BY JOAN W. SCOTT
This essay is adapted from the author’s contribution to a forum the Johns Hopkins University AAUP chapter organized to discuss Lisa Siraganian’s Academe article “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity.”
As with so many other liberal principles, the Right has seized and perverted the seemingly benign pluralism implied by “viewpoint diversity” to attack higher education at its very foundation. This is of a piece with the use of Title VI to root out a fantasized antisemitism that is supposedly making Jewish students feel “unsafe” on campus and, at the same time, to denounce as discrimination against whites attempts (like diversity, equity, and inclusion and affirmative action) to meliorate racist structures and practices. It is also of a piece with the new use of Title XI to defend “real, biological women” (defined by their reproductive capacities) against the “penetration” of their “private spaces” by transwomen. (I’m not making this up, it’s the very language of the January 20 executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”) Title IX, enacted in 1972 in response to intense feminist pressure, was meant to end discrimination against women because of their biology and gain them equal access to education, law, athletics, and politics. Now it is about protecting or defending women and keeping in place (or restoring) hierarchies based on biologically determined sexual difference.
If the perversion of Titles VI and IX is about establishing the grounds for legal oversight of the academy, the demand for viewpoint diversity is of another order since it seeks to monitor what is taught, to whom, by whom, and how. The US academy is, and has always been, marked by a certain liberal pluralism in regard to the production and transmission of knowledge. That is because, at least in its idealized form, it is one of the institutions associated with democracy and the production of a democratic citizenry. Liberal democracy, however critical we may be of its limits and exclusions, is the real target of the MAGA movement.
In the liberal democratic version of it, the university is dedicated to the endless pursuit of truth which is characterized by conflict and debate; consensus, once established, is not immune from critique whether in the sciences or the humanities. This is not an apolitical process since values necessarily inform the interpretations we come up with, but it is not a partisan process, and it doesn’t correlate with political party membership. Indeed, at its best, the pursuit of truth destabilizes and even changes our viewpoints, understood not as immutable but as themselves open to change. From this perspective, viewpoint diversity already exists in the academy, it is the only way knowledge production can happen. And conservative positions are fully represented, if by conservative we mean not party membership, but epistemological commitments. In my field of history, for example, liberals are often philosophically conservative, denouncing as radically unacceptable those of us who interrogate the facticity of facts.
The current right-wing demand for viewpoint diversity takes viewpoint to be a fixed position, a property or possession of scholars that is usually equated with political party membership. It depicts the university as a marketplace of ideas, suggesting a permanent quality to competing ideas granted legitimacy by consumer preference, not standards for distinguishing opinion from knowledge. Never mind its truth value, freedom of speech guarantees that all opinions warrant consideration. “Under the First Amendment,” a court ruled in 1974, “there is no such thing as a false idea.” When, as is often the case in popular right-wing discourse, free speech is made synonymous with academic freedom, we are in the brave new world of alternative facts. But the university is not a marketplace—it is an institution governed by agreed-upon rules about the production of knowledge, about what counts as truth, however provisional and subject to revision. Academic freedom is meant to protect the process from outside interference.
The idea that viewpoint diversity is a character trait, a (marketable) property of students and faculty, undermines the critical mission long understood to be the job of the university: to interrogate the premises of the values we embrace, to subject our interpretations to scrutiny in the light of our research, to cultivate in ourselves and our students the unsatisfiable desire to always know more, to refuse to make the process serve political ends decided in advance, indeed to ask instead what the relationship is between our critical thinking (our theorizing) and our politics. Here I look for guidance to Stuart Hall, who insisted on the difference between theory and politics: The one interrogates meanings; the other seeks to establish hegemonic narratives. I’m suggesting that the university’s mission is the critical one; our knowledge may be used to inform the construction of hegemonic narratives, but that is not its purpose.
If by conservative, the Right means a denial of this kind of critical knowledge production on the grounds that we already know what we need to know (and there is surely something of this on the partisan left as well), their viewpoint diversity is a perversion of the university’s mission, an attempt to put political operatives in the classroom in order to cancel critical knowledge production in the name of the regime’s established truth. It is a full-scale attack not on wokeism or political correctness but on the very existence of liberal democracy, all of those institutions—universities among them—that have to be dismantled if the authoritarians are to prevail.
I have to add as a postscript to this that I find myself in the uncomfortable position of defending a set of ideals that have long been compromised by the organization of the corporate, neoliberal university. This is the university Bill Readings described in 1996 as “in ruins.” Nonetheless, there has been space among the ruins to pursue the production of knowledge as I’ve described it. What we are facing now is the imminent closure of these spaces. One way to defend them, I think, is to take the idealized version as the reality we want to protect.
Joan W. Scott is professor emerita in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.
See other responses, by Dale E. Miller and by Eric J. Weiner, to “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity.”
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“the use of Title VI to root out a fantasized antisemitism that is supposedly making Jewish students feel ‘unsafe’ on campus”
Did Professor Scott bother to read the report of Harvard’s task force on antisemitism there [https://www.harvard.edu/task-force-on-antisemitism/]? They found it! But Professor Scott gives the report and its findings no credence, believing it all “fantasized”?
When an article starts off with such a demonstrably false premise as you rightly point out, it is hard for a reader to give much credibility to the rest of its contents. Indeed, such an initial display of overt bias gives one pause to question the employment of any academic rigor.
Thank you for the affirmation. We reacted in very similar ways to Professor Scott’s upfront declaration of overt bias(es), which undercut(s) all that she then went on to say about “viewpoint diversity,” though there might have been bits and pieces we agreed/disagreed with in that.
When there is an egregious, undeniable act of racism for all to see and an onlooker insistently denies that what was observed was in fact an instance of racism, does that deny onlooked indict themselves as a racist? I think they do, absent some hard to imagine alternative explanation for the obtuseness. Along those same lines, I wonder what is to be inferred from Professor Scott’s “obtuseness,” insensitivity,” non-comprehension, or whatever with regard to antisemitism (“fantasized antisemitism that is supposedly making Jewish students feel “unsafe” on campus”), that she is an antisemite herself? I expect she would vehemently deny it (and maybe even has Jewish antecedents), but I don’t think it an unfair supposition given the evidence she has provided us.
And to go on a bit further, it is worth noting that Professor Scott doesn’t let it go with scornful dismissal of those Jewish “snowflake” students who claim to feel “unsafe” on campus. She holds them up to obloquy as part of or allied with an ill-intentioned cabal of right wingers (“of a piece with the use of Title VI to root out…at the same time, to denounce as discrimination against whites attempts …to meliorate racist structures and practices. It is also of a piece with the new use of Title XI to defend “real, biological women” (defined by their reproductive capacities) against the “penetration” of their “private spaces” by transwomen…”) In other words, those Jewish students are intentionally or unintentionally enemies of the “progressive” GOOD!
Yeah, after “a demonstrably false premise…it is hard for a reader to give much credibility to the rest of its contents.”
Just a bit more in response to Professor Scott…
The learned professor derisively mocks Jewish students who feel “unsafe” on account of campus antisemitism at schools like Cornell. She holds that antisemitism is only fantasized and their fearssupposed. Well, if she had done even the most minimal of due diligence, she would have had no difficulty identifying fresh reason for fear on the part of Jews on many campuses: ttps://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzQcqQsfvtBZGDzkqZShXlzZVvjr?compose=GTvVlcSHvbDtlcFrlpXhcKpXCCPPgLqNCbNRqTsZPZkMxBSrfZQjTGFTrXKLQCGjgsccJhvVHmfDz
But as George Orwell famously remarked, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”