Translator: Florencia Bracamonte Reviewer: Mirjana Čutura
As a teacher,
I know the value of having a classroom filled with students
from different backgrounds.
My classes on American politics are deeply enriched by the diversity of my students.
For example, when discussing welfare reform,
there's nothing like having a brave young student raise their hand
and talk about the challenges of personally growing up in poverty
to get the rest of the class to sit up and pay attention.
But while our colleges and universities
make every effort to increase the representation
of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities,
there's another kind of diversity that we often forget:
viewpoint diversity.
In today's increasingly polarized political climate,
having people on campus with different perspectives is more important than ever.
If you haven't noticed, Washington DC has recently been a bit of a spectacle.
(Laughter)
And if you're like me, you've probably thought
that our leaders could use some remedial education in civil dialogue.
(Applause and cheers)
Our colleges could be a place
where our future leaders learn to engage with people they disagree with.
But today, too many people on campus seem to think
that the appropriate response to people they disagree with
is shouting, name-calling, and even violence.
Every year, every semester brings more and more examples.
In 2017, at Middlebury College, when the liberal professor Allison Stanger
tried to moderate a free and fair exchange of ideas
with a controversial libertarian Charles Murray,
students yelled, screamed, and pulled fire alarms.
Eventually, campus officials tried to sneak them out of back door,
but a mob of mass protestors found them
and jerked professor Stanger's head
so violently that she suffered whiplash and a concussion.
This is what's happening on our campuses,
places the next generation of leaders is learning to interact with others.
If it's happening there,
can we be surprised at what's happening in Washington
or corporate boardrooms
or even our own neighborhoods?
My expertise happens to be in higher education,
and I've seen the lack of intellectual diversity first-hand.
Today, less than 13 percent of professors identify as conservative,
while 60 percent identify as either liberal or far left.
In the Humanities and Social Sciences,
fields where politics is often central to teaching and research,
only five percent identify as conservative,
and most of those are in Economics or Political Science.
In some fields, they're almost an extinct species.
And of that five percent,
only some are even willing to admit it to their co-workers.
Seven years ago, my friend John Shields and I
decided it would be interesting to study conservative and libertarian professors
in the Social Sciences and Humanities.
Everyone in the university knows
that professors are overwhelmingly liberal.
But we realized that there was almost no research
on the experiences of conservatives on campus.
What are their lives like?
Are they afraid of being punished or that they'll be denied tenure
because of their politics?
We ended up interviewing 153 conservative professors.
Much of what we found was alarming:
One-third of them hid their politics from their colleagues.
They described themselves as "in-the-closet conservatives."
Many expressed profound fear about being outed.
Some even thought that our project was a Red Scare in reverse:
we must be trying to identify conservatives
so they can be run out of the university.
One sociologist was so afraid
that he refused to let us interview him.
But after convincing him that we came in peace,
he finally agreed to talk to us
but only far away from his office,
where his colleagues would never see or hear us -
in the middle of a botanical garden.
(Laughter)
John and I left this interview feeling like spies
rather than the nerdy, socially awkward professors that we actually are.
(Laughter)
Now, maybe you think that it's not a problem
that conservatives have to hide behind bushes in botanical gardens,
(Laughter)
but if you think that diversity is good for all of us,
then so is viewpoint diversity.
For one reason, it matters for teaching.
(Applause and cheers)
At its best,
the university is a place where students can learn deliberative virtues,
like civility, toleration, and mutual respect.
But in a monoculture, it's difficult to do this.
This is a lost opportunity for civic education.
The university is also a place
where students should learn to live in a diverse society.
For many, it's really the first time
they're exposed to people who are different from themselves.
Ideally, students would learn the best arguments
of both the left and the right,
not the watered-down and inflammatory versions
you hear on cable news or read on social media.
But today, it's quite possible to receive an education -
and an elite one at that -
and never be exposed to major conservative ideas,
ideas that have, for better or worse, profoundly influenced American politics.
But it's not impossible.
Robby George is one of America's most prominent conservative professors,
and Cornel West is one of our most prominent African American scholars.
He's a progressive and a self-declared radical democrat.
Despite their political differences,
the two became close friends while they were colleagues at Princeton.
Eventually, they decided to teach a course together.
