Today’s post was prompted by two recent news items: first, by the announcement that Martin Peterson, currently professor of philosophy at Texas A&M University, will be moving to Southern Methodist University (SMU); second the report by the Harvard Crimson that “Harvard Asks Donors to Endow $10 Million Professorships for ‘Viewpoint Diversity.’” (Wasn’t that what the visiting fellows program at the Kennedy school was for?)
First, Peterson’s comments (quoted at the top of this post) resonated with me. Of course, administrators are also people with mortgages, have parents with expensive care needs, and have kids with expensive tuition. American political economy with its go-fund-mes for urgent medical care and (say) funeral costs makes individual, principled stances incredibly fraught affairs in a job-market that is clearly imploding for mid-career academics, and that most certainly leaves fewer alternative opportunities than (the usually more lucrative options) former prosecutors have. Some of the administrators at Texas A&M may well have had tenure, and they do deserve special opprobrium for their cowardice.
Second, Peterson’s words remind us that something is very broken in the academy when the people who are charged with running it — and Texas A&M is not some idiosyncratic place; it is one of the great, earlier public land-grant research universities — can’t bring themselves to even try to defend fairly basic academic freedom. (If you inform yourself of the details you will learn that Peterson was really making a basic point.) This absence of principle exhibits cynicism and only engenders further erosion of the academy’s spiritual authority (recall this post). I don’t mean to suggest the situation is more cynical than a President who barely pretends to care about revelation and then reads 2 Chronicles 7:14 in front of the cameras. Both exhibit what Machiavelli would call ‘corruption.’
Third, and speaking of cynicism, in its fundraising, Harvard has embraced a term, ‘viewpoint diversity,’ whose (let me adopt James Burnham’s terminology) formal meaning implies a kind of openness to intellectual pluralism, but whose real meaning means ‘people that are critics of liberalism from the non-libertarian right.’ That is to say, this is affirmative action for right-wing coded intellectuals.
As an aside, I am myself not a critic of funded centers that presuppose an ideological commitment. If the institutional embedding is properly organized, these can enrich a campus and even the disciplines in which the academic housed in them publish. (I have a soft spot for the development of ‘schools’ with distinct orientation within many disciplines.) I have been a ‘visitor’ at centers where the ultimate source of funding was ‘right’ coded back in the day.
Harvard University’s official guidance for a policy on university statements (May 2024) does not embrace institutional neutrality. So, I am not suggesting that Harvard is inconsistent with its own understanding of university speech. In fact, its “policy commits the university to an important set of values that drive the intellectual pursuit of truth: open inquiry, reasoned debate, divergent viewpoints and expertise. An institution committed to these values isn’t neutral, and shouldn’t be.” (That’s from an NYT OPED written by Noah Feldman and Alison Simmons.)
But the reason why I use ‘cynicism’ is because nobody believes that Harvard’s funding drive is designed to create intellectual pluralism at the disciplinary or methodological level where groupthink may be lurking. (I have published on the epistemic and normative risks to society of disciplinary groupthink, so this is not a merely intellectual matter.)1 The fundraising goal is not a means to advance knowledge. Rather, Harvard’s fundraising is patently a means to appease a hostile and dangerous administration and the intellectuals that are partisans of it.
This administration has demanded ‘viewpoint diversity’ from Harvard in a letter (here) of April 11, 2026. And the reason why it is legitimate to be cynical about the use of ‘viewpoint diversity’ is that this is an administration that across a range of topics and institutions seems to have no interest in ‘viewpoint diversity’ when those views contradict its own. Most strikingly this is exhibited in the way it has sought to control public media and the way it has sought to deport foreign students who express views it doesn’t like; but also in weaponizing the judiciary in attacking its enemies (and so on).
This gets me to the real point of today’s post, which is not the manifest cynicism on display. Rather, to grapple with the following point. I have remarked before that many prominent universities are exceedingly long-lasting corporations. They have endured, in part, by their willingness to exhibit context-sensitive prudence, alas. If, say, a well-entrenched, Bonapartist government wants a certain amount of conformism to its preferred viewpoints in public institutions and universities, it will usually be obtained eventually. Again not merely a hypothetical point; the forced departure by (former prime minister) Orban of CEU from Budapest is fresh in memory. Many nineteenth century European intellectuals may have been spontaneously nationalist and imperialist, but the governments also nudged the universities in appointing reliable pairs of hands.
Sometimes this process leads to an official purge at the official universities and the subsequent development of an ‘underground university’ as occurred in, say, Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring. I understand Zena Hitz’s Catherine project and Justin Smith-Ruiu’s The Hinternet Foundation as the building blocks of an underground university of the future.
The more intense cases occur, in circumstances where the academics and the social forces that really support them and, say, the political and economically influential elites have drifted apart, but the law has not caught up with that divergence yet. The best known and most dramatic examples of this occur in the context of civil war or separatism/revolutionary wars. For example, in the age of the English civil war, Oxford’s politics was sometimes very far out of step with the parliamentarian party. And, after the American revolution, the University of New Brunswick and the University of King’s College were founded by loyalist exiles in what came to be known as Canada.
I have used the neutral term ‘drifted’ in the previous paragraph, but echoing the diagnosis of Michael Polanyi back in the day, strategic agents including fascists and anti-liberal movements will aim to lower the trust and authority in the professions and the academy in order to make possible and consolidate their own power. So, it would be a mistake to treat ‘drift’ as pointing to a lack of agency. But universities’ vulnerable strategic position is also due to the loss of their spiritual authority in wider society.
