The second of the Vanderbilt Report’s subreports has been released, this one on the state of scholarly standards in sociology. I was particularly looking forward to this one as it pertains to my home discipline and was authored by my heterodox compatriot Ashley Rubin, and it did not disappoint. Those highly invested in the matter should read the whole thing. Those with more passing interest can instead turn to her Substack. The maximally interested should read both, because the blog is not a mere summary, but offers substantial context that is valuable for understanding the substance.

A few brief impressions:

• It is clear that Rubin took the task seriously. One can disagree with her conclusions or doubt the wisdom of the whole Vanderbilt Report enterprise in its circumstances, but one cannot in good faith accuse her of having crafted a grievance document or a screed. She is scrupulous throughout about the nature of her evidence, what it can and cannot show, how it might be interpreted by different parties, and what gaps remain to be filled.

• The evidence base, while unoriginal (time constraints did not allow the collection of new data), is both extensive and diverse. I’m struck by the amount of time the subreport spends on high-end blog posts in addition to published scholarship (shout-outs to Dan Silver and Turgut Keskintürk). Some might look askance at this, but to my mind this approach serves a valuable purpose, since it is difficult to evaluate a discipline “from the outside” while limiting oneself to its internal framework. If we think the structures of academic scholarship are unsound, we cannot very well limit ourselves to those structures.

• It is not some sort of “nail in the coffin,” nor does it claim to be. She is open about the fact that none of her evidence decisively settles the question of to what extent scholarly standards in sociology are compromised by ideology. As I have written on here before, I am not sure anything like a point estimate of ideological compromise is possible even in principle. If it is, it would certainly require more than one person’s part-time labor over a period of a few months, even for someone competent and dedicated.

Which brings me to my point here. In her Substack summary, Rubin describes herself as offering a “sociological analysis of sociology.” Given her constraints, however, it might be more accurate to describe it as the beginning of one, a kind of opening salvo that deserves follow-up. At several points in the report itself, she indicates where more research is needed as available data are either dated or simply do not exist. A proper analysis of the state of sociology would require a more substantial investment of scholarly time and energy. If we are to treat the report and the moment that gives rise to it as an opportunity for reform, then what we need is a revived sociology of sociology to help us navigate through these unsettled times.

The (In)coherence of Social Life

The term “unsettled times” was developed in the 1980s by sociologist Ann Swidler, as an element of her “tool kit” theory of culture and social behavior (or, as we like to say in sociology, “action”). Previous sociological theories of culture had emphasized the crucial component of rationality and values in shaping human action. Max Weber argued social systems developed around (among other things) deeply held beliefs or values, which gave rise to rational principles that then expanded to govern other life domains (as in, famously, the move from the Calvinist belief in predestination to the practice of austere industrial capitalism). In the theory of mid-20th Century giant of sociology Talcott Parsons, individuals deeply internalized the values socialized into them by their society, and through the enactment of those values, maintained and reproduced that society.

Swidler’s move was to turn all this on its head, converting values from deep commitments into floating rationalizations. She argued that most people, most of the time, do not act according to some kind of logically coherent system founded on deeply rooted principles. What most people, most of the time, do is—well, whatever they damn well please, provided they can rationalize it. Or to be a bit less flippant and more sophisticated about it, moment-to-moment most people are guided by their immediate habits, preferences, short-term goals, and prevailing social norms. To some extent, we act according to broadly institutionalized practices shared across societies, like celebrating holidays or sending greeting cards. More immediately, we behave in ways that are rewarded or at least tolerated in our proximate environments of household, workplace, or community. But as social agents, we tend to operate according to what presents the path of least resistance rather than what is dictated by deeply held value commitments.1

So then, why do we talk about values or self-narrate around some kind of larger ethic? Swidler argued that such talk is precisely that—talk. We seek to justify ourselves, both to ourselves and to others, and so to offer rationales for our actions that seem to comport with some manner of higher calling or more noble enterprise. But this primarily amounts to post hoc rationalization. If we want to stay with our spouse despite marital strife, we appeal to the importance of commitment. If we would rather strike out on our own, we appeal to the principle of self-actualization, living our best lives and the like. But at bottom, what drove our decision is that we either wanted to stay with them or we didn’t. Neither individual actions or larger social systems typically operate accordingly to philosophically coherent and determinative sets of ultimate values even when they profess them.

But Swidler carves out an exception to this rule. Most people, most of the time is not all the people, all the time. We might undergo the trouble and stress of adopting and acting on a logically consistent, value-based ethic in those moments when our routine habits or strategies break down—when even our short-term goals are frustrated, our environment renders our habits dysfunctional, or our rationalizations fail us. Swidler referred to such periods as unsettled times. Picture the scorned divorcé who reorganizes their life around CrossFit, the recent lonely arrival to a new city who converts to a communal religion, or—at a larger social scale—the region wracked by industrial decline that sees a surge in support for a populist political party. It is precisely when our normal modes of operation have broken down that we seek to develop coherent systems rooted in deeper values to restore some sense of purpose and order.

Sociology’s Unsettled Times

Is the discipline of sociology facing unsettled times?

Ashley Rubin seems to think so. Though measured and non-alarmist, her ultimate assessment is that the field suffers from serious ideological distortions (topical skews, blind spots, mechanisms of social control constraining questions and answers) that can be found even at the prestigious heights of the field.

She is not alone. Over the span of a few weeks, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times have each published substantially critical reports of the discipline. In a recent election for the American Sociological Association (ASA), the “institutional neutrality, pluralism, and reform” candidate lost to a Notre Dame sociologist who critically studies the political right, and vowed to use this expertise to resist GOP attacks against the discipline. He will have his work cut out for him—Florida has already moved to strip sociology of its general education status at public universities due to perceptions of the discipline as overly politicized. This will have direct consequences for course enrollments, and by extension, student exposure to the discipline and budgetary health of departments. All of which, however, has been overshadowed by controversy surrounding a bitter BDS dispute at the ASA’s recent annual meeting.

Then there are the more conventional metrics. ASA membership and sociology course enrollments are in long-term decline. Sociology’s replication rates compare unfavorably to those of several other disciplines, and it has been resistant to the open science practices that social psychology, political science, and economics have adopted in defense of rigorous research—and relatedly, their reputations. Sociology is furthermore high on the list of most-regretted majors.

Sociological research practices in general face the prospect of disruption. The combination of bottoming-out response rates and bot invasions undermines the viability of the survey data that has long been the workhorse of quantitative research. Federal funding cuts may throw a wrench in the operations of those few long-standing, high-quality survey series remaining (the General Social Survey, the American National Election Studies). Meanwhile, the emergence of AI both threatens and promises to transform the research landscape in ways as yet unforeseen. This may be a boon for some efforts and a barrier for others, but in any case renders established patterns of empirical scholarship precarious to say the least.

To be clear, many of these challenges pertain to other social sciences as well, if not higher education as a whole. But others are distinctive and acute. There is plenty of unsettledness to go around, but given its combination of internal divisions and external pressures, sociology is a bit more unsettled than its nearest neighbors.2 If it is to navigate this treacherous environment, sociology will need to give an account of itself—to the government agencies and general public that fund it, to the students it hopes to attract, to the neighboring disciplines who would encroach on its subject matter, and to university administrators looking to simultaneously repair public trust and prune budgets.

But prior to all of that, sociology needs to give an account of itself to itself, because many of its most vocal critics are its own practitioners who are alienated from the mainstream of the discipline. Such an account may start with critiques, commentaries, and counter-organizations, but it cannot end there. Following the path Rubin sets in her report, what is needed is a new sociology of sociology.

The Sociology of Sociology

The sociology of sociology is not a formal subdiscipline with an ASA section, a journal, or other trappings. But it is an established, if niche and sporadic, strand of scholarship.3 This does not refer to mere commentary on the state of the discipline—of that, we have plenty. The sociology of sociology, rather, is exactly what it sounds like—the systematic empirical and theoretical examination of the discipline itself, asking why some questions are pursued and others neglected, some ideas or theories flourish while others founder, or why some scholars dominate the field while others remain marginal. It entails examination of the social, symbolic, and material forces underlying the processes of the production of sociological knowledge, using the same tools sociologists would apply to other aspects of social life.

On the surface, this sounds like so much pretentious navel-gazing, little more than a scaled-up version of “me-search.” But major figures in this tradition such as Alvin Gouldner and Pierre Bourdieu understood themselves to be doing something more than this, though they differed on what, exactly. Gouldner argued for a recognition of sociology as an actor in the social world rather than some neutral, distant observer. The sorts of questions sociologists ask and the answers they provide both reflects and serves particular causes and interests, and he saw pretensions to value-free objectivity as an evasion of responsibility. Sociology as a discipline should instead make its tacit normative commitments explicit and take ownership of them, which was precisely what a sociology of sociology facilitated.

Bourdieu, in contrast, saw the enterprise as a way of enhancing objectivity. In his view, when a sociologist approaches some set of subject matter (race relations, or urban poverty, or evangelical politics, etc.), the questions they ask, the concepts they develop, and the conclusions they report are shaped by their own relationship to that subject matter, their discipline’s relationships to that subject matter, and the larger political or economic environment’s relationship to the discipline, among other factors in a complex web of social relations. The knowledge we produce bears the mark of the environment that produces it. If we are ignorant of these forces and conduct our scholarship naively, we will fail to recognize this mark and pass off social distortions as objective scientific conclusions. The sociology of sociology provides recognition of this web of forces and lets us account for them in our scholarship, thus crafting more objective understandings of the social world. The second-order practice thus provides the tools for a more valid first-order practice.

I am more inclined toward Bourdieu’s aims than Gouldner’s, but the latter’s account is more applicable in at least one sense: He was writing in response to perceived crisis in American sociology.4 It is somewhat hard to imagine at this distance, but when Gouldner was writing, sociology was a highly respected, even “establishment,” discipline, highly popular among students and with close ties to government and business. But Gouldner saw that the social and political conditions sustaining the discipline in its mid-century form were crumbling, and proclaimed it was time for sociology to reimagine itself. His reimagining entailed a more explicitly critical and political brand of sociology I do not endorse. But one can disagree with his prescription while recognizing some real insight in his diagnosis, and the value of the methods by which he arrived at it.5

The Coming Crisis of Public Sociology

In 2004, ASA president and Marxist ethnographer Michael Burawoy picked up Gouldner’s mantle and brought it to sociology’s center stage. His presidential address that year called for the discipline to be more publicly engaged—committed to intervention on behalf of the marginalized, to public-facing work, to activism, and to community engagement. Some considerable debate ensued on the topic, but most of it was centered around just what “public sociology” meant rather than whether it was the sort of thing sociologists should be doing in the first place (with some notable exceptions).6 As the narrative in Rubin’s report indicates, the basic ethic of public sociology took hold and became a basic feature of the mainstream of the discipline.

There is hardly room to explore the entire saga of public sociology here, but one feature of Burawoy’s address is notable: He explicitly justifies his call for public sociology, at least in part, based on the observation that the discipline had moved to the left while the public had shifted right. From this, Burawoy concluded that sociology was increasingly concentrated on the right side of history, and furthermore, that the world desperately needed to hear what it had to say (even if it didn’t want to). Two consequences follow from this posture. First, being self-congratulatory, it is not conducive to the sort of critical self-reflection that would lead the discipline’s practitioners to seriously question whether their prescriptions for society are, in fact, the right ones. It is antithetical to intellectual humility. Second, it encourages a stance toward the public (on behalf of the public, of course) that is, at minimum, condescending, and perhaps actively adversarial. Two decades with this as more or less the official attitude of the discipline has not left its representatives very well prepared to alleviate the concerns of right-wing politicians who exhibit a novel willingness to wield state power against a discipline they perceive to be—well, adversarial.

But as Rubin’s report ably documents, sociology is a deeply pluralistic discipline, for both better and worse.7 Then as now, large swathes of the discipline had no interest in the ethic of public sociology, but simply wanted to keep doing research on subjects that interested them. Rather than gird their loins and do battle over the institutional center and disciplinary identity of sociology, however, they opted to tune out the noise and keep doing what they damn well pleased. The upside of this is that there is a great deal of sociology happening right now that is good, interesting, rigorous, and worth doing. The downside is that this isn’t what outside observers see when they investigate what is happening in the discipline—as The Chronicle, WSJ, and NYT have recently seen fit to do.

Sociology’s turmoil of recent years highlights the pitfalls of the present arrangement. If those of more activist orientation are institutionally involved and motivated, while those who prioritize scholarly objectivity opt to mind their business and do their work, then the ones who show up are the ones who define the discipline, in large part through the ASA and its agenda-setting, legitimating, and communicative power.8 The discipline’s primary organization provides the most visible and concentrated outward representation by which it will be judged, by students, parents, taxpayers, trustees, executives, legislators, private funders, and other stakeholders who, collectively though in different ways, hold the future of the discipline in their hands.

Ironically, this social fact seems to escape many of those whose enterprise is ostensibly the recognition and study of social facts. In the wake of recent coverage and controversy over the discipline, the primary defense of sociology I have seen is what I alluded to above—that it is a big, pluralistic discipline producing lots of great work, and so we should not treat as representative the explicit pronouncements of its literal, duly elected representatives. But this attitude cannot sustain sociology through its unsettled times. If the discipline has a center, and that center is in a poor state, then the healthier peripheries will not be spared the institutional consequences. If it doesn’t have a center, then it isn’t a discipline at all, and calls to “liquidate sociology,” as Christian Smith in WSJ provocatively put it, would not amount to an act of destruction so much as the mere recognition of the facts on the ground.

Taking Stock

I do not think we are there. But I do think restoring sociology will require not merely keeping the torch alive through a series of worthy but scattered research agendas, but rather redefining the disciplinary center. A fragmented field whose mainstream runs on the fumes of a public sociology viewed by the public as either hostile, absurd, or irrelevant is not poised to navigate its unsettled times and come out healthy on the other side. Rather, following Swidler’s formula, the moment demands that we revise and articulate a set of central principles and carry them out.

Most visibly, this is an intradisciplinary political project, since it requires the grubby business of running for office, crafting messages, participating in committees, and forming coalitions. But more fundamentally, it is an intellectual one, since a healthy sociology must possess the rigorous and distinctive theories, methods, and practices to be able to formulate interesting problems about society and then make real progress toward solving them. To revitalize the center, we must have some idea of what the substance of that center might look like.

Which brings me back to Ashley Rubin’s report and the sociology of sociology. Because the sort of reform effort that can guide us back to settledness—of the fruitful, not the complacent, sort!—requires an assessment of where we are, what we have, and what a plurality of this fractious discipline can commit to and the rest can live with. Such an assessment is a formidable undertaking in its own right. The hope is that the Vanderbilt report will serve not merely to deliver a verdict but to light a path.

I have a confession to make—I don’t particularly like using the term “viewpoint diversity.”

I do it anyway, because it is the most recognizable term describing a set of arguments that I think are crucial to the cause of higher education reform. My objection is that it sounds too much like a benign buzzphrase to bear the weight of a position that is complex, sometimes radical, and subject to some thorny internal tensions that require sustained attention. This may well be strategic on the part of that position’s advocates—after all, who wants to take a stand against viewpoint diversity?1—but it is not quite conducive to grappling with the principle’s full meanings and implications.

