Healthy scholarly inquiry is lively, robust, and even contentious at times. The conditions for such inquiry necessitate that campus and academic life host a broad range of perspectives and abundant opportunities to meaningfully engage with different (and sometimes uncomfortable) ideas.

Despite the importance of viewpoint diversity to the truth and knowledge-seeking process, little has been known about how faculty themselves feel about the extent to which different dimensions of diversity improve (or undermine) the quality of teaching and research.

In one of the first national surveys to ask faculty directly how they value different dimensions of diversity within their disciplines, we show that across disciplines and the political spectrum, faculty see viewpoint diversity as an asset to teaching and research — and they underappreciate how much their colleagues share this view

Drawing on responses from 3,563 faculty across 80 institutions, surveyed in partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago between November and December 2025, the report includes several key takeaways on the value of viewpoint diversity across a range of disciplines:

• Every form of diversity measured — eight dimensions in total, including political perspectives, religious views, and theoretical and methodological diversity — won majority support from faculty. Methodological and theoretical diversity was the single most valued dimension of all, endorsed by 84% of respondents. 
• Sixty-nine percent of  social science faculty, where political diversity can be especially highly valuable, said that it improves their discipline.
• Viewpoint diversity is not only a “conservative cause.” Left-leaning faculty valued political diversity more than their right-leaning colleagues, 62% to 46%, a gap that held within disciplines — not just across them — in every field except STEM.
• A silent majority is hiding in plain sight. On average, faculty personally saw political and religious diversity as good for scholarship, but assumed their typical colleague saw considerably less value in it. This perception gap was widest among social scientists, who underestimated peers’ support for political diversity by 15%.  More than one in four personally valued political (29%) and religious (28%) diversity more than they assumed their colleagues did.
• Despite the majority of faculty supporting all dimensions of diversity asked about, nearly 30% of faculty report not regularly engaging with anyone who disagrees with them on substantive issues in their discipline. Adjunct professors were nearly twice as likely as tenured faculty to report this (41% vs. 22%). STEM faculty were 1.5 times as likely as their counterparts in the social sciences (36% vs. 23%) to report so.