It has become common for conservative, and some liberal, critics of campus DEI efforts to insist that “viewpoint diversity” should supplement, or else replace, diversity understood in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. Where does that idea come from? What does it mean?
As the anthropologist Nicolas Langlitz explained recently in an essay in our pages, the current vogue for viewpoint diversity began in the 2010s, when social psychologists became concerned that their own political homogeneity was distorting their findings about human nature and human behavior. Those concerns were exacerbated by the “replication crisis,” which afflicted social psychology with particular severity. Perhaps, the thinking went, admitting more conservative thinkers into psychology’s fold would nurture “a system of ideological checks and balances” whereby liberal biases would be nullified and accuracy therefore improved.
Proponents of viewpoint diversity, then, were effectively calling for something like affirmative action for conservatives, not for reasons of justice — not because conservatives deserve, as conservatives, more places at the table — but for the sake of knowledge production. Understood this way, viewpoint diversity is an epistemic, not a political or moral, good.
Viewpoint diversity entails “a challenge to the discipline’s hitherto dominant epistemic value of value neutrality,” as Langlitz puts it, “because it requires the identification of researchers with a political stance.” When value neutrality is the ideal, a psychologist might happen to be a liberal or a conservative, but should strive to suppress any influence those contingent facts have on research. When viewpoint diversity is the ideal, a psychologist’s political leanings constitute “a perspective that they will carry into scientific forums such as lab meetings, peer-review processes, or conference-panel discussions where their bias will help to advance knowledge.”
The idea that more accurate scientific knowledge will issue from a politically heterogeneous body of researchers is open to challenge on many fronts. For the philosopher Brian Leiter, a critic of Republican legislation mandating “intellectual diversity” in university hiring, “viewpoint diversity” is simply “not a value in higher education or scholarship, all of which is predicated on judgments that some viewpoints are not worthy.” Within social psychology, critics have pointed out that the ideal ideological constellation imagined by proponents of viewpoint diversity tracks very closely the continuum of American party politics. But if viewpoint diversity’s justification is epistemic, why should it merely reflect the local political arrangements of the United States? As a group of German psychologists asked, why should “communists, fascists, and even terrorists” not “also be included?” As Max Weber himself argued in 1913, in a text that articulated some of the ideas made famous in his 1917 lecture “Science as Vocation,” the only way to justify admitting ideological viewpoints into research practice would be to allow “all partisan valuations” to “have an opportunity to assert themselves on the academic platform.” It is partially against such a morass that Weber’s value neutrality was posed.
This is not the first time that the liberal-bias problem became a live issue for an academic field. In the early 1990s, the political scientist Philip E. Tetlock worried that his discipline risked uncritically reproducing “the received wisdom of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party,” compromising its capacity to make “surprising discoveries that enrich our understanding of human nature and politics.” But Tetlock did not suggest that hiring more conservatives was the way to fix the problem. Instead, he counseled a conscious recommitment to value neutrality. On this view, it shouldn’t matter that most scholars in any given field are substantially to the left of the general population — a demographic fact as old as the American research university. If they strive for the impersonal austerity demanded by Weberian viewpoint neutrality, they can overcome whatever biases their personal politics happen to foster.
In the contemporary political landscape, proponents of viewpoint diversity and proponents of DEI are usually considered to be at odds. But both are opposed to Weberian value neutrality, and on very similar grounds. When, in 1978, the Supreme Court ruled in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that affirmative action was justifiable for reasons not of historical justice but of diversity, it ensured that DEI’s advocates would make epistemic arguments on diversity’s behalf — and not just in the social sciences but in the harder sciences, too. A representative claim, from the anthropologist Deborah Bolnick: “Scientists with diverse backgrounds and experiences ask different kinds of research questions, develop different study designs, and adopt different approaches to data collection and interpretation, leading to new and expanded scientific knowledge.” We might think of DEI not as opposed to viewpoint diversity but as a species of it.
Whether the call is coming from Republican legislators, centrist academics, or even critics on the left, the shift from value neutrality to viewpoint diversity as the solution to disciplinary politicization is a major conceptual transformation. Read Nicolas Langlitz’s “How ‘Diversity’ Became the Master Concept of Our Age” to learn more.
