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New York Times

Why Hiring Professors With Conservative Views Could Backfire on Conservatives

Is hiring more conservative professors and admitting more conservative students a solution to liberal bias in American higher education? Many people think so. The Trump administration, in threatening to cut Harvard's federal funding, demanded that the university foster greater 'viewpoint diversity,' including by recruiting faculty members and students who would restore ideological balance to campus. Other political actors have embraced the idea, too. At least eight states have passed or introduced laws to require viewpoint diversity at public educational institutions. Certainly, there is not enough engagement with conservative ideas on college campuses. Schools can and should do more to ensure that students encounter a greater range of political perspectives in syllabuses and among speakers invited to give talks. But a policy of hiring professors and admitting students because they have conservative views would actually endanger the open-minded intellectual environment that proponents of viewpoint diversity say they want. By creating incentives for professors and students to have and maintain certain political positions, such a policy would discourage curiosity and reward narrowness of thought. I am a philosophy professor whose views are, for the most part, politically progressive. When I teach the social contract — the theory that underpins many of our ideas about government and its justification — I assign the work of the philosopher Robert Nozick, one of the most prominent and effective defenders of libertarianism. I do so because I want my liberal students to be challenged and my libertarian students to think carefully about the arguments that support their position. Mr. Nozick's own story helps show why hiring professors and admitting students for viewpoint diversity would be misguided. When he arrived at Princeton as a graduate student around 1960, he was a socialist. At Princeton he encountered the writings of the political economist Friedrich Hayek, a Nobel Prize-winning libertarian. In trying to argue against Hayek, Mr. Nozick found himself developing the ideas that would form the basis of his influential 1974 book, 'Anarchy, State, and Utopia,' which made a forceful case for a minimal state. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.