Faculty Express Cautious Concern About Harvard’s Plan To Endow Viewpoint Diversity Professorships

Harvard’s plan to bankroll a new cohort of professors in the name of “viewpoint diversity” is drawing a wary response from faculty, who said the proposal could expand donor influence and reshape faculty hiring.

The proposal, pitched to donors by Harvard’s top brass, would seek to raise several hundred million dollars to endow professorships — each valued at roughly $10 million — aimed at broadening ideological representation on campus. But many professors said its implications — and even its basic definition of “viewpoint diversity” — remain unclear.

In interviews and statements, more than a dozen faculty members weighed in on the still-nebulous proposal, with some questioning what administrators would define as “viewpoint diversity.”

Harvard spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain said new hires would continue to move through existing school-level processes.

“The President and Provost have long allocated centrally endowed chairs to support new faculty appointments within Harvard schools,” he wrote in a Thursday statement. “New faculty appointments will continue to result from school-level processes.”

Not all Harvard schools will host the new faculty. Harvard School of Dental Medicine spokesperson Heather Denny confirmed that HSDM will not be part of the effort. Spokespeople for the rest of Harvard’s graduate schools did not respond to requests for comment.

The new initiative is in keeping with new trends in faculty hiring. Harvard has increasingly turned to large, donor-backed initiatives to steer hiring in recent years, including cross-school efforts on climate and sustainability and the Kempner Institute, which was backed by a $500 million donation from Meta chief executive officer Mark E. Zuckerberg.

Classics professor Richard F. Thomas cautioned against the new $10 million professorships, arguing that the proposed appointments would unnecessarily expand donor influence.

“The spirit behind these appointments will only intensify deep suspicions about the impartiality of the ad hoc process, not to mention diminishing trust in the institution, which might be seen as an extension of various industries associated with the names of the donors,” Thomas wrote in a statement.

The debate arrives against a politically charged backdrop. Critics have long argued that Harvard’s faculty skews overwhelmingly liberal; in last year’s FAS survey, more than 60 percent of respondents identified as liberal.

That criticism intensified under federal scrutiny last year, when the Trump administration called on Harvard to assess “viewpoint diversity” and curb the influence of faculty it described as more activist than scholarly.

Still, many professors questioned whether targeting hiring based on ideology is an appropriate — or workable — response.

“Any expansion of the faculty is to be welcomed - but I don’t think we need to target ‘conservative’ professors to bring viewpoint diversity into our classrooms,” Anthropology professor Jason Ur wrote in a statement.

English professor Stephanie L. Burt ’94 said hiring with an eye toward partisan identity would be misguided, though she supported efforts to recruit scholars whose intellectual perspectives are currently underrepresented.

“If Harvard is setting out to hire people who always vote Republican or support Trump, I think that’s a mistake, and it won’t end well,” Burt said.

“If Harvard is setting out to hire people who might describe themselves as philosophically conservative or people who might describe themselves as radical in unusual ways, or people doing high quality, intellectually robust work that is not represented here, I’m not against that,” she added.

Others raised more fundamental concerns about how the concept translates across disciplines. In fields like the natural sciences, some faculty said, the idea of “viewpoint diversity” is difficult to define.

“I am not sure what greater ‘viewpoint diversity’ would entail in my department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology,” Biology professor David A. Haig wrote. “The department already contains a diversity of viewpoints on evolutionary matters.”

Several professors also warned that the initiative could encroach on longstanding norms governing faculty hiring and tenure.

History professor Kirsten A. Weld said the endowed chairs could potentially encroach on academic freedom in departmental appointment decisions.

“This proposal, if realized, would run counter to the longstanding norm that faculty experts in the relevant academic fields, at the department level, are the ones who lead the process of making academic appointments,” Weld said. “It is unlikely to inspire the trust and confidence of the faculty.”

Not all faculty were critical of the University’s efforts. Astronomy professor Abraham “Avi” Loeb welcomed what he views as an “an important and much needed step in the right direction.”

“Scholarship thrives in a diverse intellectual environment,” Loeb wrote in a statement. “For too long Harvard cultivated an academic culture that leans towards one extreme of the political spectrum and as a result alienated about half of society.”

Former Harvard Medical School Dean Jeffrey S. Flier wrote that insufficient intellectual diversity is a “serious impediment to the truth seeking goal of universities.”

“Other approaches would likely be either extremely slow or ineffective, in part because those in disciplines with limited viewpoint diversity often fail to recognize or acknowledge the problem,” he wrote.

Comparative Literature professor David N. Damrosch said that, if done with care and faculty control, the initiative could provide diversity to a liberal faculty.

“I’m enough of a liberal humanist that I would like the University to not only be populated with liberal humanists,” he said.

—Staff writer Abigail S. Gerstein can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at abbysg.97. Follow her on X @abbysgerstein.

—Staff writer Amann S. Mahajan can be reached at [email protected] and on Signal at amannsm.38. Follow her on X @amannmahajan.