AAUP: Academic freedom on the line | The critical necessity of viewpoint diversity

Paul Brest is a former Dean of Stanford Law School and an emeritus professor of law. He is a member of both the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and Heterodox Academy and is co-chair of the Stanford Chapter of Heterodox Academy.

Last week, Professor Jessica Riskin argued that the concern for viewpoint diversity (VPD) is fundamentally a conservative attack on universities, which are already adequately ideologically diverse. Granted that it has been used as a conservative bludgeon, I believe that the concerns about ideological homogeneity (the lack of VPD) are nonpartisan and involve the very missions of higher education.

Why is VPD essential for a university’s missions of teaching and research? The short answer is that it tends to reduce confirmation biases, which inhibit critical inquiry and the search for truth. In John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” (1859), he articulates this elegantly and extensively. 

Given his general aim of defending free speech, Mill doesn’t address academic freedom as such. But here’s how VPD contributes to academic freedom. A faculty member’s right to academic freedom can be abridged both by institutions and groups of individuals. Typical institutional actors are state governments (e.g., the Florida Stop W.O.K.E. Act), the federal government (e.g., the Trump administration’s demands on universities) and university administrations (e.g., Texas A&M’s forbidding the teaching of materials condoning homosexual relationships). 

But a faculty member’s academic freedom can also be effectively curtailed by the actions of fellow faculty members and students. This is most evident when a faculty member is, or reasonably fears being, ostracized, cancelled or doxxed because of their views on academic topics. Less obviously — but still pernicious — being surrounded by colleagues who collectively hold views that differ from their own creates social pressures to conform and therefore to refrain from expressing contrary views in their classroom or their scholarship. This can result in self-censorship as destructive as institutional sanctions. Moreover, an ideologically homogeneous faculty will tend to hire faculty who share their beliefs, thus exacerbating the social pressure and its adverse effect on academic freedom.

Professor Riskin doesn’t controvert this analysis. Rather, to oppose the argument that university faculty are homogeneously left-leaning, she names a number of prominent conservative faculty who are public intellectuals or who have served in government and describes a couple of powerful conservative student organizations. 

But cherry-picking individuals is not a substitute for empirical analysis, and any number of empirical studies indicate that, in general, university faculty members are on the liberal side of the ideological spectrum. I’ll cite several studies here from Chris Calton, Neil Gross, Tyler J. VanderWeele, Jon Shields, Yuval Avnur and Stephanie Muravchik. 

In any event, Professor Riskin rightly observes that ideological homogeneity differs by departments and fields. An ideologically homogeneous economics faculty may influence the teaching and writing of other economics faculty but is unlikely to exert undue influence on humanities faculty — and vice versa. My guess is that many universities have departments that are fairly homogeneous — on the right as well as the left — with unfortunate consequences for their students, their research and academic freedom more broadly.

There are various theories about the causes of ideological homogeneity. Both Keith Whittington and Steven Teles have written thoughtfully about them. Along similar lines, Professor Riskin takes note of “the widely acknowledged excesses of DEI.” She suggests — correctly, in my opinion — that these are not attributable to ideological homogeneity among faculty but rather to university administrators and the diversity consulting industry they hire. Hopefully, this is on the decline.

While Professor Riskin and I disagree mainly about empirical matters, she makes a different sort of argument that strikes me as fundamentally flawed — an argument based on guilt by association. She neither mentions, let alone responds to, the thoughtful arguments for viewpoint diversity made by respected scholars such as those cited above. Rather, from the very start, she links the concept of VPD to far-right activists including David Horowitz and Charlie Kirk, and writes that “in Trump II, ‘viewpoint diversity’ is fulfilling Horowitz’s wildest dreams …. [It] has grown from a twinkle in his eye to a tremendous cudgel that the federal and red state governments are wielding with gleeful abandon.” While acknowledging that Heterodox Academy, a strong proponent of viewpoint diversity, is committed to academic freedom, she adds that one of its founders “is a member of two libertarian organizations.” She fails to mention that the two other founders describe themselves as political centrists. But why is this relevant at all? Heterodox Academy’s leadership and membership, and AAUP’s as well, surely include people across the political spectrum — and that’s a good thing!

It seems unlikely that Stanford is entirely immune from the centripetal forces of viewpoint diversity described by the scholars cited above. It might be useful for each department to take an introspective look to consider whether its faculty’s teaching and research could be improved by having more diverse views. If so, how one might move toward that goal is a complex matter, beyond the scope of this brief interchange.

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.

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