How did this term come to dominate our discourse anyway? Its precise origins are obscure—by which I mean I asked Claude (the high-effort model!) and did not receive an immediate, decisive answer. But quite plausibly, it derives from the First Amendment doctrine of viewpoint neutrality.2 Under this principle, courts have ruled that when it comes to free expression, the government cannot put its thumb on the scale for one party over another. If Black Lives Matter activists get to hold demonstrations, white nationalists get to do the same.3 To disallow expression of one set of views where others are allowed would amount to viewpoint discrimination, which courts have held impermissible. This principle is basically Millian in the sense described in my previous post—the point is to maintain a wide-open public square where any and all views can be expressed and contested. The oppressed always still have a voice. Truth and righteousness can survive and eventually triumph even when circumstances or public opinion are arrayed against them.

Under this principle, the courts never had to fully resolve the question of what constitutes a viewpoint. Insofar as they have addressed the question, this has been ad hoc, piecemeal, and reactive, because courts are fundamentally reactive institutions. In legal deliberations, viewpoint neutrality has been maintained as a primarily negative doctrine.

But for reasons I elaborated last time, this model doesn’t work in the case of academic scholarship, because the expressive environment is not and cannot be open in this way. Though it does apply formally on the campus commons at public universities, and can be partially applied as a norm in the classroom as well, scholarship involves a fundamentally different set of considerations. Avenues of legitimated expression are scarce and heavily gatekept. The range of expressed views must be curated. We require some criteria of exclusion and inclusion, that is, discrimination, making prohibitions on “viewpoint discrimination” without some elaboration incoherent. Efforts to equate lack of viewpoint discrimination with viewpoint diversity when it comes to faculty composition are rhetorically compelling but logically untenable. Viewpoint diversity in the context of the professoriate thus requires a positive account, which forces us to confront the central question the First Amendment doctrine was largely able to sidestep, namely: What exactly is a viewpoint?

We may approach the question functionally. Recall that from an epistemic perspective, the benefit of viewpoint diversity is that it improves inquiry by allowing us to address problems from a range of perspectives. It lets us maximize the range of evidence and arguments brought to a problem, test rivals against one another, and achieve some synthesis that produces the most effective and comprehensive solution. Whatever we mean by “viewpoint” must be understood in relation to its contribution to that process.

A further practical consideration is that viewpoint diversity is typically (though not always) discussed in relation to people, whether in terms of hiring, hosting speakers, or seeking stakeholder feedback. As generally understood, “diverse viewpoints” equates to “people with diverse viewpoints.” This discussion will proceed on that assumption, though I recognize alternatives are available.

In what follows, I will offer some preliminary thoughts on what might constitute a “viewpoint” so understood. I will first lay out some properties a viewpoint must have, and then discuss some accounts from philosophy and social science that might give us some conceptual leverage on what a viewpoint actually entails.

What isn’t a Viewpoint?

Let me start by ruling out a couple common candidates. Two things a viewpoint cannot mean:

1. A straightforward, falsifiable empirical claim

   1. In order to contribute to inquiry, a viewpoint must mean something more than a simple, testable claim. First, so understood, a viewpoint would be too narrow to contribute to anything other than a highly restricted range of inquiry. Second, if the claim is tested and falsified, its contribution is spent. Surely, this cannot be the sort of thing viewpoint diversity advocates have in mind. This sounds obvious enough, but the fact that flat-earthers are always brought up in these conversations indicates that it must be stated explicitly, since “The earth is flat” is exactly this—a straightforward, falsifiable claim (that has, in fact, been falsified).4

2. A fixed theory, doctrine, or argument

   1. This one is less obvious, and the operative term here is “fixed.” A claim of this kind might extend beyond a narrow, falsifiable claim to a generalizable rule, such as “Markets function best when they are unregulated,” or “Gender roles are fundamentally oppressive.” These arguments are broader than the kind of specific claim described above, and if engaged, might contribute some real value to inquiry. When puzzling over problems that touch on markets or gender roles, we benefit from taking them seriously. Held dogmatically, however, they will be unable to generate novel understandings on new problems, or even new variants of the old ones. Doctrines of this kind are immune to creativity or adaptability. This does not necessarily make them useless—after all, sometimes we can find the solution we’re looking for by consulting the existing rulebook. But their benefits could be reproduced via a reading list, or perhaps a chatbot.

Many discussions of viewpoint diversity, especially among opponents but even some advocates, appear to assume one of the two versions above. But neither is sufficient to justify viewpoint diversity as a consideration in personnel decisions.

Properties of a Viewpoint

What, then, must a viewpoint entail in order to provide the sorts of epistemic benefits promised by viewpoint diversity’s advocates? Let me offer a few criteria.

Problem Relevance

A viewpoint can only be beneficial in relation to a problem or domain of inquiry. One reason discussion of political diversity is largely focused on the social sciences and humanities is because it is assumed that one’s politics have no relevance for astrophysics or marine biology. Contra last essay’s quip, we do not typically consider one’s orientation toward Irish nationalism, or history of nu metal fandom, because there is no plausible pathway by which these might influence most areas of academic inquiry for either good or ill. A viewpoint only matters to the extent that it offers a perspective on something.

This sounds obvious, but it carries some nontrivial implications. If viewpoints only matter with respect to problems, then the space of valuable viewpoints is determined by the problem. That space is finite, even if we cannot know a priori what its precise boundaries are. Someone may have all manner of fascinating life experiences or intellectual interests that give them a tremendous range of wise and deeply considered views. They might be The Most Interesting Man in the World. But if their rich perspective has nothing to do with our problem, they cannot be said to offer a beneficial viewpoint.

A further implication is that just as some perspectives held by actual people do not count as beneficial viewpoints, there exist latent beneficial viewpoints held by no actual people. The range of perspectives that could potentially be helpful for our problem exists independently of the actual range of available perspectives. Blind spots exist where there is a potentially beneficial viewpoint but nobody holding it.

To apply my favorite epistemological analogy of the blind men and the elephant, it would be helpful to have someone investigating and reporting on the ear. If nobody is manning the ear, that represents a gap in our knowledge that will make it more difficult to correctly identify the elephant. In contrast, somebody investigating a tree trunk or fan palm a few feet away has nothing to contribute to our knowledge of the elephant.5

Of course, determining problem-relevance can be formidable in its own right. Given that we are discussing viewpoint diversity in the context of academia, the problems we engage (society in sociology, the mind in psychology, politics in political science, etc.) can seem unhelpfully broad. Taken in basic form, virtually any perspective could be plausibly argued to shed light on them. In actuality, we must conceptualize the problems more narrowly in order to make them somewhat tractable. But then, the conceptualization of the problems can be quite as contested as the proposed solutions to them, meaning we must consider relevant viewpoints as they pertain not only to the problem but the meta-problem. This issue is beyond the scope of what I address here, but warrants acknowledgment nonetheless.

Generativity

By definition, if we have a problem, we don’t already know the answer to it. Furthermore, the sorts of problems academics engage are complex, “wicked” problems that are embedded in systems of interacting forces which change over time.6 A valuable viewpoint, in addition to being problem-relevant, must also be able to adapt—to new manifestations of the problem, to new evidence or arguments, to feedback from the other viewpoints, or to changing circumstances. This is the property that rules out simple hypotheses or more fixed theories and doctrines. A hypothesis might, through being either supported or refuted, enhance our understanding of the problem, but cannot be generative in the sense I mean here. A theory or doctrine may go further than this by providing valuable inputs to the problem, but does not become generative unless it can be applied or adapted in unanticipated ways. A valuable viewpoint must be able to not only engage a problem, but do so creatively.

Dispositional

A valuable viewpoint must entail some distinctive, prereflexive inclination to direct attention to certain aspects of a problem, to detect and address particular anomalies, or conceptualize solutions that do not occur to others. It further requires a degree of motivation to engage the problem in a particular way. Even when dealing with preexisting arguments, some effort and inclination is required to consider that argument, follow it out to its conclusions, determine its application to a particular problem, and advocate for that application.7 Notably, features of inclination, attention, effort, and motivation are those characteristic of human beings. Thus, a valuable viewpoint requires human embodiment in order to yield the benefits envisioned by viewpoint diversity advocates.

Taking these qualities together, we can understand a viewpoint as a problem-relevant, generative disposition. Optimal viewpoint diversity occurs when a group of actors collaborating to solve a problem inhabits as much space as possible within the range of valuable viewpoints, though without falling outside that range which would be inefficient and potentially disruptive.

Dispositions of Inquiry

As much as I wish I could take credit for this brilliant insight, the importance of fostering the right sorts of dispositions for solving difficult problems has been recognized by many other thinkers. Aristotle, for one, seems to have preempted me. The prospect of applying a diversity of such dispositions to a problem is of somewhat more recent provenance, but has nonetheless been pursued in a number of iterations, as Musa al-Gharbi has shown.

So what form might these problem-relevant generative dispositions take? What do they look like and where do they come from? Though typically not theorized in the context of viewpoint diversity or its cognates, a number of thinkers from a range of disciplines have elaborated something like what I have in mind. In what remains of this post, I will offer a few accounts that have helped me, at least, think through these issues. Some are more immediately applicable than others, and they are more or less well-developed (as is my knowledge of them). Some of them have genuinely distinctive features, while others may seem like different ways of saying the same thing. The list is by no means exhaustive, and readers may well know of other works or concepts I have excluded. I will further not attempt any general evaluation or synthesis here. My intention is simply to offer a menu that may give a variety of readers some point of entry into how we might understand viewpoint diversity on a dispositional account.

Dispositions as Mediating Assumptions

Background Assumptions (Helen Longino)

Longino offers an authoritative philosophy-of-science account of the need for viewpoint diversity, particularly in her book Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Her argument depends on the principle of the underdetermination of theory by evidence. Between any given body of particular evidence and a general conclusion, there lies a gap, a necessary leap, a link that has to be drawn by some other source. That source is what Longino describes as a “background assumption,” that is, some preconceived notion of how the world has to work in order for a conclusion to follow from a set of evidence.

To take a basic example, suppose we identify a disparity in suspension rates between white and black students. Some will look at that fact and assume some manner of discrimination, while others assume a racial disparity in suspension-worthy behaviors. The conclusion requires an assumption. Of course, we can collect more evidence which may lend more support to one conclusion or another, and thus make some real progress on the puzzle. But further evidence can only constrain the range of available conclusions, never make them logically necessary. Furthermore, any provisional conclusion only opens up more questions, which require more evidence, which requires further assumption-based leaps to conclusions. We never get to a point where evidence decisively determines an ultimate conclusion.

When all inquirers share the same background assumptions, they land on conclusions they treat as more settled than they really ought to be, because they mistake a conclusion partly rooted in their assumptions for one simply determined by the evidence. This creates a potentially distorting blind spot. The corrective to such potential distortions is none other than viewpoint diversity—communities of inquirers must possess a range of background assumptions to provide different perspectives on a problem, while also holding shared standards that allow for at least provisional consensus around intersubjectively strengthened conclusions.

Longino’s account has been highly influential for me personally, but shares something in common with Wittgenstein’s hinge propositions.8

Ideology as a Relativized A Priori

A further account I have found helpful from Vaccarino Bremner and de Canson theorizes ideology as a relativized a priori, that is, some mode of sense-making that shapes how we understand problems at the moment of encounter. Ideology on this understanding is relatively stable, but it is not fixed. It is shaped by new inputs, but only gradually and in the background, so that it is determinative moment-to-moment even as it evolves through experience.

To take a simple example, suppose we read Huckleberry Finn at age 16, and then again at 36. On the first reading, what stands out to us might be, first and foremost, shock at the racial injustice and amusement at the narration, language, and comical characters. On revisiting in adulthood, having acquired a perspective shaped by both considerable life experience and formal education, we might instead attend to the unexpected profundity of Huck’s reflections on human nature and moral conflict. In both cases, our experience of the book is shaped by what we bring to it, which was at least provisionally “set” before we cracked it open, but what we bring to it is quite different between the time points. Of course, we can apply the same principle between two different people as we can to the same person at different time points.

Here, viewpoint diversity would mean having a range of perception-shaping a prioris which are relatively stable but not fixed. One reason I find this account appealing is that it addresses a charge sometimes levied by viewpoint diversity skeptics, namely, that platforming based on their “viewpoint” constrains them to maintaining that viewpoint. There is no reason this should be the case—we can allow that someone’s viewpoint evolves while still retaining its distinctiveness and epistemic value.

A Set of Bayesian Priors

In a similar but more formalized version of the relativized a priori, we could understand a viewpoint as a set of Bayesian priors. The basic idea is that the way we evaluate new information is, and rationally ought to be, constrained by our existing stock of old information. If we encounter a claim that runs counter to our existing beliefs, this means there is either something amiss with the new claim or the old stock, and supposing the old stock is deeply held and extensive, this at minimum offers rational cause to scrutinize the new claim more heavily. The converse holds true as well—a new claim that sits comfortably with the old might be adopted with little or no scrutiny. Bayesian inference allows for the formalization and mathematization of this general principle.

In this case, viewpoint diversity would consist of people bringing different sets of Bayesian priors to a problem. Encountering the same evidence, they will find different explanations more or less probable, and will disagree about what that evidence would look like if one or another explanation were true. This leads them to develop and pursue different lines of inquiry, ultimately producing more complete scrutiny and a more comprehensive set of explanations pertaining to the problem.9

Dispositions as Pre-Reflective Processing

Tacit Knowledge (Michael Polanyi)

Across several works (e.g., Personal Knowledge; The Tacit Dimension), philosopher Michael Polanyi argued for the centrality of tacit, embodied knowledge in carrying out both routine and complex tasks. A straightforward example of this is driving a car—once we have done it enough, it becomes second nature, to the point we can safely navigate traffic and even accidentally drive to familiar locations other than our intended destination because we were so lost in thought on some matter besides the road. Yet adults who have fully mastered the skill of operating a vehicle struggle to communicate the relevant principles to their novice teenage children, not (necessarily) due to the latter’s incompetence, but rather the difficulty of articulating the nature of the skill. In Polanyi’s oft-quoted formulation: “We know more than we can tell.” This principle applies no less to complex, highly skilled activities like laboratory science than mundane physical tasks like driving. Some elements of tacit knowledge never are, and perhaps cannot be, articulated, but only acquired through extensive practice.

On this account, we might think of viewpoints as diverse tacit knowledge bases. Because they require extensive training to acquire and are inarticulable, they can only be provided by the human beings who embody them.

Type I Cognition

This concept is drawn from dual-process models in psychology, whose most popular formulations come from Daniel Kahneman (Thinking Fast and Slow) and Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind) in psychology, and have been further adapted by Stephen Vaisey and Andrew Miles in sociology. These accounts separate cognition into two types. Type I is practical, intuitive, “fast,” “hot,” and motivational, and is argued to guide most of our action most of the time. Because it is cognitively inexpensive, we tend to “offload” as much of our thinking as possible onto it. In contrast, Type II cognition is more “slow” or “cold,” deliberative, and what we think of as “thinking”—the effortful act of puzzling something out, required for non-routine, novel, or difficult situations. Even when engaging in Type II cognition, however, our process is substantially shaped by the Type I intuitions.

The common metaphor applied for dual-process models is that of an elephant and a rider. The elephant is ultimately the one doing the moving and is carried forward largely by momentum. The rider engages in the higher-order operation of steering the elephant and describing what it is doing. The metaphor breaks down partway, however, in that presumably a competent rider has control of its elephant, whereas in many formulations of dual-process models it is really the elephant doing the steering while the rider simply offers a plausible narrative for why the elephant is going in the right direction.

