- Aug 20, 2019
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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.
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.
Would a deliberate effort to hire professors with conservatives views backfire or create balance? The example of Robert Nozick is given in the article as an someone who had an obvious Libertarian view but was hired for intellectual rigor and not his politics. Is that a good example?
ETA: The author concedes that there is liberal bias in US universities.
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.
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.
Would a deliberate effort to hire professors with conservatives views backfire or create balance? The example of Robert Nozick is given in the article as an someone who had an obvious Libertarian view but was hired for intellectual rigor and not his politics. Is that a good example?
ETA: The author concedes that there is liberal bias in US universities.
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