The university’s distinctive spiritual authority (recall this post) was rooted in two features of its intrinsic mission: witnessing truth and being the institution that engages a non-trivial part of the education of an important subset of near adults. Both tasks are serious and dedication to them commands respect. How to engage in this mission such that spiritual authority is the effect is something to figure out and decide upon by each university, conceived as a corporate entity (in the medieval sense), and to be articulated in its mission and the practices that are structured by it. A private university should have more space for autonomy in these matters than public ones. Self-consciously politicizing their mission — by seeking out ‘viewpoint diversity’ — is not a means to recover such authority.
MAGA and its allies want universities to believe that Stateside a regime change has already occurred and so that accommodation is the only prudent way forward for research-intensive universities. It is somewhat puzzling that while they maintain considerable freedom to shape events on their own campus, so few universities have found ways to make the case that an independent education and the advancement and preservation of knowledge is worth preserving.
1 Elsewhere, I have argued (in Dutch) that, for example, ideological conformism is to be expected (and not without its problems) in many professions and fields, but when it occurs it is far more politically dangerous in policing and the armed forces than it is in the academy.
{ 50 comments }
Matt Lister 04.24.26 at 10:14 am
Given that 1) Peterson himself didn’t resign in the face of oppression, but waited to leave Texas A&M for when he had another (fairly attractive) job offer, and given that 2) He surely knows that federal government lawyers can almost always walk into other well-paying, often even attractive, jobs if they resign, I assume that he means that deans and department heads should have been willing to give up their administrative positions, not their tenured jobs, in order to protest the harm done to many US universities. That does seem reasonable to me. Some of those jobs (dean) do come with more money, and giving that up might be a loss for some people, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable to ask people to bear that. But given his own stance it would be surprising to me if Peterson were asking for more. I do think he’s right to ask for that!
engels 04.24.26 at 11:28 am
this is affirmative action for right-wing coded intellectuals
Yes, I think it’s a right-wing variant of representational idpol: “time for a supreme court/federal reserve board/disease control committee that looks like America,” except “looks like” has become “sounds like” and “sounds like” means 50% should be screaming lunatics.
Tm 04.24.26 at 6:01 pm
If tenured university professors (and deans and chancellors are typically tenured, afaik) are not willing or capable to defend even the most basic principles of academic freedom, then I have no idea why they should deserve tenure.
The cowardice of the American elites (economic, academic, media elites) vis a vis an unpopular fascist regime trying clumsily to consolidate power is absolutely shameful. Unless it’s not cowardice but active complicity. I have long been skeptical of the “liberal academia” narrative. I think there is far more right wing sympathy in academia than is generally claimed, and the influence of right wing donors has always been pervasive.
Mike on the Internet 04.24.26 at 7:17 pm
While I often take issue with Brian Leiter’s hostility to (in particular) identarian stains of “wokeness”, I think this situation shows the merit of his central complaint about what he calls ” diversity blather”. That is, the original purpose of affirmative action policies (in the US at least) was to counteract the effects of specific, concrete historical discrimination, especially against people of African descent. It was a targeted remedy for the lasting impacts of slavery and apartheid. Under that historically concrete understanding of affirmative action’s purpose, it would be absurd for the descendants and beneficiaries of the historical oppressors to claim any right to avail themselves of affirmative action benefits. But if, as Leiter argues, affirmative action is recast as something that seeks general societal benefits by delivering a good called “diversity”, and people who should be fighting to preserve its original reparation logic instead go along with this PR make-over, then anyone can make a special plea for inclusion in the name of “diversity”, without engaging any historical or substantive moral discussion about the merit of the specific difference by which they diverge.
I’m often quite skeptical of “liberalism hoisted on its own petard” narratives (as opposed to, say, “liberalism hoisted on a petard furnished by conspiring fascist billionaires controlling vast media empires”), but I do think Leiter’s complaint about the dubious emergence of diversity per se as an institutional good identifies something important here.
Alex SL 04.24.26 at 11:13 pm
It is unrealistic to expect academia to be able to operate outside of the Overton Window. This should become obvious if we attempt a few thought experiments like communist academia in 1950s USA, atheist academia in Iran today, or anti-slavery academia in ancient Greece. That is not me erasing differences between democracy and dictatorship – an academia policing itself against racism is much preferable to me over an academia policing itself against anti-racism – but simply an acknowledgement of the reality of being in a society.
The government has the purse strings, the ability to decertify a university, and ultimately, the guns. If your personal duty is to keep your spouse and children safe and fed, and your professional duty is to be a good steward of the institution you have been entrusted with, what are you going to do against that? Quite frankly, I have more respect for a professor or university president who is keeping their head down while hoping that this all goes away than for one who, while running a DEI program under a Biden presidency, shuts down academic disciplines to funnel more money towards the sports team or outside business consultants. At least with the former I can plausibly believe that they are doing it under duress to protect the institution so that it survives until times get better, whereas the latter makes the unencumbered decision to ensure that the institution decays and crumbles.
Mike on the internet,
I would remain skeptical of those narratives, because it seems implausible to me that arguing for diversity as a public good made the difference. It is also obviously correct to argue that, at least outside of narrow fields where there is only one valid, purely technical and well-established methodology: if people from more diverse backgrounds are part of a team or a conversation, they are much more likely to come up with ideas and angles that a very homogeneous team would have missed. I am glad to have a diverse team and shudder to think how little we would achieve if everybody was very similar to me in cultural background and personality.
