4

Ideological Ostracism and Viewpoint Diversity on Campus

Universities need not be committed to a mission of advancing and disseminating knowledge. They need not serve as sanctuaries for free inquiry in the search of truth. The University of Notre Dame could declare that it would henceforth refuse to allow scholarly research or teaching on its campus that calls into questions any components of the Catholic faith. Middlebury College could announce that in the future it will allow on campus only discussions that are designed to advance the political commitments favored by its current student body. The University of Illinois could proclaim that it will tolerate on its campus only speech that will give no offense to the elected representatives of the state of Illinois and their agents on the university board of trustees (though the school would run into constitutional constraints on that one).

Few universities in the United States, or indeed in much of the Western world, are willing to make such a public pronouncement. The value of such circumscribed institutions of higher education is limited, and the constituencies interested in supporting such institutions are few. Colleges like Oberlin and Reed would prefer not to give the impression that their faculty and students are required to pledge themselves to a statement of faith in order to remain campus members in good standing. Modern universities instead prefer to advertise themselves as committed to the pursuit of truth rather than to the recitation of dogma. Actually following through on that commitment often proves difficult. Some of those difficulties are theoretical. In order to protect free speech, we must first understand what is required by the principles of free speech. Some of those difficulties are practical. In order to preserve a campus environment that respects free speech, we must be able to resist the constant temptations to suppress the inconvenient, the troublesome, the unpopular, and the offensive. Some of those difficulties are normative. In order to sustain institutions of higher education that contribute to human progress, we must commit ourselves to liberal values of tolerance and freedom rather than to illiberal values of conformity and coercion. It is only by acknowledging those principles of free speech and respecting them, however, that universities are able to realize their promise and make their best contribution to society.

Embracing free speech is easy if the speech never seems very challenging. It is easy to listen to pleasing ideas and affirmations of our own prior beliefs. It is much more difficult to learn to tolerate those with whom we disagree and who espouse ideas we find preposterous, repugnant, or even dangerous. We tolerate, and even affirmatively seek out, such disagreements not because they are pleasant but because it is through controversy that we can make progress, often in the most unexpected ways. At their best, universities tolerate controversies in the hopes that some of those controversies will generate not just heat but light. As students and scholars, we should welcome controversies that test our ideas and speculations and help us discard those arguments that are weak and build on those that are proven strong.

Universities across the country and the world strive to assemble the best community of scholars and students that they can. The members of those communities can boast impressive professional credentials and markers of intellectual achievement, and the competition to join the most selective institutions of higher education can be fierce. Prospective members of the faculty prepare to join those communities not through the rough-and-tumble of John Stuart Mill’s debating societies but through the intensive disciplinary training pioneered by the German universities in the late nineteenth century. They are trained to question what we know and push the boundaries of knowledge outward, and they seek to lead classrooms where students can learn to challenge themselves and find their own convictions unsettled.

Unfortunately, universities sometimes struggle to sustain the kind of diverse intellectual communities that would best facilitate the advancement and dissemination of knowledge. Mill worried that a closed society, too comfortable in its own convictions, would retreat into dogmatism. It would not have the opportunity to grapple with diverse opinions, to have its own opinions tested, to refine its own ideas by identifying and shedding those that were weak and borrowing and bolstering those that were strong. Academia values skepticism, not credulity, but that requires bringing to campus those who will question and not merely affirm. Modern academic disciplines make progress by systematically screening out ideas and arguments that cannot survive careful scrutiny. In this way, they insist not on homogeneity but on expertise. They do not require agreement, but they do require competence and mastery of an established body of knowledge and accepted tools for acquiring new knowledge. The university does not need the Young Earth theorist, the flat earth true believer, or the Bigfoot specialist in order to make scientific progress and host serious scientific debate. But if a community of scholars is not to become lethargic, and if the advancement of knowledge is to proceed, scholars cannot become complacent in their studies and blind to their deficiencies and biases.

