless. If a department has spent decades narrowing the range of acceptable opinion, it makes no sense to ask that department to be the sole judge of viewpoint diversity. That is like asking a cartel to write antitrust law. This does not mean donors or politicians should dictate conclusions. They should not. But boards and presidents are responsible for the health of the institution. If universities become politically homogeneous environments where dissent is chilled and students are protected from serious disagreement, leadership has failed."
As I just wrote: what do you think will happen if "boards and presidents" are given more power over faculty? Any belief that this'll be simply some moderate intellectual conservatism strikes me as severely out of touch.
There's only so much space and time, so I'm staying focused on this aspect for my point, not other aspects of the article (where I have different thoughts).
I want people who talk about "viewpoint diversity" to give answers about when one can say right-wing lunancy is right-wing lunancy, even if it's common and politically powerful. An answer of "never" leads to madness.
“Sometimes it means creating programs specifically designed to expose students to serious arguments that their departments have filtered out."
I agree with you that people need to specify WHICH arguments. But I’d also like to see evidence that serious arguments have been “filtered out.” Where does this happen, in which schools and in which classes?
Some of the classes my own college-aged relatives have taken lately: dialogue editing & voice processing, criminal evidence & procedures, Chinese calligraphy, history of the English language, western civilization I/II, intro to music theory, computer science “senior design project”. I have no idea of the political leanings of those teachers, though I would guess the former police officer teaching criminal justice leaned right.
Most college classes are like these—not political. So who cares what political donations their faculty make? Maybe it’s true that the music theory teacher who donates to Marianne Williamson also shortchanges her students; in that case, show me the evidence.
We can see in this very thread that people firmly believe colleges are throttling right-wing perspectives, even when their own lived experience contradicts that belief. Somehow they are the lucky few who encountered left-wing beliefs and survived with their degrees and common sense intact.
Re “WHICH disagreements?” Whichever disagreement the faculty and/or students chose. There are no “safe” topics and there are no “unsafe” topics.
Repeating, the faculty making the choice was already strongly rejected in the post above, as "like asking a cartel to write antitrust law". And to be fair, that follows logically from the premise - which is a reason why I keep asking about how this is supposed to work in practice.
Regarding safe/unsafe, as a free-speech supporter, I don't believe it should be illegal to deny the Holocaust happened. But I also think it would be wrong for "viewpoint diversity" to mean that history faculty would need to have professors who deny the Holocaust happened. Hence, I keep asking, (and not getting a good answer) what does it mean?
We need more strawmen, apparently.
You could answer the questions. I never seem to get an answer.
In specific, Creationists have been around for a long time. Why don't they count?
> " interesting cranky people who are wrong about half of everything but right about the half everyone else missed. "
Thank you for remembering my people exist.
Also, good article!
The political right rejects expertise, so why do you expect / desire universities to employ those on the right or believe these ideas create knowledge?
A few examples of the rejection of expertise:
- Ukraine invaded Russia
- Foreign countries pay tariffs to the US government
- Tax cuts always result in higher tax revenue (see Brownback's Kansas experiment)
- the US government deficit is due to spending increases not tax cuts - approximate level of net tax cuts since 1980 is $5-7 trillion
- Vaccines are more dangerous than letting disease run through populations
- "regulations" hamper economic growth and should be eliminated. This is often/always stated without identifying specific regulations to be undone nor acknowledging that regulations are typically a response to a market failure
So if one attends a university class on foreign affairs, economics, finance, biology, or civics and is taught these things, is "knowledge created," or is it quashed?