Part 2: The Next Campus Battle after Free Speech: Viewpoint Diversity at America’s Elite Universities

There is a pressing long-term and deeply embedded problem at many universities – the almost total lack of viewpoint diversity among faculty. This is Part 2 of our breakdown of the problem with viewpoint diversity at Ivy League universities. Read Part 1 here.

WHAT TO DO? FIRST, RECOGNIZE THERE IS A PROBLEM

It is axiomatic that before a problem can be addressed, it must be recognized. There exists no study that credibly refutes the findings of the Yale and Harvard studies mentioned above, as well as the findings of numerous polls over recent decades. However, there are many who dismiss the significance of the lack of viewpoint diversity or even attack the concept. See, for example, a recent article by Johns Hopkins professor Lisa Siraganian in Academe Magazine, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), wherein she argues that “[v]iewpoint diversity functions in direct opposition to the pursuit of truth, the principal aim of academia.” In an article that appeared last October in Inside Higher Ed, “Universities Can’t Pursue Truth Without Viewpoint Diversity,” authors John Tomasi and Jonathan Haidt (President and co-founder of HxA), counter Siraganian’s attack on the importance of viewpoint diversity:

By a circular logic, whatever (and whomever) a discipline rejects as ‘intellectually unsuitable’ must be so because the members of the discipline are the ones who set the disciplinary standards. By this reasoning, even when a discipline rapidly changes its scientific views, or politicizes its standards for admissions, hiring and publications, it could not be because they have lost a healthy amount of internal contestation, or have turned self-selection and self-governance into ideological capture. The professors are the experts, after all. Whatever they decide must ipso facto be correct.

The response of Yale and of Yale professors is instructive as to how administrators and faculty will duck and obfuscate on the diversity issue. In response to the Buckley study, Yale put out a statement that said: “Yale hires and retains faculty based on academic excellence, scholarly distinction, and teaching achievement, independent of political views.” To believe this, you would have to believe that only 2.3 percent of the pool of potential professors who would meet Yale’s qualifications are Republicans. (Of course, some Republicans may self-select not to apply for a Yale faculty position because they know their political views will disqualify them.)

And faculty response to the Yale Daily study shows a similar lack of perspective. One professor attributed the faculty far-left tilt to the fact that the Trump Administration “just cut Yale’s budget by $300 million annually,” referring to the endowment tax. But in the next paragraph of the story, the Yale Daily pointed out that in a previous study announced in January 2024, 98.4 percent of Yale faculty donations went to Democrats. That study was done based on contributions over a year before Trump took office for the second time. Again, lack of viewpoint diversity existed well before Trump’s focus on universities.

Another professor made this argument: “It’s true, generally across the culture, not just in universities, on the whole, in the country, educated people vote Democratic.” The implication is that Republicans are generally too uneducated to be professors. It is true that more college and graduate school graduates vote Democratic, but the numbers certainly do not justify this professor’s arrogant comment. According to the Pew Research Center, in the 2024 election, those with a college degree voted Democratic by a narrow margin – 51% to 46%; those with a post graduate degree voted Democratic by 65% to 33%.

These responses from Yale and Yale professors show the extent of the refusal of many administrators and faculty to recognize how lack of viewpoint diversity leads to the insular mono-culture that students, parents and the general public increasingly see.

UNIVERSITY LEADERS MUST LEAD

A very important schism has developed between university leaders over the need to make reforms that include addressing the lack of viewpoint diversity. Major articles in The Atlantic and elsewhere draw a distinction between those university leaders who resist acknowledging the problems, in part from the belief that conceding to a need for internal reform plays into the hands of those (including in the Trump Administration) who want to attack universities, and those who see the need to initiate reforms. The most visible spokesperson for the former group is Christopher Eisgruber, the President of Princeton. Daniel Diermeier and Andrew Martin, the Chancellors of Vanderbilt and Washington University in St. Louis respectively, are the acknowledged leaders of the latter group. These two have created Universities for America’s Future to engage other university leaders in reforming higher education. It would be a major step forward if the two sides of this schism could find common ground.

Importantly, Harvard President Alan M. Garber recently took aim at faculty activism as a cause of stifling freedom of speech and open debate. And Dartmouth’s President Sian Leah Beilock recently made a forceful argument in The Wall Street Journal for university leaders to take action now to restore the public’s trust.

But to make change, more university leaders, presidents and chancellors, need to take this issue head on. It is understandable why many leaders will be reluctant to do so. It could be a very dangerous, even a career ending, endeavor. The debate will be controversial, and the odds are high that there will be a public fight with the most powerful group on campus – the faculty. Efforts to increase viewpoint diversity will be seen as attacks on academic freedom and as caving to political forces. There has been overreach from the Trump Administration and the right, and university leaders will need to lay out clearly that they recognize this overreach and that their efforts are in response to recognized internal problems, not simply to external pressure.