In any case, as Type I cognition contains motivation and directs attention, viewpoint diversity here would refer to a range of Type I characteristics. In contrast, Type II cognition contains the range of reasons or arguments that might, in theory, be accessible to anyone.

So just what are these Type I characteristics? Psychological literature of recent years offers two prominent candidates: Values, and moral foundations.

Values

The psychological study of values has a long pedigree, but the most famous version of it comes from Shalom Schwartz.10 As theorized by Schwartz, values are cognitive components, variable in degree but universal in kind, that shape what sorts of ends we are prone to pursue at a high level of abstraction. As typically operationalized, values are relative, meaning what matters isn’t how much we value an abstract end in a relative sense, but rather how much we value the end relative to other options, since in some cases they are in tension. This system is often presented in “wheel” form.

Moral Foundations

This theory, developed by Jonathan Haidt, similarly posits universal though variable cognitive components shaping our moral evaluations. Rather than referring to ends, however, these capture boundaries, and run along five (or depending on whom you ask, six) dichotomous dimensions: Care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion, and sanctity/degradation.

According to either of these theories, viewpoint diversity might take the form of different profiles of moral sensibilities. As presently constituted, academe possesses a high concentration of the universalism and self-direction values to the exclusion of tradition and security, and care and fairness moral foundations to the exclusion of those pertaining to authority, loyalty, and purity.11

I’ll note that I include these examples because they are well-known and readily applicable to my topic here. During graduate school, they were also quite influential for me personally as they provided a social scientific formulation and set of mechanisms to the questions I most care about. I have soured on them since, however, for a few reasons. First, I am simply skeptical that these psychological components are real entities or that questionnaire research can establish them as such. Second, they are argued to derive from a mix of nurture (the social environment) and nature (genetics). But to the extent that they are socially derived, they are more or less middlemen, and I would rather simply go straight to their social sources (see the next section). To the extent that they are genetic, we would be drawing a line between viewpoint diversity and genetic diversity, and I really don’t want to go there.12 I nonetheless see these theories helpful at least as a stepping stone toward thinking clearly about these issues.

Dispositions as Social Formation

Thus far we have focused on abstract conceptual accounts of how a disposition might work in order to qualify as a viewpoint. But particularly in the case of the social sciences and humanities, we should expect the inputs shaping relevant viewpoints to be social in nature. A viewpoint is something that should be, to a large though not total extent, shaped by complexes of social forces, with its location in social space producing distinctive dispositions with respect to social problems.

Habitus (Pierre Bourdieu)

The figure whose work speaks most directly to this idea is sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and his concept of habitus. Bourdieu argued that our accumulated experiences within our particular social locations in our societies (class, region, religion, neighborhood, etc.) shape our dispositions (habits, tastes, attention, use of language, bodily movements) into a sort of complex he labeled a habitus, which we carry with us across time and place. On the one hand, Bourdieu could be reasonably labeled a sociological reductionist in that he saw habitus as a genuine product of some nexus of social forces and explicitly conceptualized human beings in terms of their location in social space. On the other, he was not a determinist—he believed the habitus was generative, with the complex of dispositions equipping us to act creatively or improvisationally in novel situations, in ways that made it possible for us to ultimately transform our social environments, though not necessarily and not easily.

Bourdieu argued our perceptions were constrained by our habitus, not only due to limitations of knowledge or experience but also our interests, since the claims we advance are not merely propositions about reality but also ways of positioning ourselves advantageously in a social field—including, most relevant to the present topic, the academy. This creates blind spots that can be addressed by developing awareness of how our ideas are shaped by the social environments in which we produce them. That is, to achieve valid understandings about the world, we cannot just naively make claims, but must seek to understand what about our professional environment led us to develop a particular claim. This awareness is best developed socially, by communities of inquirers of diverse habitus.13 As a scholar of humble background who rose through the ranks of France’s intelligentsia, Bourdieu attributed his own insights in part to his oft-times outsider status which allowed him to perceive social dynamics invisible to comfortable insiders.14

Standpoint

The idea of standpoint as derived from feminist and critical epistemology is in some ways a close cousin to that of viewpoints, despite some key differences and an opposite political valence. The key claim in this strand of epistemology is that knowledge is socially situated. The effect of our social (often interpreted to mean demographic) status and identity on our knowledge is not a limitation to be transcended in the pursuit of an illusory view-from-nowhere objectivity, but rather a resource to be harnessed. Our particular place in society offers us access to insights not available to others. In some versions, members of marginalized groups have access to special epistemic privilege as their status makes them more attuned to power dynamics. They may further have the benefit of mastering both the dominant ways of knowing (because operating in society successfully requires it) and that of their own milieu, and are thus in some sense bilingual—though such privilege is argued as something to be achieved rather than simply bestowed based on group membership.

Standpoint epistemology is controversial for a number of reasons—its apparent demographic essentialism, its insistence on understanding knowledge in relation to power, and its accompanying political commitments, among others. The justice of these charges depends both on the critic and the version of standpoint epistemology being criticized, as some are more careful (on both sides) than others.15 The basic idea of knowledge as socially situated, however, seems difficult to dispute, is consistent with other less politicized accounts (e.g., Bourdieu, Robert K. Merton’s insider-outsider distinction), and is readily applicable to viewpoint diversity arguments.

Tradition (Alasdair MacIntyre)

In a very different vein, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that all inquiry must take place within a tradition. On his understanding, a tradition is its own sort of rationality, an established social system with distinctive internal goods and practices, and modes of reasoning oriented around these. A tradition is not fixed in the sense many may assume from the word, but rather creates a bounded space of contestation in which adherents work through the arguments as to the nature of the good and the appropriate means of achieving it. For instance, liberalism is a modern Western tradition whose followers share certain premises (e.g., the moral status of the individual) and extol certain virtues (e.g., tolerance) even as they disagree amongst themselves about what it requires or how it pertains to new problems.

A tradition is, by definition, a social endeavor rather than an individual-level property, but individuals can act as its carriers. Thus, individuals shaped by a tradition may bring its modes of reasoning or insights into environments other than the one where it was acquired. While MacIntyrean traditions famously rely on different types of rationality that might serve as a barrier to mutual engagement, this barrier is not necessarily insurmountable. Rival traditions may encounter similar problems which some may be more successful than others at addressing. In this case, viewpoint diversity would mean the collaboration of people formed in different traditions but facing shared problems.

Indeed, there is a direct connection between MacIntyre’s account and the idea of viewpoint diversity. MacIntyre argued that the purpose of the university, uniquely, was to offer a space for rival traditions to compete with one another (or collaborate, or fuse, or split—traditions can interact in many different ways) over the meaning of truth and its pursuit.16

Conclusion

The above list is decidedly ad hoc, and I do not claim to have done justice to any of its individual entries. My purpose is simply illustrative—to elaborate on my formulation of a viewpoint as a problem-relevant generative disposition by offering some sources to indicate the sort of thing that might be. Some version of this idea has seemingly been recognized by philosophers, scientists, and social theorists alike. We have diverse accounts of how it might operate and where it might come from.

What does all this mean when we descend from the lofty abstractions and return to the case of modern American academia? First, it means that our understanding of viewpoint diversity will be heavily dependent on the way we conceptualize our problems. Since that in itself is a major site of contestation, there is a sense in which we are trying to build the ship while we’re sailing it. Second, it means those best suited to foster optimal viewpoint diversity in a given domain of inquiry are those with enough knowledge of the problem to have a sense of which viewpoints it needs and lacks, but with enough distance from the current community of inquirers to be willing to enact fruitful disruptions. Third, it means fostering viewpoint diversity requires selecting for judgment over achievement where these conflict, since achievement without judgment only serves to perpetuate the distortions that need correction. This process requires its own type of judgment, one that neither citation counts nor party registrations can meaningfully inform.

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I’ve thought about writing something on viewpoint diversity for a little while, and this week’s academic Twitterstorm has provided me the impetus. Atlantic writer Tyler Austin Harper posted a couple threads arguing, more or less, that academia discriminates against certain conservative viewpoints, and that so long as it continues to do this it will not be able to regain the trust of the (particularly conservative) public, thus lending support to the viewpoint diversity cause.

This kicked off a stream of critical responses and condemnations, taking a few forms I list here in descending order of sophistication and ascending order of volume:

1. There is no particular reason to think that political representativeness will aid the higher education sector in performing its social functions of instruction and inquiry, especially in cases where political partisanship and error are correlated.

2. Oh, so you want to grant tenure to flat-earthers.

   1. (This is not so very sophisticated, but it does at least touch on a philosophically valid concern, as I will discuss later.)

3. Academia is actually a very conservative institution in its historical legacy, resistance to change, economic model, etc., so claims of leftward ideological imbalance are absurd.

   1. (This one sounds more sophisticated than 2, but is actually just changing the subject. At least 2 engages the argument, however crudely.)

4. Fascist!

It’s almost enough to make one question whether Twitter is an ideal forum for probing the subtler points of institutional legitimacy or social epistemology.

The thing is, there are actually some very interesting, difficult, and pressing conversations to be had about the principle of viewpoint diversity in higher education, and this is the right moment to be having them. For my part, I’ve been beating the viewpoint diversity drum for years and basically think that any higher ed reform effort that doesn’t take this principle seriously is, well, unserious. It isn’t everything—and indeed, for reasons I will elaborate, it isn’t enough. But it is indispensable if we hope to sustain the university system in anything like its present form.1

So what exactly is this principle whose benign, even banal, appellation stirs up so many animated boos and cheers, hopes and fears?

Viewpoint Diversity: Truth Forged in the Fires of Contestation

The principle of viewpoint diversity comes in many versions, helpfully linked in a recent post from Ashley Rubin (about whom more below). But they share a common lineage in the second chapter of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty, which remains unsurpassed in its clarity and rhetorical force. Strictly speaking, his argument is against censorship, but this is justified by the epistemic benefits yielded by the expression of a wide range of views.

On Mill’s telling, the best way to pursue truth is to establish a deliberative environment that facilitates a full hearing for as many views as possible, rendered in their strongest possible form. Mill is adamant that this applies even to views we consider obviously erroneous or offensive. One reason for this is Mill’s central principle of fallibilism—we might be wrong even on matters we view as settled in our own minds or within our own societies. By maintaining free expression, we preserve the possibility that our errors might be exposed and corrected by others when we are unable to correct them ourselves.

But even genuine falsities produce some epistemic gain. For in the process of crafting arguments against them, we will come to better understand why they are false, and so enhance our own understanding of the truth. By taking the trouble to refute flat-earthers, for instance, we may learn something new about astronomy. Through the process of argumentation, we come to hold our correct beliefs at the level of informed conviction rather than habit or dogma, so that even the expression of pure falsehood can serve the cause of truth by placing it on firmer ground.

Of course, in most cases we will not be wholly in the right, nor our opponents wholly in the wrong. In these instances, the benefits of viewpoint diversity (not Mill’s term, to be clear) are that our partial errors are corrected, and our partial truths made more whole. On matters of scope and complexity, where different sides of an issue contain different parts of the truth, only through their free and robust expression can we achieve a more complete and accurate synthesis. It is through this clash of views, any and all views, sincerely held and expertly argued, that we individually and collectively arrive at truths about the world that otherwise would have eluded us, hobbled as we are by prejudice, laziness, self-interest, or social conformity.

When it comes to sound processes of inquiry, then, there really is no substitute for viewpoint diversity. The fundamental affliction of fallibility places a ceiling on our ability to self-correct. Some errors can only be exposed by others, and this can only happen in an environment where they are willing and able to issue the challenge, and we are obliged to accept it. And vice versa.

Mill’s statement is far more powerful than my summary of it here, and well worth reading even if you think you already know the basic argument. Practically every other sentence is a mic drop. Its logic is simple, elegant, and if you accept the deliberative environment it presupposes, seemingly incontrovertible. As we will see, however, a lot rides on that “if.”

For now, it will suffice to note that the applicability of Mill’s argument to academia appears obvious. As the university is the closest thing we have to a community of pure inquiry, Mill’s account bears directly on the sector’s ability to adequately carry out its social function. Academics, being human, are fully susceptible to the blind spots and biases Mill warns against. In cases where academics are homogenous on trait X, and this inclines them toward a delimited perspective on question Y, they will be substantially handicapped in how well they can answer question Y. Since the trait X of political ideology informs perspectives on a great many question Y’s of acute social concern, the shared academic blind spot is a broad and consequential one. Greater viewpoint diversity, if achieved, would thus be expected to yield rapid and tremendous epistemic benefits, enhancing our valid understanding of an expansive range of social phenomena.

But that’s not all! Tyler’s Twitter threads were less focused on epistemology than on the fractured relationship between the (conservative) public and the (progressive) academy. A more ideologically diverse higher education sector that conservatives did not experience as broadly antagonistic might be able to recover greater social trust and legitimacy, and thus continue to enjoy public support for the task of inquiry—which, as we have seen, would be carried out far more effectively by operating according to Millian ideals.

As presented here, then, at least with respect to the ideological dimension of higher education’s crisis, viewpoint diversity would be a veritable silver bullet, a panacea, a cure for all our ills.

Why, then, do I withhold the third cheer? In short, because Mill’s account does not transfer to academia quite so neatly as it initially appears. Before I get to that, however, I want to spend a little more time defending viewpoint diversity against some of its friendliest and most sensible critics.

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The Worst Higher Ed Reform Except for All the Others?

In a post from a couple weeks ago, University of Hawai’i sociologist, Vanderbilt report co-author, and Substacker Ashley Rubin argued against viewpoint diversity as a target for higher education reform. Though she is clearly favorable to the general principle, she nonetheless rejects the idea that it should be a point of intervention. I do not attribute her specific arguments to any of the report’s other authors, but it is notable that both in the report itself and in follow-up commentary, others have downplayed if not disparaged concerns over ideological imbalance per se (as opposed to ideological scholarship specifically) as part of the problem. In this sense, Ashley’s arguments may be indicative of one general orientation toward higher ed reform.

Actually, I agree with most of her points individually. I just don’t see them as sufficient reasons to give up on viewpoint diversity interventions.

One of Ashley’s objections is that viewpoint diversity might weigh down efforts at academic reform because it is right-coded and that scares some people off. But any proposed solution to—or even recognition of—the problem of progressive ideological distortion in scholarship is going to be right-coded, because people who don’t want reform are going to code it that way. I don’t see this as a reason not to pursue a reform if it can stand on the merits. Another objection is that viewpoint diversity is invoked by too many people for too many purposes, thus watering the principle down to the point that it can’t accomplish anything. But the solution to that seems to be to articulate clearly what it is and what it is for, not abandon it altogether.

So I want to focus most closely on what strikes me as the most fundamental point of disagreement. Ashley argues that viewpoint diversity is a means, not an end. It is about procedure, not outcome, and procedures can be performatively gamed to meet metrics and satisfy stakeholders without effecting real change. Emphasis on viewpoint diversity lends itself to symbolic compliance with no real enforcement mechanism that would actually solve our problems. Administrators might hire a couple token conservatives, hold a couple high-profile debates, wait for the political winds to change, and then call it a day. Meanwhile, scholarly output will carry on with all the same shortcomings.

