BY DALE E. MILLER
In “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity,” Professor Lisa Siraganian throws down a gauntlet. After offering “seven theses against viewpoint diversity in any of its guises,” she writes that “if viewpoint diversity means committing oneself to a robust debate about truth and values, then the movement should be open to responding to and refuting” these theses.
Although I don’t regard myself as part of any “movement,” I will accept Siraganian’s challenge by responding to her theses and offering a defense of moderate viewpoint pluralism. I won’t claim to refute her theses, or at least not all of them. I agree with her that higher education has been attacked for its putative lack of viewpoint diversity (thesis 6) and that these attacks are sometimes made in bad faith (thesis 7). Higher education is also being attacked for being soft on antisemitism, however, and this charge is also sometimes made in bad faith. Universities nevertheless have an obligation to address antisemitism if it exists on their campuses. Why shouldn’t the same be true about a lack of viewpoint diversity?
Siraganian would presumably reject this parallel by claiming that while antisemitism is a genuine evil, viewpoint pluralism is not a genuine good. She asserts (thesis 1), “Viewpoint diversity functions in direct opposition to the pursuit of truth, the principal aim of academia.” Although “viewpoint diversity might be useful to initially survey competing theories” of some topic, “once a consensus of the truth of that matter has been established, viewpoint diversity” is undesirable. For a university to hire faculty who favor theories that have been decisively refuted, like triple-helix DNA models, would enhance viewpoint diversity but impede the pursuit of truth.
As Siraganian notes, the philosopher John Stuart Mill is a favorite of viewpoint diversity’s advocates. Mill maintains that we pursue truth most effectively through discussion and debate among adherents of competing viewpoints. For Mill, viewpoint diversity is instrumentally valuable for what it contributes to this pursuit. Like Siraganian, he believes that our intellectual progress over time should narrow the number of propositions that are debated. In chapter 2 of his 1859 essay On Liberty, Mill contends that “the well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths which have reached the point of being uncontested.”
Mill would hardly recommend that universities hire faculty members who subscribe to disproven theories. However, he likely would see value in their having faculties who represent the range of views that are still live and worthy of serious consideration by the standards of academic disciplines, so that they’re positioned to participate with other academic researchers in the cut-and-thrust of scholarly discussion. Mill would see value in presenting students with this range of views, regardless of professors’ own positions. This moderate standard of academic viewpoint diversity doesn’t call for science departments to hire triple-helix theorists, let alone climate-change deniers or antivaxxers. Contra Siraganian (thesis 4), in this “guise” viewpoint diversity doesn’t undermine disciplinary standards. Insofar as its “background conception” of what makes a “good, valuable university” is that this involves discussion and debate among a diverse range of scholars whose methods and arguments conform to the standards of their respective disciplines, it’s hard to see how it could be “incoherent” (contra thesis 5) unless the AAUP’s Redbook is as well.
No university could hire enough faculty members to have a defender of every theory that is a live option within every discipline. Still, it might be tempting to assume that most satisfy this standard as well as could be reasonably expected and that higher education as a whole will satisfy it quite well, since different universities won’t all have the same gaps. I’m not sure, however. Siraganian quite rightly states that efforts to paint American professors as radical leftists involve considerable exaggeration. Still, the available evidence does suggest (contra thesis 3) that for whatever reason there is a dearth of faculty members on the political right. This is especially true in the humanities and social sciences. There are live views in these fields, views worthy of serious consideration by the standards of their disciplines, that align with and are most likely to be defended by right-of-center scholars. (In my own discipline, philosophy, these might include theism, pro-life views on abortion, theories of business ethics that are skeptical of economic regulation and redistribution, and retributive approaches to punishment.) These views sometimes figure in intellectual debates with centuries-long histories concerning questions where consensus isn’t likely to be reached soon. The paucity of conservative and libertarian faculty members suggests that there may be systemic lacunae where these views are concerned.
I lack space to propose solutions here, but I’m no more enthusiastic than Siraganian about the creation of new academic units. Perhaps all that can be done is to encourage faculty to treat viewpoint diversity as one important desideratum among others in hiring and in constructing their syllabi. I acknowledge that if academic departments began to hire more serious right-of-center scholars this still might not satisfy some populists, since their perspectives would still be unrepresented on campus. Satisfying them is not the point, however. The point is pursuing truth more effectively by including a wider range of intellectually credible viewpoints in the discussion.
Enhancing viewpoint pluralism in higher education might have some civic or political benefits beyond facilitating the search for truth, including exposing students with right-of-center political leanings to versions of this tradition with more intellectual heft than Jordan Peterson videos or Joe Rogan podcasts, but this search is the real core of my modest defense (contra thesis 2). (Defenders of viewpoint pluralism often center the notion of truth in their arguments and suggest that it’s their opponents who want universities to pursue other goals, like social justice.)
Properly understood, viewpoint diversity is genuinely, if instrumentally, valuable in higher education. It may have been coopted as a slogan by bad-faith critics of academia who endorse ham-fisted solutions. But the proper response is to correct their misunderstanding of what viewpoint diversity means in an academic context, not to jettison it altogether.
Dale E. Miller is professor of philosophy at Old Dominion University. His views do not necessarily reflect those of his employer.
See other responses, by Eric J. Weiner and by Joan W. Scott, to “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity.”
