by James A. Bacon

Defenders of the higher-ed status quo don’t dispute the imbalance of partisan and ideological views in college faculties, a reality that is so well documented that there is no sense in pretending otherwise. Rather, they’ve adopted a rhetorical gambit to put their critics on the defensive — painting them as hypocritical for wanting to rectify the asymmetry.

Conservatives, they contend, reject preferential hiring to address racial and ethnic imbalances in college faculties, but they are happy to see hiring preferences to bolster the number of scholars with right-of-center sympathies. As my colleague Dick Hall-Sizemore sums up the logic in yesterday’s post: “Some might call it DEI for conservatives.”

Dick is hardly alone in his view. I’ve heard similar sentiments expressed, in the comments section of this blog and, more respectfully, from members of the University of Virginia faculty with whom I engage.

Some may be tempted to dismiss “DEI for conservatives” as mere sophistry. But I take the messaging seriously. It compels us to ask important questions: How do we restore a semblance of intellectual diversity to higher education? What is our ultimate goal? How will we know when we reach it? By what means do we accomplish it?

Conservatives, libertarians, classical liberals and others who have been marginalized in America’s universities (whom I lump together under the umbrella of “conservatives” for purposes brevity) have been so focused on the fact of liberal-leftist domination and so remote from the levers of power that they never moved beyond describing what’s wrong. But here in Virginia a confluence of developments — aggressive federal action under the Trump administration along with three (soon to be four) years of appointments by Governor Glenn Youngkin to governing boards — have given political conservatives an unprecedented opportunity to bring about the reforms they yearn for.

At the University of Virginia, for instance, a search is underway for a new provost (the chief academic officer), and the Board of Visitors is asserting tight oversight of President Jim Ryan. The Jefferson Council, whose executive committee I serve on, has gone so far as to call for a “change in leadership” at the University. But even at UVA, where academia’s critics are close to gaining power, intellectual diversity is no more than a vague, undefined goal. There is no plan to bring it about.

I have some preliminary thoughts on the subject, which I present here in the hope of stimulating useful discussion.

Here’s my starting point: I don’t want conservatives to marginalize leftists like leftists marginalized conservatives. I don’t want to turn Virginia’s public universities into facsimiles of Liberty University or even Hillsdale College. I envision UVA as an institution where ideas collide and sparks fly.

I concede there is a massive asymmetry at work here. With a few noble exceptions, the administrators and faculty who run things have felt perfectly comfortable enforcing their social-justice orthodoxy. They drove out heretics who fell afoul of speech codes and microaggressions. They installed ideological filters for hiring and promotion such as mandated diversity statements. And in slow-rolling purges, department after department replaced retiring professors of diverse perspectives with a younger generation of scholars with uniformly left-of-center views.

Conservatives and other free thinkers don’t want to replicate practices we abhor. But how do we undo what was done without adopting ideological filters and preferences of our own?

Indeed, what constitutes a desirable balance? How much intellectual diversity is enough?

Do we want a 50-50 split between liberals and conservatives? That’s an arbitrary number. Do we want a faculty whose views “look like America”? According to Pew Research about a quarter of voters say they are liberal (16%) or very liberal (8%), while 37% say they are conservative (26%) or very conservative (10%). Alternatively, would we be willing to settle for a lower percentage of conservative professors if it is sufficient to change the campus culture and members of the university community feel comfortable to express themselves freely?

Once we answer those questions, we move on to the next set: How do we get there? In an ideal world, we would hire and promote professors on the basis of their teaching and scholarly merit. But that’s a non-starter. Who defines “merit”? If the decision makers are the same old department heads who showed no interest in admitting conservative thinkers in the first place, we won’t get anywhere. Do we instead appoint deans who impose conservative-friendly definitions of merit? What, then, of academic autonomy? Are we willing to sacrifice that principle?

One non-coercive strategy might be to solicit endowed professorships to recruit professors offering fresh intellectual perspectives. Several universities have established centers for the study of American civic and democratic traditions, including the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and the University of Florida. Other examples reside close to home. George Mason University, where the professoriat is predominantly left-of-center, has created oases of intellectual diversity in the economics department and law school. Philanthropy-funded new schools, institutes and centers would start with a blank slate, hiring thinkers who contribute to intellectual diversity without engaging in knock-down struggles with department heads resistant to change.

Another approach is to set new expectations. Governing boards can hire a presidents, provosts and deans who go beyond mouthing platitudes about intellectual diversity and do the hard work of changing ingrained habits. As the cultural tone loosens up, people will feel freer to express themselves, and that includes many professors of moderate and moderate-liberal political beliefs who kept their heads down for fear of censor. Every institution has some left-of-center faculty who see their job as educating students, not indoctrinating them. They are silent supporters of intellectual diversity, and they will assert themselves when it is no longer career-threatening to do so.

Finally, once an institution earns a reputation as a vibrant place to learn, teach and conduct research, it will become a magnet for scholars who feel unfulfilled in centers of leftist dogma. Universities renowned for their Intellectual diversity will have no trouble recruiting eminently qualified faculty of varied philosophical persuasions.

The bottom line: Universities don’t need diversity quotas, ideological litmus tests, or “DEI for conservatives” to create more intellectually diverse communities. But we do need clarity on what we hope to accomplish..