Viewpoint Diversity in Higher Education Should Mean More Conservatives

By Jesse Smith

Saturday, July 05, 2025

 

A series of events running from the universities’ lackluster response to the October 7 attacks through the Trump administration’s battle against Harvard have brought higher education to a state of crisis. This has prompted needed self-reflection as university leaders ask themselves how their institutions can earn back the nation’s trust and preserve the independence and public support they have long enjoyed.

 

A commonly proposed reform is to increase viewpoint diversity among faculty. As the argument goes, higher education has turned into an intellectual monoculture. The lines between teaching, scholarship, and activism have blurred. Slant and censure in and out of the classroom have dampened the free exchange of opinions central to the university’s mission. This lamentable situation can be remedied via the fostering of a greater diversity of viewpoints that allows people to check one another’s biases, creating an environment more closely approximating a marketplace of ideas.

 

But what sort of monoculture are we resisting, and which viewpoints are needed to correct it? This is not exactly a secret. Among the professoriate overall, Democrats are estimated to outnumber Republicans by a ratio of nearly nine-to-one. Among Harvard faculty, over three-quarters identify as liberal, while fewer than 3 percent are conservative. These imbalances are mainly in the social sciences and humanities — precisely those disciplines whose teaching and research are most relevant to American politics. If universities are too homogenously liberal, then the solution is straightforward: Viewpoint diversity means a lot more conservatives.

 

Yet among reformers, this seemingly obvious conclusion has not seen enthusiastic uptake. Many seem to prefer the abstract, euphemistic language of “viewpoint diversity” to the more concrete prescription of “more conservatives.” Left-leaning reformers may not be entirely comfortable with the prospect of too much conservative presence, failing to see its value or viewing it as outright aversive. For their part, conservatives are skeptical of arguments or measures that reek of affirmative action or DEI. Such approaches have typically been used for purposes and rooted in principles that conservatives find objectionable. They therefore hesitate to advance solutions that seem to apply the same measures selfishly.

 

These hesitations are understandable, but misguided. If what higher education needs is not merely general “viewpoint diversity” but specifically more conservatives, we should not be shy about saying so and exploring principled strategies to make this a reality. If leftward ideological slant is the cause of academia’s intellectual stagnation, then an infusion of conservatives is the most efficacious cure.

 

To understand why, we may begin by asking the reasonable question: For purposes of teaching and scholarship, why does it matter if the professoriate overwhelmingly leans left? In theory, professors should be able to teach courses and conduct research in an unbiased way, strictly adhering to the constraints of facts, logic, and scientific principles. In so doing, they can purge themselves of partisanship in their professional activity. The problem is that too many faculty have let activism seep into their work. If we can get back to separating out academics and politics, the ship will be righted, and the fact that faculty lean so strongly left will be irrelevant.

 

In reality, this naïve view ignores key aspects of both human nature and intellectual life. We have a natural inclination to form coalitions, pursue moral causes, and understand our political commitments as rooted in objective reality rather than subjective opinion. So even if it were possible to cleanly separate facts and logic from beliefs and opinions, we would tend toward trying to promote the latter if left unchecked. With regard to intellectual life, as John Stuart Mill expertly argued, the best way to represent any given perspective is to trust its advocacy to someone who actually believes it. A party who opposes a particular view will struggle to represent it fairly. This means that an academy dominated by one set of partisans will be unqualified to offer an environment with a free exchange of ideas, however much this might be supported in principle.

 

For instance, suppose a political science professor genuinely believes that pro-life advocacy is rooted in a desire to establish male control over women’s bodies, and that taken to its logical conclusion, the pro-life position will inevitably result in a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia. Will that professor be able to fairly present the pro-life side of the abortion debate when it comes up in the classroom? It is possible, particularly if they have a strong commitment to balanced teaching (many do not). But it will be difficult, and any time the professor errs or loses discipline, this will come at the expense of the pro-life side. If other professors share similar biases on the same topic, however subtle, then students will graduate having received an ennobled view of the pro-choice cause and a darkened view of the pro-life cause. Now scale that problem up, to include professors, universities, and subject matter, and you will see the extent of the concern.

 

Though it receives less attention, this problem applies to scholarship as well. Indeed, this is probably where it is most pronounced. Certain checks on politicized expression in the classroom, such as belief in the free exchange of ideas or a desire to avoid alienating right-leaning students, do not pertain to research in the same way. To continue with the abortion example, there are many empirical questions on this topic that we might pursue. Faculty could research how the lack of abortion access interferes with women’s professional trajectories. Alternatively, they could ask how readily available abortion drains a community’s human capital over time. In higher education as presently constituted, it is not a mystery which of these research agendas will be pursued and which neglected. Furthermore, since the content of scholarship informs what is taught in the classroom, slanted research programs will steer even conservative instructors toward teaching progressive-aligned content.

 

Given these factors, a university split between hard progressive activists and moderate, objectivity-minded liberals will not be up to the task of ensuring fair representation on matters of partisan controversy, even if the latter group wins the day. The only way to achieve the touted benefits of viewpoint diversity — promoting the rigorous and unbounded pursuit of truth, equipping students with genuine critical thinking skills, and restoring public trust in higher education — is to seek a substantial increase in the presence of conservative professors on campus.

 

There are signs of progress in this regard. For instance, my professional home, the Ohio State’s Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society, is one of several centers being established at universities across the country to open up new avenues of academic inquiry. These centers emphasize constructive teaching and scholarship in the American civic tradition and therefore hold particular, though by no means exclusive, appeal to scholars with conservative sensibilities. This is the most conspicuous and widespread effort to improve ideological balance currently under way, but other recent proposals also show promise.

 

Though existing measures are encouraging, they are too limited and localized to achieve anything approaching an open marketplace of ideas. A few enclaves in a few institutions, while laudable, are not sufficient to combat intellectual homogeneity across the universities. If reformers are not serious about getting many more conservatives in higher education, then they are not serious about viewpoint diversity.