AAUP | “Viewpoint diversity” isn’t about viewpoint diversity

“Viewpoint Diversity,” like “All Lives Matter,” seems irreproachable if you focus just on the phrase itself. How can anyone argue with the principle that all lives matter? But the expression arose as a retort to “Black Lives Matter,” which makes all the difference. The same is true for “viewpoint diversity.” How can anyone object to the idea that campus culture should reflect many perspectives? Well, this phrase, too, has a polemical origin.

In the 2003 Supreme Court case Grutter v. Bollinger, the Court upheld the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy, endorsing the university’s argument that American businesses needed employees who had been exposed to “diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints.” Opponents of affirmative action accordingly began promoting “viewpoint diversity” as distinct from ethnic diversity. Far-right activist David Horowitz, mentor of Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, promulgated an “Academic Bill of Rights” in 2004, immediately adopted by the Georgia State Senate, mandating “intellectual diversity.” Horowitz — who later compared the multiracial, nonviolent Black Lives Matter movement to the KKK — wrote that he was “organizing conservative students,” teaching them to appropriate the language of the left: “The conservative viewpoint is ‘under-represented’… The university should be an ‘inclusive’ and intellectually ‘diverse’ community.”

Horowitz’s plan inspired many including activist Charlie Kirk, who founded the right-wing student organization Turning Point USA in 2012. The organization’s “watchlist” encouraged students to denounce professors who “discriminate against conservative students.” By the time the Heritage Foundation produced Project 2025, the Horowitz strategy was in full swing. In the section that calls for eliminating the Department of Education, Project 2025 mandates that federal money go only to schools that “embrace intellectual diversity.” 

As Horowitz made clear, “viewpoint diversity” is not about viewpoint diversity. Its advocates aren’t losing sleep over the absence of Marxists on business school faculties. 

To be sure, it hasn’t only been members of the far right who’ve been pressing for “viewpoint diversity.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), which calls itself “proudly non-partisan,” has been doing so too. FIRE tracks instances in which speakers were disinvited following campus protests and advocates for students and faculty sanctioned for controversial speech. FIRE has also defended organizations against Trump’s attacks on academic freedom and freedom of the press. Similarly, in 2015, New York University (NYU) business professor Jonathan Haidt and Georgetown law professor Nicholas Quinn Rosenkranz founded the Heterodox Academy to promote “viewpoint diversity” and related values. It too calls itself “nonpartisan” (though Rosenkranz is a member of two libertarian organizations).The Heterodox Academy has also spoken out against the federal attacks on universities.

Until Trump II, FIRE and Heterodox largely opposed “DEI”: the proliferation of rules and practices promoting “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion” and disruptive protests of professors, cancellations of invited speakers and sanctions for controversial speech. But the widely acknowledged excesses of DEI don’t arise from a lack of viewpoint diversity. Their source is the corporatization of the universities and a multi-billion-dollar consulting industry that some call the “Inclusion Industrial Complex.” Its origins lie in the 1980s, when corporate consultants reframed the diversity mandates of the Civil Rights era from legal obligations to business opportunities. Diversity consulting firms mushroomed, spawning bloated administrative bureaucracies in colleges and universities.

Administrators, not faculty, generally write Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies, as FIRE has pointed out. And whatever the National Academy of Scholars may say, the language and culture of DEI didn’t come from the humanities. Scholars have traced its origins to corporate consultants and bureaucrats. Moreover, a combination of studies by FIRE and Heterodox found that students in universities with larger DEI bureaucracies were less tolerant of conservative speakers and more inclined to disruptive protest. This makes sense. Intellectual culture encourages nuance and deliberation; commercial culture breeds reductive simplification and sloganizing. Universities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on DEI, and it wasn’t going to their English Departments. The university presidents who hasten to concede that their campuses have lacked “viewpoint diversity” don’t acknowledge that it was their administrations who paid a mint to purchase the very practices they now say limited academic speech. 

So, when FIRE and Heterodox describe their goal as increasing “viewpoint diversity,” they’re misdirecting the blame: the practices they deplore didn’t arise from ideological uniformity in campus intellectual culture, but from the incursion of a profit-seeking consulting industry. You can’t solve a problem if you misidentify its cause. Worse yet, adopting the slogan “viewpoint diversity” legitimizes radical-right propaganda.