Her solution is to skip past the intermediate and gameable step of viewpoint diversity and intervene directly on the desired outcome of better scholarship. Why splash around upstream when we can swim straight down to where the action is? Why spend our time tinkering with the epistemic environment, and navigating all the resistance this generates, when we can just raise the damn standards?

I would answer this in a couple ways. First, I would argue that the pursuit of real, substantial viewpoint diversity is a more direct and durable means to the end of better scholarship than the alternatives, for reasons Mill articulated. The clash of committed yet contrasting views is an efficient mechanism for identifying and correcting errors, testing claims, and sharpening insights. Insofar as communal blind spots are the problem, viewpoint diversity is a necessary corrective since abstract commitments to objectivity and rigor do not reveal blind spots in themselves. Insofar as viewpoint diversity interventions shape the long-term composition of personnel, and personnel is policy, this approach has the potential for more lasting benefits. I would also question how much the means-ends distinction holds up in practice, as Ashley’s preferred solutions could also be described as procedural, are ultimately means to ends, and could be gamed or carried out performatively.2

Ultimately, I think Mill’s logic survives this set of objections. These are reasons why viewpoint diversity interventions are challenging, but many of these reasons also apply to other methods. They do not undermine the tremendous epistemic benefits viewpoint diversity might yield, some of which are not replicated by other approaches. So to my mind, as an antidote to ideological scholarship, viewpoint diversity remains an indispensable principle and viable target.

There is a deeper problem in Ashley’s exhortation to higher standards, however, and it is fundamental—and not particular to her. We must first ask: What exactly are the standards? To answer that, we must ask the higher-order question: What is academic scholarship actually for? Just what is this end toward which we are seeking the best means, and from which standards would be derived? Until we have planted a flag somewhere in that highly contested territory, talk of raised standards is not very meaningful. But of course, this isn’t some routine administrative matter to move past to get to the real business—it is the crux of the whole conflict over higher education.

Unfortunately, the viewpoint diversity principle doesn’t have an answer to this problem either. And that is why I can only give it two cheers.

Is Academia a Millian Marketplace of Ideas?

John Stuart Mill never used the phrase “marketplace of ideas.” That is Oliver Wendell Holmes’ gloss. But one can see the logic of the analogy. If only we remove both formal and social constraints on the expression of ideas, any and all ideas, and allow them to be fully unleashed and pitted against each other, then the strongest, truest, most comprehensive claims should emerge victorious, just as a free market should optimize for the highest quality goods at the lowest price. Mill’s explicit prescription is essentially negative and laissez faire—by removing superfluous barriers to open deliberation, sound inquiry will be optimized.

Yet the benefits promised by his model seem to require something more than the absence of censorship. First, he assumes a deliberative environment in which competing views can be fully expressed and considered by relevant parties, and judged according to shared standards of logic and evidence. Second, he calls for views to be expressed by those who sincerely hold them, as those who entertain them provisionally will fail to do them justice. Third, views must be defended with “equal talent and energy.” After all, we would hardly expect a court trial in which a top-tier law firm endowed with unlimited resources faced off against an overworked public defender to be fairly adjudicated.

In short, though what Mill calls for is the negative measure of unrestricted inquiry, what his model requires is something more like platforming. In the context of academia, we might distinguish between platforms for people and for ideas. For people, they begin with spots in graduate training programs and run through postdocs and professorships through which participants acquire the standing and professional positions from which to advance their views. For ideas, platforms consist of fora such as academic journals, university presses, or conference panel sessions.

One key characteristic of academic platforms is that they are subject to scarcity. There are only so many graduate programs, postdocs, faculty positions, or spots in good journals to go around. This scarcity necessarily excludes many prospective entrants, meaning academic discourse immediately lacks the openness, the negative condition, which was the starting place of Mill’s system. From this, it follows that there must be criteria of inclusion and exclusion. Suppose we start from criteria of hard exclusion, delineating some set of people and ideas that cannot be allowed to express views we have predetermined are beyond the pale. These are our flat-earthers and Holocaust deniers. While such a boundary is unavoidable, it represents a further departure from Mill’s system, as he insisted such views require a hearing and their a priori exclusion is poor epistemic practice. However justified it may appear, with the act of exclusion we open up space for our fallibility to operate.

This is where the flat-earther gambit operates as both a straw man and a real pressure point. It is a straw man because literally nobody is suggesting we might need to grant tenure to flat-earthers. It is a real pressure point because it recognizes the need for a boundary that falls afoul of Millian viewpoint diversity in its pure form. Once we have conceded that there is a boundary, we have recognized a site of legitimate contestation over whether conservatives, or Marxists, or anarchists, or prison abolitionists, or anybody else should be denied the comfort of viewpoint diversity’s warm embrace. Minimalists might say we should only deny those espousing views which, according to expert consensus, are demonstrably, empirically false. Others might add, but what about people who are hateful? And now we have embarked on a boundary dispute that the principle of viewpoint diversity, having already been acknowledged as limited, cannot resolve.

Perhaps rather than focusing on hard exclusion criteria, it is more helpful to shift our focus to inclusion. To whom do we want to grant access to our limited academic platforms? What is the desirable mix of views, and within what range? But to render these judgments, we need some clear idea of our end, some object of inquiry governing the process of curation. We must know just what we want to accomplish before we can determine the appropriate blend of viewpoints we think can deliver. On this matter, the principle of viewpoint diversity in itself doesn’t offer much guidance. It isn’t meaningless, because given an orienting end, we really do need a range of views within appropriate boundaries that can challenge, test, and supplement each other’s perspectives. We want a group of inquirers sufficiently diverse to triangulate toward the object of inquiry, bringing a maximal range of evidence and argument to the task. Locally, Mill’s system still applies. What viewpoint diversity cannot provide us is the orienting, substantive vision that allows us to set the boundaries.

Applied to the problem of higher education reform, then, viewpoint diversity remains relevant and even necessary, but it does not retain the simple, elegant incontrovertibility it appears to possess in the pages of On Liberty. Viewpoint diversity can only be made efficacious as a means if it is attached to an end. The trouble is, again, the end is the whole crux of the conflict. Until we have made some progress on that fight, viewpoint diversity and raised standards alike read as empty slogans.

Why Ideological Diversity?

So I’ve conceded that true, open-ended Millian viewpoint diversity doesn’t really work in higher education. Viewpoint diversity in this context only makes sense if it is hitched to some substantive guiding principle shaping the inclusion and exclusion criteria that we cannot do without. If all we wanted was more diversity of viewpoints per se—and giving the flat-earthers a break for a moment—why not Trotskyists, or Irish nationalists, or Southerners, or devotees of 19th century romanticist literature, or people who were really into nu-metal in their teens and feel a little sheepish about it now? In practice, our calls for viewpoint diversity are not neutral because neutral is not a real place. Or to be more precise, neutrality only makes sense with respect to some shared reference point, and that is just what we don’t have. By emphasizing ideological viewpoint diversity, we smuggle in an unstated premise, and critics are justified in calling this out.

It’s time we circled back around to the most sophisticated objection to Tyler’s threads, namely, why would political representativeness in academia matter for the core activities of scholarship and instruction? And matter enough that we should care about it more than other things, enough that we should want to do something about it? Even if we accept the value of viewpoint diversity as a principle, why should it be oriented around the American left-to-right ideological spectrum? Let me offer some reasons and then issue some hedges.

First, because political ideology is what we’re talking about anyway. The reason we’re having these conversations is because of the large body of research showing massive political skew among the professoriate, syllabi that only cover one side of contentious debates, and scholarship that subordinates truth-seeking to left-wing political causes. If lopsided politicization is the problem, then greater political balance seems like a natural solution. The prescription should be matched to the diagnosis.

Second, because especially in our polarized times, political ideology is a proxy for all sorts of things—issue opinions, social characteristics and backgrounds, life experiences—that are epistemically relevant for all sorts of questions. Valuation of freedom vs. order, religion vs. secularism, localism vs. globalism, tradition vs. modernism, rural vs. urban living, and so on—conservative vs. liberal touches on all of them. With respect to achieving fruitful viewpoint diversity, emphasis on the ideological spectrum gives us a lot of bang for our buck, so to speak.

Third, following up on the second point, since partisanship is so all-encompassing and socially salient, it encapsulates many of the issues that we most care about and want to understand. Immigration, abortion, religion, national identity, gender roles, poverty, not to mention political partisanship itself—all of these are matters over which liberals and conservatives are acutely interested yet divided. It’s not a good thing if the issues we care about the most are those whose study is subject to the greatest epistemic liability.

Speculatively, we could go beyond this and suppose the points of division aren’t merely on the issues of the day, but the perennial issues facing modern societies, over which we need all the leverage we can get. If you’ll permit me one of my favorite Mill quotes:

“Unless opinions favourable to democracy and to aristocracy, to property and to equality, to co-operation and to competition, to luxury and to abstinence, to sociality and individuality, to liberty and discipline, and all the other standing antagonisms of practical life, are expressed with equal freedom, and enforced and defended with equal talent and energy, there is no chance of both elements obtaining their due[…]. Truth, in the great practical concerns of life, is so much a question of the reconciling and combining of opposites, […] and it has to be made by the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners” (pps. 88–89).

This passage has aged rather well, I think. Over a century later and across the pond, Mill’s antagonisms still carry some recognizable partisan dimension.

Fourth and finally, a purely political consideration at the heart of Tyler’s threads: higher education is facing a politically lopsided trust crisis, and an academy that ceased to be a progressive sectarian institution might help out with that. This case isn’t epistemic at all, and taken on its own, could actually be used to justify granting tenure to subpar scholars with recognizably erroneous views. And so I wouldn’t want to take it on its own. But it is a real, unavoidable consideration with acute practical consequences all the same.

So if what we’re really arguing for is ideological viewpoint diversity, we should be willing to acknowledge we are operating from a substantive principle, not some imaginary ground of pure procedural neutrality. But there is a strong argument to be made for that principle.

Now for the hedging. It bears constant repeating, in a “taps the sign” sort of way, that so far as I am aware, nobody issuing calls for viewpoint diversity is advocating for explicit political litmus tests, D:R quotas, or anything of the sort. Conservatism, as I have written elsewhere, is a proxy for substantive interests, ideas, or arguments we think would most improve the academy’s environment of inquiry. Whatever we mean by “conservative” in real academic contexts must fully translate into actual academic activities that live up to academic standards (insofar as we know what these are and they aren’t themselves compromised—I know I’m stealing a base here).

OK, so what does that look like in practice? There is no one-size-fits-all answer to this, and this is where it becomes difficult to have higher ed reform conversations at the 30,000-foot view. Precisely what viewpoint diversity requires, even if we accept ideological diversity as a guiding principle, will vary tremendously by area of inquiry. Depending on the nature of any given field, it might not make sense to use terms like “conservative” at all, or if we do, they would have a very context-specific meaning—interested in military history, or the ongoing vitality of white evangelicalism, or theories of social order rather than oppression, or what have you. At the ground level, the practices and conversations around hiring and scholarly activity may well not have any explicit hue of partisan politics at all, even if they should result in greater partisan balance in the aggregate.

Clearly there are a lot of difficult questions here about both what we want to achieve and how we should go about it. Appeals to viewpoint diversity cannot answer those questions—at least not all of them, and not without some assistance from other sources. Still I maintain that though viewpoint diversity is not a sufficient principle for guiding higher ed reform, it is necessary, and furthermore, it is non-trivial. It isn’t something we can expect to arise spontaneously or sustain itself naturally, and reform efforts that do not take it seriously will be less effective and more fragile. The conceptual and practical challenges it presents are formidable, but they are worth the struggle.

In my previous post, I argued that trying to combat toxic polarization in general by entering the fray on behalf of one side is a dead end. Efforts to transcend partisanship through partisan means are self-undermining and counterproductive. In this essay, I apply this general principle to the particular case of Trump-era resistance liberalism. To start, however, let me elucidate the principle via another thought experiment.

The Illiberal Defense of Liberalism

Suppose a nation is preparing for a major election between its two main political parties, Fuchsia and Cyan. Each party is internally divided into Liberals and Illiberals. Liberals are those who seek to preserve free speech, political rights, and general reasonableness, even for opposing partisans. Illiberals would prefer to strip their opponents of free speech and political rights, and don’t much care to be reasonable about it. The parties’ internal divisions are almost even, but not quite. Fuchsia consists of 55% Liberals and 45% Illiberals, whereas Cyan is 45% Liberal and 55% Illiberal. In the case of victory, either party will operate with total unanimity, meaning Fuchsia would offer Liberal, and Cyan Illiberal, governance. The election is expected to be close. Any intervention could be decisive.

Within this nation is an organization entitled the Defenders of Liberalism (DoL). For nearly a century, they have devoted themselves with impressive single-mindedness and integrity to their titular cause, advocating tirelessly and consistently for free speech, political rights, and general reasonableness. One of their primary functions is to create voter guides for every election contest, assigning a Liberalism score of between 0 and 100 to every candidate along with a profile explaining the rating. These guides are well-respected and influential among the group’s Liberal adherents and serve as the chief means by which DoL influences political outcomes.

Alarmed by the electoral situation, DoL considers what measures will best serve to avert what could be looming disaster. A Cyan victory would represent a devastating setback for their cause. They thus determine that Fuchsia must win at all costs. Given that the voter guides and associated Liberal endorsements are their primary weapon, the most effective strategy appears straightforward—they must endorse all Fuchsia candidates as highly Liberal, and denounce all Cyan candidates as highly Illiberal, regardless of those candidates’ actual stances.

Of course, this also means they have to write corresponding candidate descriptions in which they explain why Liberal Cyan candidates are actually Illiberal, Illiberal Fuchsia candidates are actually Liberal, etc. Since outright fabrication of facts would be discrediting, they opt instead to engage in the selective reporting and tortured reasoning necessary to maintain their distortions.

DoL’s followers respond to its hard-nosed tactics in various ways. One group consists of both principled Liberals and relatively high-information voters who mostly rely on DoL guides for supplement or confirmation. They quickly pick up on DoL’s strategy, determine somewhat ruefully that the organization has converted to pure partisanship, and cease to regard its communications. A second group is high-principle but low-information, and thus accepts DoL’s claims at face value and votes accordingly. By the next election, however, this second group picks up on DoL’s compromise and similarly disregards them, so the tactic can only work for one election.

A third group of followers does not consist of principled Liberals. They are not Illiberal either, but simply don’t have a strong understanding of or appreciation for the distinction at all. They consider themselves Liberals only because their understanding is that Good People are Liberals, and they want to be Good People. They have always fulfilled this identitarian commitment by following the DoL voter guides. In the past, this rendered them functionally indistinguishable from principled Liberal voters since the DoL was itself principled. But for this election it instead converts them into fully committed Fuchsia partisans.

At least for this election, DoL’s strategy can be expected to bear fruit for many, though not all, of its followers. Suppose the intervention is successful, Fuchsia is victorious, and Liberalism reigns for one more election cycle at least.

But at what cost? At minimum, DoL has cashed out nearly a century’s worth of accumulated credibility and alienated a substantial portion of its followers. This severely undermines their ability to speak with the authority necessary to influence future political outcomes.

Other consequences may be rather more serious than this. To this point, DoL has been the leading social authority on what constitutes Liberalism, and many still regard them as such. They cannot simply admit to their subterfuge and return to principled, consistent Liberalism, for this would burn what credibility they still possess, plus the logic of their initial tactic may still apply in upcoming elections. To maintain viability as an organization, they are thus required to maintain continuity with their shift to partisanship moving forward, placing them at odds with the fully principled Liberalism of which they remain the self-proclaimed defenders.

