“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” — John Stuart Mill
The debate over “viewpoint diversity” has moved from faculty lounges to legislatures and boardrooms. Universities from Ohio to Florida have written it into law, and others, like Johns Hopkins, have partnered with think tanks to bring new intellectual voices to campus. Into this moment steps Lisa Siraganian, whose Chronicle of Higher Education essay “Viewpoint Diversity Is a MAGA Plot” captures how defenders of orthodoxy mistake pluralism for a threat.
This fall, Siraganian denounced the Hopkins–AEI partnership for promoting “intellectual diversity.” She claims that the initiative and the broader call for “viewpoint diversity” is a cynical project of well-funded, conservative institutions bent on “replacing people with whom the right disagrees.” Far from enriching scholarship, she warned, such efforts threaten academic freedom itself.
The accusation is revealing.
The Inversion of Freedom
Siraganian insists that the pursuit of truth “directly opposes” viewpoint diversity—a reversal that would astonish the very liberal tradition she claims to protect. From John Stuart Mill and Karl Popper to Isaiah Berlin and Hannah Arendt, the great defenders of freedom understood that truth emerges from contention, not conformity. Mill called the “collision of adverse opinions” the lifeblood of knowledge; Arendt reminded us that plurality is the ground of all human understanding.
To confuse consensus with rigor is to mistake comfort for vitality. A university in which 90 percent of faculty share the same political orientation may be collegial, but it is not intellectually free. In my own “Seven Theses for Viewpoint Diversity,” I argued that academic freedom without ideological diversity becomes performative—a ritual of independence conducted within a closed circle. Freedom without dissent is theater; pluralism is its substance.
The Mirage of Neutral Expertise
Siraganian assures readers that academic norms—such as peer review, disciplinary standards, and the “self-correcting” nature of research—already guarantee objectivity. These norms matter deeply, but they are not self-executing. In theory, scholarly consensus refines truth; in practice, it can entrench bias. A growing body of empirical research demonstrates that intellectual conformity and the power of credentialism often constrain inquiry long before ideas reach the stage of review or replication.
Studies of faculty political composition show how narrow the range of perspectives has become.
Inbar and Lammers (2012) found that 80 to 90 percent of social psychologists identify as politically liberal and that nearly one in three would be less willing to hire a conservative colleague. Mitchell Langbert’s (2018) analysis of voter registration among more than 8,000 professors at elite liberal-arts colleges revealed a Democrat-to-Republican ratio of 12:1 overall and more than 40:1 in art, sociology, anthropology, and communication. This ideological clustering inevitably shapes what questions are considered legitimate and which findings are deemed credible.
Research on peer review and grant allocation shows similar distortions.
Honeycutt and Freberg (2017) document that reviewers in psychology and communication systematically penalize studies that challenge leftist assumptions, while Crawford and Jussim (2018) reveal how ideological assumptions influence what research questions are asked, which findings are published, and how funding decisions are made. Duarte and collaborators in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (2015) find that social and personality psychology suffers from ideological imbalance that leads to biased peer review and grant processes, and recommend deliberate inclusion of political diversity to improve rigor.
Research from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression reinforces these findings. Its 2024 Faculty Survey on Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression, for example, reveals that today 35 percent of faculty say they recently toned down their writing for fear of controversy, compared to nine percent during the McCarthy era. The data also shows that 27 percent of faculty feel unable to speak freely for fear of how students, administrators, or other faculty would respond, and 40 percent worry about damaging their reputations if someone misunderstands something they have said or done.
On the student side, the Heterodox Academy Campus Expression Survey found that 62 percent of U.S. college students agreed their campus climate prevents students from saying what they actually believe, and 60 percent reported reluctance to discuss at least one core controversial topic in class. These are not manufactured talking points; they are indicators of a shrinking intellectual common.
Dismissing such research as “pseudoscience,” as Siraganian does, does not rebut it; it demonstrates the problem. A confident scholarly culture would test unwelcome data, not anathematize it. Yet, across disciplines, inquiry emerging from outside the dominant ideological ecosystem is rejected because it comes from outside. What was once peer review has, too often, hardened into peer policing.
I see it in my own classroom: bright students who begin a sentence with, “I’m not sure if I can say this, but …” That hesitation should never be the measure of belonging in a university.
A Tradition Older Than the Culture War
Siraganian portrays “viewpoint diversity” as a partisan invention, invoking David Horowitz’s campus campaigns of two decades ago as its origin. But the idea long predates contemporary politics. It descends from Popper’s Open Society, from the post-war AAUP’s defense of academic freedom, and from the Enlightenment conviction that knowledge advances through exposure to error and alternative reasoning.
The Hopkins-AEI fellowship exchange stands squarely in that lineage.
It sponsors research, lectures, and teaching collaborations that bring scholars with divergent assumptions into genuine conversation. The aim is not ideological replacement but intellectual encounter. The relevant question is never who funds an inquiry but whether that inquiry meets standards of honesty, rigor, and openness. The fact that such modest pluralism now provokes alarm speaks volumes about how brittle the academic imagination has become.
Freedom or Homogeneity
Siraganian writes that “exposure to more unvetted views” will not necessarily yield truth. Of course not, but ideological uniformity ensures the opposite. When entire disciplines become morally or politically homogenous, the circle of what is considered “vetted” shrinks to what the dominant faction already assumes to be true. The result is not a community of scholars engaged in discovery but a closed epistemic guild enforcing moral conformity through professional norms. Academic freedom then protects only insiders from one another.
