Viewpoint Diversity at Harvard Must Be More Than a Hiring Initiative

According to recent reporting, Harvard is quietly asking donors to support as many as 20-30 new professorships to improve “viewpoint diversity” on campus. That’s notable. It suggests the university understands that the lack of viewpoint diversity is not just an issue of optics or politics.

A university cannot credibly claim to value free inquiry while allowing broad categories of thought to become professionally disfavored. Free inquiry contracts when dissent carries the threat of reputational risk. When that happens, conformity takes its place.

So yes, bringing 20-30 new voices to Harvard would be a positive sign and a good first step. Hopefully, however, this is not all Harvard intends to do.

Viewpoint diversity should be a basic condition of academic life. Each department should reflect the full range of credible perspectives within its field. The objective should be to hire excellent scholars, based on their achievements and potential, protect their freedom to follow the evidence where it leads, and stop treating political and moral objectives as a substitute for merit.

That means no litmus tests in hiring. No rewarding scholarship or teaching because it aligns with the prevailing campus consensus. Academic standards should do the sorting. Institutional preferences should not.

Although hiring 20-30 established scholars would be a highly visible step, the university should not neglect the nitty gritty work occurring at earlier stages of the academic pipeline. Hiring junior faculty and advancing them through the tenure process is critical to encouraging durable intellectual diversity. It’s important that these processes not discourage, marginalize or filter out those who advance heterodox and unpopular views.

Viewpoint diversity is not about manufacturing partisan symmetry or satisfying political quotas, however. It’s about hiring excellent scholars who will offer the full range of intellectual thought on campus and who will be free to disagree respectfully with each other and challenge orthodoxies. Also, it’s important that hiring a small group of established scholars not appear as just a public relations effort to placate university critics. Without a sustained, institution-wide commitment to cultural change, there is a risk that it could be perceived that way.

So, will Harvard hire excellent scholars whose work challenges prevailing orthodoxies? Will those scholars be free to teach, publish, argue, and dissent without adverse professional consequences? Will this be just the first step to change the underlying culture on campus so that faculty and students do not feel a need to self-censor?

If so, this could matter.

If not, it will be just another initiative with a polished label and little impact on the incentives that created the problem in the first place.