RobinM 04.24.26 at 11:18 pm
It seems to me that rather than behaving in a cowardly fashion (though I don’t doubt some of them are) those who direct and manage universities are seizing the opportunity to maintain and expand their authority over their institutions, their faculties, and their students. I think we get it wrong when we locate the authoritarian impulse in one particular place or among some particular and particularly obviously malign set of politicians. The system is riddled wih authoritarianism.
LFC 04.25.26 at 2:21 am
Mike on the Internet @5
I don’t think the (supposed) concern with “viewpoint diversity” among faculty really has all that much to do w/ affirmative action, notwithstanding the OP’s use of the phrase. Justice Powell’s controlling opinion in Bakke, which dates to 1977 iirc, accepted diversity in the student body as a justification for taking race as one factor among many into account in undergraduate admissions. That was basically the state of the law, w/ some modifications, until the Roberts Court, a couple of years ago, ruled race-based affirmative action in college admissions unconstitutional.
Powell in Bakke accepted the argument that students would benefit from being exposed to diverse experiences, backgrounds, and views among their peers. That’s quite different from the argument that they also should be exposed to a diversity of opinions among their professors. The latter position tends to assume, for one thing, that professors’ personal views affect how they teach, which may be true in certain cases but not in many other cases.
The current concern about viewpoint diversity among the faculty is largely a result of years of right-wing complaints that their views are underrepresented in the professoriate, and now that Trump 2.0 has cynically taken up this cudgel universities have an incentive to, as the OP notes, “appease a hostile and dangerous [Trump] administration” by taking steps in this direction.
So in the present context, the main problem is not that “diversity blather” has replaced the original rationale for affirmative action. That ship really sailed a long time ago. The problem is that the current Trump admin has weaponized the issue of viewpoint diversity in the faculty and is using it as one of its sticks with which to beat universities.
All that said, while it would not be a welcome development if Harvard solicited and got some big donations to hire conservative professors, I’m not sure it would matter all that much. Moreover, the Harvard administration might come to regret starting down this path. I wouldn’t be surprised if some student groups started pressuring the Harvard administration to hire some Marxist professors whose views, after all, are also underrepresented on the faculty. The top administrators might come to rue the day they opened this can of worms.
Jay Danube 04.25.26 at 1:26 pm
https://crookedtimber.org/2021/01/04/the-stock-obe/
Marco Rossi 04.26.26 at 7:35 am
Re “diversity blather”
IMHO the problem is that It Is implicit in the idea of “diversity” that it should be applied to groups that are somehow oppressed, but there is not a clear definition of who is oppressed, so it can easily be stretched and weaponised but also people with different political ideas are likely to have different opinions on who is oppressed and who doesn’t.
On the other hand, probably the reason such a vague language became common is exactly because it is difficult to agree on a detailed definition of who is oppressed.
D. S. Battistoli 04.26.26 at 5:26 pm
@Mike on the Internet 4
@LFC 7
I’d suggest that we can separate the question of moral responsibility from that of philososphical implication:
@Alex SL 5
I agree that left-of-center advocates of various types of academic diversity do not bear any moral responsibility for this; they are not being hoist by their petard. That is, it would be hard to demonstrate that conservative critics of academia have been inspired to demand representation on faculty because of, say, the shift in justification for affirmative action from a structural adjustment of access-lanes to the middle and upper echelons of society to a desire to have academia “look like” the populace as a whole.
And yet a left-on-left critique of the philosophical position underpinning certain diversity claims is possible without asserting or relying upon an accusation that advocates of such claims have created the circumstance in which American academia now finds itself.
Now, given that academic tenure enables thinkers who have once demonstrated some social or political value to their thought to continue to support themselves while thinking academically through retirement, and given that the United States may likely coming to the end of Donald Trump’s time in office, Harvard, which seems to appreciate its status as a university with a revolving door opening onto America’s National Mall, may be deciding that it wants a few (more?) Trumpists on faculty, like it has had many Reaganites, two flavors of Bushites, Clintonites, and Obamians on staff. They may have decided that fundraising for shiny new faculty chairs at this particular time to be the least-costly way to do so with regard to their current staff.
I really think that Harvard’s new endowed chair under this scheme should be called the Richmond Chair. The duchy of Richmond was first created in the United Kingdom for one of Henry VIII’s bastard sons, and the current duchy was created for one of Charles II’s. Nothing would better-reflect Harvard’s desire to create a permanent endowment for the intellectual offspring of every political age, including the current one, than to give such a fitting name to this (or these) new professorship(s).
Tm 04.27.26 at 6:49 am
Alex 5: “The government has the purse strings, the ability to decertify a university, and ultimately, the guns.”
In the US, the government afaik doesn’t have the ability to decertify a university, and some universities have huge endowments, and in many cases when universities fought in the courts against Trumpian takeover attempts, they won. And I’m not sure where the guns enter into the equation, at leats at this point in the US.
Also, the appeasers and enablers by and large haven’t managed to protect their universities from the wide-ranging funding cuts that the Trump regime has enacted in medical research for example (https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2026/04/they-want-you-to-die). Curiously, this regime seems to be less interested in controlling and using to its own advantage the academic system than in destroying it wholesale – they don’t need expertise, research or education, all they need is a handful of oligarchs running chatbots. Collaboration doesn’t really seem to work to the advantage of the collaborationists.
RobinM 6 makes a good point: “those who direct and manage universities are seizing the opportunity to maintain and expand their authority over their institutions, their faculties, and their students.