The result is that the very category of Liberalism in public understanding and discourse begins to lose meaning altogether. Discussion of Liberalism is regularly accompanied by both rhetorical obfuscation and pro-Fuchsia partisanship, so that the two become fused in public understanding. Fucshia supporters call themselves Liberal but do not feel bound by the principles this once entailed. Formerly Liberal Cyan partisans cease to identify as such or to advance Liberal arguments, given the label’s growing Fuchsia-istic associations. In the end, though the rhetoric of Liberalism is still regularly tossed around, the principle itself starts to fade altogether. Increasingly, the nation’s politics are dominated by a logic of pure partisanship.

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Mainstream Institutions as Bastions of Resistance

The case of the hypothetical Defenders of Liberalism illustrates the tragedy of Trump-era resistance liberalism. This term can be used to mean different things, so I should clarify that I do not merely mean the phenomenon of political liberals who loathe Donald Trump, see him and his political influence as existentially threatening to the American system, and are eager to make this known through multiple means.

By resistance liberalism, I here mean the narrower phenomenon of elite knowledge workers operating ostensibly non-partisan epistemic institutions who nonetheless engage in anti-Trump partisanship, not on their own time, but rather through their official professional functions. Most prominently, I’m thinking of journalists and academics, whether at the individual or institutional level, who judged that the threat to society posed by Donald Trump and the GOP was so acute that their core professional tasks and guiding principles had to be subordinated to the larger cause of opposing it.

Resistance liberals of this kind were liberal in two senses. Yes, they tended to be left of center, but they also manned the machinery of what Jonathan Rauch, in The Constitution of Knowledge, calls liberal epistemic institutions. Their credibility is derived from commitments to such principles as fallibilism, objectivity, open inquiry, tolerance, professionalism, civility, and institutional disinterestedness. They are thus not only typically partisan liberals, but also the chief representatives of Liberalism in its classical and epistemic manifestation. This afforded them credibility to burn.

The most high-profile instances of this form of resistance liberalism occurred in the world of journalism. The line between the newsroom and the editorial section blurred. Reporting on Trump and his allies increasingly carried framing once confined to the editorial page: his claims were reflexively tagged as made "without evidence," and the Hunter Biden laptop story was dismissed as a "conspiracy theory" or Russian disinformation, only to be authenticated later. Selective fact-checking developed into a small industry. The Washington Post changed its slogan to "Democracy Dies in Darkness." New York Times opinion editor James Bennet was forced out for running an op-ed in which a sitting Republican senator defended a Trump administration policy that polling showed was widely supported, with the very articulation of the argument treated as a threat to staff safety. Principles of objectivity or neutrality gave way to what was termed “moral clarity.” Subscriptions soared even as trust declined.

Here I will focus, however, on resistance liberalism within that other key epistemic institution of academia. Where journalism operates from one news cycle to the next, academia’s form of knowledge production is slower, more theoretical, more insulated from the public, and more heavily gatekept. For all these reasons, it is less visible but more durable, shaping a substructure of knowledge less ephemeral and more seismic. The precise forms of resistance liberalism in academic scholarship overlap with those of journalism in some ways—most prominently, in their emphasis on “moral clarity”—but also carry some distinctive features.

Most of my examples below come from the “Christian nationalism” research literature in sociology and political science simply because that is what I know best, and represents a fairly clean case. But the forms have broader applicability. Indeed, some of their highest-profile expressions can be found in history or philosophy.

Intellectual Forms of Resistance Scholarship

Partisan Propheteering

In the final chapter of their 2022 work The Flag and the Cross: White Christian Nationalism and the Threat to American Democracy, sociologists Philip Gorski and Samuel L. Perry write:

“[T]he political fault lines dividing America grow deeper. They now threaten to tear the country apart. Here, too, white Christian nationalism is working just beneath the surface. [...] There will be another eruption— and soon. Will this one be ‘the big one’? The one that finally topples the centuries- old structures of American democracy? The one that finally dissolves the Union?”

They conclude the book with the lines:

“Whether there will be another American century, and whether that century will be democratic, remains to be seen. Much will depend upon the decisions that individual Americans make in the next few years, and also on the alliances that they forge.

Donald Trump and his most zealous followers have already made their decision: they have rejected America’s experiment in multiracial democracy in favor of white Christian nationalism.

Whether they are successful is up to the rest of us.”

These quotes illustrate one key form of resistance scholarship: an apocalyptic prophetic register applied directly to partisan politics. Works in this vein feature bombastic, moralistic pronouncements that seem better suited to the pulpit than the podium. These are not the sorts of claims that can easily be logically or empirically grounded, and in more normal times they would constitute scholarly norm violations. Researchers would know better than to write them, and if written, reviewers or editors would screen them out prior to publication. In the resistance mode, however, they become commonplace and encouraged.

To be clear, the problem isn’t the prophetic mode of academic writing per se. While not a dominant mode of scholarship, it does constitute a vital tradition running from Karl Marx and Thorstein Veblen through to Robert Bellah and James Davison Hunter.1 But while these figures shouted from the mountaintop, and with a higher degree of restraint and erudition, resistance scholarship issues its exhortations from the middle of the battlefield, and with calls not to higher principles but to arms. It is distinctive in its urgency, its transparent partisan alignment, and its haphazard blending with other approaches to scholarship. It can be found not only in explicitly normative or synthetic commentaries, but even in the discussion sections of otherwise dry quantitative research papers. This may be regarded as the academic version of journalism’s dissolved boundary between news reporting and opinion editorials.

Manichean Lumping

This is really two moves rolled into one. In the Manichean portion, resistance scholarship draws a line through social reality separating good and evil—which, as it happens, maps almost exactly onto American partisan politics. A clean example of this comes from the second page of Nathan Kalmoe and Lilliana Mason’s 2022 book, Radical American Partisanship: Mapping Violent Hostility, Its Causes, and Its Consequences for Democracy, which summarizes the American partisan landscape as follows:

“Republicans increasingly pursue outsized power and benefits for dominant social groups while working to undercut government by the people. The party has been overtaken by those who long for the stricter racial hierarchies of the old white South, who envision a Christian theocracy, and who steer government benefits to the rich, all of which have had national constituencies since the founding. Not coincidentally, many of the Capitol insurrectionists displayed Confederate symbols and Christian iconography, and a surprising number were business owners or white-collar workers.

By contrast, Democrats today are a pluralistic multiracial party increasingly committed to advancing democracy through electoral representation and equal rights and liberties. They are reckoning with and attempting to overcome America’s legacy of oppression by race, sex, religion, and class, among other categories. This is a battle over the future—and the past—of the United States. No wonder, then, that many Americans (though not most) engage in politics with a spirit of violence and not comity or compromise—today’s parties pursue fundamentally incompatible visions for America’s future.”

It would be difficult to craft a purer expression of the asymmetric account of polarization as discussed in the last post.2 This formulation does not make any pretense to the academic virtues of restraint, circumspection, impartiality, nuance, or careful grounding. Where social science, when true to its stated purpose, is oriented toward confronting and seeking to disentangle society’s complexities, this passage dissolves them by fiat, rendering a partisan caricature that might comfortably feature in the campaign literature of the Democratic Party. The difference is that this passage was published by a top-tier academic press.

The lumping portion requires a little more explanation (though only a little). In any kind of theory, conceptualization, or system-building, academics are faced with the tension between lumping and splitting—that is, dividing reality into larger, more capacious or smaller, more fine-grained categories. The tradeoff is between scope and specificity. Take something like the Enlightenment, which Encyclopaedia Britannica dates from 1688 to 1789. On the one hand, this is quite a large lump. Do John Locke and Jeremy Bentham, with all that historically and intellectually separates them, really belong together in the same category? On the other, it can seem arbitrarily restrictive. Is it really fair to exclude someone like John Stuart Mill from the Enlightenment proper? And of course, there are other lines to be drawn around which ideas and thinkers fit, whether there are fundamental distinctions between the English and French versions, etc. The general challenge applies no less to social science than history, and there is no ultimately correct way to make the tradeoff. How much, and where, we choose to lump and split must simply be tailored to the problems we are trying to solve.

A characteristic feature of resistance scholarship is that it leans heavily toward lumping. Indeed, building on the Manicheanism, it effectively posits two lumps, a good one and an evil one, though with the emphasis overwhelmingly placed on the latter. This mode of analysis operates on a kind of “guilt by association” plus “six degrees of Kevin Bacon” principle in which some evil phenomenon is identified, anything plausibly related to that phenomenon (provided it is associated with the political right) is placed into a category with it, and the overall category is defined with respect to its worst contents.3 Ideally, a link can be drawn between some feature of mainstream American conservatism and the Third Reich or the Ku Klux Klan, but January 6 frequently serves as a serviceable and more plausible reference point.

The Flag and the Cross once again serves as a prime example. Throughout the book, interpretive leaps across time and place paint a picture of “white Christian nationalism” recalling the yarn-strewn billboards of A Beautiful Mind. I wrote about this in an essay for The Public Discourse a couple years back, and as I don’t think I can improve on my exposition there, I will simply quote it directly:

“[P]henomena attribute[d] in whole or in part to white Christian nationalism [...] include, non-exhaustively: King Philip’s War, the Ku Klux Klan, vaccine skepticism, the Electoral College, gun culture, American imperialism, American isolationism, libertarianism, judicial originalism, pocket Constitutions, the Tea Party, the Southern ‘Lost Cause’ narrative, the national anthem, premillennial eschatology, Fox News, QAnon, conservative Christian preoccupation with sexual morality, religious freedom advocacy, Catholic integralism, post-apocalyptic fiction, Marvel comics, and John Wayne fandom.”

Analytically, this level of lumping is wholly unsuited to the crafting of a scholarly account capable of doing real explanatory work. It defies the possibility of any serious empirical or theoretical grounding. It can thus only be understood as oriented toward some goal other than scholarly analysis.

Normative Political Theory as Sloganeering

A third form of resistance scholarship involves the use of the terminology of normative political theory for rhetorical use. Social phenomena are identified as (anti-)democratic, (il)liberal, or (anti-)pluralist. These terms are sufficiently thick, contested, and value-laden that they cannot do any analytical work without some sustained attention to their meanings and implications. Yet as applied superficially in resistance scholarship, they serve more as slogans or brand names than theoretical concepts. Indeed, in many cases their usage moves from merely rhetorical to outright perverse.

A striking example of this phenomenon comes from the University of Connecticut’s conveniently titled “Meanings of Democracy Lab,” housed in the department of sociology. The lab’s website features a “Pluralist Resistance Syllabus,” a reading list whose preface runs as follows:

“As our team begins its work to build a comprehensive database of the groups and leaders combatting (White) Christian Nationalism, we have compiled a list of books that are part of this effort. Some of these have been written by groups and leaders engaged in this work. Others are referenced in public discussions about the dangers of WCN for American democracy and Christianity. Finally, others are academic texts that expand our understanding of the history and current nature of WCN in the US.”

Two features of the reading list that follows stand out. First, as promised, it contains a mix of scholarship, polemics, and polemics presenting as scholarship. Some entries are academically serious and worthwhile, while others represent all the worst impulses of activist caricature and invective. Their juxtaposition on the syllabus equalizes their epistemic authority under the academic imprimatur.

Second, they fall broadly on the same side of the issues under contestation, arrayed against politically conservative Christianity and in favor of secularist understandings of American church-state arrangements.4 Debates about the appropriate role of religion in American public life are complex, multi-faceted, and admit of a broad range of perspectives, but anyone treating this reading list as authoritative would arrive at a severely curtailed understanding of those debates. Notably missing are informative or foundational works from Richard John Neuhaus, Christian Smith, Lydia Bean, James Davison Hunter, John Inazu, or Daniel K. Williams that would afford some measure of balance to the presented perspectives. More typical are titles such as The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism and American Crusade: How the Supreme Court is Weaponizing Religious Freedom.

Given these curatorial choices, what should we make of the label of “pluralist resistance”? Pluralism is arguably even thicker and more contested a term than “democracy” or “liberalism,” but it minimally entails a sense of diverse parties sharing a society in spite of deep difference. Its normative formulations point toward a social arrangement in which groups with widely divergent interests, beliefs, or values can nonetheless engage in mutual tolerance toward and political cooperation with one another. Respect for differences, even major and consequential ones, is a basic tenet.

Yet “resistance” implies something very different—mobilizing in order to defeat an opposing party whose differences cannot be tolerated. The center of gravity in the reading list leans far more toward “resistance” than “pluralism.” The latter would require some effort at mutual understanding and charity, but politically conservative Christianity in most of the works listed is primarily featured as a cartoon villain. With few exceptions, the thrust of the listed works is not “How can we live together in peace with those who think differently from us?” but rather “We must mobilize against those who think differently from us to neutralize the threat they pose!” As explicitly stated, the thing being resisted is “white Christian nationalism,” but the practical effect of the syllabus is to generate resistance against pluralism itself—under the pluralist banner.

The Price of Resistance Scholarship

What these forms of resistance scholarship all share, as stated at the outset, is the subordination of intellectual considerations to partisan ends. The proper function of scholarship is to understand, to weigh evidence and carefully craft explanations, refine theories and concepts to enhance their clarity, tackle complexity, bridge logical gaps, correct errors, hedge and caveat and acknowledge uncertainty. Partisan propheteering, Manichean lumping, and political sloganeering are manifestly at odds with these functions. Many resistance academics have shown themselves capable of adhering to scholarly norms in their other work. As they apparently know how to do it, and yet choose not to, it follows that with resistance scholarship they must be trying to do something else.

I won’t attempt anything like a larger sociological theory of resistance liberalism here.5 Rather, let us return to the analogy of the Defenders of Liberalism (DoL) and suppose the logic is what it appears to be on its face, in which resistance scholars determined the threat of Trumpism was so acute and dire that they had to devote themselves to opposing it. What are the consequences of this move?

First of all—did it have the desired effect? As judged by electoral outcomes, we would have to judge it a temporary success but ultimate failure. Trump lost in 2020, but came back in 2024 stronger—winning the popular vote, with a better claim to a mandate, cannier and angrier. Many of the sorts of abuses we were warned about in the first Trump term have come to fruition in the second. Resistance, apparently, was futile.

Second, what was the effect on the resistance scholars themselves, and their institutions? In considering this question, we should note that the forms of resistance scholarship are not exactly subtle or sophisticated. It is not difficult for anyone inclined to skepticism to identify the departure from the scholarly norms and principles that sustain academic authority. To persuade any audience outside the choir, resistance scholars could only lean on the pure institutional credentials of the professorial position and the university press. These could be expected to hold little weight for any opposing partisans, whose respect for the academic imprimatur would be outweighed by resentment at falling victim to Manichean lumping. Neither would this approach convince audiences who, though broadly left-leaning, value the role of scholarship independently of partisanship and know how to tell the difference. Thus, whatever resistance scholars gained by trading on the academy’s institutional credibility came at the price of devaluing the currency. This is not unrelated to the combined trust and political crisis besetting higher education.

