Harvard Can’t Hire Its Way Into Viewpoint Diversity

Harvard is shopping for viewpoint diversity — but it’s looking in the wrong aisle.

Top administrators are privately soliciting $10 million donations to endow new professorships in the name of “viewpoint diversity.” Though ideological diversity is a noble ideal, this approach doesn’t cut it.

Elite universities have long been criticized for their faculties’ liberal bent. Most recently, the Trump administration’s pseudo-authoritarian assault on Harvard’s independence has been marked by demands to drastically reshape the University’s ideological makeup. However bad faith the White House’s attacks, it remains true that a University’s pursuit of truth benefits when its affiliates are exposed to a broad range of ideas.

Today, sizable majorities of Harvard’s students and faculty identify as liberal or progressive. Yet moderates and conservatives have different life experiences, world views, and interests. We would all benefit from engaging with different ideas and perspectives — especially when they push us to test our arguments and revisit our assumptions. Ideological diversity benefits education and research alike.

But the current plan to embed “viewpoint diversity” hires throughout Harvard will not capture these advantages.

After all, only a small fraction of students will take classes with these new faculty. It is foolhardy to think that one or two ideologically “diverse” new professors in a department will tangibly impact campus discourse or the student experience.

It would be even more mistaken to believe hiring a few token conservative intellectuals will quiet populist, far-right attacks on Harvard: The University’s overall ideological makeup will remain largely unchanged. Those who decry universities as “the enemy” will continue to do so — the gripe is with the structural function of higher education, not the number of Republican professors.

A more effective solution would be a new institute for pluralism.

Take Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. While officially nonpartisan, the Hoover Institution espouses “ideals of peace, individual liberty, free enterprise, and limited government,” and is widely recognized as a conservative-leaning. Moreover, Hoover is guarded from administrative meddling — with its own governance and endowment independent of the school it calls home. Harvard could benefit from a similar space where faculty hires possess a well-articulated academic mission, and where conservatism can operate as an intellectual approach rather than a protected identity.

Such an institute would offer a place where students can express and be exposed to diverse viewpoints. After all, Harvard’s ideological diversity problem is not that students are barraged by faculty bias every time they go to lecture — and anyways, as suggested by University President Alan M. Garber ’76, professors are meant to not bring their personal views into the classroom at all.

Instead, the issue is a lack of exposure to conservative thought in an intellectually generative setting. With no academic home for conservative ideas, Harvard misses out on valuable counterpoints while conservative students (or at least the male ones) are left with polarizing organizations like the John Adams Society.

A new institute could serve as a home for rigorous conservative thought, exposing students and faculty across disciplines to heterodoxical perspectives. It could also be the hub of a new kind of curriculum reform — helping ensure that students across Harvard are exposed to differing ideologies and arguments.

A center promoting rigorous conservative thought would benefit even the most progressive among us. If Harvard is serious about viewpoint diversity, it will need more than a few donor-funded dissidents.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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