What's actually wrong with the modern university?
Today on Heterodox Out Loud, renowned legal scholar and public intellectual Cass Sunstein joins John Tomasi to examine one of the most important, and contentious, questions in higher education today.
Drawing on his decades of experience at institutions including the University of Chicago and Harvard, Sunstein reflects on what universities get right, where they fall short, and why debates over viewpoint diversity have become so central to the future of academic life.
Offering both philosophical reflection and practical insight, Sunstein explores the tensions between academic freedom and institutional accountability, the role of administrators in shaping intellectual culture, and why ideological homogeneity may pose risks even when everyone involved is acting in good faith.
Subscribe to Heterodox Out Loud on your preferred podcast platform. A transcript of the episode is below.
John Tomasi: Cass Sunstein, welcome to this special edition of Heterodox Out Loud and Heterodox Academy. So thanks for being here.
Cass Sunstein: A pleasure and an honor to be here. Thank you for having me.
Tomasi: So let’s just jump into this. You know, the sequence of events that led us to this conversation was this beautiful Substack piece you posted on April 22nd, which a bunch of us read immediately and with great interest. It was called “Viewpoint Diversity,” which caught our attention, of course, at Heterodox Academy. And you did two things that really struck me. One, you said early on in that piece that this is an issue in which you admitted, with your normal, classic humility, in which you see through the glass only darkly. And yet you also wanted to tell a love story, as you described it, about something you experienced as a professor at the University of Chicago in the 1980s. Something that may illuminate our thinking about what viewpoint diversity is. Would you mind for our audience just saying a bit about the love story, about what it was you saw at Chicago in those days before we dive into the more conceptual questions?
Sunstein: Sure. So as a young, you know, Harvard grad, I went to Chicago and there was Richard Posner, who was awe-inspiring and definitely right of center, and a law and economics kind of guy who was skeptical about rent control and maximum hour laws and didn’t much like an active Supreme Court. Left-of-center shibboleths were to him, you know, embarrassing and kind of thin. Then there was Richard Epstein, who was like a volcano. And he was a libertarian. He was as quick a mind as I had ever encountered. He was funny. He was full of life. He thought Posner was completely wrong in his embrace of utilitarianism, or maybe fundamentally but not completely wrong, because he had a rights-oriented view of how to think about things.
Shortly after I joined Chicago, Michael McConnell, who was and is a social conservative, joined the faculty, who believed, you know, Burke was on the right track on many things. And the Supreme Court on religious issues in particular had gone off the rails in a way that was unfaithful to our constitutional tradition and in some ways contemptuous of religion. And I’m just referring to three. There was also, by the way, Antonin Scalia and David Currie, and they were writing a casebook together. People know the name Scalia. Currie is in my eyes a giant, and they were both originalists. And Scalia thought the Constitution should be understood to mean what the public meaning was at the time of ratification. And Currie thought the same thing. Now, Currie in his politics was kind of a Democrat, and Scalia in his politics was more than kind of a Republican, but they shared originalism.
And for me, these were just sunbursts. You know, the libertarian view of life, to encounter it on the part of someone who was, you know, full of intellectual fire, that was new to me, at least at that degree of proximity as an adult. To see someone who was an economics-oriented utilitarian, that was new. And originalism hadn’t been on my view screen, though I’d clerked for the Supreme Court of the United States and graduated from Harvard Law School. And it was just like, you know, a celebration in a way that was hard but thrilling, of thinking. And I almost said a word like combat, but it’s not right because everyone was trying to figure out what was true. So it wasn’t like trying to win, though of course people with different views would try to win. But figuring out, you know, was Posner right about the minimum wage law? That was really interesting. And is Epstein right? He developed thoughts about property rights. You know, I tended to think not, but I was keenly interested and learned a ton from his view of property rights.
Tomasi: That’s all fascinating. There’s so many pieces in there of interest. One that just struck me in the way you described it just now is, you used the word proximity. That there’s something about you as an adult being in proximity to these diverse thinkers that struck you. But, you know, an outsider would probably say that in the 1980s at Chicago, well, certainly in the economics department, there was something like a Chicago School, which in many people’s minds represents the idea that to some degree of conformity, at least about methods or baseline assumptions, can help advance scholarship in intensified ways. And one view of viewpoint diversity is that having pockets of intensity is all we need, as long as there are many different pockets. But what you’re describing is a kind of ecosystem that itself, because of proximity, had what you called a love song. Do you want to say anything about that?
