Professors Can Be Ignorant. That’s Why We Need Viewpoint Diversity.

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

In an academic environment in which objections to the reigning political, social, and cultural assumptions are castigated as beyond the pale of academic discussion, professors find themselves dangerously isolated, ignorant of how their students and fellow citizens view their behavior. Discussing faculty posts on social media about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a student at the University of Texas at Austin writes: “I’ve learned that there are people on my college campus who would cheer if someone like me, a young person who openly expresses my traditional Christian beliefs and right-wing political views, were murdered.”

This is not the lesson most faculty members intend to teach, but many professors simply don’t know how they appear to nonacademics and don’t know how to respond appropriately to ideas that differ from their own. Professors in many fields tend to think that disagreement with their disciplines’ consensus (on, say, police reform, capitalism, or gender) is equivalent to Holocaust denial, or, as Lisa Siraganian puts it in a recent essay in Academe attacking viewpoint diversity, denying the double-helix model of DNA.

Siraganian is a scholar of literature. Her implication that to disagree with the settled English-department positions on race, class, or gender is equivalent to denying the reality of DNA will seem absurd to people outside the humanities and social sciences. Siraganian claims that academics are singularly devoted to their mission of discovering the truth. Yet in its distortions, omissions, and confusions, her essay exemplifies the condition she denies. Ironically, it serves as a vivid illustration of the need for viewpoint diversity. She presents a false account of the history of the viewpoint-diversity movement, wrongly labels groups like the Heterodox Academy as “conservative,” and fails to identify even a single example of a genuinely controversial issue. Siraganian rejects viewpoint diversity because she doesn’t know what it is, doesn’t understand where it came from, and can’t even recognize the problems it means to address.

Contrary to Siraganian’s claim that viewpoint diversity originated as an explicitly conservative political project, its origins are in fact in debates that began in the early 1990s, as Nicolas Langlitz has shown in an essay in these pages. Then, at the beginning of the 21st century, some social scientists began to argue that Max Weber’s concept of value neutrality was insufficient to counter the deforming epistemological effects of ideological homogeneity. The interest in viewpoint diversity gained steam with the replication crisis in psychology, which some suspected was in part caused by psychologists’ ideological blinders. Langlitz explains: Since “it is as people with political viewpoints that social scientists study the political viewpoints of people,” scholars like Jonathan Haidt concluded that “the pursuit of truth no longer required making the academy value-free. Instead, viewpoint diversity advocates for a meaningful representation of conflicting ideological perspectives.”

The goal, for Haidt, is neither the proportionate representation of conservatives in academe nor the representation of every possible view on an issue, but “institutionalized disconfirmation.” There should be a sufficient diversity of views in academic units to enable teachers and researchers to identify and challenge claims that, in homogenous conditions, are often tacitly accepted. The most common and compelling case for viewpoint diversity in academe thus bears little resemblance to Siraganian’s picture. Advocates of viewpoint diversity focus on demonstrable epistemological failures, mount a persuasive argument that some of these failures can be traced to the rigidly enforced political uniformity increasingly characteristic of fields in the social sciences and humanities, and seek to improve things by welcoming qualified academics with political views that differ from the majority. While the form of viewpoint diversity I support thus exists as a pragmatic adjunct to the search for truth, it offers the additional benefit of enabling universities to contribute to their educational mission by embodying the kind of collegial and civil disagreement across partisan lines that’s now scarce in our society.

I know Siraganian to be a thoughtful and serious person and a dedicated scholar. If her research of the history of her subject seems like that of an undergraduate working with an archive of Bluesky posts, and if her argumentative logic reads like the non sequiturs of a newspaper’s comment section, this reflects not her own intelligence and seriousness but the warping of an intellectual context, which is, on many subjects, simply impervious to realities that fail to accord with reigning assumptions.

Siraganian’s failure to understand the subject of her own essay is hardly idiosyncratic. It is no exaggeration to say that I encountered evidence of this epistemological disease every week of the 20 years I spent teaching in a humanities department. Speaking with a humanist or social scientist is sometimes like watching someone through a two-way mirror. They hear your voice, but they’re talking to themselves. For example, at a dinner after giving a talk at an Ivy League university, one of my hosts, a literary scholar, told me of his work on the ways neoliberalism has impoverished and immiserated the developing world. I asked him what he made of the famous elephant curve, which shows that the global 10th to 50th percentile of the income distribution have been among the primary beneficiaries of capitalism in recent decades. He’d never heard of this curve and was genuinely unaware that hundreds of millions have been lifted out of poverty by capitalism. He became visibly angry with me, and when I told him I wasn’t cheerleading for capitalism but just trying to understand his own anti-capitalist position, he accused me of lying.

