Diversity, Merit, and Distrust

Comparing arguments for demographic and intellectual diversity

A common inconsistency

It’s funny how many partisans seem to find it completely obvious that we need affirmative action for [choose one: demographic or political/intellectual] minorities in academia, while arguments for the other choice are patently bankrupt, bad-faith moves by a power-seeking coalition that clearly can’t be trusted.

The arguments over intellectual diversity are more interesting to me, because the arguments both for and against it seem much stronger. Ideological bias seems a much stronger force in academia than demographic bias. On the other hand, it’s vastly more plausible that the views and arguments of intellectual minorities may lack intellectual merit than that any comparably sweeping claim about demographic minorities is correct.¹ So while there’s more animosity and discrimination against conservatives than against (say) women, it’s going to be much harder to establish, in any given case, that the anti-conservative discrimination was wrongful. People may have good reasons for judging certain views negatively! Much will depend on the details.

In either direction, opponents like to tar proponents of affirmative action with prioritizing diversity over merit. The easy response is to deny that the opponents are competent at assessing merit. They’re so damned biased (perhaps subconsciously; perhaps explicitly in some cases) against the specified minorities, proponents argue, that affirmative action is needed in order to give talented minorities a fair shot. Only by explicitly correcting for background bias can we reasonably hope to find the actually most meritorious candidate. Given all the past discrimination against the specified minority group, perhaps we should even expect that the best candidate from the minority pool will be outright better than the best remaining candidate from the (vastly larger) majority pool? (I’m dubious of forming any such strong expectations prior to evaluating the individual candidates, but it sure would be convenient for proponents to be able to reduce the apparent trade-off between merit and diversity in this way!)

Personally, I’d rather avoid both forms of affirmation action, though I can see where the proponents are coming from and don’t think their case is “beyond the pale” or anything. (In both cases, I think search committees should at least make significant good-faith efforts to be aware of their possible biases and try to mitigate them. Obviously this won’t satisfy the “but you’re incorrigibly biased!” crowd, who so fundamentally distrust the evaluators that they effectively want to deprive them of the power to use their best judgment at all. Such deep distrust makes common ground hard to find.)

While a variety of first-order positions on this issue seem broadly defensible to me, I find it striking that the partisans themselves tend not to share my tolerance. Many seem to regard it as outrageous that anyone disagrees with their views on diversity. Given the structural parallels between their own views/arguments and those of the opposing partisans, their narrow-mindedness seems pretty unreasonable to me! Indeed, I’m inclined to think that one should probably hold broadly similar views about demographic and intellectual diversity, e.g. supporting affirmation action either for both or for neither. Yet it seems rare to hear from people with such consistent views.² Consistency is inconvenient for partisans, I guess.

Initial thoughts on Rufo’s “Manhattan Statement”

Chris Rufo’s Manhattan Statement on Higher Education offers a manifesto of right-wing discontent. (Bryan Caplan explains his support, here.) Their central accusation:

The universities have brazenly, deliberately, and repeatedly violated their compact with the American people. They have engaged in a long train of abuses, evasions, and usurpations, which, with every turn of the ratchet, have moved our society toward a new kind of tyranny—one in which ideology determines truth, and the university functions as a political agent of the Left.

This strikes me as absurdly overblown. Like any gigantic social institution, universities are imperfect. I have my complaints, and ideas for how they could improve. At the same time, universities are engines of innovation and sources of critical commentary that provide crucial checks on other sources of power. The public defunding they are currently undergoing is a form of massive disinvestment in basic research that seems likely to prove incredibly detrimental to society at large—like amputating your hand because you’re upset about a splinter in your pinky finger.

Moreover, given that the Trump administration has outright deported people for their speech (!!??), I do not for one moment trust them to reform universities into more consistently open-minded “free speech zones” of the sort that liberal reformers (myself included) would like to see.

The following complaint from the Manhattan Statement seems especially revealing:

The universities have contributed to a new kind of tyranny, with publicly funded initiatives designed to advance the cause of digital censorship, public health lockdowns, child sex-trait modification, race-based redistribution, and other infringements on America’s long-standing rights and liberties.

If “initiatives” here means research—research into misinformation, pandemic models, gender-affirming care for minors, racial reparations, and so on—then it’s crazy to call this “tyranny”. By all means call for more research, and more even-handed research if you feel like one side of the debate has not received a fair hearing. But to suggest that any research that reaches left-leaning conclusions is by that fact alone “tyranny” or an “infringement” on rights and liberties? That’s nuts. And antithetical to the very notion of free inquiry, which is what universities should be all about.

(If policymakers act upon certain recommendations, they may unjustly infringe rights. Policymakers shouldn’t do that. And universities should contain sufficient diversity of thought that voices can be relied upon to raise appropriate warnings about the downsides of proposals like lockdowns, digital censorship, etc. Progressive monoculture threatens the university’s ability to generate such warnings when needed, which is a fine reason to welcome more viewpoint diversity. But it’s absolutely vital that individual researchers—includes ones whose work is supported by public funds—are allowed to “push the envelope” and explore ideas that could turn out to be horribly mistaken. In a well-designed system, others will push back, politicians will be somewhat conservative about crazy-sounding new ideas, and the overall result will be incremental, marginal progress towards a better society. But we won’t get such progress if any research that sounds offensive to politicians is thereby disallowed—with the details flipping around wildly every time the White House changes hands.)

Some criticisms I agree with:

• University administrations were mistaken to adopt partisan positions on behalf of the entire university. In future, they should embrace institutional neutrality and leave it to individual researchers to express their individual viewpoints. (“The proper vehicle for criticism is through the individual scholar and student, not the university as a corporate body.”)