Mike 4: “I think this situation shows the merit of his central complaint about what he calls ” diversity blather”… anyone can make a special plea for inclusion in the name of “diversity””. But not everyone is making it! Visiting scholar programs or even professorships that are explicitly reserved for right wingers exist at many US universities, (e. g. CU Boulder https://www.colorado.edu/center/benson/CTP – it’s worth perusing the list) and they are an abomination. There is no left wing or liberal equivalent, nowhere. An academic position that requires an ideological commitment as a precondition of hiring should not exist. There is absolutely no excuse. Observing this from the outside, I really can’t fathom how American academics are shrugging this off as if it were normal.
engels 04.27.26 at 9:15 am
Visiting scholar programs or even professorships that are explicitly reserved for right wingers exist at many US universities… There is no left wing or liberal equivalent
In which case there’s a simple solution: American ultra-righties could get established “non-political” professorships in their areas of interest: Jordan Peterson -> women’s studies, Charles Murray -> African-American studies, etc…. (In all seriousness that this is both repulsive and absurd might suggest a flaw in the above thinking.)
Tm 04.27.26 at 10:52 am
engels, not sure what your point is. I’m familiar with a university that has a business school partially funded by Walmart money, a “Department of Education Reform” partially funded by Walmart money, an endowed Chair in Petroleum Geology partially funded by fossil fuel money. Anybody who believes that these donors don’t influence the academic activities they help fund is kidding themselves (and it’s noteworthy that these gifts are never enough to actually cover the expenses – the university always ends up subsidizing the ideological hobbyhorses of their rich (and generally right wing) donors). What I mentioned above, the explicitly ideological sinecures for right wing pseudo-acadamics, are just the tip of the iceberg. But it’s telling that they don’t even bother to deny the ideological intention.
I have made this point many times before: “Liberal academia” is a myth. It exists perhaps in a few small departments that typcially have the least power and money (tell me about all those thousands of endowed chairs in gender studies (*) ), but by and large, US academia is more often than not right coded. Only, nobody ever talks about this, including liberal academics.
(*) I don’t know whether it really needs spelling out but of course, gender, colonialism, racism would in a sane world be considered totally normal objects of study, just like the climate or evolution. But we live in a world in which both climate science and gender studies are “ideologized” in the sense that one half of the ideological spectrum rejects their very existence and tries to eradicate every activity associated with these fields of study. In the US, federal grants now are automatically rejected if they include any of a set of hundreds of forbidden words, among which the words “women” and “climate”. This is Stalin level ideologized science and it’s definitely not the fault of the scientists.
engels 04.27.26 at 5:01 pm
#13 I mostly agree but I don’t think you can deny that professorships like those I mentioned aren’t in practice open to those on the far right (who won’t necessarily deny the existence of racism, sexism, empire, patriarchy, etc but effectively defend them or claim they are good things).
PatinIowa 04.27.26 at 8:57 pm
One thing that’s clear: very little of this is a response to student demand.
“The center’s Political and Economic Institutions in the United States class has two of 32 available seats filled and its American Culture and Values class has four of 32 seats filled as of Feb. 2.”
My first response was, “Of course, if you’re a College Republican or TPUSA student, it’s a lot easier to own the libs online in your apartment or frat house than it is to schlep to a building on campus. Plus, you can crack a forty while you do it.”
Of course, now the legislature is shovelling more marketing (!?) money at these grifters and contemplating requiring students to take the Center’s classes.
https://dailyiowan.com/2026/02/02/lack-of-student-interest-scheduling-issues-delays-ui-center-for-intellectual-freedom/
Tm 04.28.26 at 11:30 am
Right wing indoctrination is already or will soon be mandatory in many US universities.
The complacency of many in US academia is mind-boggling. Here’s the latest Academic Freedom Index and it’s devastating:
“In addition, our data show that declines in institutional autonomy are widespread among (former) democracies, and the decline in institutional autonomy in the United States stands out as a case of fast and steep deterioration that warrants comparative analysis… The data also show that the United States has experienced a remarkably sharp drop in institutional autonomy compared to other countries in Western Europe and North America (Figure 6) and also compared to major autocratizing countries such as Hungary, India, and Türkiye, where institutional autonomy has declined more
gradually (Figure 7). In the US, the initial decline began in 2020, driven largely by state-level actions. It intensified in 2025 under the second Trump Administration, driven by an unprecedented array of coercive federal executive measures that amplified and fueled state-level pressures on autonomous universities.
The US case illustrates how quickly institutional autonomy can be damaged via coercive executive action, yet it also suggests that pushback by academic institutions, civil society organizations, and court action against illegal measures are key to protecting academic freedom in autocratizing countries.”
https://academic-freedom-index.net/research/Academic_Freedom_Index_Update_2026.pdf
Sebastian H 04.30.26 at 3:06 pm
“Visiting scholar programs or even professorships that are explicitly reserved for right wingers exist at many US universities… There is no left wing or liberal equivalent”
DEI hiring programs like the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP) were used specifically to shepherd activists directly into tenured positions outside the normal hiring processes. And that isn’t even beginning to touch on how ridiculously bad scholars like Kendi get enormous grants. These aren’t visiting professors. They get full tenure!
somebody who remembers yale and harvard dont exist 04.30.26 at 3:41 pm
What I find most remarkable isn’t that harvard, columbia, yale and the other “plaything of the wealthy” schools capitulated – of course they did! I am more horrified that the public universities did. i guess the good news is that the libraries will have the books banned so nobody will know what they’re missing when the Jeffrey Epstein Chair In Skull Bump Studies lectures to a classroom of car dealership stepsons that black people have IQs of 37.
Cutty Snark 05.01.26 at 9:25 am
Sebastian H, 17
AFAICT under the PPFP fellows are hired into temporary postdoc roles, not tenured positions. And while they typically receive mentoring, research support, and sometimes a pathway to apply for faculty jobs later, any transition to a tenure-track role still requires going through a formal hiring process (department votes, committees, campus approval, etc.). So even if someone enters through a targeted fellowship or diversity hire initiative, they do not receive automatic tenure.