Finally, what was the effect on American political culture more broadly? This is where I think the forms of resistance scholarship are the most subtle yet corrosive, especially that of the sloganizing of normative political concepts. The principles of democracy, liberalism, or pluralism are not self-evident or free-floating. They require maintenance and adaptation in order to wield broad moral force as well as provide practical guidance to ever-evolving political challenges. Such maintenance and adaptation are fundamentally scholarly tasks. Academics and intellectuals do not merely adhere to the principles or not, but craft the publicly available and institutionally recognized accounts of those principles. By continuing to invoke them while refusing to respect them, they strip those principles of their higher meanings and convert them into weapons of pure partisanship.6 The effect is not merely to abandon but actively degrade those principles. And if the principles themselves are degraded, those who hope to transcend America’s toxic polarization have nothing toward which to turn an upward gaze.

It turns out that amidst increasingly vicious and all-encompassing partisanship, the need to preserve a sphere in which scholars carry out their distinctive, nonpartisan function becomes more important, not less. Even if resistance liberals are right about the principles being under threat, the imperative is to safeguard the principles themselves, not compromise them in a misguided effort to neutralize the threat. Under adverse circumstances, that task may have less the character of the bishop rendering judgments in the town square, and more that of the monk drawing up documents in the monastery. The contents of those documents should consist not of battle plans, but of blueprints.

Given the way that political polarization defines our era, it’s strange to think that not so long ago, there was a lively debate as to whether or not polarization was even a real phenomenon. And more strangely still, that the skeptics seemed to have the stronger side of it. James Davison Hunter’s groundbreaking Culture Wars of 1991 prompted many to argue based on both quantitative and qualitative analysis there was, in fact, no evidence of any major partisan fracture. Well into the 2000’s, some recognized the phenomenon of partisan sorting, but still rejected the idea that political polarization, or more dramatically, culture war were appropriate appellations of our situation.

The Trump election ended the debate over whether we’re polarized and shifted the conversation toward questions of how and why. The resulting body of research is voluminous and has led to proliferating accounts pointing to a multimodal phenomenon—ideological, affective, epistemic, interpretive, or what have you.

Despite this complexity, in this post I want to discuss a single fundamental divide in how we think about polarization. It could manifest at the level of explicit theory, but is just as likely to occur at the level of sensibility or rhetoric. Should we regard polarization as a symmetric or an asymmetric phenomenon?

Symmetric Polarization

Symmetric accounts emphasize polarization as something afflicting partisans across the spectrum. This is a “something in the water” perspective that points to the way we do politics. We might lament that Republicans and Democrats in Congress don’t work together or make compromises anymore. That partisan discourse has become coarse and vicious. That conservatives and liberals alike restrict their media diet to sources that are all too happy to stoke partisan grievances. That everything has gotten too political these days, so that you can’t even go to church, watch a movie, or turn on the game without being subject to somebody’s political rant. That we’ve forgotten how to disagree constructively, we’re too quick to cast judgments, we only amplify the angriest voices, we treat every election as if it might be the last. People issuing these sorts of laments are operating under a symmetric understanding of polarization.

Academically, theories of political sectarianism or echo chambers have an inherent symmetric emphasis. For that matter, the term “polarization” itself implies some degree of symmetry, as it communicates something about the whole field rather than any particular part of it. From this perspective, what we need to do is figure out how to take the temperature down. This could mean some kind of structural reform to the political or media environment, or could simply mean promoting a set of social norms where we use nicer words, view our opponents more charitably, and try harder to seek out and engage perspectives that challenge us. As Hunter details in his more recent analysis on the culture wars, there is a host of organizations (e.g., More in Common, Better Angels, Truth Over Tribe) dedicated to precisely this project.

Asymmetric Polarization

According to asymmetric accounts, polarization is primarily the fault of a single set of partisans. The reason we can’t have nice things is because one side or the other has decided we can’t have nice things. This may be because they stopped following the norms that previously allowed us to live together in relative harmony, like using nice words, engaging opponents’ arguments, or respecting disagreeable election outcomes. It may be because they are pursuing a social vision so fundamentally radical and offensive that good people have no choice but to oppose it aggressively (though strictly for defensive purposes), whether through dramatic denunciations, hardball political maneuvering, deplatforming, or whatever other measures are required to preserve things good and holy.

The fiercest fighters in the culture wars are implicitly operating according to asymmetric accounts. For those on the right, the threats to America are wokeness, socialism, cultural Marxism, rampant immigration, and other ills coming from or facilitated by the left. At stake is, depending on who you ask, either a sharia law regime or the dystopia of Huxley’s Brave New World. For those on the left, the threat is from the forces of right-wing extremism, fascism, white supremacy, Christian nationalism, far-right populism, and all those who would seek to impose Margaret Atwood’s Republic of Gilead.

On the asymmetric perspective, because the threat is both dire and concentrated on the other side, it is not really possible to err by fighting too aggressively on behalf of one’s own team. The cause is fundamentally righteous, however one engages in the battle. Granted, we should be careful in our choice of tactics, but the imperative is end the conflict by winning it, not defusing it. Failing to throw oneself fully into the fray would be a far greater sin than fighting too hard or dirty. Proponents of asymmetric accounts are less likely to use the term “polarization” at all. And if we accept their premises, they have a point. Europe’s main problem in 1938 was not that it was polarized—it’s that it was full of Nazis.

For those subscribing to an asymmetric understanding of polarization, those responsible for national conflict are opposing partisans, who are fundamentally bad actors. For those who subscribe to the symmetric view, the responsible parties are, well, the ones who hold the asymmetric view.

A False Binary?

As a matter of analysis, it may be argued that this is a false choice and we should reject the strong form of both options. Surely the truth lies somewhere in between. That is, it may be that partisans on both sides engage in unhealthy political behaviors that sustain polarization, and that one side is worse. Indeed, it seems rather unlikely that each side would be genuinely symmetrical on any given criterion. Isn’t it most likely that we’re dealing with partial asymmetry?

This might take a couple different forms. We could look at the historical record and determine that one side drew first blood and broke the norms that had previously held us together. The other side proceeded to do the same, but only as a defensive measure in the face of existential odds, and so can hardly be held at fault. Depending on the partisanship and formative memories of the observer, we might trace this fall from grace to the Bork hearings, the Gingrich reforms, the 2000 election, the Obama HHS mandate, the Obergefell decision, the 2016 election, or some other point. Even if we disagree on the precise story, we can accept that in principle, there could have been some moment in which an unscrupulous partisan of one stripe or another committed an act of original sin which set us on a path of no return, and that the blame falls on their heads and those of their children unto the third generation. To emphasize symmetry is to evade historical responsibility.

Alternatively, we could use statistical analysis to determine that whatever we think the bad polarizing characteristic is, one side is worse than the other. Perhaps one side is more willing to tolerate political violence , or restrict political liberties, or end friendships over politics, or endorse bizarre partisan conspiracy theories, or confine themselves to partisan media silos, or cast their political opponents as subhuman enemies rather than mere political rivals. These claims are symmetric in the sense of identifying the bad thing as bipartisan rather than being wholly identified with one or the other, but are generally invoked (often in the form of charts shared on social media) asymmetrically with the intention of highlighting who the real offenders are.

Analytically, then, it would seem the most plausible way of understanding polarization is in terms of partial asymmetry—polarizing dynamics can be found on both sides, but one side of the divide bears more responsibility than the other. This appears to be the nuanced and realistic position that right-thinking people should hold.

Symmetry or Asymmetry: Pick a Side

Yet I want to argue, counterintuitively, that in terms of both the fundamental diagnosis and intervention, we really are faced with a binary choice. Either we locate polarization in some common tendency afflicting American partisans of the left and right alike, or we identify some discrete partisan group we think is the ultimate source of the problem and focus our energy on decisively stripping them of the ability to perpetuate that problem. We cannot effectively inhabit some middle position, because the two understandings involve distinct and mutually undermining logics.

Suppose we have two axes of variation: one axis of degrees of bad, polarizing political behavior, and another left-to-right axis of partisanship. Let’s say they’re correlated but distinct, meaning the bad behavior is present on both sides but stronger on the right.1 If we decide the way to defeat polarization is to defeat the right, and thus array ourselves against them, we wind up in opposition to at least some right-partisans who are not engaged in polarizing behavior, while vindicating that same toxic behavior on the left.

This holds even if we clarify that we only oppose the right because we think their concentration of polarizing behavior makes them the greater threat, and that we do not approve when our allies on the left engage in similar behaviors. The difference between “We all need to do better,” and “We all need to do better—but especially you lot over there” is ultimately one of kind rather than degree. Functionally, partisans of all stripes hear the latter formulation as a division between Good Partisans and Bad Partisans. In the end, attempts to adopt a middle position of partial asymmetry inevitably collapse into full asymmetry.

In contrast, opposing polarization from a symmetric perspective means resisting or condemning bad polarizing behaviors wherever we find them, eschewing general alignment with one side or the other. In any given instance, our concerns may focus on a liberal or conservative expression, argument, figure, policy, etc., but in another instance might easily shift to partisans on the other side. In any instance, such condemnations should be focused on the mode of partisanship itself, rather than the particular social platform. To be clear, this stance does not require us to abandon political commitments altogether, in the sense of supporting whichever party aligns better with our policy goals. It simply means we pursue our partisan commitments within what we believe should be a generally binding set of political norms, while remaining evenhandedly critical of partisans on any side who transgress those norms.2

The Battle for Verona

An analogy may be helpful in clarifying this principle.

Suppose the Montagues and the Capulets are in the midst of a bloody clan war over control of the city of Verona. Both sides possess the same short- and long-term goal, namely, to kill members of the other clan and seize their territory, with the hope of ultimately dominating the city itself. The conflict is symmetric in this sense.

In other ways, however, the sides are not equivalent. At one point the clans had coexisted peacefully in an even balance of power. Then one day, for no particular reason, the Montagues initiated an unprovoked conflict with the Capulets. Furthermore, the Montagues use more explosive weapons that result in more civilian casualties and collateral damage. The Montagues have a further advantage of more soldiers and greater stockpiles of arms. In the context of the conflict, the Capulets may clearly appear the righteous underdogs. If it were a movie, viewers would be rooting ardently for Capulet victory.

The Bishop of Verona wants to see an end to the bloodshed. He accordingly issues condemnations of each major act of violence, regardless of the perpetrator—though based on the nature of the conflict, the Montagues do rack up rather more condemnations. He visits the families of the deceased, attends funerals, and stages anti-violence demonstrations in contested territories. He takes every opportunity to issue exhortations toward peace. After extensive efforts buttressed by an image of impeccable integrity, he is successful in convincing each party to come together for peace talks under his auspices.

But suppose it comes out that in advance of the conference, the Bishop meets secretly with Capulet, but not Montague, leaders. Though he maintains his stance of opposition to all violence, he expresses particular sympathy for Capulet losses, affirms the view of the Montagues as the greater offenders, and strategizes ways to coordinate a peace that works in the Capulets’ favor. There may be a reason for this that is consistent with his proclaimed position as an opponent of violence, since perhaps a stronger position for the Capulets will produce a more just and durable peace.

Even so, once these meetings are discovered, the Bishop’s efforts toward peace become fundamentally compromised. He claimed to be operating in a non-partisan manner, subordinating the matters internal to the conflict to an overriding principle of ending the bloodshed. Yet by aligning himself with one violent faction over another, he loses his credibility as an opponent of violence per se, and this was his primary source of authority as a mediator. In anger, the Montagues call off the talks and the war in the streets escalates, producing unprecedented Capulet casualties. Thus, the Bishop’s efforts to operate simultaneously as an external mediator on behalf of peace and an internal actor on behalf of the Capulets result in setbacks for both causes.

The Bishop’s situation highlights the untenability of attempting to engage polarization from a perspective of partial asymmetry. The effort to balance two logics that are fundamentally in tension renders us unable to pursue either effectively, and further leaves us vulnerable to charges of bad faith or hypocrisy.

If we want to be partisans, we can do that. If we want to appeal to higher principles that transcend partisanship, we can do that, too. If we try to put a foot in each camp, we will stumble and fall.

In the following post, I will apply this formulation to a particular, contemporary case: the tragedy of resistance liberalism.

The Vanderbilt/WashU report on the problem of ideological scholarship in the humanities and social sciences continues to generate both applause and condemnation. The report’s strongest summary conclusion runs as follows:

“Every field we have studied shows some signs of [...] a deterioration in scholarly standards fueled by the substitution of political criteria for properly scholarly criteria in the assessment of research and a more general repudiation of long-standing ideals of rigor and objectivity.”

Among critics, one particular line of attack has been simply to reject this claim as either right-wing hysteria or at least an irresponsibly unsubstantiated assertion.

For instance, from academic commentator John K. Wilson in an Inside Higher Ed essay:

“There is virtually no evidence offered in the report for their sweeping conclusions about the entirety of the humanities. Instead, the report declares that it has a series of secret ‘internal reports’ on various fields that prove what it claims.

No sound scholar publishes their conclusions and declares that all the evidence to support those claims is found in secret ‘internal reports.’ Whether you agree with the conclusions or not, it is a bad argument when you refuse to show your evidence.”

A particularly scornful dismissal from sociologist Julian Go (unlinked as Go’s X account has since closed):

And from public policy professor John Holbein:

These are not the only examples, but they suffice to illustrate the point.

Now, I do not think these critics are all of a kind, but rather fall on a range. At one end are those who seek to defend the sort of research critiqued in the report, not on the merits, but rather through a strategy of “deny, deflect, disparage.” Those at the other end simply want our conversations about these matters to be more empirically grounded. To the former group, there isn’t much to say that will be constructive. To the latter, I reply: OK, fair enough.

Admittedly, for those of us who have long been observing, documenting, and decrying ideological scholarship, these dismissals can feel like a bit of gaslighting. Higher ed reformers have published books, articles, and edited volumes, blogged, tweeted, held conferences, and founded organizations, all dedicated to calling out and addressing this very problem. Given all these receipts, it is tempting to dismiss the dismissals of ideological scholarship as an act of willful ignorance.

Yet if we’re honest, we must admit that none of these efforts add up to a point estimate, a hypothesis test, or any other concrete empirical statement of the sort the report’s critics demand.

If a skeptic asks us just how serious or extensive the problem of ideological scholarship is, really, then we can regale them with tales of slanted sloppy scholarship and outlandish activist absurdities for days on end. But suppose they interrupt us and demand, “OK, OK, I get the gist. It sounds bad. But what’s your evidence?” We might respond in some puzzlement: “What are you talking about? I’ve been sharing evidence this entire time!” “No,” the skeptic counters, “you’ve been giving me anecdotes. I want something hard. What percent of scholarly claims are compromised by ideology? What proportion of published research falls below appropriate scholarly standards?” At this we might hesitate, stammer a little, and admit we can’t produce a figure. To which our skeptic, shaking their head ruefully, might sigh, “You really had me going there. Come find me when you have a spreadsheet in hand.”

The trouble is, there is no straightforward answer we can give to the skeptic’s questions. Even if measuring ideological scholarship were a merely empirical task, it would be a formidable one (though with the ever-expanding capabilities of LLM’s, perhaps not out of reach). A Scopus search for original articles in the social sciences and arts/humanities turns up 76,128 results from 2024 alone, or just over 200 publications per day.1 That would be a lot of material to sift through even if we knew just what we were looking for.

