Is affirmative action based on political identity the solution to liberal bias in higher education? Most liberals tend not to think so, nor do those who identify themselves as center-right. What has prompted this rare moment of political alignment in higher education?
The Trump administration has engaged in legal battles with a number of top universities, most notably Harvard University, and has charged them with correcting the ideological imbalance of the professoriate and the student body. The key phrase used by the Trump administration is “viewpoint diversity,” which essentially means that they need to hire and admit more conservatives.
A recent opinion piece in the New York Times by University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor Jennifer M. Morton suggests that this would create an even bigger problem. “By creating incentives for professors and students to have and maintain certain political positions,” writes Morton, “such a policy would discourage curiosity and reward narrowness of thought.”
Morton’s argument is a good one. She suggests that creating a system that incentivizes people to be political in their work and scholarship will create conservative echo chambers where conservatives only focus on work by other conservatives.
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Morton is likely correct about this. The problem, though, is that if she is right that hiring conservatives because they are conservative encourages them to silo off with other conservatives, then it is equally plausible that jobs written with a liberal or progressive focus will produce the same result. Indeed, hiring based on political ideology would encourage opportunistic faculty to claim ideological allegiance to secure a position.
I am sympathetic to Morton’s argument; she seems fair and honest about the warts of higher ed vis-à-vis conservatives, but she misses the mark when it comes to echo chambers. She seems to think that having conservatives on campus, but primarily and only engaging with other conservatives, will make the academy less intellectually diverse. This is like saying that admitting more students of color, because of their color, will lead them to hang out almost exclusively with other students of color. It is a form of tribalism. At present, it benefits only the left and the “marginalized groups” it focuses on, so why can’t there be a conservative tribe?
More importantly, echo chambers are the norm in academia because intensive specialization is the norm of graduate school training. We are, for the most part, not trained in conducting interdisciplinary research. We are taught the basics of our discipline, asked to choose a specialization, take intensive coursework focused on the minutiae of our specialization, all so we can teach and do research in our area of specialization. We then write books and articles about our specialization, which are read by people who share our specialization or a closely related field. If that is not the definition of an echo chamber, I’m not sure what is.
So, suppose echo chambers are the current norm in academia, both politically and in terms of specialized training. Why shouldn’t we just hire a bunch of conservatives and balance out the professoriate? At least then there would be a more balanced number of echo chambers.
Morton helps to clarify the problem with this line of thinking through her example of the libertarian philosopher, Robert Nozick. As a young man, he was socialist, but when he moved to Princeton to take up graduate studies in the 1960s, he encountered the work of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek and eventually became a libertarian. Morton sees Nozick’s changing political beliefs as impossible if he had been hired as the token conservative in Harvard’s philosophy department. Rather than feeling pressured to represent conservatism, “he knew he was free to change his mind if that was where the arguments or evidence led him,” wrote Morton. She notes that this freedom to change one’s mind is the indispensable freedom for academics and students alike.
I hope, therefore, that she would agree with me that the University of California system’s decision to integrate “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) into the hiring, promotion, and tenure criteria for its employees in 2015 effectively eliminated this most indispensable of freedoms across the whole University of California system. Well, one could probably change their mind about any number of things, so long as you knew what you needed to think about DEI. Ten years later, as of February 2025, the UC system employs 73,800 employees whose livelihoods have been tied to their ideological allegiance in exactly the way Morton worries will happen if conservatives are hired based on their beliefs. As of March 2025, the University of California system lifted the requirement for potential employees to submit diversity statements as part of their application. However, the other policies related to DEI in evaluation, promotion, and tenure remain in place.
The point I want to drive home is that the ideological litmus test that she worries will produce close-minded conservative echo chambers on college campuses has been in use on college campuses for at least the last ten years. It already exists, it’s already being used to hire liberals and progressives with the right ideas about DEI, and it already produces ideological echo chambers on campus.
Given these inconvenient facts, what should be done?
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I suggest a three-pronged approach: revise university mission statements, revise university evaluation systems, and revise university job descriptions.
The “uni” in university means “one” or refers to the singular. Mission statements are unifying and hierarchical; they tell the public what the university prioritizes and why. All university mission statements should highlight the search for truth and the production of knowledge as the primary aim of the institution. While most university mission statements allude to this in some vague way, there are many other things that universities make it their mission to address.