However, given your firm statement “DEI hiring programs like the President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program (PPFP) were used specifically to shepherd activists directly into tenured positions outside the normal hiring processes”, perhaps you can show us the evidence?
engels 05.01.26 at 11:20 am
Niall Ferguson -> Professor of Post-Colonial Studies
Kathleen Stock -> Professor of Gender Studies
Not sure either of these would get past the initial (AI) sift?
LFC 05.01.26 at 4:43 pm
somebody @18
Public universities esp. in certain “red” states can come under a lot of pressure from politically appointed boards of governors or trustees, and from state legislatures; just look at some of the recent and not-so-recent news (out of Texas or Florida, e.g.). So their “capitulation,” where it’s occurred, is not that surprising.
You are also under a misconception that a college/university whose student body is skewed toward the upper ends of the income distribution has only wealthy students and is a “plaything of the wealthy.” Not accurate. But I’m not sure why I bother to make this point since it’s not going to have any impact on your commenting strategy here or your repeated claim that only public universities are the repositories of virtue and every other place is the embodiment of vice.
Tm 05.02.26 at 8:45 pm
Engels, what is this about? Kathleen Stock was a university professor, I assume tenured, until she voluntarily resigned and joined the “University” of Austin. She would of course free to apply for a chair in gender studies if such positions (still) existed, but given the fact that she has absolutely no expertise in that area and her own academic field is the philosophy of aesthetics, the search committee probably wouldn’t put her on the shortlist. Because contrary to popular belief, academic hiring is normally, in the vast majority of cases (butwith notable exceptions as explained above) based on qualifications and expertise and not on political positions and nepotism.
Regarding Ferguson I’m gonna quote a paragraph from Wikipedia:
“Sir Niall Campbell Ferguson HonFRSE (/ni?l/ NEEL; born 18 April 1964)[1] is a British and American historian who is the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior fellow at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University.[2][3] Previously, he was a professor at Harvard University, the London School of Economics, New York University, a visiting professor at the New College of the Humanities, and a senior research fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. He was a visiting lecturer at the London School of Economics for the 2023/2024 academic year and at Tsinghua University in China from 2019 to 2020.”
You earlier mentioned Jordan Peterson and Charles Murray, prominent, extensively published, and amply remunerated extremely right wing academics. Is anybody trying to suggest that right wingers have difficulty advancing academic careers? Your own examples refute that claim. Contrary to Sebastian’s false claim, there is really no left wing equivalent of the right wing sinecure carousel. Probably not all left wing academics are great and perhaps not all deserve their positions, but none of them get offered highly paid, prestigious positions just for making outlandish claims.
engels 05.03.26 at 12:02 pm
Is anybody trying to suggest that right wingers have difficulty advancing academic careers?
Idk but I am only claiming that it’s in practice impossible for them to hold official positions in certain fields (the various “studies” ones I mentioned). I’m not saying they’re sinecures but they seem effectively to require a progressive political orientation, perhaps because those fields are premised on political assumptions (eg that women are oppressed or that gender is a problematic object of study) that right-wingers may not hold. So the main difference with the right-wing positions you referred to is that the exclusion isn’t explicit.
RobinM 05.03.26 at 3:14 pm
To say that Kathleen Stock “voluntarily resigned” doesn’t quite reflect the circumstances surrounding her resignation. It’s a use of “voluntary” that reminds me of those unfortunates “voluntarily” returning to their countries of origin rather than deal with what ICE was doing or was threatening to do to them.
engels 05.04.26 at 10:28 am
what is this about?
Appointments in Women’s/African-American/Post-Colonial/Gender/etc Studies, which seem to be commonly understood to effectively exclude right-wingers (even those with research foci on the relevant areas), not academia in general, which might be hostile but doesn’t.
Cutty Snark 05.05.26 at 10:16 am
No doubt a failure on my part to understand the argument, but I am struggling to see how this is different to medical or science departments not appointing vaccine skeptics or climate change skeptics to professorships in epidemiology or climatology…
engels 05.05.26 at 12:53 pm
I am struggling to see how this is different
Afaics the kind of opinions that disqualify centrists and right-wingers from those fields aren’t as scientifically disprovable as climate change or vaccine scepticism (ymmv).
Cutty Snark 05.05.26 at 2:53 pm
To clarify my comment a bit – as I understand it, the argument is broadly as follows: disciplinary epistemic boundaries may exclude candidates whose views fall outside what a field treats as acceptable foundations for research in that area, and since certain theoretical positions may correlate with real-world political affiliations, this may produce an over-representation of some perspectives without implying any systematic political bias in hiring.
However, this relies on an unstable mapping between political affiliation and theoretical position and treats disciplinary boundaries as fixed filters rather than contested and plural standards. Even where certain fields disproportionately attract scholars with particular political orientations, it does not follow that this reflects indirect exclusion rather than self-selection, research focus, or methodological alignment. The inference from representational skew to de facto political filtering is therefore not established. On that basis, it is difficult to treat such potential skew in certain fields (e.g. gender studies, jurisprudence, sociology, or even climate science) as structurally equivalent to the more explicit institutional remit of roles like a Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy, where political orientation is part of the position’s stated purpose.
Given this, I remain somewhat unclear what substantive point this line of argument is intended to establish, or what it adds to the broader discussion.