Sunstein: Yeah, completely. Thank you for that. And this is a fantastic point that the Chicago School, which was amazing, had proximate people who had a great overlap in their views. So we wouldn’t say that the Chicago School of Economics was defined by viewpoint diversity, though it certainly added a ton of viewpoint diversity to the stock of knowledge. At Chicago, at the time, there was proximity among members of the Chicago School, and people at Chicago, who thought the Chicago School was fundamentally wrong. So I got interested in behavioral economics, and Richard Thaler came to, guess where, Chicago. And both of us thought the rationality assumption wasn’t right. I certainly, and I’m sure Thaler would say the same, had untold admiration for the Chicago School and learned a lot, but thought that they were, on important matters, wrong. And engaging with them was essential to what’s good in behavioral economics. And Gary Becker, who was maybe the mind with the greatest integrity I’ve ever met, he was just so curious and he wanted to know what’s the evidence. And he with some mildness but ferocity too, said in response to anything, what’s the evidence? And that kind of got under my skin.
Tomasi: Interesting.
Sunstein: In a good way. And so Becker was maybe defining in some ways of the Chicago School, but in response to anything, he would not say, you’re wrong. He’d say, what’s your evidence? And then there’d be a discussion. So we can think of Becker as incarnating openness to the force of argument, even as he was part of a school which he wasn’t at all ambivalent about.
Tomasi: Interesting. So maybe we could say, and that’s extremely interesting, maybe we could say, just as a marker for now, there’s some questions about the units within which we want to see viewpoint diversity, or the universe or perhaps the units across which we want to see viewpoint diversity, that we haven’t yet settled and may not in this conversation. But if we’re going to develop a clearer understanding of VPD, we’d want to know things about Chicago School styles pushing through together. Different departments doing the same things perhaps at one university. But there’s something about that proximity point that you made that seems really striking, I think, to me certainly, in the face of that need to push through with a methodological group. So let’s just maybe we just mark that as something maybe we’ll come back to in this conversation.
I’d like to move to, I want to move to kind of, as it were, the big questions. And this is like the big stone that I think once you push it over, things start to roll. And that’s what I sometimes call the great fact. And the great fact is just about the viewpoint diversity, the change in viewpoint diversity among the professoriate over the past thirty and forty years. So the great fact can be stated in different ways, but the fact says something like this. In the ‘80s, when you were at Chicago, the ratio of left to right leaning professors across the country was about two to one. By the 2010s, that ratio of left to right was about five to one, six to one. Currently it’s even steeper than that. And if you break out into certain subfields or some areas like humanities and social sciences, we find greater imbalances.
Sam Abrams has done, I think, some just really seminal work showing us that, making that data point a little more sophisticated because he points out that geography matters a lot. So it turns out, according to Sam’s data, that if you focus on New England, you find that the ratio is always, even in the ‘80s, about 26 to 1. Sorry, was about five to one, forgive me, about five to one in the 1980s in New England. And now it’s about 30 to 1. So there’s going to be geographic things that are going to make the great fact more complicated.
But I mentioned the great fact, I’m playing as some of you probably know on Deirdre McCloskey’s idea that the great fact in economic history is the fact of the hockey stick theory of growth. This GDP change happened, and that change requires an explanation. And so my question finally to you is some kind of change, significant change, in the breadth of the ideological orientations of the professoriate has occurred over the past 30 years. We can describe that fact in different ways, of course. But that great fact, that delta, that change seems to require some kind of explanation, as it does in economics. Do you want to give us your first thoughts about that? When you see that fact or hear that fact, the great fact in this area, what do you think? What’s your first reaction?
Sunstein: Well, it’s alarming. That’s a normative point. On the empirics, I want to know whether people who are interested in academic life have become disproportionately left of center recently compared to the ‘70s. So I want to ask: are the people who are right of center and amazing thinking that academic life isn’t for them and why would that be? Or are people coming in as assistant professors or graduate students moving to the left? And is that because of faculty inclinations or something? Or is it because of some more general split among super-educated people and the rest of the country, which has an ideological component?
So I would wonder about hypotheses. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if you took a pool of people who want to be academics in, let’s say, 2018 and compared them with those in say 1978. And it turned out that those in 2018 are just much more left-leaning. I’d be keenly interested to see whether that’s the case. Now that would itself need explanation. Is it that people who are right of center are thinking, you know, the educational life is boring, or it’s not dynamic enough, or the economic options are not promising. These are the things I’d wonder about.
Tomasi: Yeah, thank you. So there’s a report that we’ll put in the chat that HxA has done looking at all the reports and analyzing the strength and weaknesses of them, and although there’s been so many reports through the years about this question about the ideological orientation and how you define what the ideologies are and more. And one of our most general findings in our report is that studies that show the greatest imbalances are often the least methodologically sophisticated. But nonetheless, those that are sophisticated show a very significant delta from the ‘80s, say, till now.
