In the early 2000s, former Marxist turned conservative activist David Horowitz advocated for universities to adopt the Academic Bill of Rights. His foundational belief was that colleges and universities were sites of liberal indoctrination where ideology counted more than truth. From that he, and many other conservatives of the time argued that universities needed to ignore racial diversity and embrace intellectual diversity – as if these were mutually exclusive goals.
On the surface, intellectual diversity seems like a laudable goal. Does it not follow that a range of perspectives on a problem would generate stronger solutions? The answer is two-fold: 1) yes that is generally true and 2) that is not what intellectual diversity means in intention or practice.
Calls for intellectual diversity are almost always lodged by conservative activists, and that is telling in-and-of-itself. There is a simple mental game that we can play that demonstrates the hidden agenda of intellectual diversity. That is, the goal of intellectual diversity is a quota for conservative thinkers because ask yourself honestly if conservative activists would support the following to support intellectual diversity:
- A Marxists being hired in a business school
- A “defund the police” activist being hired by a criminal justice program
- An expert on labor unionization being hired as part of an agricultural school
Of course, they would not support efforts like these because historically, intellectual diversity has always been lodged in a context of attacking the “liberal academy.”
Thus, it has nothing to do with expanding perspectives on in academia, and everything to do with creating an underground affirmative action program for conservatives. Every discipline has standards, and ideologically driven hiring quotas undermine said standards.
The overall point that I want to make is that the pursuit of “intellectual diversity,” is simply not an honest debate. It is a thinly-cloaked conservative agenda which is a larger part of their all-out attack on higher education. Those petitioning for intellectual diversity would likely never tolerate it if it supported leftist academics, therefore, we are not dealing with a matter of principle. We are dealing with contentious power relations and rising authoritarianism.
One issue I have had with my more liberal colleagues is that they tend to frame this issue in terms of defending academic freedom. I really wish they/we should be more intentional about putting this movement on the offensive instead of constantly responding to their attacks.
Georgy Lakoff has been sounding this alarm since the mid-1990s, arguing that liberals are always bested in the court of public opinion, in large part, because 1) their arguments are defensive and not offensive and 2) that they tend to lack a moral foundation that resonates with the masses. The current controversy over intellectual freedom is emblematic of this issue.
So many frame their arguments in defense of academic freedom instead of attacking the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing that is intellectual diversity. Additionally, academics have missed the mark because the mass public actually does not care about academic freedom on par with the way they portend to care about freedom of speech. They are two separate issues in the court of public opinion, and again, to quote Lakoff, conservatives are leaving liberals in the dust.
Therefore, we collectively should be on the attack, and some may be asking, How? As I previously offered, I do not find proponents of intellectual diversity to be lodging honest critiques – rather ones that are advancing the MAGA agenda.
The problem we are currently facing is that the MAGA base of the modern-day conservativism is increasingly divorced from reality (e.g., the focus on non-existent election fraud and climate change denial), but this is not a new phenomenon. In 2006 when President Bush’s poll numbers were tanking and conservatives were in denial. Comedian Stephen Tyrone Colbert presented at the White House Correspondence Dinner and he offered, “We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in ‘reality.’ And reality has a well-known liberal bias.” This is the core of matter, and it is important that academics acknowledge this dynamic.
When scholarly work guided by rigorous methodologies continually arrive at the same conclusion that leans politically to the left, that is not an issue with academic work. This is the core issue we are dealing with here – a conservative disconnect from reality and facts. To ironically borrow from conservative commentator Ben Shapiro, “Facts don’t care about your feelings.”
If conservative academics want to be part of the academy, they should gain entrance through their own merit just like the rest of us. The current calls for higher education accreditation to include intellectual diversity is a classic case of a solution in search of a solution. Ultimately, intellectual diversity in practice allows for conservative feelings to override rigorous academic deliberation, and nothing could be more unmeritorious.
Nolan L. Cabrera is a professor at the University of Arizona, but he writes this as a private citizen. Views expressed here are only his own. He is the author of Whiteness in the Ivory Tower, and this blog post is adapted from Chapter 5 of this book. He is also the author of the award-winning Banned!.