At a conference talk I attended, the speaker asserted that most Black Americans in prison are there for nonviolent drug offenses. When I asked the source of this data the speaker looked genuinely shocked. He looked around the room. “Does anyone else here doubt this?” No one raised their hands. The woman sitting next to me moved over a seat.

A similar phenomenon occurred when I debated with a colleague over the merits of the provision in Ohio’s Senate Bill 1 that faculty teaching subjects of significant political controversy should endeavor to present different sides of the issue. A colleague in the audience suggested that the law mandates teaching Holocaust denial. When another audience member said that he’d never met an academic conservative who advocates Holocaust denial, the first made it clear that he considers the conservative positions on immigration, gender, and affirmative action the moral and intellectual equivalent of Holocaust denial.

Nonanecdotal evidence of this pattern of epistemological failure is not hard to find. In a widely circulated study, Jon A. Shields and Yuval Avnur show that professors routinely assign highly controversial course material without assigning any texts that describe the relevant controversy or indicating that what one work presents as settled science is in fact the object of serious critique. For example, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow appears on thousands of syllabi in several disciplines — it is assigned more often than Shakespeare’s Hamlet — without accompaniment by any readings from the numerous studies from the political left and right casting serious doubt on Alexander’s assumptions, data, and conclusions.

David A. Bell offers a more honest, though hardly more persuasive, defense of the academic status quo in his recent essay in these pages, “The Myth of Faculty Indoctrination.” Bell, a historian, doesn’t try to deny the reality that many humanists and social scientists view their work in terms of left-wing political activism. But he argues that a) students don’t listen to these professors, b) those who sign up for humanities courses are already on the far left politically, and c) hardly anyone enrolls in humanities courses anyway, pointing out that more students now major in physical education than English literature.

Bell, perhaps inadvertently, echoes a sentiment I’ve often heard from colleagues in the sciences. The epistemological problems attendant on the lack of intellectual diversity only affect the humanities and softer social sciences. Here in biology, they tell me, they really are investigating DNA, and their pursuit of truth cannot easily be shown to be affected by the admittedly left-leaning composition of the faculty. English, history, and gender studies have been hemorrhaging students for years. Their faculties are not reproducing themselves, and they have become essentially epiphenomenal with respect to the academic enterprise as a whole. It’s unfortunate that the media focuses so much on these fields, but gradually that focus will die down along with the fields in question.

It is true that the best case for intellectual diversity is a pragmatic one. While the sciences have hardly been immune to ideological distortions, not all fields suffer equally from a lack of different political perspectives. Some fields may not suffer any epistemological consequences at all. The goal of the university is the pursuit of truth; the pursuit of intellectual diversity is best seen as a means to that end. Physics or civil engineering may not be seriously compromised by ideological conformity; whether a biochemist is conservative or liberal may well have no effect at all on her teaching and research.

But I have come to believe that the questions asked by historians, literary scholars, and political scientists — which necessarily touch on matters of intense political controversy — cannot be adequately posed or answered in an atmosphere of ideological closure. When I look back on my own career, I realize that certain intellectual possibilities were literally unimaginable to me before I encountered people whose political assumptions and values differed from my own. I will never forget the moment in graduate school when a nonradical political scientist asked me about the evidence for the Marxist view of history I referenced in my dissertation. It may sound strange to nonhumanists, but I had never before considered that Marxism was the kind of thing that another academic might find questionable. I had a vague sense that right-wing talk-show hosts and people in the business world weren’t Marxists. But one hardly had to take them seriously. If there were non-Marxists in the English department, they never mentioned it and certainly never asked for evidence of Marxist claims.

The Review | Essay

Viewpoint Diversity Is a MAGA Plot

By Lisa Siraganian October 10, 2025

Needless to say, I had no way to answer the professor’s simple question. But he had planted a seed. While I did not embrace free-market economics, I did change how I teach and write about economic issues as they pertained to literary topics. And I made it my practice to try to test my assumptions by seeking out those who disagreed with them. To do this, I sometimes had to look outside my discipline, and even outside the university. I encountered cranks and provocateurs, but also people of reason, learning, and insight.

I fear that colleges’ response to the political distortions of humanities disciplines will be to further marginalize and defund these disciplines. But the very feature of the humanities that renders them vulnerable to distortion by ideological conformity is also the source of their immense value to the educational enterprise. We are, ultimately, after 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 to judge a work of art. Our work engages passions and values that animate everyone’s lives.

To see beyond our passions, to step outside our prejudices, to suspend our most powerful commitments — this is a discipline, and a difficult one. It is the humanities’ proper discipline, and at this moment it requires welcoming new perspectives and voices into our classrooms and lecture halls. The creation of spaces in which the humanistic pursuit of truth can truly flourish may also be what this violent and divided nation most needs from higher education.