MisterMr 05.05.26 at 3:08 pm
@Cutty Snark
The difference is that, arguably (this is a big arguably), vaccine science and climate science are hard sciences, can be tested, and therefore vaccine skeptics and climate skeptics (and also creationists) are out on objective grounds.
OTOH, again arguably, [*] Studies have a strong policical/ethical component, so people who disagree with the conclusions of, say, Women Studies, is not out on strictly objective grounds.
There are limits to this, for example if the average wage for women is like 20% less than male wages this is an objective data and people who negate this are objectively wrong in the same sense of creationists etc.; however someone who is, say, an antifeminist, but doesn’t negate objective data could logically compete for an appointment in Women Studies.
I say this not because I have women studies, but because I’m worried that many people do not actually understand why keeping out creationists from appointments in science is not a matter of freedom of speech.
Tm 05.05.26 at 7:27 pm
engels: „it’s in practice impossible for them to hold official positions in certain fields“
Once again, it is (or should be) impossible for them to hold positions in fields that they have no expertise in. The examples you gave fall into that category and I wonder why you think this is in any way remarkably. Not interested in any more of this pseudo debate. In other news, creationists are not qualified for positions in evolutionary biology, not because they identify as Christian or right-wing but because those positions require expertise in the field of evolutionary biology.
Tm 05.05.26 at 7:33 pm
Reborn 24: Simply wrong, everybody can read up in Stock and how and why she resigned and what happened afterward. There are cases of academics and journalists actually being fired for political reasons, both in the US and Europe, and mixing those up with the likes of Stock and Weiss, who resigned secure positions for no other reason than to gain notoriety and make more money elsewhere, is deeply dishonest.
John Q 05.05.26 at 7:38 pm
The core problem in all this isn’t about hiring. It’s that academia is a field of employment that requires high education but delivers relatively low incomes, both of which are highly correlated with being on the political left. That, along with the rise of explicit anti-intellectualism on the right, explains why there are very few PhD graduates with rightwing views. That’s true regardless of whether the field has any explicit political content – there are essentially no Republican scientists even in fields that haven’t yet been swallowed by the culture wars.
To get “viewpoint diversity” you need to make “diversity hires” in the most pejorative sense of that term – appointing weak or even unqualified candidates because they have the right political views.
LFC 05.05.26 at 9:05 pm
JQ @30
I can’t quantify this precisely, but I’d say there’s a non-trivial number of Right-leaning law professors and political science (or political theory) PhDs in the U.S., just to mention two fields. They’re a minority across all of academia but they do exist. There are also some libertarians in various fields, who in some respects can be hard to place on the standard left/right spectrum. It will be interesting to see whether certain universities start trying to lure some of these people away from where they are now.
JPL 05.05.26 at 9:54 pm
“I have used the neutral term ‘drifted’ in the previous paragraph, but echoing the diagnosis of Michael Polanyi back in the day, strategic agents including fascists and anti-liberal movements will aim to lower the trust and authority in the professions and the academy in order to make possible and consolidate their own power. So, it would be a mistake to treat ‘drift’ as pointing to a lack of agency. But universities’ vulnerable strategic position is also due to the loss of their spiritual authority in wider society.”
The precursor of the current situation was the neo-liberalization of the university that occurred via the totalizing cultural wave of the 1980s and 90s, and still continuing, that promoted an ethos of “Realism” in the Kissinger sense of denying the reality of ideal principles of ethics and truth-seeking (as opposed to the metaphysical sense in which that term is used in philosophy). (E.g., completely rejecting the importance of the perfectly good economics notion of ‘externalities’.) Effective management of the university does not have to follow the ethically and intellectually barren ethos of neo-liberalism. Restoring an appreciation of ideals has to be part of the rebuilding project undertaken to counter the influence of the Satanic figure of Trump and his cult movement, another result of the neo-liberal steamroller. Thanks for keeping this theme alive.
Tm 05.05.26 at 9:55 pm
John makes some good points but I think the claim that working in academia is “highly correlated” with the political left and “there are very few PhD graduates with rightwing views” is a huge overstatement. Most PhD graduates are probably relatively unpolitical centrists, and there definitely are many right wing ones. But they are more likely to go in fields like law, economics or medicine than sociology or literature.
A good example for thinking about this question might be history. There are definitely right wing historians and left wing historians and also many historians whose politic views aren’t obvious. Eric Loomis of the LGM blog is known as a labor historian and a leftist. I would guess there are few right wing labor historians although there is no inherent reason why a right winger couldn’t be successful in the field. It’s likely a self selection effect. And of course, Loomis’ title isn’t “professor of labor history” – he’s a professor in the Department of History at the University of Rhode Island who happens to specialize on labor history. That is all there is to say about this.
Cutty Snark 05.05.26 at 9:57 pm
@engels and @MisterMr — I’m not sure if you saw my clarification @28, but I think there may be some crosstalk here (for which I’m partially responsible).
I take the point that in domains with strong empirical convergence, some positions are not merely controversial but incompatible with the evidential base of the field. On that view, excluding candidates who reject those results is best understood as an epistemic filter — a judgment about competence relative to disciplinary standards rather than political alignment. The underlying thought is that empirical constraint generates relatively clear conditions of admissibility: convergence of evidence stabilises correctness conditions, and exclusion tracks epistemic failure.
If I’m understanding the main divergence correctly, it is about how far this model is meant to extend beyond the hard sciences? In more interpretive or normatively structured fields, disagreement is often not straightforwardly about empirical falsification but about theoretical or conceptual frameworks. On that reading, what looks like “political skew” or exclusion may partly reflect shared disciplinary priors rather than straightforward competence filtering. So is it that the disagreement is less about whether empirical constraint exists in science, and more about how far it generalises across fields? E.g. whether epistemic constraints do relatively direct work in separating admissible from inadmissible positions, and how cautious we should be about inferring exclusion from epistemic structure once frameworks themselves are part of what is contested?
