A solid core enlivens free speech and viewpoint diversity
For decades, administrators and professors – especially at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities – have waged a campaign to regulate speech. Their contrived transgressions and expedients – trigger warnings, microaggressions, safe spaces, free-speech zones, bias response teams, and more – exposed higher education to public ridicule.
The conspicuous targets at colleges and universities impelled reformers to defend on campus the right to express, and to hear expressed, dissenting opinions.
While free speech on campus deteriorated, administrators and professors – especially at the nation’s most selective colleges and universities – built, or did little to protest the building of, intellectual monocultures. In classrooms and student cafeterias as much as in departmental meetings and faculty lounges, progressive opinions operated as orthodoxy while conservative opinions – when someone had the bad taste to bring them up – elicited discomfort, disapproval, or denunciation. Consumed with diversity of skin color, ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, and gender, colleges and universities created student bodies and faculties deficient in diversity of views and ideas, forms of diversity that are essential to liberal education.
The paucity of conservative voices on campus has been less visible than have been colleges’ and universities’ offenses against free speech. While aggressively regulating thought and discussion, colleges and universities quietly and behind the scenes exploited bureaucratic mechanisms and acted on unspoken but widely shared prejudices – in admitting students and in hiring, retaining, and promoting faculty – to exclude conservatives and perpetuate campus orthodoxy. Consequently, it has taken reformers longer to recognize the urgency of ensuring that American colleges and universities also provide a home to students who espouse conservative views and professors who can present conservative opinions and teach vital subjects such as military and religious history, in which conservatives disproportionately specialize.
Free speech and intellectual diversity promote toleration and civility and equip students to think creatively and independently. Restoring them will contribute to the repair of liberal education. But liberal education is about substance as well as about forms.
It is not any old course of study that cultivates free and democratic citizens. Yet our nation’s most selective colleges and universities have largely abandoned core curricula. And they have discarded the idea that higher education in America should be grounded in the exploration of the basic ideas, key institutions, and major events that define America and which distinguish the broader Western civilization out of which the United States arose.
Few have given the construction of a sensible core curriculum much thought. This is in part because fixing the curriculum faces formidable difficulties, not least the widespread failure to recognize that it is broken. Most of today’s university administrators and professors came of age after the demise of core curricula. Having themselves been deprived of a well-rounded liberal education, today’s administrators and professors lack the professional knowledge to advocate for, design, and teach one. For them, an undergraduate curriculum that serves faculty members by featuring courses that focus on their circumscribed and arcane scholarly interests is normal and desirable. Administrators and professors will regard as eccentric and burdensome a curriculum that serves students’ interests by concentrating on introducing them to the great works and seminal events of America, the West, and other civilizations.
In “The Next Campus Battle After Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities,” Edward Yingling and Leslie Spencer illuminate the narrower issue concerning the range of permissible opinion on campus and thereby advance the larger task of reforming college curricula. Coauthors Yingling, Princeton ’70 and secretary of Princetonians for Free Speech, and Spencer, Princeton ’79 and the organization’s vice chair, emphasize the tight connection between free speech and viewpoint diversity. “If everybody on a campus believes pretty much the same thing,” they observe, “there is not much learning or advancement of knowledge through open inquiry and debate.” Similarly, if students and faculty lack a common foundation in America, the West, and the world, then free speech and viewpoint diversity will do little to increase knowledge and refine understanding.
Still, first things first: Fostering free speech, in part by enhancing viewpoint diversity, represents a precondition for reforming the curriculum.
The authors summarize data that illustrate faculties’ overwhelmingly progressive orientation. For example, in December 2025, the Buckley Institute, a Yale student organization devoted to bolstering free speech and intellectual diversity on campus, published a report on faculty political diversity. Among Yale College, Yale Law School, and Yale School of Management faculty, “82.3 percent were registered Democrats or primarily supported Democrats,” “15.4 percent were independents,” and “2.3 percent were Republicans.” In the college, “Twenty-seven out of 43 undergraduate departments had not a single Republican on the faculty.” The Yale Daily News also found that Yale faculty skewed decidedly to the left. In January 2026, the student newspaper reported that it identified 1,099 Federal Election Commission filings from 2025 in which individuals listed Yale as employer and “professor” as occupation. Of these, “97.6 percent of the donations went to Democrats and 2.5 percent went to independent candidates or groups” while “not one contribution was made to a Republican.”