Freedom in the liberal tradition has never meant the mere absence of interference; it means the presence of conditions under which independent judgment can thrive. That requires disagreement; sometimes uncomfortable, often unpredictable. The most consequential ideas in human history, from heliocentrism to abolitionism, entered the academy as unvetted and unwelcome. What made universities great was their willingness, however halting, to entertain arguments before they became fashionable.
As legal theorist Robert Post observes, disciplines rightly discriminate among ideas, but on epistemic, not political, grounds. When ideological litmus tests replace methodological excellence, scholarship ceases to be exploratory and becomes devotional. We see this today in hiring patterns that privilege activism over inquiry and in departments where dissenting views are filtered out long before peer review. Such environments may appear harmonious, but they achieve harmony only by silencing variation.
True academic freedom depends on diversity of thought precisely because only intellectual diversity generates the friction that refines understanding. Without that tension, the university becomes an echo chamber, confusing politeness for peace and uniformity for rigor. In that sense, Siraganian’s position does not defend freedom; it mistakes homogeneity for health, mistaking the stillness of stagnation for stability.
Projection and Fear
Throughout her essay, Siraganian warns of “coordinated networks of far-right think tanks” threatening universities. Yet, the actual coercion now comes from within. Faculty who dissent from prevailing orthodoxies on policing, gender, or Israel face ostracism, reputational harm, and sometimes formal investigation. National surveys show widespread self-censorship among professors and students alike. These realities are not “manufactured backlash;” they are the realities of those whose careers depend on silence.
The deeper irony is that the fear of heterodoxy betrays a loss of faith in reason itself—or perhaps more accurately, an admission that academic discourse operates through institutional power rather than pure intellectual merit. If conservative or heterodox scholars truly lacked rigor, open debate would expose their weaknesses. But the modern academy knows better than to trust such idealistic notions.
The insistence on excluding dissenting voices in advance suggests not intellectual confidence but institutional anxiety—a recognition that control over hiring, tenure, and professional advancement matters more than winning arguments. This gatekeeping reveals a troubling truth: those who dominate the academy may fear that their ideas persist not because they are more rigorous or truthful, but because they hold the levers of institutional power. The exclusion of heterodox thinkers thus becomes necessary precisely because the “marketplace of ideas” is a fiction—and everyone knows it.
The Moral Core of Liberal Education
Siraganian’s central error is philosophical. She treats academic freedom as a procedural entitlement—a possession to be guarded from outside interference—rather than a moral practice grounded in humility and truth-seeking. The great tradition of liberal education, from Newman to Arendt, has always understood freedom as a means toward formation: the shaping of intellect and character through exposure to competing truths.
John Henry Newman called the university “a place for the communication and circulation of thought, by means of personal intercourse.” In his vision, the university was not a haven from conflict but the arena where moral and intellectual maturity take shape through disagreement and reflection. The liberal arts were never intended to produce consensus; they were meant to foster discernment. As Popper argued, the open society depends on institutions willing to falsify their own assumptions—to seek truth is to accept the risk of error and therefore the presence of others who might prove us wrong.
That risk is not a threat to academic freedom; it is its moral center. To teach students that certain ideas are too dangerous to encounter is to deny them the education that liberal learning promises. A university that cannot sustain internal disagreement is not defending freedom; it is defending fragility. And in doing so, it forfeits the formative work that distinguishes education from indoctrination.
The Civic Consequences
The habits cultivated in the classroom inevitably shape the habits of citizenship. The civic costs of intellectual closure are already visible. As Alan Bloom deftly observed in The Closing of the American Mind, “Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even specially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities.” Unsurprisingly, then, public trust in higher education has collapsed, especially among conservatives and independents, who once viewed universities as guardians of democratic competence. That distrust is not the result of demagoguery alone; it reflects the perception, often accurate, that higher education no longer mirrors the intellectual diversity of the society it serves.
Universities once modeled what it meant to argue honorably, to disagree without hatred, to hold liberty and truth in creative tension. When they abandon that vocation, the work of deliberation migrates into the political sphere, where incentives reward outrage over understanding. Restoring trust will not come through slogans about inclusion or bureaucratic messaging campaigns. It will come only through a renewed moral and civic imagination, one that sees pluralism as the very precondition of learning and democracy alike.
Viewpoint diversity is therefore not a partisan demand. It is both a democratic necessity and a moral one. The capacity to coexist in difference is the highest expression of a free mind and the only durable foundation for a free society.
The Work Ahead
Siraganian concludes by calling viewpoint diversity a “damaging distraction.” In truth, it is the defining work of the university and, more generally, of higher education, in our time. To preserve academic freedom in any meaningful sense, scholars must rebuild institutions that can house genuine difference without fear.
The philosopher Michael Oakeshott once described the university as “a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves.” Conversation implies more than speech; it requires respect for the possibility that one might be wrong. Siraganian’s argument, for all its erudition, betrays a community that no longer trusts that possibility.
Freedom, rightly understood, is not the defense of orthodoxy but the courage to confront it. The task before us is to recover that courage—patiently, humbly, and together.
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