At the University of Pennsylvania, left-leaning faculty warn that ideological policing could have negative effects on the intellectual environment.
Dr. Jennifer Morton, a philosophy professor at UPenn, wrote a piece this week for the New York Times on “Why Hiring Professors With Conservative Views Could Backfire on Conservatives.” Her warning comes too late, of course, is self-blind, and is correct.
Morton’s argument is simple: Up the quota for conservative faculty, and you up the level of rigidity surrounding these viewpoints. “By creating incentives for professors and students to have and maintain certain political positions,” she wrote, “such a policy would discourage curiosity and reward narrowness of thought.”
If done tactlessly, she means. The current state of higher education indicates that this degradation has already taken effect, with professors “whose views are, for the most part, politically progressive,” at the top.
Students have long felt pressure to self-censor — but that’s surmountable. What has no workaround is the existing regime that prevents many conservative professors from even being hired, let alone intellectualizing in their own field or framework. Again, Morton describes the situation best: “For professors hired for their political beliefs, the pressure to maintain those views would be even greater.”
The point is salient in the example of UPenn law professor Amy Wax, a colleague of Morton’s. After Wax made comments about the “downside of affirmative action,” and on another occasion explained how the “re-embrace of traditional values” would make for a functional culture, other UPenn professors and higher-ups condemned her statements and campaigned against her seat as a faculty member. Currently, Wax is preparing for a one-year suspension with half pay, to begin in August of this year.
Likewise, diversity, equity, and inclusion-based racial hiring quotas have determined university faculty for several years now. Those go for graduate students, too. At the University of California, Los Angeles medical school, “faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge” as a result of routine, race-exclusionary practices. A more recent example is the case of Naomi Epps Best at Santa Clara University’s psychology program, where Best was denied requests to opt out of extremely sexually explicit activities and assignments.
So, the Trump administration pushes to defund DEI programs at universities, and the professors running them warn that the tilt is a nascent intellectual authoritarianism.
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But the conservative view of these things is much broader, and much simpler, than Morton envisions. Requests for “viewpoint diversity” and “ideological balance” are just that — balance. Hiring conservative professors is equivalent to being willing to hire conservative professors. Viewpoint diversity is more an escape from overbearing progressive professors than an entry into a forced conservative classroom.
If conservatives secretly do want to implement their own university regime — which most do not, though it would be more tolerable — that goal turns into an avoid-at-all-costs wrong. It is the same system Leftists have put all their efforts into creating for themselves, and it is the lesson of Morton’s essay.