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Harvard is quietly asking donors for $10 million gifts to establish new endowed professorships in a sweeping bid to reshape its faculty under the banner of “viewpoint diversity,” according to two people familiar with the initiative.
The campaign, driven by Harvard’s top brass, aims to raise several hundred million dollars to support a new cohort of professors. If successful, the funding could bring dozens of faculty members to campus and drastically shift Harvard’s academic makeup.
It’s time for conservative faculty to stop “keeping their heads down until tenure.” Universities need bold, excellent conservative scholars—not undercover ones—to strengthen their institutions. Having worked at a free-market think tank before academia, my sympathies were clear. Yet as the only openly right-wing faculty member in my college, I earned tenure, served as program director, and became department chair. Here is my advice.
In August, Indiana University Bloomington sanctioned professor Benjamin Robinson after a student complained that Robinson had discussed in class his own experiences of being arrested and jailed during pro-Palestinian rallies.
Robinson said the examples were relevant to the lecture for his Introduction to German Thought and Culture course, which discusses philosophical concepts. Robinson, who received a letter of reprimand that will be in his permanent personnel file, is among at least two professors disciplined by Indiana’s flagship university under a two-year-old state law aimed at promoting intellectual diversity in college classrooms.
To keep the frontier of inquiry truly open, we must address the lack of viewpoint diversity in the academy. HxA’s most recent report reviews literature on faculty political diversity, and draws attention to a potentially narrow range of political viewpoints on campus — with some important caveats. We found that left-leaning faculty are the norm, yet many faculty are apolitical or independent and only a small proportion are conservative.
Higher education faces a choice on how to proceed: build to expand, or ban to counter. Both of these competing approaches are underway, and this week’s news displayed that tension.
A Buckley Institute report last month on the predominance of Democrats on the Yale faculty sparked criticism from conservatives about political imbalances in higher education — and prompted an apparent response from Yale.
On Dec. 1, the organization released its Yale Faculty Political Diversity Report, which reported that 82.3 percent of the 1,666 faculty members examined are registered Democrats or primarily support Democratic candidates. Of the remaining faculty, 2.3 percent were found to be Republicans with the remaining 15.4 percent not affiliated with either major party. Of 43 departments that grant undergraduate degrees, 27 had no Republican faculty members at all, according to the report.
John Tomasi
Free the Inquiry
Despite campus leaders’ renewed commitment to open inquiry, it’s largely understood as the free exchange of ideas and constructive disagreement. However, the third pillar of open inquiry — viewpoint diversity — is rarely (if ever) explicitly mentioned by leaders as part of their commitment to open inquiry. In today’s changing campus climate, supporting free expression and respectful discussion have (thankfully) become fashionable; but viewpoint diversity remains a third rail of university life.