• Universities should enforce “time and place” restrictions on permitted protest, and impose “significant penalties, including suspension and expulsion” on those who violate these policies in ways that disrupt the intellectual function of the university (disrupting invited academic speakers, etc.).

• “DEI” included some bad stuff that should be stopped (e.g., pushing implicit quotas, using “diversity statements” in hiring as loyalty oaths to filter out non-woke potential hires, etc.).

  • On the other hand, “DEI” may also include activities that are surely both legal and good—e.g. outreach efforts to broaden application pools; efforts to help more people to feel welcome in the university community. If we can’t trust the DEI bureaucracy to do the good without the bad, it may be best to cut the whole thing. But there’s plenty of room for reasonable people to disagree on this.

Given the room for reasonable disagreement about how the pros and cons of DEI balance out, the suggestion that any failures to comply should be “punishable by revocation of all public benefit” strikes me as insanely disproportionate. The Manhattan Statement as a whole seems to be explicitly inviting heavy-handed political interference in university business (including hiring) in a way that seems extremely dangerous to me. As I previously wrote:

Ideally, of course, academics would self-police, to ensure that they are worthy of the public trust. (As a first step, more need to acknowledge the possibility and undesirability of ideological capture, and thus care to promote norms that better ward against it.) But what if they don’t?

One risk here is that politicians may exploit the resulting social distrust to fire faculty that they view as “too left-wing” and replace them with right-wing ideologues instead. (My sense is that this is indeed what the likes of DeSantis and Rufo are hoping for in Florida. I hope I’m wrong.) Politicians are literally political partisans; it’s their job. So it would seem crazy to trust them to micromanage universities and expect that that would somehow help academic freedom.

Academics should take political bias more seriously

While I distrust Rufo & co., when I read what progressive academics have to say about political bias in academia, it’s also… less than reassuring. Consider Jennifer Morton’s recent piece in the NY Times:

a policy of hiring professors and admitting students because they have conservative views would actually endanger the open-minded intellectual environment that proponents of viewpoint diversity say they want. By creating incentives for professors and students to have and maintain certain political positions, such a policy would discourage curiosity and reward narrowness of thought.

It sure would be a problem if there were (e.g. social) incentives for professors and students to have and maintain certain political positions! Now, can progressives please seriously engage with the concern that this is precisely what they have done over the past 10 - 15 years? How much “curiosity” have you welcomed on social justice issues recently? Do you not remember how you treated anyone who questioned the narrow progressive consensus during the pandemic? And have you seen the results of having social incentives shape bioethics? I’m a liberal, and I’m appalled by the amount of orthodoxy-enforcement I perceive in academia. I can only imagine how alienating academic culture must be for anyone more conservative.

While I don’t think affirmative action for conservatives is the answer, I do think we should make more of an effort to welcome (or at least engage civilly and charitably with) a much broader range of heterodox viewpoints within academic social spaces.

As Matt Yglesias recently wrote:

If you could wave a wand and make 50 percent of the people applying to graduate school go be cops, and get more right-wingers doing physical science and public health, that would make for a much more even-keeled society.

Of course, we do not have such a wand. But I think political leaders should start talking in a calm, non-judgmental way about the fact that strong ideological sorting across professions is not a positive trend for society. Having robust disagreements about values among professionals with the same areas of factual expertise can clarify our options and the tradeoffs they entail. This sort of diversity also makes it easier for expert communities to communicate with the broad public in a way that’s credible and compelling, rather than relying on arguments from authority that increasingly fail in our endlessly fragmented ecosystem.

It’s trickier in philosophy since we don’t exactly have “factual expertise”. But we are especially good at “clarifying our options and the tradeoffs they entail.” The exception is when philosophers get blinded by politics. This seems to motivate a lot of intellectual dishonesty—as if admitting that right-wing critiques ever have any merit would somehow detract from how bad it is for ICE agents to assault and kidnap people. Call me naive, but I really think we’d be better off saying all the true things (within reason)!³ No-one has a monopoly on truth. For any question worthy of inquiry to begin with, we should seek out the truth wherever it may lie. That means admitting the tradeoffs and downsides of our currently-preferred answers. These may be easier to discern if our colleagues are willing to openly disagree with us.

1. Standard examples here include young-earth creationism, climate change denial, anti-vax views, etc. On the other hand, I think the anti-market economic views of many on the political left are comparably lacking in merit. Economic ignorance / heterodoxy is just much more socially acceptable in academic circles than comparable levels of scientific ignorance / heterodoxy. I’d be curious to see someone attempt a principled defense of this double standard.

2. In a Facebook discussion thread not long ago, I tried engaging with some delusional academics who insisted that professors were never hired on the basis of race or gender. Without taking a stand on the merits of the practice (or naming any names), I noted that I was personally aware of cases where University administrators had made funding available for “target of opportunity” (TOO) hires that were explicitly limited to racial minorities only. So it clearly has happened.

What happened next was most curious: a senior philosopher from a top department jumped in to suggest that all other job searches were effectively TOO hires for white men only. He deleted the comment before I got a chance to ask him whether we should similarly conclude that putatively open searches are effectively just TOO hires for progressives. I really wonder how those who think it’s valid to infer unjust discrimination from unequal outcomes hope to block conservatives from exploiting the very same pattern of reasoning.

3. Limited to questions that merit an answer, of course. Some questions, like “How can I make a deadly pandemic virus in my home laboratory?”, presumably shouldn’t be answered.