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As an anthropologist and historian of science, I have done research on how diversity as an epistemic value is transforming science and scholarship, especially in the United States. As a participant observer of the changing culture of higher education who teaches at The New School, a historically progressive university in New York, I have lamented that despite — or, maybe, because of — the valorization of diversity, the fields and institutions in which I move suffer from rather narrow political limits. I am not a political conservative and cannot complain about ostracism of my own views. But as a college student in Germany I found reading about debates between scholars with opposing political visions — Hans Blumenberg and Carl Schmitt, Theodor W. Adorno and Arnold Gehlen, Jürgen Habermas and Hans-Georg Gadamer — exhilarating.
These were very scholarly debates over the history of secularization or methodological disagreements over hermeneutics and ideology critique, but they came with pronounced political undertones and pitted nuanced progressive and conservative perspectives against each other. If the former wrestling manager now running the Department of Education could make the American humanities and social sciences great again by bringing about a renaissance of such rich controversies, I would applaud her efforts.
This, of course, is politically naïve. As the historian of science Michael Hagner predicted in 2019, the commitment of right-wing populists to epistemic pluralism only lasts until they manage to establish their own views well enough to eliminate all other points of view. Consider book bans, grant cancellations, and the violation of the First Amendment rights of foreign students and faculty and you will find validated Hagner’s cynical perspective on the authoritarian promotion of viewpoint diversity.
But the liberal campus majority should resist the temptation to fend off the Trump administration’s illiberal capture of an ur-liberal value by dismissing calls for greater viewpoint diversity as merely a smokescreen for the government’s war on higher education. That would be too easy. And, in fact, in its response to the Trump administration, Harvard confirmed its own commitment to “open inquiry in a pluralistic community free from intimidation and open to challenging orthodoxies.”
The fact is that diversity has come to define late modern science and scholarship to such an extent that today both progressives and conservatives are claiming it for themselves. Even critiques of diversity often present a particular concept or practice of diversity as insufficiently diverse (for example, Karsten Jonsen and colleagues showed that the field of diversity research was U.S.-centric and could benefit from including more diverse viewpoints). Diversity has become the master concept of our age; the question is not whether we are for or against it but what place it should occupy in a more extensive moral economy of knowledge. In my eyes, viewpoint-diversity audits are no way to foster the intellectual creativity and scholarly rigor to which the Trump administration purports to be so devoted.
Let me highlight two arguments for viewpoint diversity. They come from rather different corners of the American academy but converge on important points. The first is the case that feminist standpoint epistemologists have been making since the 1980s. They have argued that knowledge is inherently perspectival and depends on researchers’ social position, especially their gender, class, and race. In her book Objectivity and Diversity (2015), the philosopher Sandra Harding claimed that supposedly objective research wasn’t actually objective unless it was conducted in a scientific field populated by diverse scientists. Since scientific findings are constructed socially, her argument goes, homogeneous scientific communities will construct the same findings over and over again, thereby coming to believe that the findings were replicable, even though they only reveal shared biases.
Harding’s valorization of diversity is not boundless, however; it is limited politically. “Of course not every kind of apparently missing ‘diversity’ will assist in this project,” she writes. “We don’t need to invite white supremacists, neo-Nazis, or male supremacists into research communities to advance the growth of knowledge.” People who publicly adopt these standpoints can and must be excluded because their assumptions already permeate prevailing research standards. It is only the perspectives of economically, politically, and socially oppressed groups that bring valuable new insights to research, Harding claims.
The second epistemological case for viewpoint diversity has grown out of a debate in social and political psychology, a field that studies psychological differences between liberals and conservatives (while being dominated by liberals). The field has produced many unflattering accounts of the conservative mind: Conservatives were said to be less open to experience, less empathetic, more given to prejudice and dogmatism, and so on. In 2011, Jonathan Haidt instigated a decadelong scientific controversy, informed by experiments and surveys that social psychologists conducted throughout this period, over how to rein in the liberal bias in their field.
Unlike Harding, Haidt considered the exclusion of right-leaning researchers to be a profound epistemological problem. Like Harding, he proposed greater viewpoint diversity as the answer. If people of different political persuasions work together on formulating hypotheses, designing research, and interpreting data, chances are significantly better that someone will force the group to consider counterarguments and identify flaws the group would otherwise have overlooked because faulty reasoning had so neatly confirmed its dearest biases. Given the resistance of an overwhelmingly liberal faculty to hiring politically disagreeable colleagues, Haidt called for affirmative action for conservatives — not for reasons of social justice, but to strengthen social psychology scientifically.
While Haidt’s demand was that of a classical liberal (he frequently cited Mill’s maxim that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that”), affirmative action for conservatives is practically what the Trump administration is now asking of Harvard. What are we to make of it?
Viewpoint-diversity audits are no way to foster the intellectual creativity and scholarly rigor to which the Trump administration purports to be so devoted.