It is important to emphasize that most scholarly disputes fly far below the public’s radar, but that internecine squabbling has large consequences for the future of teaching and research on college campuses. In history departments, traditional political history (which emphasized politicians and public policy) was crowded out by the rise of social history (which emphasized ordinary people and daily life) before making a bit of a comeback in a form that was influenced by the insights of social history. In economics departments, upstart “freshwater” economists based at universities near the Great Lakes disagreed with more traditional “saltwater” economists based at universities on the East Coast over how we should understand the workings of national economies and what public policies might contribute to stable economic growth. In political science departments, the introduction of game theoretic models of political behavior disrupted established ways of thinking, just as the introduction of statistical models had done a generation or two earlier. When most scholars think about intellectual diversity, or its absence, they think about these sorts of esoteric disputes.

We rarely think of these sorts of scholarly disagreements as implicating free speech or academic freedom on campus. In part, that is because scholars are generally committed to engaging openly and aggressively in exactly these sorts of academic debates. To the extent that the fortunes of some schools of thought rise or fall as a consequence of those debates, we recognize those fluctuating fortunes as being the result of professional judgments. If disciplinary judgments on these matters turn out to be wrong, we expect them to be corrected through new rounds of scholarly engagement. Revisionist scholarship upsets the status quo and forces established schools of thought to defend their conclusions anew and adjust to new findings.

It marks a fundamental misunderstanding of academic life to conflate scholarly disagreements and political disagreements. It is perfectly possible for university faculties to overwhelmingly hail from the political left and yet disagree vehemently with one another on matters of scholarship and teaching, and it is likewise possible for faculty members who would be very much at odds with one another in the realm of politics to be in complete agreement in the realm of scholarship. Only someone who does not understand what happens on college campuses could declare, as the office of US Senator Tom Coburn did, that “political science would be better left to pundits and voters,” or that “CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, the print media, and a seemingly endless number of political commentators on the internet” serve the same function as the venerable American National Election Studies of public opinion managed by the University of Michigan and Stanford University.1 Pundits on CNN and political scientists in their ivory tower both have their contributions to make to society, but it is a fundamental error to think that those contributions are of the same type and one or the other is simply redundant.

Unfortunately, some members of the campus community seem similarly confused, and therein lies the problem for those concerned about intellectual diversity and free speech on college campuses. The evidence that American university faculties lean to the left in their political preferences is overwhelming. While the gap is smaller in some disciplines (e.g., engineering), it is extremely large in many others (e.g., sociology).² It would be a reasonable, and in many ways correct, response to this fact to say that for most purposes the political preferences of university faculty members have nothing to do with their work and how they conduct it. It is much less reasonable to respond, as many academics have, that university faculties should lean to the left. When the chair of a philosophy department says that the empirical finding that university faculties include few conservatives is unsurprising because “stupid people are generally conservative”; when an English professor declares “colleges and universities do not need a single additional ‘conservative’ … what they do need, and would much benefit from, is more Marxists, radicals, leftists—all terms conventionally applied to those who fight against exploitation, racism, sexism, and capitalism”; and when a soon-to-be law school dean observes that conservatives are adequately represented in elected offices and thus have no claim to being “an embattled minority” in the groves of academe—one then suspects that the diversity of thought on campus is inadequate.³

We should take into account this context when considering, in particular, the controversies that have surrounded invitations to campus speakers. When few conservative faculty members can be found on a college campus, students and others seeking to hear a conservative perspective on matters of public concern by necessity must look beyond campus. Preferably, the goal of such invitations should not be to replicate what could easily be found by simply turning on a cable news show. It is to be hoped that any speaker invited to a college campus can provide a more extended and more serious analysis of topics than might be covered in the mainstream press, and even better could explore ideas and issues that are not sufficiently discussed in other venues. It is a missed opportunity if time, resources, and energy are committed to hosting events that do not advance the distinctive mission of a university and aspirations of a campus community, but are instead spent facilitating the business of professional agitators.

