Harvard’s Viewpoint Diversity Initiative: A Good Idea That Could Still Go Wrong

Tal Fortgang
‘17

Prestigious universities and leading state schools across the nation have embraced viewpoint diversity by building new institutions—civic education centers and the like—which are simultaneously on yet apart from the campus. Harvard has quietly taken a different tack. Over the past several months, the university’s top brass have been asking major donors for $10 million gifts to endow new professorships under the banner of “viewpoint diversity.” Provost John Manning, a scholar often associated with the conservative legal movement, has led the effort, aiming to place between 20 and 30 new faculty across schools and departments rather than siloed in a standalone institute. 

Why Harvard would need additional funding for this is an open question, but putting that partly aside, we ought to ask what to make of this unique initiative. It stands a chance of being either the most consequential reform attempt in elite higher education this decade, or a sophisticated piece of reputation management serving double duty as a clever fundraiser. Which one it turns out to be depends on whether Harvard has thought carefully about what viewpoint diversity means, and whether it intends to execute in line with a considered answer.

Where the viewpoint-diversity movement is going is guided by where it comes from. After October 7, 2023, Harvard’s task forces on antisemitism and anti-Muslim bias folded bias prevention into a broader project of open inquiry. President Alan Garber pledged to “speed the establishment” of a university-wide viewpoint diversity effort. The Trump administration then sharpened the pressure considerably, demanding in an April 2025 letter that Harvard commission an external audit of its faculty, students, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, and reform any department found lacking by hiring a “critical mass” of new faculty. 

Garber rejected those demands while acknowledging that Harvard had “unfinished business” and needed to reaffirm “a culture of free inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and academic exploration.” The Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics has since piloted a “Debate, Debrief, and Dessert” series, launched an American Service Fellowship for public servants and veterans, and floated a visiting faculty program that would bring scholars for yearlong fellowships with the hope of retaining some permanently. Harvard Law School has reportedly extended an offer to Notre Dame law professor and philosopher Sherif Girgis, who is known for his eloquent defenses of socially conservative views that tend to be unpopular at elite universities. Bringing Girgis aboard would be the single best thing Harvard has done in years. He is a one-man viewpoint-diversity machine.

Yet when the endowed professorship plan became public, more than a dozen Harvard faculty weighed in with cautious concern. Some questioned what “viewpoint diversity” would even mean. Others worried about donor influence over hiring. An op-ed in the Harvard Crimson argued that viewpoint diversity should be understood to mean promoting disciplines “under attack by those in power,” specifically naming women’s and gender studies, while rejecting the idea of hiring faculty who hold views that “one political party or even a majority of Americans has adopted.” The faculty who produce the monoculture are defining, on their own authority, which heterodox views count as legitimately heterodox. 

This brings us to what viewpoint diversity actually requires, and why getting the definition right is no semantic quibble.

Viewpoint diversity is not synonymous with partisan balance or with ideological bean-counting. Trying to reach a fifty-fifty split regarding any issue or system of thought would be unworkable and beside the point. What matters is whether a department contains scholars with genuinely different foundational assumptions, different methodologies, and different prior commitments within the university’s legitimate remit — scholars whose work, at its core, challenges rather than confirms what their colleagues take for granted even as they remain geared towards the basic republican goods an American university must promote. 

I’ll give an example. A department of economists who disagree about marginal tax rates but agree that market mechanisms are presumptively legitimate, and that empirical social science is the appropriate way to resolve policy questions, has almost no viewpoint diversity in the sense that matters. A department that also contains an economist who questions those priors, and who can supervise doctoral students who question them, contributes something valuable.

This can be a bitter pill for those of us who believe that free-market economics are superior to their competitors to the point of discrediting the alternative. But universities require not just diverse ideas but diverse points of entry into the conversation, including different views of the life well-lived and the university’s role in promoting it. The task of viewpoint diversity is to introduce scholars capable of challenging what the dominant culture has declared settled, not scholars who vary only within the range the dominant culture considers acceptable.

This is also why viewpoint diversity is a prerequisite to the free-speech-reform project’s success. The past several years have produced genuine progress on the procedural dimension: universities have adopted Chicago-style free speech principles, DEI statements are being dropped from hiring criteria, and even FIRE’s speech-codes database is thinner than it once was. But procedural reform without cultural reform is a new set of rules administered by the same people with the same assumptions. 

If minority answers to the great open questions are met with members of the majority rolling their eyes, assigning lower grades, excluding dissenters from dissertation committees, or making clear through a hundred informal signals that some ways of thinking categorically do not belong, rules protecting speech will not change such an environment. The culture will persist as long as it treats some premises as unbecoming of sophisticated people.

Tenured scholars in prestigious departments are the mechanism that changes this. Visiting fellows, debate series, even endowed chairs in an adjacent institute can provide succor to students who feel stifled, but they are unlikely to shift the culture from the outside. Scholars who stay, who advise students, who sit on committees, who push back in faculty meetings — these are the people who alter what questions a department treats as worth asking. 

How bad is the problem? Harvard Kennedy School’s visiting fellowship proposal is a promising signal, but its own donors were told that the school is struggling to find qualified conservative candidates. Perhaps this is merely academic self-justification: we would hire more widely if only the pipeline produced them. Yet there is reason to accept half of that argument. The pipeline is definitely thin. That doesn’t excuse the universities from addressing that problem. You need a few teachers to break in and train a new generation of diverse-thinking scholars, not because the universities need affirmative action to benefit individual conservatives (or even the conservative movement), but because the university itself benefits from having a critical mass of people willing to debate and refine matters of public importance.

Harvard’s decision to embed new faculty across schools and departments rather than in a standalone institute is the right one. (Princeton’s James Madison Program is similar; though it exists as its own entity, its faculty are dispersed throughout different departments.) It signals that the goal is to change ambient departmental culture, not to create a politically protected preserve where heterodox views are tolerated at a safe distance. 

But the university now faces a harder question than whether to act. The question is whether it will allow “viewpoint diversity” to mean what it must mean: scholars who can look their colleagues in the eye and tell them that their field’s received wisdom is flawed, and who have the job security to keep saying so. Five years from now, the test of this initiative will not be the number of chairs endowed or the balance sheets of donor dinners. It will be whether a doctoral student at Harvard can write a dissertation that challenges the orthodoxies of her field while still engaging in forms of reasoning her fellow Americans can recognize—encouraging sophistry is not the point—and can find a faculty committee to supervise it. Harvard will have succeeded if such a scholar can question the things seemingly all Harvardians believe, and still be treated as of the campus, rather than an outsider who somehow infiltrated. 

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a Legal Policy Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and a contributing writer at The Dispatch.