To minimize the risk, and most importantly to achieve success, the groundwork must be laid carefully. The process must proceed step-by-step, with allies and supporters being brought together. An important and necessary development is the creation of a network, formal or informal, of leaders of universities who are working for bottom-up change. Such a network can provide ideas, but most importantly it can demonstrate to a university’s constituents that the university’s leader is not acting in isolation or doing something radical. The change a given leader is advocating will then be part of a broad, well-grounded movement that has strong intellectual and historical support. In addition, such a network can be tasked with developing voluntary best practices on key issues, such as measurement of progress on viewpoint diversity and the role of faculty in choosing new faculty. It will be very difficult for individual university leaders to address such issues if they try to do it in isolation without a broader base for their actions.

It appears that such a network may be developing under Daniel Dermeier’s and Andrew Martin’s Universities for America’s Future, with the strong support of their boards of trustees.

TRUSTEES NEED TO SUPPORT CHANGE

Too many boards of trustees have abdicated their roles. Too often they are timid followers of the administration, rubber stamping whatever the leadership wants. A big problem is the way trustees are elected at many universities, which leads to passive boards. Princeton’s Board of Trustees election process provides a vivid example. While it appears on the surface that alumni elect much of the board, and alumni do vote for candidates, in reality the process is set up so that the choices are limited and picked by insiders. Candidates for board seats are not permitted to take public positions on any issues during the election – for example, on free speech. The result: current and past members of the board have told us that there is little internal debate about the need for change.

Yale provides a similar example. Like Princeton, Yale has a policy that prevents prospective board members from providing much information other than their biography. Yale used to have a policy that an alumnus with enough alumni signers on a petition could run for election to the board. However, after an alumnus achieved the required number of signers and was put on the ballot, Yale repealed the petition option. It would be a good idea for a group of leaders to produce a best practices document on the election of trustees.

A recent analysis from the Manhattan Institute, Ending Conformity on the Quad: How Trustees Can Bring Viewpoint Diversity Back to Their Universities, includes ways to empower boards of trustees that can apply to both public and private institutions. It is increasingly clear that trustees should recognize their fiduciary duty to address tough issues pro-actively. As a matter of course they should be asking if their university is fulfilling its mission. These problems will not evaporate after Trump’s term. The public’s low regard for public education should not be ignored by those charged with overseeing our universities.

ORGANIZE DEBATE AND MOBILIZE PUBLIC OPINION

What is the role of public trust in university reform? Gallup polls over time show a cratering of public trust in higher education from 60 percent to 32 percent in the last two decades. Two main reasons are cited for the decline: affordability and lack of viewpoint diversity.

Ongoing public debate between those who deny or downplay the problem of viewpoint diversity amongst faculty and those who see it as a serious problem in higher education would help to educate and mobilize the public. Coverage of the campus protests over the war in Gaza increased public awareness, but the focus of that coverage has been largely on free speech and antisemitism. Much of the public is generally aware of the lack of diversity among faculty, but its extent and its implications for society need more emphasis.

HOW TO MEASURE PROGRESS

While it will be difficult, progress on faculty diversity should be measured. This could be done by polling, but faculty may strongly object to, or may purposely sabotage, a poll. The Buckley Institute and The Yale Daily studies could be replicated. Creating a system of measurement would be a good project for the network of university leaders described above. Having a common system of measurement used by many universities would remove much of the possible controversy over its use at individual universities. The goal would not be to achieve some targeted numbers; it would be to see if progress is being made.

FACULTY SHOULD NOT BE SOLE GATE KEEPERS OF FACULTY HIRING

The most difficult obstacle to overcome in achieving more diversity in faculty will be the existing faculty. As we have laid out, the faculty at most universities is overwhelmingly on one side of the political spectrum. Consequently, they often live in a bubble where their views and their prejudices are seldom questioned. In many cases they are outright hostile to conservative and even moderate faculty. Most important to this discussion, while the situation varies by university, faculty act as gate keepers, to a large degree controlling what new faculty are hired and who is promoted.

To make material progress on faculty diversity, this gate keeping function on faculty hiring and promotion must be addressed. It will be a difficult and time-consuming battle against a powerful and entrenched opposition. Much of the battle will be over academic freedom, with faculty defending their gate keeping function and attacking attempts to weaken it as attacks on academic freedom.

The AAUP definition of “academic freedom” is instructive. According to AAUP, the main elements of academic freedom are freedom to teach; freedom on research; freedom on intramural speech; and freedom on extramural speech. It is the third item, intramural speech, that is relevant to the role of faculty in choosing other faculty. AAUP’s key sentence on this is: “In order to participate effectively in governance, faculty members must be free to speak truthfully and factually, and in order to protect academic freedom and academic quality at the institution, faculty must participate in governance.”

