How diversity of viewpoints can help protect academics from themselves (and perhaps also heal our civic culture)

Ohio State Professor Michael Clunewho caused a sensation in the academic world with his December 2024 essay “We asked for it” has a new try in the Chronicle of Higher Education responding to recent criticism of the push for heterodoxy and intellectual pluralism on campus. The test, “Teachers can be ignorant. That’s why we need a diversity of perspectives,” begin :

It’s difficult to succeed as an educator when you don’t know what you’re talking about. And yet, many humanities and social sciences professors—who teach and write on topics like capitalism, police reform, and sexuality—fail a simple, classic test. To understand your own position, you must be aware of the objections to that position and be able to respond to them. We need a greater diversity of political and social opinions in academia, not because diversity is a higher value than truth, but because the intellectual isolation of academics has compromised their ability to pursue truth.

In an academic environment where objections to dominant political, social, and cultural assumptions are castigated as outside the scope of academic debate, professors find themselves dangerously isolated, ignorant of how their students and fellow citizens perceive their behavior. Discussion of faculty social media posts regarding the killing of University of Texas at Austin student Charlie Kirk writing: “I learned that there are people on my college campus who would rejoice if someone like me, a young person who openly expressed my traditional Christian beliefs and right-wing political views, were murdered.”

This is not the lesson most professors intend to teach, but many professors simply do not know how they appear to non-academics and do not know how to respond appropriately to ideas that differ from their own. Professors in many fields tend to think that disagreement with their discipline’s consensus (on, say, police reform, capitalism, or gender) amounts to Holocaust denial or, as Lisa Siraganian puts it, a recent test In University attacking the diversity of points of view, denying the double helix model of DNA.

As Clune explains (and those of us with heterodox views in academia often find), the lack of intellectual diversity in many departments and disciplines produces epistemological failure and undermines academic inquiry, and this is particularly problematic in the humanities and social sciences.

the best case for intellectual diversity is pragmatic. Although science has hardly been immune to ideological distortions, not all fields suffer equally from the lack of different political perspectives. Some domains may not suffer any epistemological consequences. The aim of the university is the search for truth; the pursuit of intellectual diversity is best seen as a means to achieve this. Physics or civil engineering cannot be seriously compromised by ideological conformism; Whether a biochemist is conservative or liberal may well have no effect on her teaching and research.

But I have come to believe that the questions posed by historians, literary scholars, and political scientists—which necessarily touch on topics of intense political controversy—cannot be adequately asked or answered in an atmosphere of ideological closure. . . .

The social sciences may well survive widespread epistemological failure and ideological withdrawal, but the humanities may not be so lucky.

I fear that colleges’ response to political distortions of humanities disciplines is to further marginalize and defund these disciplines. But the very characteristic of the humanities that makes them vulnerable to distortion due to ideological conformism is also the source of their immense value to the educational enterprise. We seek, ultimately, human truths: the meaning of happiness, the nature of revolutions, the right way to organize a government, the best way to interpret a text or judge a work of art. Our work engages passions and values ​​that drive everyone’s lives.

Seeing beyond our passions, stepping outside our prejudices, suspending our most powerful commitments is a discipline and a difficult one. This is the discipline unique to the humanities and, in this day and age, requires welcoming new perspectives and voices into our classrooms and lecture halls. Creating spaces in which the humanist quest for truth can truly flourish is perhaps also what this violent and divided nation needs most in higher education.

One way to address these concerns might be to take Advice from Professor John McGinnis and focus more on teaching students to disagree productively. This will help universities combat epistemic closure and perhaps help heal our civic culture as well. In theory, law schools already do this, but the lack of meaningful ideological diversity prevents these efforts from being more effective.

An education system should aspire for citizens to achieve a “ideological Turing test“, demonstrating the ability to present the strongest arguments for the views they reject so convincingly that a reviewer cannot infer their own. A person who can do this builds relationships across the aisle by grasping the full force of the arguments that motivate opponents.

Unfortunately, education at all levels today hinders the ability to pass this type of test. . . .

Universities can still circumvent the civic arc if they return to their primary vocation: the search for truth through protest. A democracy only functions well if its elites set an example of respectful disagreement. This kind of respect is the first step toward creating a political atmosphere free of fear and threat. This atmosphere is itself conducive to the desire for compromise on which pluralist democracy depends.