Doing that allowed them to show students
how you could respectfully engage people you disagree with
and sharpen your own arguments at the same time.
Today, they have a traveling roadshow and visit campuses around the country.
The only sad part of their story is that it is so rare.
Our campuses would be far healthier places
if their example was the norm rather than the exception.
(Applause)
Another important goal of the university
is to generate research that improves our understanding of the world.
But academic echo chambers, where we only talk to people we agree with,
undermine that mission.
And that's because of confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is just the tendency that we all have
to accept evidence that supports our pre-existing beliefs.
For example, if you're like me and drink a lot of coffee,
at least one to two pots a day,
(Laughter)
you enthusiastically accept every story about the health benefits of coffee,
(Laughter)
and you share them widely on social media.
"Look, everyone, science has confirmed my life choices."
(Laughter)
But if you see research showing that coffee might be bad for you,
"Don't tell me, I don't want to hear about it, it can't be true."
That's confirmation bias.
Basically, none of us like being told that we might be wrong,
and that's particularly true about our deeply held beliefs
about things like politics, religion, or coffee.
When intellectually isolated research communities form,
no one is there to challenge their biases.
And when that happens, groupthink sets in, and errors go uncorrected.
When we're divided into groups of like-minded people,
our positions also tend to become more extreme.
Just compare Boulder to Colorado Springs.
(Laughter)
You may have heard there are some differences between the two communities?
(Laughter)
In fact, scholars have studied them.
In one experiment, they took a group of liberals from Boulder
and had them talk about controversial issues like climate change
and same-sex marriage with each other.
And then they took a group of conservatives from Colorado Springs
and had them do the same thing.
After each group had deliberated, their views became more extreme.
The Boulder liberals moved farther to the left,
and the Colorado Springs conservatives moved farther to the right.
Viewpoint diversity directly affects the quality of education we're providing
and the quality of research that we're producing.
Universities, particularly administrators, must make it a priority.
They need to remind their campuses
that the university depends on the free exchange of ideas.
And that affects everything from hiring to guest speakers.
Now, these changes aren't going to happen overnight,
but there are things that we can do that can make a difference.
One option is what my co-author and I have called
"an ideological Fulbright Program."
The Fulbright Program is an educational exchange program
where American faculty and students go abroad to study, teach, and research.
And then non-US citizens come here and do the same.
America created it after World War II.
The goal was to promote peace
by increasing mutual understanding across cultures.
Something similar would be useful here at home,
where conservative and progressive cultures
rarely interact with each other on campus.
In fact, there's already a program much like this
at the University of Colorado Boulder,
where each year they bring a conservative professor to campus.
(Laughter)
More faculty could also be encouraged
to follow the example of Robby George and Cornel West
and teach classes across the ideological divide.
Many professors are already on board.
One organization, Heterodox Academy,
was founded in 2015 by a progressive scholar.
It already has several thousand members.
These faculty believe that viewpoint diversity
is in their own self-interest
because it makes them better teachers and scholars.
But there's a deeper lesson for all of us whether we're on campus or not.
We all need to get out of our comfortable political silos
on Facebook or Twitter.
Think about the close, personal friendship
between the conservative Justice Antonin Scalia
and the liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg,
(Applause and cheers)
the notorious RBG, as she's known.
(Laughter)
Before Justice Scalia died,
there were hardly two people on the Court who disagreed more
about how to interpret the Constitution.
But there were no closer friends on the Court either.
In fact, they also had a traveling roadshow,
where they went around the country
and talked about how they disagreed just about everything
when it came to politics or constitutional interpretation.
Their odd-couple relationship even inspired someone to write an opera
about their peculiar friendship.
(Laughter)
When Justice Scalia died,
Justice Ginsburg wrote a moving tribute to the man she called her best buddy.
She said, "We disagreed now and then."
(Laughter)
That's a significant understatement for anyone who studies the Supreme Court,
but she said whenever Scalia dissented from her opinions,
it always made them better
because Scalia nailed all the weak spots.
We all need friends like that.
We can't really do our jobs as citizens without them.
In the end,
what happens in the ivory tower doesn't stay in the ivory tower
because today's student is tomorrow's leader.
A diversity of ideas will make us better leaders, neighbors, voters,
but only if we get a chance to hear them.
Thank you.
(Applause)