Obstructions of campus speakers have the immediate effect of preventing a willing audience from hearing the arguments that the speaker was invited to convey, but obstructionist protest tactics have an additional effect as well. They are efforts not merely to shout down a particular speech, but to ostracize the speaker from the campus community. They are designed not only to prevent a particular message from being heard, but also to send a message of their own: you will not be tolerated here. The censors of yore punished speakers for what they said and prevented publication of writings that contained controversial content. Obstructionist protesters, by contrast, do not wait to hear the speech before deciding whether it should be suppressed. They engage in suppression before the content of the message is even known. The protesters object to the very presence of an Ann Coulter or a Charles Murray on campus.

The Charles Murray fracas at Middlebury College made the goal of ideological ostracism plain. Murray was invited to speak in 2017 about a topic related to his most recent book on class, culture, and polarization in contemporary American life. He was pilloried for arguments he had made in The Bell Curve, a controversial book he wrote more than two decades earlier and before many of the undergraduates at Middlebury had even been born. Even so, many of the members of Middlebury’s faculty who signed a letter denouncing his appearance on campus admitted that they had never actually read anything that Murray had written but had simply been told that he was a “white nationalist.” When a team of psychologists sent a blind copy of a transcript of Murray’s remarks to a sample of college professors and asked them to rate its content on a left–right ideological spectrum, they rated it as “middle of the road.” (When a second sample was told the name of the author, they gave it a substantially more conservative rating but still near the middle of the scale.)4 The obstruction of Murray’s speech was an effort to enforce ideological boundaries on Middlebury’s campus by ostracizing anyone who might be thought to hold problematic views. To complete that effort, the chairman of the department that cosponsored Murray’s talk was forced to issue a public apology for his role in breaking campus taboos and bringing a forbidden person to campus.⁵

A similar effort to purge the campus of the unclean took place a few years earlier at the University of California at Berkeley. John Yoo is a tenured conservative law professor and served in the Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush. As with many university professors who have taken a leave of absence to spend time in public service, Yoo returned to campus after his brief stint in the government. Yoo’s situation was unusual, however, in that it was soon revealed that he had drafted controversial opinions justifying the administration’s legal position in the early days of the War on Terror after the attacks on September 11, 2001. In particular, he had authored what was dubbed the “torture memo,” subsequently rescinded, that provided legal cover for so-called enhanced interrogation of captured suspected terrorists. As a result of his actions in the government, many on the Berkeley campus called for him to be fired from his job at the law school. An email campaign argued that Yoo “should be prohibited from spreading his distorted view of the law and the role of lawyers to young law students. He must be fired.”6 To the consternation of critics, the dean of Berkeley’s law school maintained that absent a showing of professional misconduct or criminal behavior by Yoo, he was not “beyond the pale of academic freedom.” Berkeley’s law school was to be a place where faculty and students could argue “about the legal and moral issues with the intensity and discipline these crucial issues deserve.” Those who were unwilling to face up to the ideas that they would condemn, and would prefer to avoid controversial arguments rather than grappling with them, “will not find Berkeley or any other truly great law school a wholly congenial place to study.”⁷ Yoo is one of the very few conservative members of the Berkeley law school faculty, his scholarship is prominent within his field of expertise, and his views of the legal issues surrounding the War on Terror remain an important part of the public debate. His removal from campus would significantly reduce the range of perspectives and the scope of arguments that students at Berkeley would be likely to encounter, much to the detriment of the quality of their legal education. As the left-leaning legal theorist Brian Leiter argued at the time, Yoo’s views as reflected in his OLC memos and elsewhere might be “implausible, badly argued and morally odious,” but if that were sufficient to warrant removing a tenured faculty member for research misconduct, then “there would be nothing left of academic freedom, since every disagreement on the merits of a position, especially a minority position in the scholarly community, could be turned into a ‘research misconduct’ charge that would lead to disciplinary proceedings and possible termination.”8

