Viewpoint Diversity at Princeton

Jonathan Chait
The Atlantic

Excerpt: A decade ago, cultural norms in elite American institutions took a sharply illiberal turn. Professors would get disciplined, journalists fired, ordinary people harassed by social-media mobs, over some decontextualized phrase or weaponized misunderstanding. Every so often, I would write about these events or the debates that they set off.

But I haven’t written about this phenomenon in a long time, and I recently realized why: because it isn’t happening any more. Left-wing outrage mobs might still form here or there, but liberal America has built up enough antibodies that they no longer have much effect. My old articles now feel like dispatches from a distant era.

Roger Pielke Jr.
American Enterprise Institute

Faculty in U.S. universities overwhelmingly hold views on the political left. That probably won’t be news to most THB readers. Today’s post documents just how extreme today’s left-leaning ideological uniformity has become among professors and shows that in the past, across disciplines faculty were much more politically diverse.

Bret Stephens
Sapir

Excerpt: Torpor, turpitude, tendentiousness: Higher education has been charged with many sins over many years. Universities have survived these periodic controversies and crises of trust because the public appetite for what they offered far outstripped the distrust and resentments they also generated. And what they offered was a lot: intellectual excellence; professional credentialization; social mobility; the creation, advancement, and dissemination of advanced and specialized knowledge; independence from external and internal political pressures; idyllic communities.

But the broader argument for universities has become harder to make in recent years.

Campus Reform

Excerpt: Hours after the Student Advisory Committee president of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics declared that the organization should no longer be nonpartisan, the director reaffirmed the institute’s commitment to remaining nonpartisan.

Robert H. Fogel and Peter N. Jones
The Harvard Crimson

Excerpt: In an op-ed published on Thursday, Institute of Politics student president Pratyush Mallick argued that the organization must abandon its practice of nonpartisanship.

We disagree. Adopting a partisan stance would jeopardize the fundamental mission of the IOP, inhibit necessary conversations, and further isolate students from perspectives held by a majority of Americans.

Nate Tenhundfeld
Free the Inquiry, Heterodox Academy, Substack

Excerpt: Our friends over at FIRE keep a running list of incidents in which scholars have been targeted for something they have said or done. Helpfully, not only do they catalog cases by year and university but also by who initiates the targeting and what ideological direction they are coming from (relative to the position or issue at hand).

But do these targeting mobs always look the same? Are threats from the left mirrored in frequency by threats from the right? One thing that becomes immediately apparent looking at the data is that the ideological motivation for targeting of scholars on college campuses does not originate from just one side of the political aisle.