Moreover, whatever “viewpoint diversity” advocates say, conservative to right-wing views have not been absent from campus culture in America. A recent longitudinal study of a public university system found that professors in 2024 showed “similar rates of Republican affiliation to individuals of traditional college-going age and to those living in geographies with relatively higher levels of educational attainment.” If academics are no more Republican than their educational cohort, maybe one reason is the well-known liberal bias of facts, in the words of economist Paul Krugman. Anyway, party affiliation is a misleading indicator. Republican voters show much less diversity of opinion than Democratic voters, nearly half of whom describe themselves as “moderate” or “conservative.” In fact, most academics belong to the political party with greater intellectual and political diversity. The numbers also vary by department, field and geographical region.

By other measures, too, American academia does not lack center to right representation. Academics have played prominent roles in the last three Republican administrations. Economists from Columbia, Harvard and Princeton served under George W. Bush. Berkeley law professor John Yoo was a member of Bush’s Office of Legal Counsel, authoring the “Torture Memos” that supported the use of water-boarding and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques. Peter Navarro, a University of California (UC) Irvine business professor, has served in both Trump administrations and helped construct the fraudulent case that Biden stole the 2020 election. At Stanford, political science professor, former provost and director of the Hoover Institution Condoleezza Rice was National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State under Bush; and medical professor Jay Bhattacharya now directs Robert Kennedy Jr.’s National Institutes of Health (NIH). 

Outside of government, too, many public academic voices are at the center to far right. Hoover fellow Richard Epstein, previously at the University of Chicago, calls himself a “libertarian hawk” and opposes birthright citizenship. Princeton political theorist Robert George is a leading Christian conservative who opposes abortion. Hoover historian Niall Ferguson, formerly at Harvard, takes a positive view of British and American imperialism and celebrated Trump’s 2024 election as “a stunning victory.” 

The Federalist Society is prominent in elite law schools, providing networking and mentorship instrumental in building a powerful right-wing legal movement. Five of the six Republican-appointed Supreme Court judges went to Harvard or Yale. University administrations reflect business-oriented, fiscally conservative priorities. Trustees and regents frequently come from corporate backgrounds and major donor pools that skew right especially on economic issues. 

College Republicans chapters, an important presence on campuses, invite right-wing speakers who draw large audiences. UC Berkeley, a school that epitomizes leftwing academic culture in the general perception, spent almost $4 million on security during a single month in 2017 when the Berkeley College Republicans and the Berkeley Patriot, a student newspaper, invited far-right activists Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos to campus. Photos show Yiannopoulos holding signs that read “feminism is cancer” and “liberalism is a mental disorder.” Carol Christ, then chancellor of UC Berkeley, said she had no regrets about spending “precious resources” to support the university’s “commitment to free speech.”

This all belies claims of an oppressive leftwing academic monoculture. Meanwhile, in Trump II, “viewpoint diversity” is fulfilling Horowitz’s wildest dreams, though he’s no longer around to enjoy it. “Viewpoint diversity” has grown from a twinkle in his eye to a tremendous cudgel that the federal and red state governments are wielding with gleeful abandon. In the past year, red states including Ohio, Kentucky, Utah, Arkansas and Wyoming have passed bills curtailing academic freedom. Take Ohio’s bill, which mandates “intellectual diversity” in universities yet limits discussion of “controversial beliefs or policies” including climate change, immigration or abortion; it also bans faculty strikes and curtails tenure protections. Trump’s “Compact for Academic Excellence” decrees “a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints,” yet requires signatories to commit to “transforming or abolishing” programs critical of “conservative ideas.” Trump also signed an executive order in April 2025 requiring “intellectual diversity” for institutional accreditation, effectively conditioning federal funding on adherence to government ideology.

In our fight to defend higher education, we must recognize the weapons being wielded against us. The Trumpian M.O. is to disguise everything as its opposite, but surely by now we’re wise to that. “Viewpoint diversity” is not a defense of viewpoint diversity, but an assault on it.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), founded in 1915, is an association of faculty and other academic professionals based in Washington, D.C. with chapters at colleges and universities across the country devoted to promoting academic freedom. The Stanford chapter of the AAUP includes faculty and teaching staff from all seven schools at Stanford. Its members hold a range of opinions on most topics but are staunchly united in defense of the ability to teach, learn and conduct research and scholarship freely. In this column, members speak for themselves, addressing topics of urgent concern relating to academic freedom.

Jessica Riskin is a professor in the history department and the co-president of Stanford’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

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