Conservatives are not the only targets of ideological purges in contemporary academia. To take a recent example, the philosopher Rebecca Tuvel published an article in the interdisciplinary feminist philosophy journal Hypatia examining the conceptual linkages between “transgenderism” and “transracialism.” Upon its publication, a group of associate editors for the journal issued a public letter of “apology … for the harms that the publication of the article on transracialism has caused,” and exclaimed that “the article should not have been published.” The associate editors pledged to consider retracting the article, but they drew a line at outing the anonymous peer reviewers who played a role in moving the article toward publication.⁹ An “open letter” was promptly circulated among hundreds of feminist scholars calling on the journal to immediately retract the article since “its continued availability causes further harm,” and demanding that any manuscripts on such topics in the future be reviewed by “referees working in critical race theory and trans theory,” who could have been expected to spike the offending article before publication.¹⁰ Deploying the tropes used to suppress “hate speech,” one widely circulated critique accused Tuvel of engaging in “discursive transmisogynistic violence” and observed that “cis women enacting violence against women of color is not the exception; it is the rule,” though its author later explained that outsiders did not have the “conceptual competence” to understand what she meant by “violence.”¹¹ Tuvel’s dissertation adviser revealed that though some critics admitted that they had not read the article in question and others privately expressed their sympathy with Tuvel, they all felt obliged to publicly denounce her for her sins lest their own careers also be put in jeopardy.12 The reaction beyond the feminist community was swift. The attacks on Tuvel were a “witch-hunt,” “innuendo [and] name-calling,” “defamation” of the professional competence of a junior scholar, and the work of “feminist thought police.”¹³ Philosophers at large wondered whether the feminist scholars engaged in the attack on Tuvel were practicing philosophy at all or had rather made a profession out of political activism and indoctrination, since they seemed committed to the view that some questions could not be asked, and some conclusions could not be stated if they were intellectually true but politically unpalatable. Eventually the Hypatia editor tried to salvage her journal’s reputation by denouncing the associate editors for acting in a way that was “utterly inappropriate” in attempting to “repudiate” an article that their journal had published after its normal process of peer review, an article that was professionally sound.¹⁴

Even more disturbing has been the recent uptick of threats of violence against professors who step out of line on American university campuses. There was a swift retraction of an article published in a political science journal arguing that imperialism had more beneficial aspects for native populations in colonized territories than was often appreciated. The article might well have been wrong or badly argued, and some initial calls for retraction were based simply on those sorts of substantive disagreements with the work, the kind of substantive disagreements that are better vetted through rejoinders than through petitions. The quick decision to send the offending academic article down the memory hole, however, was made by the publisher in the face of what it called “serious and credible threats of personal violence” directed at the journal editor.15 Similarly, Drexel University decided once again to suspend its most notorious professor over tweets about the Las Vegas mass shooting in October 2017. Because of “a growing number of threats” directed at the professor, the “safety of our campus” had to take priority over free speech and the professor had to be removed.¹⁶ Evergreen College likewise appealed to campus safety as the reason for suspending a professor who came under fire from students for questioning a proposed “Day of Absence” on which white students and faculty were asked to stay away from campus.¹⁷

Such purges are not designed to filter out would-be scholars who do not meet professional standards nor to dedicate intellectual energy to the most promising lines of scholarly inquiry. They are designed to impose and enforce ideological boundaries on the scope of academic discussion. Ideas without any credible intellectual grounding can be ignored. Arguments that are simply mistaken can be corrected through further argumentation and research. Scholars who have engaged in misconduct can be exposed and disciplined through fair procedures. Speakers who say what may not be said should not simply be excluded, and professors who step outside the bounds of academic or societal orthodoxy should not be threatened with violence or termination.

While such episodes might showcase academic communities that are failing to live up to their own ideals, do they actually pose a problem for the mission of a university? If the artificial constraints on the intellectual diversity tolerated on campus had no real consequences for the pursuit of truth or the advancement and dissemination of knowledge, then those constraints might be annoying and embarrassing but of no great significance.

It seems naive to imagine that such might be the case. Certainly in other contexts, we tend to think that artificial boundaries on the pursuit of knowledge and exclusions from the scholarly community are damaging not only to those left on the outside but also to those within the community. As Mill pointed out, it is the closed society that will not hear from outsiders that suffers the most from the intellectual blinders it has imposed on itself. Ignorance flourishes where free inquiry is impeded. Flawed assumptions go unchallenged. Weak arguments go uncorrected. The agenda for intellectual investigation itself is restricted as questions go unasked. Indeed, part of the rationale for adding gender, racial, and global diversity to American college campuses is that individuals with different experiences and perspectives will improve the quality of academic discourse. Specifically ignoring the value of nurturing greater intellectual diversity on campus seems misguided.

