On Survey, Majority of FAS Faculty Oppose Harvard’s $10M Viewpoint Diversity Push

More than half of respondents to The Crimson’s annual faculty survey opposed Harvard’s efforts to solicit donations for a viewpoint diversity initiative — rejecting a push to raise hundreds of millions of dollars through $10 million endowed professorships meant to broaden ideological representation.

Nearly 47 percent of faculty respondents also disagreed that Harvard has a troubling lack of ideological diversity among its faculty, while roughly 31 percent agreed. The split was little changed from last year, when 45 percent disagreed and 34 percent agreed — putting most respondents at odds with critics, including Trump administration officials, who have charged that Harvard’s faculty is too ideologically narrow.

Those assessments come from a respondent pool that itself leaned liberal. Roughly 69 percent of respondents to this year’s survey identified as “somewhat” or “very” liberal — up from last year’s 63 percent, but below the 70 percent reported in 2024 and 77 percent in 2023.

Still, support for the viewpoint diversity initiative varied sharply by ideology. Among the 22 conservative respondents who answered the question, 55 percent supported the effort. Moderates were nearly as supportive, at 49 percent, while only 17 percent of liberal respondents backed it.

The Crimson distributed this year’s FAS survey to more than 1,400 faculty members across the FAS’ three academic divisions from April 29 to May 22. Respondents included both tenure- and non-tenure-track faculty pulled from the school’s public masthead. The Crimson received a total of 463 responses to the email survey, with 292 fully complete and 171 partially complete.

This is the second installment in a series breaking down the survey results. The first analyzed faculty opinions on Harvard leadership and budget cuts.

Viewpoint Diversity

Critics of Harvard have long held that its faculty is overwhelmingly liberal and its ideological scope too narrow. Over the past year, “viewpoint diversity” has become a central part of Harvard’s response to those concerns.

Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 rejected the Trump administration’s April 2025 demands that the University audit its faculty for viewpoint diversity. But after the University released reports from its task forces on antisemitism and Islamophobia, he committed to “accelerating” a University-wide initiative on the issue.

Last summer, The Wall Street Journal reported that Harvard was weighing a centralized hub for conservative faculty modeled after Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. But by April, The Crimson reported that Harvard officials were instead courting donors for $10 million endowed professorships for “viewpoint diversity,” with the new hires embedded across schools and departments rather than housed in a standalone center.

Forty-one percent of respondents to The Crimson’s survey said they strongly opposed the new initiative, with another 13 percent saying they somewhat opposed it. Support closely tracked whether respondents believed Harvard had an ideological diversity problem: 62 percent of faculty who agreed that Harvard’s faculty has a “troubling lack of ideological diversity” supported the fundraising initiative, compared with just six percent of those who disagreed.

Support for the initiative also did not necessarily translate into support for explicitly conservative hiring. Fewer than half of the 76 respondents who backed the fundraising initiative also supported a “concerted effort” to hire more conservative faculty.

Faculty told The Crimson this spring that the proposal could constrain departments’ ability to make hiring decisions and unduly expand donors’ influence: Roughly 78 percent of respondents said donors had too much influence on the University’s actions.

Faculty generally opposed explicitly political hiring. More than 60 percent of respondents opposed any “concerted effort” from Harvard to hire more conservative faculty. Fifty-five percent of conservative respondents supported such an effort, compared with just eight percent of liberal respondents.

Conservative faculty were also more likely to see ideological diversity as an issue in the first place: 64 percent agreed that Harvard had a “troubling lack of ideological diversity among its faculty,” compared with 21 percent of liberal faculty.

Beyond Conservative Hiring

Professors have been more open to hiring based on departments’ academic strengths and weaknesses — the mindset behind a second, quieter push at the department level to recruit faculty that would broaden intellectual inquiry within a given discipline.

Two searches in the Government department, for example, do not use the phrase “viewpoint diversity,” but seek scholars whose research and teaching would expand traditional academic discourse in their fields.

English and Comparative Literature professor Martin Puchner said in May that viewpoint diversity should be applied based on a discipline’s intellectual range.

“What we need in this context is not just a few hires that carry the label conservative thought, but a broader conversation, discipline or division specific, about the kinds of perspectives that we need for the health of these disciplines that we don’t have right now,” she said.

Still, Garber has argued against faculty bringing their politics into the classroom. In a podcast released in December, he said Harvard “went wrong” by allowing faculty to inject their personal opinions into the classroom.

This year, roughly 68 percent of respondents said they “always” or “often” refrain from expressing their stances on political issues in the classroom. That figure rose to 82 percent among conservative faculty, compared with 63 percent of liberal faculty.

The ideological gap was wider in conservations with colleagues. Forty-five percent of conservative faculty respondents said they “often” or “always” refrained from expressing their stances on political issues with colleagues, compared to 15 percent of liberal faculty.

—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.