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Conservatives oppose DEI, so we shouldn’t promote ‘viewpoint diversity,’ one professor says
Cornell University should not take proactive steps to recruit right-leaning scholars, according to a faculty report from the Committee on the Future of the American University.
The 238-page report, written by 18 faculty members, largely focused on changes to education, artificial intelligence, and the university’s relationship with the public.
“This report asks how the university must adapt to honor its quietly revolutionary purpose in American life. The answer cannot leave the university exactly as it is today,” the report said.
“Today’s pressures are too intense and the opportunities too promising to prioritize nostalgia over envisioning the future,” the authors stated.
Drafters of the report also included different opinions on viewpoint diversity.
The committee was unable to come to full agreement on some of the issues, but their “disagreements did not curdle into outrage.” Instead, the disagreements produced “sharper and more thoughtful analysis than any of us would have reached alone,” the report states.
Architecture professor Milton Curry and chemistry Professor Abraham Stroock warned about federal government intrusion into higher education.
Stroock and Curry’s main points were about making the university accessible to all people and protecting inclusion and academic freedom.
They said “the stakes are high” because “the federal government forcefully asserts control over private universities’ autonomy in selecting their students, deciding what to teach, and determining who to hire and the standards for their advancement and promotion.”
However, conservatives use viewpoint diversity as a way to attack higher education, the pair argued.
Curry, a dean, wrote with Stroock that they believe diversity, equity, and inclusion should not be confused with viewpoint diversity while rejecting political bias at Cornell.
“Viewpoint diversity (associated with conservatives’ assertion that universities suffer from the bias of a majority of left-leaning faculty and are incapable of teaching countervailing views), far from being inclusive, is the fulcrum from which a constellation of organized vicious attacks on higher education have emerged,” the reflection said.
Similarly, Durba Ghosh, a professor of history in Cornell’s College of Arts and Sciences, defended DEI in her reflection. She believes inclusion of faculty, staff, and students from diverse cultures, ethnicities, and religions is important to Cornell’s mission.
“This mission, however laudable, is increasingly under threat,” Ghosh’s reflection said. “We bypassed a definition of diversity in the service of concluding the report; yet our evasion renders the goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion vulnerable to complete erasure.”
Dhosh said the committee agreed that “being inclusive was an important value,” but they were left questioning how to “accommodate politically conservative voices.”
There were proposals to research and teach conservative political thought and to hire a conservative scholar, which raised debate about whether the “putative exclusion” of conservatives at universities was comparable to the “historic exclusions of Black students, women, Latino/a, and Indigenous students,” according to Ghosh.
“As a historian, I am reminded that the groups that are calling for viewpoint diversity these days are descended from the groups that opposed diversity, equity, and inclusion over a half century ago,” Ghosh said.
“Without an assertive and clear declaration about what we mean by diversity, we risk losing a vision of a future that is inclusive, welcoming, and just for all,” Ghosh said in her reflection.
The College Fix attempted to contact Ghosh via email and phone call to ask about her concerns with hiring conservative scholars but did not receive a response in the past several weeks.
Several professors warn of hostile environment for open debate
Economist Rick Geddes also wrote a reflection for the report, calling for “greater diversity of viewpoints.”
“A large and growing left-leaning political dominance within U.S. universities is now well documented,” Geddes wrote. “What is underappreciated, however, is the degree to which alternative views, whether defined as conservative, classical liberal, libertarian, or even ‘old-fashioned liberal, are minimized or marginalized.”
Geddes did not provide further comment to The Fix, but did send along further information for consideration.
Plant scientist Randy Wayne backed the calls for viewpoint diversity.
“Any university that is not grounded in the belief that objective truth exists is not worthy of funding from the taxpayers,” Wayne said to The Fix in an emailed statement. He has been vocally opposed to DEI and critical race theory.
Wayne also said in his email that he hopes that Cornell’s President Michael Kotlikoff “will either send the report back insisting that the committee declare that the mission of the university is the search for truth (which does exist) or scrap it all together.”
Phoebe Sengers – a professor in Cornell’s technology studies department – wrote her reflection on “The Hope of Deliberation.”
She started by discussing how her interest in the social impact of technology exposed her to new viewpoints. This helped “to see the limits of my own experiences, to reconsider my views, and sometimes, to question my core values,” according to Sengers’ reflection.
“So, I was both shocked and astonished the first time a Cornell undergraduate told me with pride that he refused to talk to anyone who didn’t share his political beliefs,” Sengers said.
“Isn’t the whole point of college to expand your experience of the world? Wasn’t he curious about why other people see the world differently?”
“We must reckon with the dwindling number of conservatives in the professoriate” and proceed during these “precarious times when we refuse to allow moral clarity to curdle into a moral certainty that rejects all challengers and, in the process, blocks us from seeing the world as it is, in all its complexity and nuance,” Sengers said.
A previous analysis by The Fix found that Democrats outnumber Republicans 98 to 1 amongst Cornell professors across six of the humanities departments.
MORE: Majority of faculty oppose Harvard’s plan to promote viewpoint diversity