Most troubling are the universities that seek to bring about “social justice,” since, as Jonathan Haidt has noted, social justice universities are oriented towards different ends than universities that prioritize the search for truth. Haidt, a social psychologist in the NYU Stern School of Business, contends that modern universities are animated by two different sacred values: truth or social justice. Haidt views Karl Marx as the best exemplar of the social justice vision, noting his unique view on academic discourse, “the philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it.” One can easily see how a truth-seeking university would reverse Marx’s epigram to read, “the philosophers have hitherto only changed the world; the point, however, is to understand it.” The social justice vision produces the leftist echo chambers that I described above. In contrast, the truth-seeking vision demands that professors seek out and confront inconvenient facts and ideas through dialogue and debate. Universities can be unified by political orthodoxy, but that would deny faculty the most indispensable of freedoms, the freedom to change their minds. If the freedom to change your mind is of paramount importance, then universities should be unified around the activity that is most likely to change a person’s mind, the open and honest search for truth.
This brings me to my next suggestion: the evaluation system at universities needs to be revised so it reinforces the revised mission statement. If truth-seeking is the most critical function of a university, then actions that fulfill this function should be given greater weight in hiring, promotion, and tenure evaluations. The criteria proposed by Abbot and Marinovic—merit, fairness, and equality—are much better aligned with truth-seeking than DEI.
On a more practical level, publishing scholarly articles is one way that academics can accomplish this, but perhaps we need to expand our evaluation criteria to include activities such as hosting or being a guest on an academic podcast. Another change that could be helpful would be more frequent evaluation of faculty teaching and materials. This revised evaluation would be focused on how faculty facilitate the search for truth through methods such as class discussion, Socratic seminars, and assigning readings that highlight the scholarly debate about an issue. These kinds of changes are necessary if we wish to reinforce the truth-seeking function of the university.
This brings me to my final suggestion: revising university job descriptions and interview practices. I agree with Morton that it was very important for Nozik to be hired based on his intellectual qualifications, that is, his ability to think, write, and teach well about his specialization within philosophy. The criteria used to evaluate Nozik’s competence for a teaching position at Harvard were not based on identity, ideology, or ideological identity. What shapes the applications for any given job? The job description.
The way forward is for job descriptions to be free of political and ideological code words and, instead, be written in the most general way possible. Since my discipline is sociology—one of the worst offenders when it comes to viewpoint diversity—I’ll use it as an example.
Here is a current job ad for an Assistant Professor of Sociology position at Gonzaga University, a private Jesuit university in Spokane, Washington, which reads, “We wish to welcome a teacher scholar with expertise in criminology, law, and/or social control, broadly defined.” This is followed immediately by, “[w]e seek candidates with a demonstrated commitment to excellent undergraduate teaching that promotes inclusive, accessible, and equity-minded learning environments.” Inclusive and equity-minded are ambiguous terms that, nonetheless, convey that a certain style of teaching is expected here. Then the ideological screen comes up:
Faculty are expected to advise and mentor undergraduate students; we invite applicants to describe their experience mentoring undergraduates from a variety of backgrounds and identities, including those historically marginalized (e.g. first-generation students, students from low-income families, students of color, LGBTQ+ students, students with disabilities)
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This job ad, in essence, seeks to hire someone to join a leftist or progressive ideological silo. There is simply no way someone with Robert Nozik’s beliefs would be able to answer these questions satisfactorily. Likewise, a job ad could be written with conservative code words so that someone like Professor Morton could never be hired. However, the political skew of universities almost guarantees that the latter would never happen. This has been cited as one of the reasons why affirmative action hiring based on political affiliation is necessary. A better way forward would be to cease all hiring based on values that do not serve the truth-seeking function of universities.
Liberals may still outnumber conservatives at the university, even after these reforms. Many things draw people towards their chosen profession—salary, prestige, curiosity, work/life balance, etc.—and it might be true that universities have more left-leaning faculty because left-leaning people tend to be more interested in the kind of work that academics do. This kind of political imbalance should be tolerated since it stems from the individuals themselves and not from the sorting mechanism, in this case, the job description. The codification of political litmus tests, regardless of political position, is to be vigorously opposed in all cases if, as I said above, the primary mission of the university is to be truth-seeking.
So, where does that leave us?
Equity, which is best defined as equality of outcome, is very different from equality, which is best defined as equality of opportunity. If this measure by the Trump administration is objectionable because it externally imposes equity on the institution, then universities should stop imposing equity on their employees and students and let them focus on the search for truth. To that end, to move beyond identity and tribalism, all references to equity and other similarly politically loaded words must be removed from university job descriptions, promotions, and tenure evaluations. Only then will we usher in the open-minded university we all wish we could work for.
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