Viewpoint Diversity On Campus

Viewpoint Diversity On Campus

First, let’s cover three premises:

1. Most people who are religious or academic believe that they either currently know the truth or that they are effectively pursuing truth.
2. Humans have evolved to associate and group together with other people who are like them, as this tends to enhance cooperation and limit conflict.
3. Almost everyone has a natural inclination to confirmation bias, a.k.a only focusing on data that reinforces our hypothesis or the worldview that we WANT to be true.

These first two concepts are very useful when trying to accomplish a singular goal in a group setting, such as victory in war, a large construction project, winning a team sporting event, etc.

Unfortunately, this last premise makes the first two largely incompatible with each other. The more that we limit our association with others who hold differing points of view, the less our ideas get challenged.

When our ideas are not rigorously challenged we are not able to effectively discard those that can’t stand up to scrutiny.

This is often an uncomfortable and even painful process.

Our ideas can often feel like a physical part of ourselves, and so when they are challenged, we feel like we are personally being challenged. When we have to let go of them, it can feel like a part of us has died.

However, if we do not go through this process, we cannot find out which ones are really worth holding on to and we are much more likely to follow beliefs that are not sound.

Unfortunately, this problem doesn’t just stop with us as individuals; anything that is created by or comprised of humans will be susceptible to this issue. Our colleges and universities have become especially affected by this tendency of group homogeneity.

To put this in perspective, the HERI survey asks how faculty members self-identify across the political spectrum which gives us a better sense of the ideological leanings among the professoriate, and it powerfully shows that the number of faculty on the right is far outweighed by those who identify as moderate or on the left.

In 1989-1990, when HERI first fielded this survey, 42% of faculty identified as being on the left, 40% were moderate, and another 18% were on the right. While it would be expected that people in academia will lean slightly more to the left (personalities that are drawn to professorship are also more likely to be liberal), it is important to note that back then there was still a significant proportion of moderate and conservative voices.

However, almost three decades later in 2016-2017, HERI found that 60% of the faculty now identified as either far left or liberal compared to just 12% being conservative or far right. This is no longer a slight lean to the left, it is a massively skewed distribution.

In 1989, the liberal-to-conservative ratio of faculty was 2:3. So in less than 30 years the ratio of liberal-identifying faculty to conservative faculty had more than doubled to 5. This is a very unhealthy academic environment if we want to maintain a diversity of viewpoints.

It has been in these conditions that we have seen the rise of the Religion of Academia.

Historically, the groups in the academies that have pursued “truth” from a critical theory framework have always been in an ecosystem that had too much competition from better viewpoints which subsequently never allowed these ideas to gain much traction.

Now, this diversity of viewpoints has all but disappeared and we have been left with a landscape that is a monolith that is only capable of seeing the world through the lens of social justice.

Furthermore, anyone who expresses ideas that are counter to the orthodoxy of the Religion of Academia is shunned, canceled, and de-platformed.

Do not confuse the calls for “diversity and inclusion” that often emanate from this crowd with an encouragement for diversity of viewpoints. They are seemingly ONLY interested in a diversity of physical characteristics that can be assigned victimhood. They are shockingly intolerant of people who do not share their views.

As Abrams wrote in The New York Times in 2016, “It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators.”

Thankfully, this problem has been expertly identified by Jonathan Haidt (author of The Righteous Mind) who has created an organization called The Heterodox Academy to combat this imbalance.

The Heterodox Academy states that its goal is to “gather and empower diverse academic insiders to advance open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement across higher education. We conduct research, develop resources, build communities, engage with leaders, and elevate public conversations, working to reshape the formal policies and informal norms that determine academic culture and practice.”

Let’s all be sure to look for ways to promote and advocate for a diversity of viewpoints in universities and also in our own personal circles.

Best,

Greg Matsen