Reviewing Viewpoint Diversity

Harvard is asking donors to spend $10 million to buy “viewpoint diversity.” Before we cash that check, we should clarify what, exactly, we’re paying for.

A plan to increase Harvard’s “viewpoint diversity” by endowing new professorships has been greeted mostly with skepticism. Critics worry that the plan will further undermine faculty governance or that it is merely a smokescreen for hiring Republican partisans. I share these serious concerns.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to have a productive conversation about viewpoint diversity if we cannot agree what it means. Which views, precisely, need diversifying? Viewpoint diversity sounds good in theory, but the practice is what matters.

We should choose which viewpoints to boost based only on their ability to further our pursuit of knowledge, and never on political or popular acceptance.

If viewpoint diversity means hiring faculty to teach essential domains of knowledge that have little representation on our campus, I’m all for it. For instance, Harvard appears to boast few scholars of screen media such as television and Instagram; let’s hire more.

Likewise, if viewpoint diversity means promoting disciplines under attack by those in power, count me in. Women’s and gender studies is under attack across the country. As debates about gender roles and sexuality roil our society, we should increase the number of faculty in that discipline at Harvard.

By contrast, I reject “viewpoint diversity” if it means hiring faculty simply because they hold ideas that one political party or even a majority of Americans has adopted.

For instance, mercantilism — which focuses on wealth accumulation in nation-states rather than free markets — now drives economic policy in the United States. Few economists on our faculty adopt a mercantilist view, however, as its premises have been widely discredited.

This does not mean that mercantilism remains untaught at Harvard. You might study the subject in economic history or in courses about international trade policy, including some taught by instructors skeptical of free trade orthodoxies. But we need not hire self-identified mercantilists.

I similarly see no purpose in representing specific views on campus simply because they are widely held by Americans. Around 35 percent of Americans reject evolutionary theory, for example. I doubt many of our biology faculty agree.

Again, does this mean you can’t learn about creationism at Harvard? No. While not currently a popular topic on syllabi, in the past decade creationism appeared in a History of Science course about the complicated relationship between religion and science. The subject does not, however, pass muster with evolutionary biologists.

One might posit that an issue that polarizes Americans deserves to have both sides represented in a “debate.”As Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ’76 recently reminded Congress, “Science is about debate.”

But productive debate requires good-faith attempts to solve problems with shared methods and strong evidence. Vaccine skepticism, which Kennedy has promoted, has neither method nor evidence to justify it. To the contrary: the return of measles outbreaks in the United States affirms the effectiveness of vaccination and the dangers vaccine-preventable diseases pose.

Similarly, almost a third of Americans do not agree either that climate change is occurring or that it is driven primarily by human activity. Our campus contains a wide range of views about how much climate change threatens the planet, as well as the best solutions — as evinced by our debate about divesting the endowment from fossil fuels. We do not need to hire environmental scientists who dispute human-induced climate change simply because a significant number of Americans have adopted that view.

Finally, some viewpoints we should reject because they are anathema to our values. When the Harvard Republican Club posted that the University had been “captured” in a post about Muslim community members celebrating Eid al-Fitr, their Islamophobia echoed views frequently aired by Republican elected officials. Neither the prevalence nor the popularity of such views among one party or the citizenry justifies “diversifying” our campus with these ideas. Harvard teaches classes that reflect on the sociology, psychology, and history of racial and ethnic hatred. Islamophobia is and should be an object of study at Harvard, but we should do our utmost to expunge all bigotry.

Put simply, we can conclude nothing about the merits of viewpoint diversity without engaging the specific views at stake. A general campaign to increase “viewpoint diversity” is a bad idea because that imperative alone cannot help us judge the merits of including or excluding any given view.

We certainly have no obligation to represent views only because they are widespread. This means that, in some cases, the majority view among Harvard’s faculty — whether based in our disciplinary expertise or in the university’s shared values — will leave us out of touch with the views of many Americans simply because we uphold professional and community standards.

A university in a modern democracy must serve the public. But, on some issues, lay and expert knowledge will inevitably be misaligned.

Our expertise does not elevate us above our citizens. It certainly does not mean we know best how others should live their lives. But sometimes we will hold different viewpoints than significant factions in our society because our views are grounded in commitments specific to our work. The loss of trust in higher education is a serious problem that we neither can nor should solve by ignoring our hard-won disciplinary knowledge or abandoning our ethical principles.

Derek Miller is a professor of English and the chair of the Standing Committee on Theater, Dance, and Media at Harvard.