And as you say, I put it a little bit differently but I like the way you put it. I would say it this way, that about the two to one ratio in the ‘80s, you know, there’s no obvious answer as to what the correct ratio should be in a free society. People choose different kinds of professions, being priests, being plumbers, being stockbrokers, being artists, being politicians, maybe being professors for all different kinds of reasons. And if we think the ideological differences are important, it’s probably because those ideologies reflect deep understandings of values that we want to see reflected. But those deep values might very well steer some people towards this profession and other people away from them. It’s almost like it’s a circle, right? We can’t fully escape from that. But there’s a big delta there. I love the way you ask those questions. That’s a whole bunch of social scientific research problems that our members in the audience and other people in the audience should be considering and perhaps undertaking.
I want to just continue with another question, if I may. Some people, when they hear the great fact, or some variation of the great fact, they react with alarm and they think that something like proportional political representation should be appropriate. There’s a simplified version of that that I think I’ve already said enough to throw some doubt on. But there are more sophisticated versions of the proportional political representation. This is a normative claim about what the ratio should be, they should be roughly proportional or something like that. And a more sophisticated version of that says something like, well, whatever the natural number might be, just whatever the natural distribution might be, in a free democratic society, where there’s public funding for universities, there’s some kind of matter of fairness, like democratic fairness, that universities have some kind of correct balance on representation. And the idea is that universities have a special role to play in educating citizens, and not just citizens, but the more power people like to be more powerful citizens in our democracy, people with greater voice. So that’s a more sophisticated version of the political representation view. Do you have any first thoughts about that? Can you make it stronger or weaker? Or what do you think of that?
Sunstein: I’m not excited about any version of proportional representation. So if a math department turned out to be, you know, 90% Republican and 10% Democrat, I wouldn’t be worried at all. If there’s a physics department that is, you know, without anyone who voted for a Democrat, that wouldn’t offhand be troubling in the least. I’d wonder more what’s actually happening in the classroom. So, let’s say in a Democratic-dominated biology department, they’re talking about how great Biden and Obama are, and how Bush was terrible and Reagan was terrible, that would be very troubling, mostly because they shouldn’t be talking about that in their course, given what their course is. Right.
So the proportional representation stuff, I think is a, it’s a first cut at something real. If you had a humanities department where the courses are all celebrating Marx, let’s say, and that we need to understand Shakespeare and Milton as either about class conflict or capitalist terribleness, that would be, I think, very bad for a number of reasons. Now, as an English major, I hope I’m not overstepping.
Tomasi: I didn’t know.
Sunstein: That isn’t a good thing to teach Shakespeare or Milton. But, you know, political indoctrination isn’t good and skewing isn’t good. So there are about five things not good about that. If at a law school people are saying that the Democratic appointees are just great and the Republican appointees are terrible, that’s not good teaching. So that’s a terrible disservice to the students. And I guess people are more likely to like the judges who align with their views. So a law school would be one where not proportional representation, but diversity of an ideological sort, I think, is essential. And that wouldn’t be true in a physics department. So it would be true with respect to physics, but a physics department needn’t have some people who voted for Sanders and some people who wish Ted Cruz were president. That wouldn’t be so important in the physics department. So I’m thinking that what’s actually happening in the classroom is what matters, and proportional, you know, political whatever is related to that, but isn’t that.
Tomasi: Nice. So I hear us putting another marker down. There’s a question: where does viewpoint diversity matter and where might it not matter? Or more we might say where does it matter most directly or most proximately and where might it not matter?
Sunstein: And with respect to what? So physics, there are forms of viewpoint diversity that are crucial, but they probably aren’t about whether the War Powers Resolution is constitutional.
Tomasi: No, I love that point. And I have dinner regularly with some professor friends who are computer scientists at Brown. And they say, yeah, viewpoint diversity, we’re really for that. You’re really right. Then they go off on these things I can barely understand when they explain the paradigms they want. But I think there’s another dimension now we’re adding, another marker, VPD of what? Because I describe the great fact because it’s such a, that’s the politicized fact, the politically charged fact about viewpoint diversity.
But the other great fact, I think, the same 50, 60 years of our universities have seen a tremendous increase in diversity in terms of identity diversity, gender and sex diversity particularly, but not only that. So there’s been a remarked increase. And we’ve seen some areas, some fields where the presence of African American voices, the presence of Palestinian and Arab voices, the open discussion, the open, we hope, conversations from Israeli voices, improves conversations. So again, there’s this question about where it matters, and there’s also a question again floating in the background, what exactly is it? I’m using the great fact to refer to ideological diversity because that’s so politically charged. Do you want to say anything about that?