The left similarly dominates Harvard’s faculty. “For instance, The Harvard Crimson reported on a 2022 faculty survey showing that over 45% of Harvard faculty identified as ‘liberal’ and an additional 37.5% identified as ‘very liberal,’” write Yingling and Spencer. “In this same study only sixteen percent identified as ‘moderate’ and 1.7% as ‘conservative.’”
There is little reason to doubt that other elite American colleges and universities follow Yale and Harvard in maintaining almost exclusively progressive faculties.
Faculty homogeneity exacts costs. Unfamiliar with the conservative tradition in America, progressive scholars transmit to students, write the authors, “a one-sided view of politics and society.” And keen to insulate their research paradigms from competition, progressive scholars use their near monopoly on faculty positions to admit to their departments and advance through the academic ranks only those graduate students who see the world and think as they do. This dynamic produces homogenized faculties that package progressive orthodoxy as the bedrock of serious inquiry and, in the process, undermine the virtues central to free and democratic citizenship. Undergraduate education, especially at elite colleges and universities, fosters arrogance among progressive students and generates resentment among conservative students. It fosters these baleful passions by promulgating the dogma that progressive opinions are true and good while conservative opinions are false and wicked.
Professors tend to ignore the lack of viewpoint diversity or, worse, insist that it is a nonissue. Last year, Johns Hopkins University Professor Lisa Siraganian – president of her university’s American Association of University Professors chapter – went so far as to present seven arguments against viewpoint diversity. As students of Socrates, John Stuart Mill, and America’s free-speech jurisprudence would expect, none stand up to scrutiny. Meanwhile, according Yingling and Spencer, when recently confronted with data about the miniscule number of conservatives on the Yale faculty, the university insisted that it adheres to the highest academic standards. One professor blamed Yale’s hostility to conservatives on the aggressive action the Trump administration has undertaken to reform higher education, as if the problem arose last year. Another made the familiar argument – though taboo as an explanation of the underrepresentation of any other campus minority – that Republicans are too poorly educated to meet Yale’s rigorous criteria.
Nevertheless, reform is underway. In recent years, note Yingling and Spencer, Princeton’s James Madison Program – established by Professor Robert P. George in 2000 – has provided a model for several programs of civic thought at public universities. These promising endeavors concentrate on the knowledge essential to responsible citizenship while diversifying faculty and broadening campus debate.
In addition, professors have established organizations to promote free speech and viewpoint diversity. These include the Columbia Academic Freedom Council, the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, the Princeton Council on Academic Freedom, and Faculty for Yale, as well as national organizations such as the Academic Freedom Alliance (to which I belong) and Heterodox Academy. And, as the authors point out, though mandatory diversity statements remain common, several institutions have moved to ban them because they function “as ‘compelled speech’ (which would be unconstitutional at public universities) and as a tool to enforce ideological conformity.”
Lasting reform demands efforts on several fronts. In addition to faculty initiatives, it requires leadership in defense of liberal education of the sort that has been provided by Johns Hopkins University President Ronald Daniels, Vanderbilt University President Daniel Diermeier, and University of Texas Executive Vice President and Provost William Inboden. It requires alumni engagement of the kind exemplified not only by Princetonians for Free Speech but also by the Columbia Free Speech Alliance and Harvard’s 1636 Forum. And it requires university administrators, professors, and alumni of the sort who put students’ interests first to work side by side to mobilize public opinion in support of old-fashioned liberal education.
A healthy right and healthy left should agree: By offering a solid core curriculum, one that concentrates on the enduring ideas and epochal events that define America, the West, and other civilizations – and which enlivens and is enlivened by free speech and by diversity of views and ideas – colleges and universities advance the public interest.