Yet there is a fundamental problem with these calls for more diversity. As an epistemic value, diversity has no inherent limitation. Several commentators on the article “Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science,” which a group around Haidt published in 2015, noted this problem. One pointed out that we do not know how much diversity would be necessary to rein in the biases that plague a field of scholarship: “Would it be enough to include liberals and conservatives? Or should communists, fascists, and even terrorists also be included?” The psychologist Steven Pinker responded with a similar reductio ad absurdum to the Trump administration’s demands on his university: “Will this government force the economics department to hire Marxists or the psychology department to hire Jungians or, for that matter, for the medical school to hire homeopaths or Native American healers?”
Standpoint epistemology of Harding’s sort is no help here, either. In Germany, neo-Nazis are a suppressed group tending to come from economically weaker regions of the country — shouldn’t that, in Harding’s view, mean that their inclusion in academic spaces would be salutary? This grotesque conclusion makes it clear how incoherent the standpoint theoretical privileging of “the view from below” is.
Yet there is a lesson to learn from Harding, namely that diversity must be curbed and balanced with other values. As the historians of science Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway have shown for climate skepticism, the inclusion of alternative viewpoints can all too easily be abused to derail urgently needed policymaking by provoking fake controversies. But values countervailing diversity shouldn’t be political; they should be other epistemic values. This balancing act requires what Aristotle called phronesis, the capacity for good judgment, and it cannot be formalized through viewpoint-diversity audits and affirmative-action policies.
The problem is not the valorization of viewpoint diversity as such but its bureaucratization. A bureaucracy requires dividing people into clearly defined categories. The diversity, equity, and inclusion policies that the Trump administration seeks to abandon measure an institution’s demographic diversity by asking its members to sort themselves into different classes: Are they “male,” “female,” or “other”? Are they “American Indian,” “Asian,” “Black,” “Native Hawaiian,” or “White”? Are they “Hispanic” or “not Hispanic”? A viewpoint-diversity audit would essentialize political identities analogously. An applicant who applied for one of the many job openings such an audit would create at Harvard could not simply submit a diversity statement that expressed their openness and support of diverse intellectual perspectives — that would be an all-too-liberal ethos (although one not always honored by self-identified liberals). The applicant would have to present themselves as a “conservative” anthropologist, biologist, gender-studies scholar, historian, or psychologist. They would have to lay out their conservative bona fides and explain how their political commitments inform their teaching and research. Bureaucratized viewpoint diversity would produce a new type of scientist or scholar.
Encouraging faculty to adopt an explicitly political persona (presumably modeled on the partisanship that organizes the political system of the United States) would represent a dramatic break with the moral economy of value neutrality, which has shaped at least the more positivist corners of the social sciences until quite recently. Of course, the critical social sciences and humanities abandoned the regulative ideal of minimizing the politicization of academic knowledge production and distribution a long time ago. In these fields, fashioning a political persona has become almost normative (the “scholar activist” is a perfectly tenurable type). But even in these fields the political pigeonholing of scholars would introduce the kind of looping effects that the philosopher of science Ian Hacking analyzed: Human beings act under a description, and they act differently when the descriptions change. A critical social scientist might have signaled their commitment to decolonization, antiracism, or neo-Marxist causes, but they also sought to make a name for themselves as an independently minded scholar rather than a representative of their political tribe. Even if the creation of a political audit culture in higher education was not an authoritarian ploy but represented a serious effort at fostering academic excellence by establishing a more pluralist scientific field, this field would be populated by scientists and scholars who would behave more like party functionaries than freethinkers.
I believe that colleges would benefit from greater intellectual diversity, and I worry that the Trump administration’s assault on their autonomy will drive them into a siege mentality that will hardly widen the range of permissible viewpoints. Change must come from inside, not by governmental fiat. Incentivizing scholars to understand themselves as representatives of a political camp does not open them up to uncomfortable facts, disagreeable ideas, and alien perspectives. It only makes the scientific field even more continuous with a highly polarized culture. This undermines the hard-won autonomy that had made modern science and scholarship so successful as motors of both technological innovation and social change. (And don’t tell me that this autonomy is an illusion because it has always been imperfect — as if it made no difference whether your department went into receivership and your next hire was overseen by a representative of the Trump administration.) American colleges do not need more administrators to inspect the viewpoints of faculty and students, but an epistemic culture that guards against dogmatism and reduces moral certainty by enabling scholars to stay on the move between alternative points of view.
I do not emphasize self-cultivation and guiding the formation of others as a substitute for diversifying the faculty and the student body. (Despite recent usage of the term to indicate minority or underprivileged status, no single person can be “diverse” — only a whole group can be.) Even the most broad-minded scholar will gravitate toward certain perspectives and not others. We contain multitudes, but there are limits to the pluralism we can achieve within. Hiring and admission committees should be on the lookout for colleagues and students who introduce different perspectives. But the work required is harder than instituting quotas (which is a measure that the Supreme Court struck down multiple times with respect to demographic diversity, so it is hard to imagine that viewpoint-diversity quotas would prove to be any more constitutional). The challenge is to find a new balance between the late modern valorization of diversity and other epistemic values. This cannot be mandated by the state. It must happen within the moral economy of the university itself.