Sunstein: So this is great. So one thing that Chicago in the ‘80s did was to put in doubt left-of-center shibboleths on the part of everyone, including left-of-center students and faculty. And that was good for many reasons. One reason is the left-of-center shibboleths might be wrong. Another is that lots of people don’t believe them, and it’s good to see other people who don’t believe them, so you understand what’s going on in your society. And a third is that the shibboleths, and this is John Stuart Mill’s point, become not a dead, like, you know, yeah, it’s not like the body snatchers, it’s like a living, and so that’s very good. And it could be that in some fields, you know, the belief that...
Tomasi: Yeah, dogma.
Sunstein: The New Deal was great and Johnson’s Great Society was great. Those are taken as like “dropped objects fall” and, “you kind of need oxygen,” but in my view they aren’t that. I tend to like the New Deal and the Great Society personally, but it’s not like dropped objects fall. And so intellectual diversity, viewpoint diversity is essential for those things. But in a psychology department, if people think Roosevelt was fantastic or Roosevelt was a demon, it probably wouldn’t matter unless they’re teaching that. And then they wouldn’t be teaching psychology.
Tomasi: Right. As you know, Bernard Schweizer and I have a new book that just came out on viewpoint diversity called Viewpoint Diversity. And we have some great contributors in there. It’s an edited volume of people puzzling about these issues, including some of your colleagues like Danielle Allen, other people, Yascha Mounk and others who think about these things. I wrote the first essay where I try to distinguish, I try to open up the stage, for the conversation by distinguishing two responses to the great fact. One, which I just mentioned, and I’ve already mentioned this, the idea that that’s a very worrying fact, and someone ought to do something about it. There ought to be a law, whatever it might be, proportional political representation or whatever. But the other approach that I described is what I call scholarly sanctification. And what I’m reaching for there is some idea of some way to understand the role of academic freedom in all of this.
And as you’ll know better than I, in the Sweezy v. New Hampshire case and some other cases, and not just cases, also in AAUP documents, is even more clear. There’s a principle about academic freedom that involves something like academic self-governance. And it’s based on the idea, I think, that whatever the ratio should be, or it should be determined by experts who have the specialized knowledge to know what excellence is. Therefore the professors should have some special powers to make their own choices one by one of what they count as excellence. And if the overall pattern emerges through time, turns out to lean one way rather than another way on some dimension of diversity, let’s say ideology, well, that’s just a consequence, the outcome is sanctified by the process because it’s scholarly. Do you have any thoughts about that view? I don’t know if that’s familiar to you. What do you think of the idea of academic freedom being able to override the proportionality people and dominate the decision about what ought to be right here?
Sunstein: I think a pox on both houses. I love your essay and I think you have that view, but I’ll say what I think. And the special powers idea makes me think of Spider-Noir, which is a new TV series, which I recommend, with Spider-Man and special powers, of course, as all Spider-Men do. Spider-Women also.
Two ideas. One is that the profession gets to set the right level of viewpoint diversity given its expertise. I think that’s too stark. You could have a profession that is in the grip of a view. You know, take your pick that capitalism is great and perfect and anything that intrudes on it is part of the road to serfdom. Let’s say this is Hayek University. And I’m a great admirer of Hayek, but that would be a disservice to students. Now if everyone thinks that, that’s very different from everyone both thinking that and proselytizing it.
So we could think that some places are now left and they’re like a mirror image of Hayek University, and the fact that they are specialists wouldn’t immunize them from external objection. So the professional sanctification view seems to me a little like Narcissus looking in the river and saying how beautiful.
A more technical thing, which is to say there’s academic freedom, which is either a legal thing, or whether or not legally protected is an ideal that we should observe so that even if institutions are screwy, they deserve to govern themselves. I don’t agree with that either. So there are some forms, some conceptions of academic freedom which are legitimate inferences from the First Amendment. So they do have a constitutional status. But the notion of academic freedom, as used in the discussion you’re pointing to, outruns the legal idea of academic freedom. So this is just a way of saying if there’s an institution that is very proud of its own standards and its standards are subject to an external objection, it’s the duty of the institution to defend its own standards against those objections. And what happens if the external authority, let’s say, has power, either because it’s wealthy or it’s the government. You know, it’s not clear what should happen. And the idea that the academic institution can claim academic freedom and just win by virtue of that is too simple.
Tomasi: And I’m interested that you just now in your final sentence used the word whether the institution can rely on academic freedom, which is one of the formulations in Sweezy, of course. But we also see departments wielding academic freedom and making choices that maybe led to this bigger delta, the great fact and the big delta dimensions. And those departments have some kind of claim to disciplinary authority. I think we both agree with that. They are the experts in that university about these things. I just wonder if we can say a little bit more about this idea about expertise and why it matters.