Given that, I’m still not seeing what substantive conclusion is meant to follow. The move from disciplinary epistemic structure to claims about hiring mechanisms or representational skew still looks like a missing explanatory step rather than an argument — it assumes the very causal link it needs to establish. And on the comparison between fields, the asymmetry still seems under-registered: explicitly ideological appointments (e.g. conservative scholarship chairs) are justified in terms of stated institutional remit, whereas the “exclusion” claim in other fields is inferred from epistemic structure alone. It’s not clear those two cases are being held to the same standard of explanation, or what follows from pointing out that both can be described in terms of “viewpoint diversity”.
On that basis, I remain unclear what the argument is ultimately supposed to establish beyond a general observation about disciplinary differences — and why that, by itself, should bear on the stronger claims about exclusion or representational imbalance that motivate the discussion…?
LFC 05.06.26 at 11:56 am
JPL @34
Not to derail the thread, but just to note that neoliberalism and political “realism,” while there may be certain connections, are different “things”. (There’s a very large amount of good scholarship on both.)
Tm 05.06.26 at 3:02 pm
Autocorrect played some tricks on me. Sorry RobinM not ‘Reborn’ at 31.
MisterMr 05.06.26 at 3:19 pm
@Cutty Snark 36
I don’t know exactly what would be the best solution, perhaps a clearer distinction and definition of what counts as objective parameters, what amounts to positive difference of points of view, what is “diversity”, etc.
But I do not have a great answer to this, it seems to me that these are definitions that everyone seems to agree on but then are very difficult to define in detail.
engels 05.06.26 at 4:29 pm
I’m still not seeing what substantive conclusion is meant to follow
To clarify: I was responding to TM’s claim that there are positions reserved for right-wingers but not progressives. Afaics it’s generally assumed that you can only “study” women/race/empire/etc from a progressive perspective ergo teaching positions in those fields are in effect reserved for progressives. If this wasn’t the case, you should be able to provide an example of academic who has published on these issues from a right-wing perspective being appointed to such a position but afaics this has never happened (my vague impression is this is somewhat in contrast to Business Studies and similar areas where there’s an implicit assumption you’re pro-business but they sometimes appoint [token] critical voices).
engels 05.06.26 at 4:33 pm
And ofc I don’t think progressive/liberal/Democrat (which is what most academics are) is at all the same thing as left but that would open up another whole can of worms.
M Caswell 05.06.26 at 9:40 pm
“creationists are not qualified for positions in evolutionary biology”
Many great biologists endorse creationism– that the world exists thanks to the activity of a divine source beyond the world itself. This is also the view of billions of people on the planet, including every believing member of all three Abrahamic religions. Do the academics among them have any reason to fear discrimination in certain precincts?
J-D 05.07.26 at 1:08 am
I take it you are suggesting that people (I don’t know who) pressed Kathleen Stock to resign. I know nothing about the circumstances of that resignation, but I do know that sometimes people are pressed to resign, so as far as I know it’s possible that this was one such case.
However, I also know that there are circumstances where it is appropriate to press people to resign. Without knowing the circumstances of this case I can’t say whether it was one of them.
MisterMr 05.07.26 at 11:19 am
@M Caswell 42
Many people are religious, and endorse some view where God created the worlds and set it up to create life because he’s all-knowing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theistic_evolution
Afaik this view is also accepted by, e.g., the Catholic Church, and although I don’t believe in it, this view does not directly contrast with evidence, so people who think in these terms are perfectly qualified for positions in biology.
However, this position is not what the term “creationism” mean.
In fact the difference between “theistic evolution” and “creationism” is a very good example of where the limit of accptableness lie.
RobinM 05.07.26 at 1:50 pm
J-D, you could get some idea of what I was alluding to by reading the wikipedia piece on Kathleen Stock, particularly the section entitled “Campaign by students at Sussex University.”
Stock’s Scottish affiliations should likely also be noted since the conflict between supporters of “women’s rights” and supporters of “transgender rights” has been particularly intense in that part of the UK, not least because Scotland’s former First Minister was such a vigorous proponent of the latter despite the fact that a considerable majority of Scots supported the former that it contributed to her departure from office. But that’s a whole other matter.
best wishes, r
Cutty Snark 05.07.26 at 2:13 pm
Thank you for the clarification and explanation. I would suggest that it is worth considering how disputes within fields may be observed in practice.
As I understand it, in business studies and economics, there are real disagreements over the primary explanatory drivers of outcomes (for example between Marxist, institutional, behavioural, and mainstream approaches); however, these disagreements do not generally involve rejecting capital, markets, firms, or organisational structures as meaningful analytical categories. The dispute concerns what best explains outcomes, not whether those objects of analysis are valid as objects of analysis within the field.
Similarly, within gender studies there is real disagreement over the primary explanatory drivers of gendered outcomes (for example between approaches that emphasise discourse and norms, political economy and institutions, or embodiment and intersectional structures); however, these disagreements do not generally involve rejecting gender as a meaningful analytical category. Again, the dispute concerns what best explains outcomes, not whether that category is valid as an analytical object within the field.
Now, it is difficult to map disciplinary positions directly onto political categories; while correlations exist, they do not translate into a simple binary of “left versus right” or “progressive versus conservative” at the level of academic structure (noting that such categorisations are themselves often contested). The relationship between political identity and disciplinary position is therefore not straightforwardly predictive in either direction in any stable or generalisable way.
