Diary: Peter Brooks on “Viewpoint Diversity”

Can compulsory ideas contribute to the pursuit of knowledge?

Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin, Still life with attributes of the arts (1724-1728, Pushkin Museum)

Among the more remarkable commands to Harvard University in the letter of April 11, 2025, signed by Josh Gruenbaum, Sean Keveney, and Thomas Wheeler (on behalf of the US Departments of Education and Health and Human Services and the General Services Administration), was that concerning “viewpoint diversity”: “By August 2025, the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” And then: “Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity,” admitting a “critical mass of students” as well.

I have noticed that a number of academics and their administrators seem to think “viewpoint diversity” might be a good thing. After all, they concede, academia skews heavily toward the liberal left. Writes Stephen Pinker in his widely read “Harvard Derangement Syndrome” in The New York Times: “Another area in which Harvard’s shortcomings are genuine … is viewpoint diversity.” There have also been proposals to create a “Center for Conservative Scholarship” within Harvard, comparable to the Hoover Institution at Stanford (though that is not part of Stanford University), which would attempt to rebalance values. And throughout academia, there appear to be many who think a greater representation of conservative thought could only benefit universities.

This is a complicated matter. There are studies that claim to show that too little diversity of viewpoints can lead to confirmation bias and the exclusion of valuable ideas. Yet a rule that universities must hire and admit in such a way as to assure viewpoint diversity as defined by the US government is deeply subversive of what the university is all about. Hiring, at least in major research universities, is largely in the hands of faculty, who choose according to their estimate of a candidate’s quality in research and contribution to the transmission of knowledge, in publication and teaching and mentoring. There is simply no other way to conceive the perpetuation of the university except through this continual quest to hire and promote those who have distinguished themselves in their fields. Administrators are charged essentially with making sure that faculties follow the rules: that searches for talent have cast a wide net, that prejudice and nepotism have not skewed the results. Those with expert knowledge must do the choosing.

What would it look like if faculties were required to assure “viewpoint diversity,” even without the external political audits proposed by the current administration? Would a Department of Biology be required to hire a creationist? Maybe the English Department would have to have someone who believes Shakespeare’s plays were written by the 17^th Earl of Oxford. Surely every School of Public Health would need to have its own anti-vaxxer. The problem is clear: “viewpoint diversity” as it is understood by the university’s critics is a political and ideological criterion that has nothing to do with quality of thought, research, and teaching. As literary scholar Stanley Fish wrote in a comment on Pinker’s “Harvard Derangement Syndrome,” ideological viewpoint diversity is only achievable by recruiting right-leaning scholars, as measured by ballot-box performance. But ballot-box performance in no way correlates with professional ability. (Student admissions, a process that is currently a mess and could use reform, poses comparable challenges to the enforcement of “viewpoint diversity.”)

The phrase “viewpoint diversity” was crafted to mirror another kind of diversity—largely ethnic—sought for a generation by American higher education and at one time approved of by the Supreme Court, until Bakke v. Regents of the University of California (1978) was overruled by Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023. Academics generally embraced the strong arguments in favor of “diversity” in student bodies and in hiring, which opened American higher education first to Jews, then to women, and finally other ethnic minorities. The persistence of racism in American society and education, and the long backlog of racial injustice that needed compensation, meant that qualified candidates were being excluded from participation in the academy and fields of study were limited as a result.

Is lack of “viewpoint diversity” comparably curtailing access to higher education and limiting its scope? I want to suggest that the well-established fact that university faculties skew liberal in political orientation is not a simple matter and cannot simply be attributed to a bias toward left-leaning candidates in hiring. Being a researcher and a teacher is predicated on a search for truth. I doubt many enter the field without at least an intuitive allegiance to this idea. The physicist searches for truth about the natural world wherever it may take her. Other fields, in the social sciences and the humanities, may have less exact notions of what truth is but nonetheless their practitioners believe that the goal of their inquiry is to make discoveries and propose new perspectives that illuminate their objects of study.

Historically, a devotion to research that adheres to shared standards of evidence, that challenges received ideas or ideas maintaining the interests of a ruling elite, has, since the Enlightenment, been associated with liberal thought. Authoritarian forces—sometimes those of the Church, or an aristocracy, or an oligarchy— often reject science, proof, and unfettered inquiry in favor of submission to dogma. This is after all an age-old fight, pitting Galileo against the Inquisition, for instance. The spirit of free inquiry is by definition anathema to the doctrinaire; and the appeal to authority as ultimate judge is inimical to the rational enterprise that is central to the university.

To honor, even only nominally, the call for “viewpoint diversity” is to succumb to a logic that is at its heart hostile to the academic enterprise, in that it accepts the proposition that the search for truth and adherence to rational argument is not sufficient to arrive at knowledge, that deference must be shown to some other calculus. Using a threat to remove federal funding for the sciences intended to benefit the health and safety of all only underlines the perversity of tying academic judgments to political ideology. To hire faculty on the basis of their divergence from the liberal traditions of evidentiary analysis means setting aside the only true basis for evaluation of faculty work. The modern approach to university governance recognizes that faculty are the people who by their accumulated knowledge are best equipped to choose others to extend their disciplines. To tell them that they must hire new faculty on the basis of criteria external to the integrity and standards of their field simply destroys the whole rationale and the metrics of study itself. The implicit assumption that faculty arrived at their own position on the basis of ideology rather than a good-faith attempt to get things right is an insult, of course. But it’s more than that. Casting out the underlying commitment to rational enterprise inherent in faculty self-governance is a commitment to ignorance and barbarism.

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Peter Brooks is the author, most recently, of Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age.

Read Peter Brooks in Book Post on Sally Rooney and the conte philosophique, Wagnerism, Marcel Proust, the “revolutionary temper,” and libertines.

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