It seems to me that, well, I’d like to get your take. Universities have a truth-seeking mission, and administrators, or at least trustees, are fiduciaries to keep the university on whatever its defined institutional mission is. It often involves knowledge-seeking as a primary or the primary purpose, let’s say. But they have other purposes too, obviously. But is there a role for administrators who are not experts in disciplines to correct the trajectory of departments that, I’m not sure what the right word is here, have gone astray on viewpoint diversity? They’re not experts themselves, they’re administrators. But they do have this thing in view, the idea of the mission, I think, which may be different, the departments aren’t necessarily thinking mission, they’re thinking academic expertise. Can you do anything with that at all? I’m not putting this question very sharply, but it seems as though departments have disciplinary expertise and that gives them a claim to decide for themselves. What’s the role for administrators in all of this?
Sunstein: Okay, so I’ll tell you an analogy. When I was in the White House, I oversaw government regulation. And I had a team that was amazing and not partisan, and I learned a lot from them and from my experience. And then the president appointed a group of outside advisors who were concerned about over-regulation, and they didn’t have any legal authority, but they were kind of getting in our business. And our initial reaction, including mine, was: really? But then after some engagement, it was clear that the non-expert outsiders knew some things and had a perspective and a set of questions that was extremely valuable for the insiders to hear.
So if there’s an administrator, let’s say, who thinks that a political science department is disturbing its students and truth-seeking because it lacks viewpoint diversity, that’s a completely legitimate question for it to ask. And for the administrator to say, you know, we’re going to push hard in the direction of viewpoint diversity, whether it’s more rational actor models, whether it’s more people who are Burkean and traditionalists, whether it’s more people who are celebratory of traditions, that’s not an objectionable intrusion on academic freedom.
So I think we should be very cautious in all domains when people wield a large ideal in a way that is protecting their longstanding practices and their self-interest. It may be that the ideal is properly invoked for those purposes, but raised eyebrow. And here it’s hard to give a conception of the university such that the department would have immunity from external scrutiny on the part of those who run the university. Now we want a discussion here. So if the people who run the university are clueless and don’t understand the field, and saying in physics we need people who know that Newton had it right, and what followed Newton was completely wrong. So we need Newtonians. It’s going to be very hard to find them. Then the physicist can rightly say why it’s hard to find them because there aren’t any, and that’s because we know better than Newton did. And then the administrators should be inclined to back off. But these are fair discussions.
If in a history department it’s urged that, you know, they’re kind of Marxist and Foucauldian position people here and that’s not all of what history should be by any means. And we need people like, I’m going to mention two, maybe they won’t be familiar, Gordon Wood and Bernard Bailyn, who are very careful historians of the American Constitution and Revolution. We need more people like that. Then how a history department would have a convincing answer to that is, at least for this non-historian, mysterious.
Tomasi: Struck by your example of the physicists thinking about looking for Newtonians, and you said it may be hard to find them. As we know that people often make a parallel argument or claim about conservatives in the academy, it’s hard to find them. Maybe not for the same set of reasons, maybe for some other sets of reasons, but it does seem to be a parallel claim at least. And I just noticed something that you were doing, I think I was detecting this. And I do the same thing, so I’m with you on this, but I’m still not quite sure where it comes from exactly. I think there should be wider viewpoint diversity within the academy, within the fields where it matters, let’s say, on the ideological dimension. And I think it should more closely represent something like missing views on the right. But where does that directionality come from? Why do we think that? Is it the son of the proportional representation view coming back to haunt us? There’s something there, even though I don’t like that view, but there’s something.
Sunstein: This is a completely great question. So you could imagine a parallel world in which two people are having exactly the conversation you and I are having, and maybe they look exactly like us (this is science fictional), in which the impetus is for more viewpoint diversity on the left that we don’t have, and this is true in American law schools, people who think that, you know, communist China basically has it right, and people who think that Lenin is a hero and that Stalin was great, we don’t have anyone like that. And that’s a problem.
Tomasi: Right.
Sunstein: Yes, and people aren’t saying that. So, and there are people I’ve seen in the law school world, not a lot, but who emphasize that far-left views, let’s say, you know, critical race theory and feminism of a quite radical sort isn’t adequately represented. And you know, these are fair things to discuss for sure, but we’re not seeing in our world impetus for viewpoint diversity in the form of much more in the way of critical race theory and in the way of much more people who follow Andrea Dworkin, let’s say.
Tomasi: That’s nice.