We have no problem with this definition. Faculty members should be able to speak truthfully and factually about university matters, and they should be able to participate in governance. But the key word is “participate.” They should not control governance and that includes practices for choosing faculty. Since it is clear that in many cases existing faculty have created practices that make it extremely difficult, and in some departments impossible, to have even a modicum of faculty viewpoint diversity, then those practices need to be changed, in consultation with faculty members, and faculty members have no right to claim such changes violate their academic freedom. Academic freedom does not give them carte blanche to decide how new faculty are chosen.

The difficulty of overcoming faculty opposition to change is further demonstrated by the very strong position AAUP has taken in support of diversity statements in hiring faculty and the right of faculty to develop and control such statements.

Here again, a best practices model for the role of faculty could be developed by the network of leaders, perhaps working with an advisory committee of faculty.

ALUMNI NEED TO ENGAGE

Alumni can have a critical role in this debate by advocating for more faculty diversity. As noted, there are over thirty alumni free speech groups for individual universities of all types around the country. While these groups’ primary focus has been on free speech, they should now also focus on faculty viewpoint diversity. FIRE’s alumni network and the Alumni Free Speech Alliance (AFSA) are resources for the creation of new alumni free speech groups. Up until now, these groups have been set up by alumni independently from their universities, and they sometimes have an adversarial relationship with their university administrations as they push for changes. However, university leaders who are now trying to effect change should consider encouraging the creation of alumni groups that, while independent, could be a source of building support for necessary change. These alumni groups can also be effective in communicating the need for change to fellow alumni. For example, our group, Princetonians for Free Speech, has over 16,000 subscribers. A very large portion of those are Princeton alumni, out of roughly 72,000 living undergraduate alumni.

Alumni obviously have another tool to promote change – alumni giving. There is clear evidence that at many universities alumni giving is down, if not in total dollars, then in participation rates. At Princeton, for example, 2024 saw the lowest annual giving participation rate in 80 years. From our discussions with alumni, it is clear the major reason for this decline is unhappiness with Princeton on issues of free speech and viewpoint diversity. Columbia also had a big drop – 28.8% – in its annual “Giving Day” contributions.

Many alumni would like to support their universities but do not want to give to a general fund that may be supporting programs with which they disagree or which seems to provide support for the status quo, to which they strongly object. The way to do this is through targeted giving to specific programs. For example, at Princeton, alumni can earmark their contributions so that they go to the James Madison Program. Supporting programs that will help change the monoculture on their alma mater’s campus can make a difference. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) has information on targeted giving.

Some universities have such large endowments that lower giving rates may not look like a big problem, but the clear unhappiness of many alumni should be of concern to all university leaders and trustees. Alumni provide support in other ways besides money. And for many universities the downturn in contributions can create real financial problems.

CHANGE IN HOW PROSPECTIVE STUDENTS AND PARENTS EVALUATE UNIVERSITIES

For many years there has been a hierarchy among universities that has greatly influenced where students want to go. The top ten, the top twenty, “ranked” schools have changed very little over the years. The U.S. News and World Report rankings, while widely criticized, have had a significant influence, although its rankings may not be all that different from where schools would be otherwise ranked through other means. Parents and student applicants devote incredible amounts of time, and in some cases money, to get into the “right” schools, often referred to as “Ivy Plus,” an elite club. There are still reasons to want to attend those schools – prestige, a top academic education, better job and graduate school prospects, etc.

But that can change, and indeed there are indications that parents and prospective applicants are now looking at issues around free speech, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity in deciding where to apply, which they can do with the aid of FIRE’s free speech rankings. And job recruitment can have an influence on which schools students choose. One example is the several federal judges who have announced they will not take law clerks from Yale Law School.

CONCLUSION

“The joke went that in a university, ‘diversity’ means people who look different and think alike; viewpoint diversity, in contrast, is the form of diversity that really matters in scientific and intellectual life.” So says Steven Pinker, author, cognitive psychologist at Harvard University and perhaps the most eloquent spokesperson on faculty-driven reform of higher education.

Our focus on the problem of faculty viewpoint diversity in this essay is to demonstrate that intellectual diversity is the necessary precondition of true academic freedom. Without a wide-open contest of ideas, questions don’t get asked, approaches to complex problems don’t get tested, whole disciplines drift and stagnate, and whole schools of thought are simply not considered. Classrooms become places where favored viewpoints are affirmed rather than places where ideas are rigorously tested and challenged. If the monoculture that now dominates the faculty of our major universities cannot be opened up, public confidence will continue to deteriorate, and ham-fisted regulators may well step in to try to create a balance that universities have failed to create for themselves. The autonomy that America’s universities rightly prize may disappear because of those universities’ leaders, trustees and faculty who refuse to act. This cannot be a partisan battle. It is a call for tangible, structural reforms to challenge an ideological monopoly and create conditions for renewal, rather than to accept decline.

Edward Yingling ‘70 and Leslie Spencer ‘79 are, respectively, Secretary and Vice-Chair of Princetonians for Free Speech.