American law schools can provide one particular example of these difficulties. Unlike, say, English departments, law schools have an ongoing connection to the wider world beyond campus since it is central to their particular mission to produce lawyers capable of successfully arguing cases before a range of judges, to work with government officials to reform and apply the law, and to generate research relevant to practicing legal professionals. Unlike, say, engineering schools, law schools provide professional training that is deeply intertwined with controversial ideas about politics and society. It is therefore striking that the political orientation of law schools is closer to that of English departments than to that of engineering schools. Whether measured by self-identification, voter registration, or campaign donations, the faculty members of American law schools lean heavily toward the political left and the Democratic Party.18 Moreover, they lean much further to the left than does the general population of lawyers in the country, and they include a far smaller proportion of conservatives or Republicans. In short, the political and ideological commitments of law school faculty members much more closely resemble those of university faculty generally than those of the legal profession generally.19

Should we have any concerns about that sort of ideological homogeneity in the law schools? Perhaps some. An important part of the teaching and research of a law school involves hands-on engagement with the practice of law, including litigation. Thus Yale Law School celebrates its partnership with the San Francisco city attorney in which its students gained experience working on the federal lawsuit seeking to strike down President Trump’s executive order on sanctuary cities.²⁰ Berkeley’s Death Penalty Clinic takes a “social justice orientation” to representing death row prisoners in appealing their convictions and sentences.²¹ Such programs are vital, if sometimes controversial, components of modern American law schools, but they also have systematic political and social consequences. If students could benefit from hands-on experience in civil rights, social justice, and environmental litigation, then surely they could likewise benefit from the opportunity to do the kind of work favored by the libertarian public interest law firm Institute for Justice or the conservative Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

More generally, law professors provide the intellectual resources for legal innovation through their research, teaching, and advocacy. With Ronald Reagan in the White House in the early 1980s, groups of conservative students at a set of elite schools organized themselves to host conferences that could bring some conservative lawyers to speak on important legal issues and debate their liberal law professors. From those efforts, the Federalist Society was born as a conservative “counter-network” to the well-established “liberal legal network” that connected law schools to liberal legal interest groups and Democratic government officials. In the years since, the Federalist Society has made little impact on the composition of law school faculties but has instead become a debating society that intersects with but operates outside of the law schools, and an alternative source of legal ideas for conservative litigators and judges.22 A group of conservative and libertarian law professors has recently proposed that the Association of American Law Schools approach “viewpoint or political diversity” as it has gender and racial diversity and examine how it organizes its own scholarly conferences, and how law schools treat their individual faculties, though to little immediate effect.²³ For most law professors, many of the landmark constitutional decisions handed down by the conservative justices of the Rehnquist and Roberts courts were both unexpected and almost literally incomprehensible. They reflected the ideas that had been incubated within the alternative intellectual space of the Federalist Society, just as the opinions handed down by the more left-leaning members of the court expressed ideas that had been gestated within the law schools. Law students are underserved if they are exposed to only one side of the intellectual forces that are shaping American law, and all sides within the intellectual debate suffer if they segregate themselves from their opponents rather than engage them.

The lack of viewpoint diversity on campus has also encouraged political backlash.²⁴ Although the economic, social, and cultural value of universities should encourage their broad support, it has become too easy for some to conclude that they have no stake in the success of universities. Both conservative professors and conservative students often find themselves beleaguered on campus.25 Conservative interest groups have fanned the flames of mass resentment of the universities.²⁶ Conservative voters, politicians, and alumni are increasingly adopting the view that mainstream colleges and universities are agents of left-wing politics that should be starved or dismantled. If university faculty understand themselves to be a force of progressive social and political change, it should not be surprising if conservatives use the tools at their disposal to fight back.