Sunstein: So the people who are urging viewpoint diversity, at least in Washington, aren’t saying, where are the Andrea Dworkins? And why aren’t you talking more about intersectionality? I can say that I haven’t heard a student in my entire career, I don’t think, refer to intersectionality. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that. And I’ve hardly ever heard, not never, a faculty member refer to intersectionality, though it’s a very prominent idea by a very prominent professor. So is that a problem?
I think the only way to think about this, you can’t avoid something either about the distribution of views that are out there or something normative about what is a reasonable distribution of views. So I’m thinking in my own field, law, I’m in favor, at various institutions that are to the left, of getting more conservatives. And that’s not hard, by the way. There are amazing conservatives in high numbers in law. Why I’m in favor of that? I think a combination of two things. One is if you don’t have people who think kind of along the lines of the majority of the current Supreme Court, that’s a big problem for the academic institutions, not students. And the other thing I think is that the American conservatives in law schools, they have a lot that’s either correct or productive to discuss. And the first points to something in the direction of the proportional, but it has more pragmatism that even if the majority of the Supreme Court were full of complete nonsense, lawyers need to have people who sympathetically engage with that, and one needs to.
Tomasi: Thank you. We’re going to go to the Q&A. So this is a question about your work on the effects of the internet and social media. Do you have any thoughts about how social media’s changed academic life? And take the question as you like.
Sunstein: I’m going to be very narrow here, meaning just the little slice of academic life that I see, not a whole lot. So social media has changed life, but not a whole lot of academic life, at least in the mostly law school world that I occupy.
Tomasi: I can’t resist adding to that that I was at a dinner recently at Vanderbilt and I was sitting with some faculty members there, and I was stunned to hear a German intellectual historian make the claim, to me startling claim, that AI is at the point where it’s doing German intellectual history at a level that’s close to what he and his colleagues do. I’m just mentioning that as a possibly interesting fact or take it for what it is.
Do you have another question for us? If you haven’t put one in, this is your chance. So another question: is there evidence (thank you for asking an evidence question), that in order to expose students to a sufficient variety of views, the faculty must truly hold that variety of viewpoints? This is a classic, difficult question. One can at least imagine that a great teacher can teach multiple viewpoints, even ones differing radically from their own. And I’ll add that the AAUP in the 1915 statement talks about the responsibilities we have to teach in ways that allow people to be liberated rather than controlled. But this person’s asking, is there something about, do faculty need to truly hold the views? Have you ever thought about that?
Sunstein: Well, John Stuart Mill thought that the person really needs to hold the view. But it’s an empirical question, as the audience member suggests. And you need a randomized controlled trial, and we need to know who are the actors in the randomized controlled trial. It’s easily imaginable that if you have a faculty member who, let’s say, is left of center, but is fairly and sincerely putting right-of-center views in their best light, that could be better than a right-of-center faculty member who’s just a poor teacher or not that articulate. So we need to know what exactly we’re holding constant.
The great fact, as you mentioned, I myself do find alarming, but I think it’s only like a first-order entry into the problem. Because if you have a bunch of people who are in an ideologically inflected, let’s say, classroom, but they don’t teach it in an ideologically inflected way, it might be just fine.
Tomasi: Yeah, it might be, and if we pushed on that “might,” I’m really struck by some work by one of our colleagues at HxA, Musa al-Gharbi. And Musa looks at just this, the fact that we’re human in these really deep ways and that biases are part of our nature. Your colleague, Steve Pinker, makes this point really, really eloquently as well. And so I wonder in response to this question, and it’s the Mill point to some degree, that even if we do our best to try to see the other views differently, there’s a reason why we hold the views we do. There’s a reason why, in some all-things-considered I hope way, we come to the conclusions we have. And that might give us certain blind spots despite ourselves. Steve Pinker talks about scholarship being an unnatural practice. And I kind of think that’s right. It’s easy to say we’re open-minded, but to actually be open-minded, I don’t know. I wish we could do that. I’m just not sure humans can.
Sunstein: It’s an empirical question. But I agree with that. For someone who, let’s say, thinks that Justice Kagan is right and Justice Thomas is always wrong or almost always wrong, to teach Justice Thomas in a sympathetic way that would convey the best version of what Justice Thomas thinks, that would be much harder than someone who actually agrees with Justice Thomas. So I agree with you, but it’s a really great empirical question.
Tomasi: Yeah, and this is a great question. I just want to say one more thing about it. Perhaps there’s a test in something about the efficacy of our research taking by its own standards. So people talk about the replication crisis in social science. And some people think the replication crisis is perhaps partially caused by something having gone wrong with our framing and with our inability to be sufficiently self-critical of ourselves. By ourselves, I mean social science of the last 30 years. So maybe there’s some external test in the quality of research that comes out that might bear on this empirical question too, though I’m not quite sure how we get to that.
