BY DALE E. MILLER 

In a recent op-ed in The Hill titled “Our Universities Need Both Free Speech and Diversity Protections to Succeed,” Austin Sarat makes a vital point: “Free speech advocates should welcome . . . efforts to make colleges and universities more diverse and inclusive.” Yet he omits an equally vital point: The people who would benefit from efforts to promote the intellectual diversity that Sarat rightly links to free speech may not always be the same people who benefit from efforts to secure the “identity diversity” central to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as we know them.

There are different rationales for wanting campuses to be diverse. One concerns social justice. Discrimination, prejudice, and a litany of other historical and ongoing wrongs have resulted in fewer members of some demographic groups pursuing higher education—either at all or in certain disciplines. Colleges and universities therefore ought to address these inequities by making special efforts to include those who would otherwise be excluded, such as racial and ethnic minorities, women, and persons with disabilities.

A second rationale stems from the ideal of the “intellectual marketplace,” which says that people should make up their minds about important questions only after hearing what can be said for and against different answers. A college campus, it seems, should be where ideas collide and compete for adherents most energetically.

That’s not to say that there should be no limits on campus expression. Putting aside the issue of speech codes banning slurs and insults, in academia there must be “quality control.” Faculty can be held to standards of intellectual seriousness, standards set by their respective disciplines. Teaching is, in part, instilling respect for these standards in students. Within these constraints, debates should be fierce. As Robert C. Post argues, by operating within these disciplinary standards scholars contribute to the “democratic competence” of the larger society.

These two rationales for valuing diversity are mutually compatible. One can believe, as I do, that both are valid. And likely there are further rationales for educational institutions to value diversity.

Sarat claims that people who find the notion of a marketplace of ideas appealing have particular reason to prize diversity. After all, a campus will hardly be a vibrant intellectual marketplace if the faculty and students all think alike. While Sarat’s claim is incontestable, his use of it as an argument for status quo diversity efforts creates a misleading impression.

Sarat writes, “Differences in history and experience help prevent a suffocating uniformity of views that is antithetical to the most robust exploration of ideas.” He offers this as a vindication of higher education’s use of DEI programs, programs whose scope is nearly always limited to the familiar social justice categories. This way of framing the issue implies that the social justice and intellectual marketplace rationales give the same guidance about whom institutions should be making special efforts to include. They don’t, at least not entirely.

A member of a group that’s underrepresented due to systemic injustice often will have some distinctive history and experience that would diversify a college’s or department’s intellectual makeup. Both rationales converge in favoring special efforts to include such individuals.

Yet intellectual diversity simply means bringing together people with different ways of thinking, and an applicant might contribute significantly to viewpoint diversity without belonging to a marginalized group. It’s not just a question of having a distinctive history or life experience. A department that hires any job candidate whose methods or theoretical commitments are intellectually serious by disciplinary standards but aren’t already represented in the department has become more intellectually diverse. In fields in which a professor’s political ideology is likely to be especially relevant to their teaching or research, a department or college could therefore become more diverse through hiring a candidate whose politics aren’t shared by many of their prospective colleagues.

The intellectual marketplace rationale for diversity therefore suggests that schools should make a special effort to hire conservatives and libertarians in the humanities and social sciences. Their underrepresentation—save, perhaps, in economics—is well documented, even if there’s disagreement about why. (Some maintain that scholars on the right are underrepresented because they experience discrimination. An alternative explanation is self-selection—that is, that right-leaning students generally aren’t interested in academic careers.)

Some might object so vehemently to the prospect of preferring applicants for being right of center that they abandon the intellectual marketplace rationale for diversity altogether. That’s a consistent position, if unfortunate. What’s not consistent is to tout viewpoint diversity as a reason to make special efforts to include members of demographic groups who have been subject to discrimination while stopping short of following this reasoning to its logical conclusion.

To suggest that colleges and universities should sometimes make special efforts to include people whose right-of-center politics make them outliers is not to call for a “conservative quota.” Hiring and admissions decisions involve many factors. To say that this one consideration should count in an applicant’s favor isn’t to say that it should ever outweigh the rest. Nor is it to deny that social justice considerations should also count. We don’t need to follow psychologist and Heterodox Academy cofounder Jonathan Haidt in believing that universities face a stark choice between serving social justice or serving truth. But once we invoke the ideal of the intellectual marketplace as a reason to value diversity, we can’t say that diversity of political opinion shouldn’t count at all.

Dale E. Miller is professor of philosophy at Old Dominion University. His views do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.