If academics and their administrators don’t find smart ways to fix the lack of viewpoint diversity on their campuses, politicians may well try to do it for them — and they could make things much worse for open inquiry.

That was the message of three professors speaking at a special Heterodox Academy (HxA) event last week. The three were co-authors (with a fourth) on a recent op-ed for the Chronicle of Higher Education: “Higher Ed Needs Checks and Balances.”

“In areas like chemistry or mathematics,” the op-ed said, “we may not be overly concerned about the political identities of our professors. But universities also support scholarship in areas that address morality, social values, and public policy. In such cases, we should value, and even encourage, scholarship that draws on a wide range of ethical and political perspectives.”

HxA’s Director of Research Alex Arnold pressed the authors in an online forum to explain their ideas and respond to questions and challenges from the audience. He also asked how they came to the notion that greater viewpoint diversity is needed in certain fields.

Lawrence Eppard, Director of the Conners Institute for Nonpartisan Research and Civic Engagement at Shippensburg University, said his field — sociology — has suffered for decades from distortions in scholarship and in teaching – which then map onto distortions in public discourse.

“This has been a long time coming,” Eppard said. “Now we’re seeing politicians coming in with a hammer and attempting to break the university in a completely inappropriate way in the opposite direction. And if we had just handled business ourselves, maybe it wouldn't have happened.”

Eppard and his colleagues noted that their proposal is hardly radical in that it basically proposes “shared governance” that is already supposed to exist. The problem has been higher-ups rubber-stamping rather than attending carefully to issues like hiring.

“It’s kind of clawing back some of [those existing powers] rather than creating a whole new role for university administrators,” Eppard explained.

Jacob Mackey, associate professor of classics at Occidental College, agreed, noting that the 1966 “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities” from the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) stated, “The building of a strong faculty requires careful joint effort [of faculty and administrators] in such actions as staff selection and promotion and the granting of tenure.”

Mackey argued viewpoint diversity imbalance is part of the public-trust problem academics now face. The public sees their interests, priorities, and perspectives not represented in academics’ work, he said.

That disconnect opens the door to politicians who want to put pressures on universities, even at the risk of interfering with academic freedom.

Michael Jindra, cultural anthropologist at the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs at Boston University, explained, “One reason why I really am worried about that is it could totally reverse the other way…. A future administration could go way in the other direction by hammering their own point of view. I just don’t think [government interference] is a good precedent. I wish universities themselves would recognize the problem and do something about it.”

Eppard agreed: “If we decide just to double down and to hunker down and try to resist all efforts to reform this process, it is going to be done by outside actors. We’re seeing that right now. And that’s not what we want. We actually see this as a way to stop the inappropriate manipulation of the university,” he said. “I don’t want to trample on academic freedom. I don’t want administrators hiring people who are not competent, hiring people simply for politics, but I think we should be honest that in a lot of ways we do that now in a lot of departments, certainly in sociology programs.”

Moderating the discussion, Arnold asked about the problem of having people who are not experts in particular fields essentially judging the qualifications of faculty candidates. The panel suggested creating expert committees to help and reaching out to external academic-adjacent organizations that could provide qualified specialists, including accrediting bodies and perhaps HxA, which has a membership of over 7,600 faculty, including many in ideologically-narrow disciplines.

Eppard suggested that even non-experts can often tell if a job ad is reading too narrowly to attract an appropriately wide variety of candidates. But he conceded that in some fields – he used evolutionary psychology as an example – non-experts might make poor judges of issues of ideological im/balance.

“I don’t know how to answer this question,” Eppard said. “I think it’s a legitimate stumbling block that we didn’t address in the short space we had in that op-ed but would need to be addressed in order for this to work.”

Mackey noted that the viewpoint constricting can happen in departments not through any intention but because people tend to want to hire people who back their beliefs and approaches. He called the process “almost mindless [and] unconscious,” but said that if faculty and administrators consciously put their minds to the problem, it could be addressed effectively.

“I have a certain amount of confidence in faculty and even administrators that if you sat down with them and just got really explicit about this, said, ‘Hey, let’s just look at…how much ideological imbalance there is, and couldn't we all agree that a certain amount of diversity of viewpoint would be good for all of us?’” Mackey said, “you could get a lot of people on the same page.”

The panelists agreed that the funding of special centers for more conservative or heterodox views could be a positive step for politicians to take, but expressed concern about further siloing of ideas.

Jindra also expressed concern about politicians deciding what should be taught. Noting what happened in Florida, he said that Governor Ron DeSantis “yanked all sociology courses from the gen-ed curriculum,” leaving students without required exposure to the methods and ideas of sociology. If sociologists had been doing a better job of providing a broader array of viewpoints, Jindra said, perhaps this would not have happened.

There are limits to which viewpoints should be added, Eppard said, using as examples flat earth theories and “classes that teach that there is no racism.” He called for inclusion of “legitimate perspectives that are missing in the university.”

Eppard reiterated several times that he does not see “add Republicans and stir” as the logical approach, even though imbalances in fields like sociology can be measured to some degree by party affiliation.

“I don’t want Republicans in the sociology department, I don’t want them not in the sociology department,” he said. “I want my department to be seeking truth honestly and objectively and the only way to do that is to get viewpoints that are missing and that are ignored and that are purposefully avoided and resisted into the department.”

“The only way we can strike the correct balance,” Eppard explained, “is for…us to do it, not for DeSantis to do it. He’s just doing it for, you know, brute raw politics. He wants Republicans in the university. I don’t actually care about the politics of the professors.”

Eppard reiterated that sociologists could fix the problem by having “really high standards…using advanced quantitative methods… I don’t want some sort of crude, just, accounting of political ideas of professors. That's a really terrible way to do this.”

Speaking to government intervention, Mackey said he welcomed crack-downs “on actual law-breaking.” He gave as examples flouting of anti-discrimination laws in hiring and admissions, First Amendment violations, and transgression of regulations of non-profits “because of universities and colleges pursuing partisan activities.”

“Where there are clear violations of the laws in a very objective, surgical way,” Mackey said, “ I think there’s a real role for the government to step in and push some external reforms. And I think that pressure then would have a kind of wake-up effect on people in these institutions.”

“But,” he continued, “it seems to me that maybe what the Trump administration is doing is much more sort of hurling nuclear weapons at universities.”

“It’s pretty scary to see them going through…grants or research or classes that mention ‘diversity’ [and] throwing it all out,” Jindra said. “I study diversity, right? I study inequality, right? But I like to say I study it from a centrist position and teach it from a centrist position. So that’s scary.”