Jonathan Zimmerman: Why higher education needs diversity in viewpoints

Chicago Tribune

3 days ago

At a court hearing in Boston on Monday, Harvard University charged the Donald Trump administration with violating the university's free speech rights. The White House had threatened to cut Harvard's funding unless the school took action to insure 'viewpoint diversity' in its different departments.
You can't have a free university — or a free country — if the government is telling you which viewpoints you need to enhance or suppress, Harvard argued. As one of its lawyers told the court, that's a 'blatant, unrepentant violation of the First Amendment.'
He's right, and I hope the court agrees. But I also hope that Harvard — and the rest of higher education — uses this moment to broaden viewpoint diversity, especially in our classrooms. The White House shouldn't force it upon us, which is clearly unconstitutional. Instead, we should widen it ourselves.
That's because our first duty is to open students' minds. And that won't happen if we're closing them off to different ways of seeing the world.
In a recent study of 27 million college syllabuses collected by the Open Syllabus Project, scholars at Claremont McKenna College showed that professors rarely assign readings that take contrasting perspectives.
For example, classes requiring Michelle Alexander's influential book 'The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarcertation in the Age of Colorblindness' — which blames white racism for the war on drugs — almost never assign texts by authors such as Michael Fortner, who claims that African Americans were a key constituency pressing for draconian drug laws.
Likewise, professors who assign Palestinian scholar Edward Said's 'Orientalism' — which connects Zionism to Western ideas of cultural superiority — rarely pair it with 'Occidentalism,' by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, who argue that the West is caricatured by intellectuals around the world.
The point here isn't that that Alexander and Said are wrong and their critics are right. It's that our students won't learn — or learn well — if we expose them to just one or the other.
And they certainly won't learn if our universities fail to protect faculty members who dissent from the conventional wisdom. That sends the message that there's one way to think, which is the enemy of real education in all times and places.
Between 2000 and 2022, universities sanctioned nearly 1,080 professors for speech that is 'protected by the First Amendment,' according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. And since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, 40 professors have been investigated by universities for pro-Palestinian speech, and nine have been fired.
That's our own fault. As Harvard told the court on Monday, the government shouldn't be telling us which professors to hire and fire based on its perception of their viewpoints. But nor should universities judge people according to their politics. All that should matter is the quality of their research and teaching.
Alas, we haven't always adhered to that principle. At Harvard, for example, the prominent biologist Carole Hooven became a campus pariah in 2021 after she told Fox News that gender could take any number of forms, but there were just two biological sexes: male and female.
The director of her department's diversity and inclusion task force denounced Hooven's 'transphobic and harmful' comments. Graduate students refused to serve as teaching assistants for her popular course about hormones. And nobody atop Harvard's administration spoke up for Hooven, who suffered severe mental health challenges and eventually resigned.
The issue came up in the fateful 2023 congressional testimony of Harvard President Claudine Gay, who was asked why 'a call for violence against Jews' is 'protected speech' but saying that 'sex is biological' isn't. Gay, who stepped down a few weeks later, replied that Harvard supports 'constructive dialogue, even on the most complex and divisive issues.'
Please. The meaning of sex is a hugely complex and divisive issue, but the university didn't support Hooven's efforts to dialogue constructively about it. Instead, it hung her out to dry.
If you're the kind of professor who is outraged by the dismissal of pro-Palestinian scholars, you need to speak up for people like Hooven. Otherwise, you don't really believe in free speech; you just want freedom for the speech you like.
And you're also echoing the Trump administration, which doesn't want real dialogue either. In a social media post following Monday's court hearing, the president called Harvard 'anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, and anti-America.'
He has a right to his opinion, of course. But he has no right — none — to impose it on anyone else. As Harvard argued in its court filing, the First Amendment doesn't allow the government to 'advance its own vision of ideological balance.' Nor should it penalize us for expressing views that the president doesn't share.
But we owe it to our students to advance viewpoint diversity on our own, no matter what the court rules. Anything less will imitate Trump, all in the guise of resisting him.