It would be preferable if the future of universities did not devolve into a partisan battle. A sincere commitment to preserving free speech on campus and sustaining a space for diverse intellectual arguments is an essential element of demonstrating the value of universities to a broad constituency. Legislative or alumni interventions into campus affairs with a goal of tilting the ideological balance in universities are often clumsy and ham-handed. They subvert important safeguards of university autonomy and intellectual experimentation and distort academic endeavors. The pressure for such outside interventions will only intensify, however, if universities do not seem to be keeping their own house in order. If universities position themselves as little more than partisan think tanks or advocates within the culture war, then partisans on the other side will be inclined to treat them as adversaries to be neutered or destroyed.

Outsiders can worry too much about ideological intolerance on college campuses. While disruptive protests are unfortunate and too common, they do not characterize the everyday routine of campus life. In a nation with hundreds of colleges and millions of students, even a daily episode of uncivil behavior would represent but a drop in the sea. The occasional instance of a speaker being shouted down or a class being disrupted commands attention, but such instances tend to overshadow the thousands of campus speakers whose biggest problem is convincing an audience to attend the lecture or the thousands of classroom teachers who are most concerned that students read their assignments and pay attention in class. Those who worry about systematic ideological indoctrination in college classrooms should be heartened by the evidence that students who are most engaged with their professors and their academic work are the least likely to drift to intellectual and political extremes.27 It is tempting to indulge ourselves and wallow in the examples of campus misbehavior that conform to familiar narratives, but we should be careful not to let such examples overwhelm us. There are troubling currents swirling through college campuses, and there are genuine disagreements about the proper mission of the university and the modes of realizing it, but campuses are not yet in crisis. Colleges do not need to be dismembered or salvaged. They do need to give attention to their foundations, however. The principles of intellectual inquiry and the conditions that sustain it need to be reaffirmed if universities are to remain vibrant and valuable institutions.

The causes of the ideological tilt on college campuses are myriad. Although it might be the case that simple ideological bias sometimes plays a role in faculty hiring, it is probably more common that ideological blinders help shape an academic culture that is inhospitable to dissenting ideas and points of view. It would seem unwise and likely futile to pursue a system of quotas for achieving greater intellectual diversity on campus. The goal should not be to put a thumb on the scale of scholarly merit. Universities must continue to strive to be the best at what they do by cultivating free intellectual inquiry and creative thinking about ideas. Members of the campus community should pause, however, before dismissing the need for intellectual diversity within academia. Those who are tempted to think that conservatives are simply too “stupid” to participate in the scholarly endeavor, or believe that the intellectual contribution of a conservative scholar on campus would be no different from what could be found on a typical evening on Fox News, should pause to consider whether they have retreated too far into an ideological bubble of their own. Nurturing and grappling with dissenting voices within academia would be likely to pay unexpected intellectual dividends as the scope of academic research is expanded, and the representation of thoughtful conservative scholars and teachers on college campuses is likely to encourage greater tolerance, engagement, and dialogue on campus and beyond.

Members of the campus community have a choice to make. The choice before them is hardly new, and is unlikely ever to be resolved once and for all, but it is a choice that is basic to the life of a modern university. They must decide whether they are committed to a joint project of learning and the principles and practices that make learning possible. If universities are to operate at the outer boundaries of our state of knowledge and to push those boundaries further outward, they must be places where new, unorthodox, controversial, and disturbing ideas can be raised and scrutinized. If students are to prepare themselves to critically engage the wide range of perspectives and problems that they will encounter out in the world across their lifetimes, they must learn to grapple with and critically examine ideas they find difficult and offensive. For more than a century, universities have been committed to the mission of advancing and disseminating knowledge, and have recognized that the free-ranging exchange of ideas is essential to the realization of that mission. They have often pursued that mission imperfectly, and they have sometimes needed to be called to account to better appreciate and work to realize their own ideals. Recognizing and respecting the principles of free speech is difficult and challenging, but there is no alternative if we are dedicated to the pursuit of truth. And the pursuit of truth is the noble and important mission of the modern university.