Here’s another issue. Cass, you said in your piece a couple of weeks ago that started this whole conversation that we were looking through a glass darkly. Here we go again. How do we ascertain what people’s views actually are? Is it possible for a spiral of silence to be at play across many departments where people are reluctant to voice views that are in opposition to the majority? And you’ve had some colleagues at Harvard and there are others, all of us who are professors have had this experience at universities, I think, in recent years where some people say things quietly, but they won’t say them out loud. And that obviously is not what a university should be. Do you want to say anything about this idea of a spiral of silence, either from your experience or theoretically as you like?
Sunstein: Yeah. So we know that people self-silence because of perceived convictions on the part of others. We have a lot of data on that, that in Saudi Arabia, young men are reluctant to say that they’re fine with their wives working outside of the home unless they’re informed that other young men think that, in which case they say, well, me too. And then you see more women working outside of the home because young men know that other young men think it’s fine. And interesting: there’s a whole literature on preference falsification, and what undoes it completely.
I think DEI is something that many faculty members have been ambivalent about, at least in certain forms. They’re certainly in favor of hiring people who are demographically diverse, but the emphasis on DEI or the incarnation of DEI is something that many faculty members have been more skeptical of than they’ve been willing to say. And that’s an example.
So I think the numbers, John, that you gave about people being more left than right and the proportions growing, it would be surprising if that were a product of people right of center giving a false answer to an interviewer. But there’s undoubtedly much more sympathy with, let’s say, unpopular views of various sorts than is visible because people don’t want to make other people think less of them.
Tomasi: Let’s pause on that DEI point you just made a moment more, because it goes to this question about what the role of administrators might be or should be. And with DEI, when DEI came in at Brown, I happened to be chairing a search committee with the philosophy department where we were looking at some candidates as we always had done in the past. It was a joint search between my unit, a center, and the philosophy department. And I remember we were all sort of surprised when we were now finding that we faculty members, that there was this other committee somewhere, an administrative body, screening through our applicant decisions. And we were quite alarmed for our academic freedom.
But I’m just wondering if I could push on this now a little bit with Harvard. Harvard’s been in the news, a great deal, in the Crimson recently, that a lot of us have been talking about. I want to ask, I won’t ask you about the details of the piece, but the general idea is that Harvard’s administration is making some push in perhaps the viewpoint diversity direction, perhaps creating an initiative to advance free inquiry which may involve faculty positions. There’s some, that article talks about the government department having two searches despite the hiring freeze across the university, where the searches are encouraged to find people who broaden the intellectual range in the government department. Do you have any thoughts about the administration getting involved in increasing viewpoint diversity? Is it like DEI?
Sunstein: This is such a great question. So I once asked a faculty member at Chicago, and I’m not going to out him, very, very conservative, what he thought of affirmative action. And he said, a little. He wants a little. And I said, what do you mean? And he said, a little. It was a great exchange.
And his view, which I think is approximately right, I mean, in principle, let’s say you can’t do it under the law, because we’re colorblind under this recent decision. But in principle, the view that he was stating was, you know, if you have a female or African American applicant, you notice that. That’s not a negative, something like that. Now you’re not going to have your standards lowered, but you understand it and you’re for it. Now that’s illicit now. And there we are. So race neutrality is the law of the land, and everyone should follow the law of the land. Exclamation point.
With respect to, I’ll just tell you my own view about law schools, which is if you have a left-of-center law school, it’s appropriate to search for people if it’s disproportionately, let’s say you don’t have anyone who thinks that, you know, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas is admirable substantively as well as admirable because of other things. You should try to get people who are conservative. I think that’s completely right. So I’m for that, both for the department and for the administration to urge it. Now you don’t want to hire someone who’s, you know, a terrible teacher or a terrible scholar, but there are many people who admire and agree with Scalia and Thomas who are amazing teachers and scholars.
Tomasi: In the case of, can I just note in the case of law schools, there again seems to be something like proportional representation at play because there’s some external standard that we look to to think what excellence in legal education might be.
Sunstein: Kind of with your article here, so the Scalia view of law, let’s just describe it crudely as textualism and original public meaning, that’s within the range of reasonable views. And there’s some people who don’t agree with that. I think the view that it’s not within the range of reasonable views is very hard to defend. And so then we’re golden. If it’s not within the range of reasonable views, then, and this is to your point, I’m still for it, on the ground that it’s a foundational part of our legal culture. And if people don’t see people who hold that view, then the educational enterprise is compromised. Now that’s not about just seeing what’s the range of views in America and tracking them.