But of course, we don’t know just what we’re looking for. There is no standard operationalization across disciplines for a) what constitutes proper scholarly criteria, and b) what counts as pernicious ideological influence. These are essentially contested matters that differ across subfields, often require insider familiarity to assess, operate as moving targets, and are informed at least as much by tacit norms or judgments as they are established and articulated principles.2 Part of the logic behind academic disciplines and peer review is that communally organized human judgment and expertise are necessary because criteria of evaluation are too subtle and rarified to be codified. In some cases, authors do us a favor by outright saying things like (as quoted in the report) “all truth is subjective” and “science itself is not neutral but a sociopolitical and ideological endeavor,” making the evaluation of ideological scholarship easy.3 But in most cases ideological scholarship is likely to be covert, unintentional, or a matter of degree.

In short, we do not have a generally accepted empirical standard for determining whether any given publication is ideological, let alone the entirety of the corpus that makes up “the social sciences and the humanities.”

That is not to say establishing such a standard hasn’t been tried.

Criteria for Ideological Compromise

As the academic heterodoxy movement of the past decade has gained steam, a few scholars have offered tests or procedures for identifying when scholarship has been compromised by ideology. I’ll cover three of them here, though I expect there are others with which I am not familiar.

The first comes from psychologists and heterodox stalwarts Lee Jussim and Nathan Honeycutt. In a 2023 article in the journal Psychology Learning and Teaching, they provide a series of tests to determine when a research study is operating as propaganda rather than science. Their criteria run as follows:

• Test 0: Does the study vindicate some political narrative?

  • [If not, it can’t very well be political propaganda.]

• Test 1: Did they misinterpret or misrepresent their results in ways that unjustifiably advance a particular politicized narrative?

• Test 2: Do the authors systematically ignore papers and studies inconsistent with their ideology-affirming conclusions?

• Test 3: Did they leap to ideology-affirming conclusions based on weak data?

A study that “passes” 0 and at least one of the remaining tests might be judged ideological. A study that passes multiple tests would be particularly egregious.

More recently in Theory and Society, Callie Burt has proposed the adoption of Ideological Epistemic Analysis (IEA) to identify ideological compromise within research agendas. She does not offer a set of concrete steps like Jussim and Honeycutt, but rather emphasizes several sites in the research process where such compromises are likely to occur:

• Research questions asked (and unasked)

• The framing of the research

• Methods (especially measures)

• Interpretation

• Canonization

Still more recently, again in Theory and Society, Ashley Rubin specifies some criteria for inappropriate politicization of research practice, as follows:

• Avoiding questions that might contradict our political commitments

• Setting out to prove a conclusion

• Ignoring contradictory evidence

• Cherry-picking evidence

• Declining to publish sound studies that contradict our political commitments

• Ignoring plausible but politically disagreeable interpretations for our findings

• Using moralized or partisan language in peer-reviewed studies where more neutral language is available

• Explicit endorsements in peer-reviewed work of politicians, political parties, or policies4

Any of these practices can be deemed a violation of scientific scholarly standards in favor of ideological considerations—that is, ideological scholarship.

It is noteworthy that each of these formulations is quite recent, and two of them are from the same journal. This concentration raises the (hopeful, in my view) prospect that the effort to demonstrate ideological slant in scholarship is turning into a research agenda in its own right, perhaps operating similarly to metascience, or its kooky older cousin, science and technology studies.

Nevertheless, I have my doubts that we are anywhere near being able to produce a point estimate or hypothesis test. Even if the above criteria can provide us some general sense of what we’re looking for, any large-scale analysis still has to overcome a major barrier: because the logics of each subfield are distinct and not fully commensurable, any evaluation of ideological distortion requires both considerable insider expertise and an irreducible element of judgment.

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The Problem of Standardizing Standards

When introducing my students to the often disorienting experience of reading scholarly literature, I suggest they approach it as if they were walking into the middle of a long-standing conversation. They should not expect to recognize every reference or pick up on every shade of meaning. I guide them as much as possible, providing context, unpacking central principles, and talking through difficult passages. Still, it is a substantial achievement if a student can dimly grasp the main thread. There is a reason that graduate training is a multi-year process. Mastering some meaningful portion of a scholarly conversation enough to participate in and shape it is a major undertaking.

Given both the long-term expansion and hyperspecialization of the higher education sector, we have branched off into innumerable separate conversations, increasingly disconnected from each other, and each with their own distinctive subject matter, internal logic, methods, norms, and sets of standards. These represent not just specialized bodies of knowledge but skills, habits, and sensibilities developed over a long period of time.

This cacophony of fragmented conversations serves as a major impediment to any effort to assess the extent of ideological influence within any given subfield, let alone across them. Even if we can apply the criteria listed above to each subfield in theory, that application will not be one-size-fits-all.

Consider the Jussim/Honeycutt tests. Let us grant that Test 0, at least, is relatively straightforward—even an informed nonspecialist should be able to tell if a given research claim vindicates a partisan narrative. Beyond that, the waters are murky. In order to judge whether a researcher has misinterpreted or misrepresented their results (Test 1), we would need a strong grasp of their evidence, and of its appropriate standards of evaluation in the subfield. To identify whether they ignored literature inconvenient to their political goals (Test 2), we need some mastery of that literature ourselves. To know whether they leapt to conclusions based on weak data (Test 3), we need knowledge of what constitutes strong data within that discipline. This sort of analysis requires both substantial preexisting expertise and a heavy investment of time and intellectual energy. In any given subfield, there are likely to be relatively few people qualified to apply these tests, and fewer still who are motivated to do so.

A further barrier to establishing ideological compromise is that the criteria listed above will typically be contestable. For instance, applying Burt’s IEA, a critic might be able to argue that the authors of a given body of work asked the wrong questions, developed slanted framings, used inappropriate methods or biased measures, applied unsound interpretations to their results, and rested their argument on work that was undeservedly canonized. Except in truly egregious cases, however, the original author and their allies will likely be able to mount plausible defenses on some or all of these points (that their question was the right one, that their framing was defensible, etc.). There will be a component of judgment as to whether a given study or literature has, in fact, failed to meet scholarly standards or shown evidence of ideological compromise.

In combination, these concerns raise major difficulties for efforts to identify ideological scholarship. If one must be an expert (likely one of a small number) in a subfield to conduct an adequate analysis of ideological compromise, and if claims of ideological scholarship are contested by other relevant experts, then the most an outside observer will be able to glean is that there is a controversy. Establishing scholarship as ideological in an authoritative, generally accepted way is a high bar.5

That is not to say such critiques are not worthwhile or cannot be done well. The authors mentioned above have put the kind of analysis they propose into practice, in my view to great effect. Rubin exhaustively documented the replacement of theory with normative claims in law and punishment studies. Burt’s IEA highlighted ideological distortions propping up problematic ideas about the nature of sex and gender in transgender research. Jussim has levied a sustained critique of claims about stereotype threat and self-fulfilling prophecies, which he shows to be overblown or distorted. In related efforts, John Iceland and Eric Silver have demonstrated the narrow and tautological nature of research on systemic racism. In some of my own work, I have argued that claims about “Christian nationalism” as a widespread and radical ideology fail many of the criteria laid out above.

Such efforts represent valuable contributions in both demonstrating ideological compromise of high-profile research agendas and, just as importantly, unpacking how that ideological influence operates. They worked because their authors had deep familiarity with the relevant literatures, the nature of the concepts, the structure of the arguments, and the links between theory and data. They were thus able to articulate based on close reading and careful argumentation precisely where ideological distortions had slipped in and driven the research off course.

But the factors that make these critiques effective are precisely the reasons they are difficult to scale. After all, these major expenditures of expertise, intellectual labor, and professional risk work to highlight ideological compromise in only a few narrow slices of the humanities and social sciences. Suppose we deliver a stack of such careful, extensively sourced reviews to our hypothetical skeptic. “You asked for receipts? Here you go!” we announce triumphantly. At this, the skeptic scoffs. “I ask you for evidence and you bring me more anecdotes. These reviews cover, what, a couple hundred studies? There were some 1500 new publications in the humanities and social sciences just last week!”

Even with some criteria and effective models for what we want to achieve, it is still unclear how we can reach a point estimate or a hypothesis test.

Toward an Ideological Audit

I promised in the introduction to The Next Turtle Down that some of the ideas would be half-baked. It’s time I made good on that promise. I firmly believe that ideological scholarship is a real phenomenon and a major problem. I don’t know how to demonstrate that as an authoritative empirical conclusion that would render it difficult for good-faith and bad-faith actors alike to demand: “Where’s the evidence?”

Fortunately for everyone involved, I’m not the only person thinking about this. The missing internal reports informing the Vanderbilt/WashU Statement that angered John K. Wilson are expected to be released in the coming weeks at the individual authors’ discretion. This will not only offer some grounds on which to evaluate the document’s central claim, but hopefully offer some idea of what systematic evidence for ideological compromise can look like.

In the meantime, I’ll conclude here with a few thoughts on how we might advance the larger project of an ideological audit of academic scholarship.

A Mosaic of Case Studies

In the section above, I suggested that although deep dives into particular problematic research agendas can be enlightening, they’re difficult to scale, in part because they’re more likely to be professionally punished than rewarded.

But suppose that were to change. Through the efforts of Jussim, Honeycutt, Burt, Rubin, and others, we have some criteria and models for how to conduct an assessment of ideological scholarship. Publication outlets may be scarce, but Theory and Society, at least, actively seeks out this sort of analysis. If the Vanderbilt/WashU report is taken seriously in larger circles, perhaps other journals will follow suit. If such ideological assessment became a viable path to professional advancement undertaken by more insiders, we might accumulate a larger body of evidence regarding the nature and prevalence of ideological compromise.

Given the partial incommensurability of subfield evaluations, this still would not give us a point estimate. But it might provide a kind of mosaic of case studies that add up to a larger, more coherent picture of our situation.

AI-Assisted Auditing

As discussed above, the barriers to conducting an ideological audit on a given body of literature include not just scarcity of expertise or possibility of professional risks, but demands on time and energy. To critique the literature, one must know the literature. Given likely pushback or accusations of cherry-picking, an effective critique should be an extensive one. Many who might possess the expertise and see the value in such a project may nonetheless lack the bandwidth to carry it out.

The rapidly advancing capabilities of LLM’s might change that calculation. As with many things AI, I’m a bit nervous about this because it would be easy to abuse with sloppy analysis or baked-in confirmation bias. I would like to think an effective audit still requires a high degree of human knowledge of a subfield and careful reasoning to assess the extent and nature of any ideological compromise. Not everything can be offloaded to the machines.

Still, once we’ve developed a sense of what the problems are and a process for picking them out, and crafted the prompts necessary to automate that process, LLM’s might facilitate much more thorough audits in less time.

By way of analogy, qualitative researchers have a concept of saturation wherein additional interviews or analyses are no longer producing new insights. In the process I’m envisioning, scholars performing an ideological audit could go through the literature until reaching saturation in their assessment of ideological compromise. At that point, an LLM might perform that assessment on the remaining literature, flagging any discrepancies that warrant further attention, but otherwise rendering the burden much more manageable.

Triangulating Evidence

Due to the difficulties of providing close, direct analysis of scholarship itself, claims about ideological slant in the academy typically rely on more surface or proxy approaches. For instance, James Manzi recently used LLM’s to analyze 600,000 social scientific abstracts between 1960 and 2024 to evaluate prevalence, direction, and trends in ideological content. Similarly, David Rozado has examined the use of particular ideology-laden terminology (e.g., white supremacy, Islamophobia) in abstracts over time. These broader but shallower treatments may not be sufficient to demonstrate a departure from scholarly standards, but can provide some corroboration for more direct evidence. Other efforts include the tracking of faculty partisan ratios, or Shields and Muravchik’s widely shared study showing one-sided treatment of controversial issues in university course syllabi.

None of these forms of evidence definitively establish the validity of the Vanderbilt/WashU report’s claim. They do not add up to anything like an ideological compromise coefficient. But taken together, they might still sway the open-minded skeptic.

Going Where the Ball Is

The logic of an audit is that while it may be random or routine in some cases, attention is best focused on the areas with the greatest risk and/or consequences. A financial audit, for instance, occurs either where transactions look the most suspicious or where the most money is involved.

Similarly, we do not need to examine 80,000+ studies per year to determine whether scholarly standards in the humanities and social sciences are compromised by ideological criteria. I would instead propose three considerations for allocating such efforts:

• Scholarly prestige: Ideological scholarship is more harmful to the scholarly enterprise when it appears in higher-ranking venues, gathers higher citation counts, or is funded by more impressive grants.

• Public recognition: Ideological scholarship is more harmful when it gets more media attention or exerts influence on policy.

• Politicized subject matter: Regardless of prestige and recognition, scholarship is more likely to be perniciously ideological when its subject matter is adjacent to partisan or cultural conflict. Research agendas on ostensible psychological differences between liberals and conservatives, for instance, should receive a high degree of scrutiny.

Though already implicit in this essay, it is worth affirming an element of the report’s recommendations: an ideological audit of the kind I am describing can and should only be carried out by those who are scholarly insiders themselves. The effort should be first and foremost internal. In part, this is a matter of qualification—only other scholars possess the ability to perform such an assessment.6 In part, it is a matter of purpose. The goal of this sort of project is to restore scholarly standards of objectivity and rigor, and insiders are the people best suited to appreciate what that looks like and why it matters.

At the same time, it is incumbent upon those scholars to be both rigorous in their assessment and clear in their conclusions. This means being willing to state outright when they think the work of their colleagues or the claims prevalent within their own disciplines have fallen short. This is not for purposes of shaming or score-settling, but rather because a norm that is lauded in the abstract but ignored in particular cases is not a norm at all. A durable course correction requires a full reckoning with where we have gone off track.

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Some context. A few days ago, Vanderbilt and WashU released a report on the state of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences, authored by several prominent figures in those fields. Their broad conclusion was that the quality of scholarship has suffered substantially from (typically left-wing) politicization, in which truth-seeking goals are subordinated to activist pursuits. The report calls for a recommitment to objectivity and rigorous standards in order to get these disciplines back on track.

Its release set the higher ed twittersphere abuzz in predictable fashion, with reformers cheering while critics accused it of legitimizing the right-wing authoritarian takeover of academia. Never mind that none of the authors, so far as I am aware, are associated with the political or intellectual right, and that the report is quite explicit that counterpoliticization by the right to address scholarly skew on the left would only make a bad situation worse. That commentators on the internet would respond to the report by mapping it onto pre-drawn battle lines rather than engaging its substance is not, I suppose, to be wondered at.

In any case, the report’s release sparked a fresh round of takes on the topic of ideological slant in the university, which always keeps me lamentably glued to my phone. Amidst this buzz, one of the report’s authors, Ashley Rubin from my own field of sociology, posted an X response to a recent Chronicle of Higher Education essay by Jon Shields, entitled “Hire Conservatives, Not Republicans.” It’s a short, pithy piece whose content is effectively captured by its title—higher education should recruit people whose perspective is shaped by the conservative intellectual tradition, as opposed to those with overt Republican political commitments. I naturally find this argument quite agreeable, having made similar points myself on various occasions.

Rubin’s take is more critical. Her thread expresses concerns that Shields’ line of argument amounts to precisely the sort of counterpoliticization that the Vanderbilt/WashU report warned against. As it happens, I published an article in Theory and Society last year arguing for the intentional cultivation of an explicitly conservative perspective in social science, which I believe addresses some of her objections, as I’ll elaborate below. Specifically, I think she makes two category errors: mistaking orienting assumptions for hypotheses, and an epistemic argument for an identitarian one.