This raises a question about what drives variation within disciplines. If acceptance of analytical categories is not primarily determined by political identity, then patterns of agreement and disagreement are more plausibly explained by disciplinary training, methodological norms, and shared research problems than by external political alignment alone. Where correlations between political orientation and theoretical position do appear, they are not sufficient on their own to establish a direct causal relationship between politics and disciplinary inclusion or exclusion without an additional account of the mechanisms involved.
In this case, it may be less useful to ask whether disciplinary positions map cleanly onto external political categories than to ask the extent to which pluralism of opinion within the bounded conditions of a discipline differs in kind from pluralism of opinion in other academic fields and what kind of explanatory work that pluralism is doing in each case.
On that basis, I am sure we should be confident that these fields are in effect “reserved for progressives” follows from either the internal structure of disagreement or the observed variation in explanatory approaches…
Sebastian H 05.07.26 at 4:23 pm
“Afaics it’s generally assumed that you can only “study” women/race/empire/etc from a progressive perspective ergo teaching positions in those fields are in effect reserved for progressives.”
Right. There is no firm epistemic reason why sociologists shouldn’t study sociological phenomenon from more centrist/right wing view points (eg what are the best ways to get immigrants to abandon certain bad social structures when they come to the West). But your CRT enthusiasts are going to make sure you don’t get hired because they will say you support white supremacy or that it is colonialist (no further explanation needed to say it is evil). We see this even in things that shouldn’t really have a political valence but accidentally acquired it (in the US we have gone through multiple periods of terrible reading teaching because ‘phonics’ got a right wing valence and we have to rediscover it every 10-15 years because progressive teachers keep trying to pretend it isn’t useful).
somebody who remembers yales role in americas greatesst crimes of the last 40 years 05.07.26 at 5:06 pm
ah LFC @ 21, it is not the students who make the university a plaything, nor (for the most part) the faculty, it is the administration! theoretically yale could be made into a moral institution, through the refusal of the wishes of the racist quintillionares begging them to output more torture-fetish supremacists into critical government positions, but would it truly be yale if it refused to vomit up a bush or a yoo or an alberto gonzalez or a cheney? the community college up the street does more for the well being of its students and the world than yale ever could, shackled as it is to the sick, trembling needs of the crawling, diseased wealthy. that’s why the wealthy work to support yale and work to eliminate the community college. it is not only that the wealthy are allied with the elite colleges that causes me to despise them. i dont get mad at luxury car dealerships, after all. it is that the elite colleges are fully aware america’s wealthy are attempting to wipe out education for everyone else and demonstrate no interest in stopping or slowing it. when texas ordered its libraries closed to rip out every book written by someone with a good haircut, harvard or yale or any of these institutions could have done something. they have infinite money and could simply have opened up another library across the street with the forbidden books there. they could have hired the fired adjuncts to teach their cancelled courses for free right up the road. they could have found that trans grad student who got fired for marking that idiot kid’s paper too low and very loudly hired her at a high salary. did they do anything like this? no, of course not! their only role was in educating and trained the lawyers, realtors and car dealers who are conducting the attack on education! the wealthy get what they want from elite colleges just like they do from their personal chefs. and those marching orders include standing aside when the wealthy want to pass 400 laws targeting trans people working in and attending schools across the country. the rich hiss “keep your fucking mouth shut, harvard. and don’t you fucking dare try to help even one of those people.” “oh yes, understood, you can count on us to do nothing to help a trans person trying to get an education in south dakota, because you’ll protect us even if every school and library across the whole rest of the country is obliterated.” if any of these elite institutions showed any kind of material solidarity with any of the other educational institutions in the country – schools, libraries, anything – i would joke a bit less cruelly (or at least i would feel that i should.) but the next time they do will be the first.
PatinIowa 05.07.26 at 7:05 pm
Engels at 40:
“Afaics it’s generally assumed that you can only “study” women/race/empire/etc from a progressive perspective ergo teaching positions in those fields are in effect reserved for progressives.”
Based on the behaviour of the legislature and the regents of my former institution, I think that the predominant conservative position on studying race and gender is that they are not worthy of study as independent disciplines or sub-disciplines. At Iowa they’ve eliminated the Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies and African American Studies departments/majors, as well as a couple of others. They’re pretending it’s about reorganizing resources more efficiently. Yeah, right.
Meanwhile, the legislature instituted a “Center for Intellectual Freedom,” as a cushy gig for conservative “scholars.” Since nobody signed up for the center’s initial class offerings this spring, our legislature has mandated that all students now take a course on American History and Culture, and requires that these courses be taught by people associated with the center, instead of, you know, the History Department. So much for studying the American empire as an imperial project. Or the genocide that cleared the ground we’re all standing on.
My sense of Iowa students is that they see this whole enterprise for what it is, and my sense of the people speaking for the Institute is that the classes will be so ham-handed that they’ll fail miserably. (Here’s a prompt for AI, “What would a person who believed in Manifest Destiny say about Wounded Knee?)
There is a difference between legislative mandates and disciplinary priors, as has been noted. As recently as the mid-seventies I heard an English professor say, “When an American writes something worth reading, we’ll include an American Literature class in the honors English requirement.” (If you studied English at Michigan in the seventies, I bet you know who it was.)
J-D 05.08.26 at 12:35 am
Believing that there is a Divine Creator is compatible with being a biologist.
Incorporating divine creation in the teaching of biology is incompatible with being a biologist. Teaching biology means teaching what people have learned about biology from studying the evidence.
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