It’s a little bit like let’s say there’s a practice of medicine, which is thought by people at a relevant medical school to be not state of the art, but it’s what everyone’s doing. You need to teach your students what it is and why they’re doing it, even if the instructor, because they want to save lives, reflects his or her own judgment, that’s not the way to go. With humility.
Tomasi: And that’s, and you and I both know, I’m attracted to a line like that, as you know. The challenge to it, I’m afraid, is something though that universities are aiming at knowledge, not public opinion polls. We try to, we hope for there being some consensus. We shouldn’t be surprised if there was consensus on some topics. So it’s an interesting twist that we’re faced in it within the academy.
Sunstein: Much more comfortable on the Scalia and Thomas view, saying both that the view is not unreasonable, even if it’s wrong, and that lawyers have to know it because it’s represented on the Supreme Court. If you only have the second and not the first, it gets harder. And it might be distinctive to the area of law that lawyers have to know what the Supreme Court thinks in a way that is attentive to the most sympathetic version of it. And I don’t know what the parallels are in history or physics or biology.
Tomasi: And there might not be parallels, but that’s part of the puzzle, perhaps. I wonder if we could take one more question. I know there’s so many questions from the audience. Thank you for these great points. So Cass, this is a question directly to you. You’ve long pointed to the dynamic of polarization to explain consensus in judicial decisions. Do you think that group polarization can explain the relatively extreme version of identity politics that dominates contemporary university campuses? Do you want to apply some of your previous thinking to this?
Sunstein: I want to, yes, I will, but with your indulgence, I’ll say that the educational institutions I know are not dominated by identity politics. So I was just at Duke and it wasn’t dominated by identity politics. Harvard Law School isn’t dominated by identity politics. I’m not seeing a domination by identity politics. It’s not like it’s Voldemort or Harry Potter and it’s taken. Maybe it’s the Jedi, maybe it’s this, I’m not seeing it. Chicago certainly not. So I think the availability heuristic, which is we think things are more probable if they readily come to mind, is behind the widespread judgment that identity politics is dominating contemporary university campuses. But it might be I just don’t know enough about university campuses and I’ve got my facts wrong.
Notwithstanding that, group polarization is really important, where if people go to an extreme view, let’s say identity politics or, you know, Chicago School economics or whatever, group polarization is typically a factor where if John, you and I and five other people are talking about something we tend to agree on, let’s say the amazingness of Olivia Rodrigo, and I hope you agree on that.
Tomasi: Of course.
Sunstein: She’s even more amazing even than I thought seconds ago, because you think it. And now we’re a group polarization machine. She’s even better than Bob Dylan. But she isn’t.
Tomasi: We have only a couple minutes left. I want to share with the audience that when you and I were talking before we came on this conversation to say that one of our hopes for this conversation is that we can open up some questions that people in the audience will pursue. We think as a democratic matter, we need to have a better understanding of viewpoint diversity than we do currently. Would you care to have the last word, Cass, and say a few things about what you think the stakes are in this conversation and how it might move forward?
Sunstein: Okay, really high. Thank you for that. So one thing I love about the topic and this discussion is that, reading you and reading others, I think some things are clear. Which is that the view that existing institutions get to define the right level of viewpoint diversity, that’s very hard to sustain. The view that we should mimic the distribution of views, let’s say within the relevant geographic area, that’s also very hard to defend. The view that an institution that’s dominated by, let’s say, left-of-center, right-of-center views as a problem and there’s explaining to do there’s explaining to do? That’s clear. There’s urgency in knowing what’s not a good practice. And I think we’ve made a lot of progress, that is, you have, and our country has in the last 10 years in understanding what’s not a good practice. And there’s also urgency in getting the right conception of viewpoint discrimination out there. I don’t have it in my own mind yet.
Still, to know what is a problem that needs improvement is essential for our students and our country’s well-being. Because take your preferred field, whether it’s philosophy or history or law or biology, we’re not going to progress enough and we’re not going to serve our citizenry unless we have a range of views that are productive of better knowledge.
Tomasi: Cass, thank you so much for taking this time to come on the show this afternoon. To all of you in the audience, thank you for joining us. Go to HxA if you’re not a member, if you’re a professor or work in an academy or not a member, please look at our materials, consider joining us. Our members direct what we do, they help us decide what we think because we’re a thinking organization. We need more smart people to join us. We’re always looking for more people. So please join us, help us, improve us, make us better, make us your own. Thanks again, Cass, and thanks to all of you for coming.
Sunstein: Thanks, everybody.