First, though, I’ll note that Rubin has been an active and effective figure in the higher ed reform space, particularly since her own Theory and Society article last year critiquing ideological scholarship in punishment studies. As far as I can tell, we’re basically in alignment on the major questions regarding where academic scholarship has gone wrong and how it should be righted. It is precisely because we share a common cause that I take Rubin’s concerns here seriously, and see engaging them as a fruitful avenue for thinking through the problem (as I see it) of social science’s conservative deficit. My hope is to use her critique as an opportunity to seek greater clarity around these issues, and to make the case that calls to hire conservatives do not in themselves constitute counterpoliticization.

Conservatism: Hypothesis or Paradigm?

Shields’ essay lays out a number of conservative priors, what he describes as a “particular cast of mind, informed by a constellation of ideas about human nature and society.” He enumerates these as follows:

• Human beings are wayward and tend to act badly without constraints.

• Long-standing institutions — especially the family and religion — are essential to guide and restrain human beings.

• Inherited institutions are marked by complexity and often serve the human good in ways that are hidden from view.

• Projects that seek to liberate individuals from socially imposed restraints should be regarded skeptically as they generally result in unintended consequences.

• Civilization is fragile — hard to build, but easy to destroy.

• Some inequality is both legitimate and inevitable.

• Human reason is limited; thus, the need for epistemic humility.

Though sympathetic to some of these propositions, Rubin objects to the idea of intentionally promoting their representation in the academy on the following grounds:

“The problem is we are scholars: we are supposed to be data driven, not belief driven. At the end of the day, it’s what the data say. What hiring conservatives brings us is a willingness to investigate or test out these ideas, but at the end of the day, each belief (with a few exceptions of value judgments) are empirically testable and probably historically variable.”

The concern, as I understand it, is that conservatives will treat their premises as conclusions and conduct research that simply confirms their priors rather than engaging in truly open inquiry—precisely the sorts of problematic practices condemned in the Vanderbilt/WashU report, just in the other direction. Rubin treats Shields’ propositions as falsifiable theories or hypotheses. Whether they are right or wrong is an empirical matter. If we engage in research that is pre-committed to them, then what we’re doing is activism, not scholarship.

But is that the proper way to view Shields’ list of conservative ideas? I think this is the first category error. While the propositions are not empty verbiage or mere tautology, none of these seem falsifiable in any straightforward sense. What experiment can we run to determine whether human beings are wayward? What data could we collect to settle the question of whether or not inherited institutions serve the common good in complex and invisible ways? A tremendous amount would depend on how we define our terms and set up our questions, but at minimum, it would be hard to deny that these propositions are true for some people (institutions, projects, civilizations, etc.), some of the time. They are not so much concrete empirical claims as they are general principles or lenses that lead us to attend to some aspects of social reality over others—which is ultimately what all theory does.1

Rather than view them as hypotheses, I suggest we think of Shields’ propositions, particularly as they pertain to research, as orienting assumptions from which to launch inquiry. They naturally highlight particular social phenomena as worthy of investigation, and provide the problem space in which we study those phenomena. They are not themselves hypotheses, but rather provide the scaffolding in which questions are developed and hypotheses are generated. Together, they add up to something closer to a paradigm or a theoretical framework than a general, testable explanation.

Now, there is a sense in which operating from these assumptions constrains inquiry—but only in the way that all inquiry is constrained. Background assumptions are simply a necessary component of scientific investigation, which must, after all, always come from somewhere. Because human social life is both incredibly complex and largely unobservable, assumptions are necessarily bearing a heavier load in social than in natural science.2

For instance, economists study markets based on an assumption of human beings as rational actors. This does not mean economists think either that humans are actually always rational or that all humans are equally rational, only that they are rational enough to sustain economists’ delimited claims about human social life. Similarly, sociologists operate from the foundational assumption of society as something sui generis with its own distinctive force on human behavior, and conversely, that humans are the sorts of beings whose behaviors and dispositions are meaningfully shaped by their social environments.

Famously, economists’ and sociologists’ assumptions are somewhat at odds, yet this does not mean that either one invalidates the other.3 It simply means that their explanations are never more than partial, and that they are suited to bringing into relief and explaining different aspects of social reality.

In this way, the conservative proposition “Some inequality is both legitimate and inevitable” is simultaneously completely plausible, unfalsifiable, and yet compatible with the more prevalent proposition among sociologists that “Some inequality is both unjust and exploitative.” So, for instance, a conservative social scientist might be interested in how traditional gender roles provide meaning, status, or functional social scripts among the members in a given population, while a progressive would instead examine how these same roles facilitate various sorts of deprivation or exploitation. In some cases, their claims might genuinely conflict and would need to be sorted out with better evidence and theory. But in others, both the conservative and progressive-valenced claims might each be perfectly sound and well-substantiated, simply explaining different aspects of a similar social phenomenon.

It is worth making explicit here what has already been implied: asking questions framed by conservative background assumptions does not pre-determine the answers to those questions. For instance, given the above point about the value of traditional religion, a conservative might hypothesize that atheists are particularly angry, miserable, and poorly adjusted people. As it happens, these hypotheses are typically not borne out—atheists tend to be happier, healthier, and more socially engaged than the nominally (though not the actively) religious. This finding challenges simplistic conservative narratives and pushes them toward new puzzles to solve, but does not outright falsify any of Shields’ propositions. It simply forces conservatives to revise their ideas about how religion functions in society, ask new questions, form new hypotheses, collect new data, and thus gain a better understanding of social reality than they had before.4 The new ideas, questions, etc., may still be constrained by priors, but this is true for anybody working in any theoretical tradition.

In brief, there is no conflict between conducting inquiry from a conservative perspective and deferring to what the data say. Nor should we assume a conservative perspective is any less legitimate or fruitful than many other widely accepted perspectives (rational choice, conflict, evolutionary, etc.) as a launching pad for inquiry.

Intellectual Diversity ≠ DEI

Rubin’s second objection to Shields’ call to hire conservatives is a common one, namely, that this would just be swapping out one affirmative action regime for another. The mess higher education finds itself in has a lot to do with evaluating people based on identity rather than merit. Swapping left-favoritism for right-favoritism is just repeating the same mistake.

More specifically, she writes:

“Do I think hiring more conservatives would alleviate those problems [of progressive ideological scholarship] and get us a more well-rounded field? Yes. Do I think hiring conservatives is just another version of DEI that privileges some people over others based on protected categories, and is therefore discriminatory? Also yes.”

The first thing I want to note here is that I have followed the “political imbalance in higher education” conversation for some time now, and do not recall ever seeing anyone make a “protected category” argument for hiring conservatives. This is the second category error. Rubin appears to be objecting to the identitarian logic of putting a thumb on the hiring scale to ensure fair group-based representation or remedy past injustices, but that isn’t the logic advocates for hiring more conservatives are applying.

Shields certainly isn’t, as his conservative vs. Republican distinction makes explicit. His case for the benefits of hiring conservatives is stated most directly here:

“More small-c conservatives would broaden the field by considering neglected areas of social inquiry, like religion, the military, and social order. And they would likely bring new interpretative approaches to the study of inequality itself, perhaps by taking more interest in its cultural sources.”

The reason to hire conservatives, the argument goes, is because it contributes in a direct way to the university’s core mission of effective instruction and inquiry, of precisely the sort advocated in the Vanderbilt/WashU report.

Of course, nobody is obliged to accept Shields’ claim. We might think he is wrong about what conservatives would contribute, or that the contribution is subordinate to the many other criteria that enter into hiring decisions.

The key point here, however, is that it is not a DEI argument. It is ultimately merit-based. The claim is that we should hire conservatives because they are the best people for the job. Not because of any general intellectual superiority, but for the more market-based reason that their particular contributions are what the academy in its current form most needs to make progress toward its truth-seeking mission.

In contrast, DEI was never presented as a primarily truth-seeking project even in principle. It was broadly understood by advocates and detractors alike as oriented around (a particular and not very popular conception of) justice, not inquiry. For reasons the Vanderbilt/WashU report captures effectively, under the logic of DEI inquiry is not treated as a primary good or perhaps even an intelligible one. If all so-called “knowledge” is ideological and if we regard questions of what justice demands as resolved, then the imperative becomes to enact justice, not seek truth. In this sense, the aims of DEI are therefore not primarily epistemic at all, but rather social and political.

In terms of their underlying logic, then, DEI and calls for more conservatives are not two sides of the same coin. They are totally different currencies. It is also worth mentioning that Shields does not advocate any law or formal intervention to force the hiring of conservatives (though of course, others do). His essay contents itself with making the simple persuasive appeal: Higher education would be better at what it is supposed to be doing if it had more conservatives around.

Again, one can disagree with this, but I do not think it can be reasonably characterized as a proposal for counterpoliticization.

Get Your Conservative Advocacy Out of My Higher Ed Reform!

Rubin concludes her thread with the appeal:

“Most importantly, we need to stop conflating fixing academia with a conservative worldview. You don’t have to be a conservative to criticize the state of the literature, but people certainly think that is the case. And these hiring proposals are only reifying that belief.”

Based on the prefix of “most importantly,” I expect this concern is the source of the frustration motivating her larger objection. As noted above, many of the reactions to the Vanderbilt/WashU report accuse it of aiding and abetting the right-wing assault on the walls of the Ivory Tower. As sociologist Julian Go publicly mused:

“It befuddles me how the authors of these ‘reports’ do not fathom that their project is basically cover for authoritarian states & industries to squash knowledge produced about colonialism, trans issues & other ‘leftist’ topics. All while complaining about politicization.”

This gives a flavor of the critical responses.

While such reactions were amplified with the report’s release, they are not new. Efforts at higher ed reform, particularly those focused on ideological slant, are regularly identified as right-wing plots and machinations, regardless of their source or substance. Reformers are accused of either being right-wing agents themselves or acting as their dupes or stooges. For non-conservative reformers whose concerns about the academy are substantive and whose efforts are constructive, this constant delegitimizing move by their opponents is surely frustrating. As I interpret Rubin’s post, she wishes conservatives like Shields (and frankly, me) would stop making arguments that lend plausibility to accusations of higher ed reform as counterpoliticization.

I appreciate the concern, but I think it is misguided for a couple reasons.

First, it isn’t a response to Shields’ argument. The fact that the presence of this sort of argument might be inconvenient for certain higher ed reform efforts does not make it wrong. Rubin thinks it is wrong, though as I have argued above, this seems to be based on a mischaracterization. If Shields is not calling for counterpoliticization, it is hardly fair to object to his argument on the grounds that an unfriendly observer might construe it as such. In keeping with the spirit of the Vanderbilt/WashU report, the argument should stand or fall on whether it is sound, not whether it is bad for branding.

Second, and crucially, I do not think it is the case that if conservatives stopped making conservative arguments for higher ed reform, the opponents would relax and jump on board. The authors of the report have argued that their fields are compromised, producing scholarship that is shoddy and ideological. This critique implicates a lot of people who either a) don’t think their scholarship is shoddy and ideological, or b) think it should be ideological, and shoddy is beside the point. Those people are not going to respond to reform efforts with equanimity. They are going to yell, point, and call names, and I don’t think it will make much difference whether reformers can be plausibly conflated with conservatives. The resistance is to the message, not the perceived ideological impurities of the messenger.

And in a sense, the opponents are not wrong. The metaphor of left-right is unidimensional. For someone who thinks that left-wing scholar-activism is what they are supposed to be doing, anyone who tells them to stop doing it falls to their right nearly by definition. Calls to abandon progressive activism in favor of objectivity and rigor are, from the perspective of the committed progressive activist, naturally going to look conservative. Higher ed reformers may fear association with overt conservatives will undermine their ability to establish themselves as non-ideological. But “non-ideological” is not a category scholar-activists recognize, and therefore not an available credential. Reforming energy is thus best spent not on brand management, which for many audiences will be a futile exercise, but instead on articulating both an ideal vision for inquiry-oriented higher education and a practical agenda for how it might be achieved.

So my first piece on here has run nearly 3,000 words. That does not reflect well on my Substack discipline. But I expect I’ll have many thousands more words to say on the topic of ideological imbalance in higher education, whether in the form of reflection or (as in this case) reaction. Stay tuned.

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I’ve put off starting a Substack for a long time. First, because like every academic I have ever met, I’m perpetually behind on projects, and embarking on something likely to consume precious minutes or hours seems irresponsible. Second, because I do not flatter myself to think the world is clamoring for what I have to say. Third, simply because I’m a late adopter. I didn’t join Twitter until just a couple years before the Great Liberal Exodus. My presence here is probably an indicator of the impending decline of the format.

And yet, here I am, joining the ranks of the world’s would-be public intellectuals. My primary reason for taking the plunge is, I expect, the same as for many others. I have a lot of thoughts that are too substantial (I do not claim insightful—that will be up to the reader) to let sit in my head eternally idle, but that lack a pathway to other forms of publication for whatever reason. Now I’ll have a place to put them. The hope is that the time I sink into it will be more valuable than my other distractions. If getting some thoughts out helps my thinking then it is time well-spent. If it helps someone else’s thinking, so much the better.

So what exactly will I be writing about? I’m a sociologist by background, trained in the quantitative empirical tradition but more humanistically inclined, heterodox in orientation, working in an interdisciplinary department that emerged out of the higher education reform movement. So I suppose my writing will reflect that constellation.

More specifically, I would split my interests into first-order and second-order categories.

In the first order, I study a variety of topics but most centrally, religion, politics, culture, and polarization. My empirical research concerns such subjects as religious transmission between generations, family formation, and “Christian nationalism” (skeptically). I may sometimes write on those topics directly.

But more typically, as the title of this Substack indicates, my mind is occupied by second-order matters of the production of knowledge itself. What do our social scientific claims consist in when we move beyond their surface level to examine what sustains them? How do our social backgrounds, motivations, incentives, and social norms as academic social scientists shape which of our ideas gain traction, and which fall by the wayside? What does any of that have to do with whether our claims are, you know—true? In terms of intellectual influences, my thinking is substantially informed by social epistemology, the philosophy of science, and the sociology of knowledge. Substantively, it’s centered around matters of ideological skew in social science, declining trust in the academy, and a political regime that is increasingly adversarial and interventionist in its stance toward higher education.

So basically, I’m thinking about the same things that dominate the pages of the Chronicle of Higher Education these days, though hopefully I’ll have something to say about them that isn’t just mimicking what you’ll find in those pages.

Like many academic reformers of the age, I like the story we tell ourselves about the university: That it is a place of pure inquiry, where we cast aside all other considerations, interests, or prejudices, and devote ourselves to grappling at the highest level with questions of what is true about reality. This isn’t an attainable ideal, but like any ideal, it is one we can try to approach, drift away from, or just abandon entirely. Academia is in a moment of upheaval, and the task at hand is to make that moment fruitful. Broadly speaking, my reflections here will be oriented toward that end.

One never knows when starting on a new endeavor where it will end up. But my goal here is simply to write when I have some nagging reflection that has achieved a minimal degree of coherence in my mind, or am reacting to something that piques my interest, approval, or ire. They may well be half-baked. Academic writing (ideally) requires the working out and tying together of all the various strands of thought, with each point extensively sourced. That’s a good thing for the purpose of scholarly rigor and standards, but not necessarily for facilitating the free flow of ideas. So where scholarship is about building an edifice, here I simply hope to follow a train of thought where it leads.

Stay tuned for my first post on a matter of ongoing interest to me: the case of conservatives in higher education.