Most faculty think viewpoint diversity makes their work better. Fewer are confident their colleagues agree — and that gap, rather than real opposition, may be the bigger obstacle on campus. A new Heterodox Academy report asked faculty about eight kinds of diversity, from theoretical and methodological to political and religious. Support was broad for nearly all of them. On demographic diversity, faculty assumed their colleagues valued it as much as they did. On political and religious diversity, that confidence fell away: they valued it themselves but doubted the person down the hall did. In this panel, HxA’s Justin McBrayer asks one of the report’s researchers (Shiri Spitz Siddiqi) and two scholars who work on these questions (Ashley Rubin, a sociologist at University of Hawaiʻi, and Jesse Smith, a sociologist at The Ohio State University) what to do with this silent majority. A transcript of the discussion is below.
Justin McBrayer: Good to see many of you. Thank you for joining us for the faculty value viewpoint diversity, but how can we make it the norm on campus discussion? There’s an awful lot to say here. We’re joined by some experts in the field. We’re going to have a really great discussion. So let me welcome you and tell you a little bit about Heterodox Academy events and what we do. As you know, Heterodox Academy hosts live events at conferences and events on campus, but we also do an awful lot virtually. We’ve got nearly 9000 members across the English speaking world. And so we’re engaging with members weekly in virtual ways, in addition to our newsletters and our reports. And for today’s discussion, I want to remind everyone to follow the HxA way.
We deeply value the norms of serious intellectual engagement, and we encourage everyone engaged in this discussion to make your case with evidence, to be intellectually charitable with those you disagree with, to be humble, to be constructive, but at root bottom to also be yourself. I encourage everyone who’s going to be asking questions and for our panelists too, not to self-censor, tell us what you really think and try to do so in a careful evidence-based way. Furthermore, we are a membership organization. We would love for you to be part of our circle. If you are a graduate student, if you’re a faculty member, if you’re staff at a university, please join HxA if you’re not currently a member. It’s free to join.
We’re a group that advocates for open inquiry in higher education, and I think you’ll really find a sense of community and collegiality across the HxA members. Also join our Substack or our newsletter if you’re not subscribed there. We have some cool events coming up. Let me tell you about one virtual and one in person. Tomorrow we have a virtual member discussion about heterodox assessments in the classroom. You need to register to have access to that discussion. There’s a QR code on the screen. Grab that if you can join us tomorrow for this virtual conversation. and then the denouement of our work this year is going to be our national conference in April.
We’re really excited about the work that we’re putting together there and we’re going to have a great main stage feature for you. If you’re interested in being part of that conference, I encourage you to register. If you’re interested in being on stage or offering you a workshop as part of that national conference, grab the QR code that you see on your screen now. The abstracts are open for a couple more weeks. Okay, with that said, I’m Justin McBrayer. I’m director of university partnerships here at Heterodox Academy. Delighted to welcome all of you to our conversation. Let me quickly introduce our panelists and then we’ll get right to the show. We’re joined first by Shiri Spitz Siddiqi. Shiri is one of my colleagues at Heterodox Academy.
She’s an experimental social psychologist specializing in moral and political psychology. She joined HxA because she views its principled, nonpartisan approach as crucial for the fulfillment of the university’s purpose. Informed by her deep familiarity with several psychological literatures, Shiri develops original research analyses around HxA’s core mission and values. She enjoys writing about psychological science for a broad audience, and contributes regularly to our HxA Substack, Free the Inquiry. I can also say she’s a fantastic colleague who gives insightful comments on pieces that I’ve put together for HxA, so I’m very grateful to have her join our conversation today. We’re also joined by Ashley Rubin.
If you’ve been in higher ed reform conversations over the last six months or so, You surely know Ashley Rubin. She’s an HxA member and a professor of sociology at the University of Hawai‘I at Mānoa, as you could probably tell by looking at her background here on Zoom. She’s an interdisciplinary social scientist studying the history and sociology of prisons and other criminal punishments, drawing on organizational theory, law and society, and punishment and society scholarship to explain how penal practices change and persist across United States history. She’s the author of The Deviant Prison from Cambridge University Press and Rocking Qualitative Social Science from Stanford.
She holds a PhD in jurisprudence and social policy from the University of California at Berkeley. And finally, we’re joined by Jesse Smith. Jesse’s a sociologist and assistant professor at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at The Ohio State University. His work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Marriage and Family, Sociology of Religion, and Socius, as well as popular outlets such as Public Discourse and Law & Liberty. He has published research on topics such as the heterogeneity of religious nationalism, moral socialization of young adults, and transmission of religious belief and practice between generations.
His current focus is on the ways that dominant paradigms in academic research lead to systematic errors and blind spots in bodies of social scientific knowledge. So Jesse, Shiri, Ashley, thank you for joining us. Here’s what we’ll do. I’m going to pose a few questions to our panelists to get our conversation started. Then we’ll pivot into Q&A with our audience. So we have a Q&A function built into chat. If you have a question at any point in time, go place it in the Q&A chat. Members will be able to upvote the questions that they most want the panelists to address, and I’ll pivot to pulling out some of those questions towards the back half of our time together will end at about 25 minutes past the next hour. So that’s our run of show.
Okay, we’re together to talk about a report that Heterodox Academy recently released on faculty attitudes about the value and impact of diversity in higher ed. So just to be clear, this was not a report about whether faculty are in fact diverse religiously, socioeconomically, politically or the like. So this was not about the diversity of faculty. It was about how faculty think about diversity and in particular, whether they value it and if so, which kinds of diversity they value and the like. Marisa will put a link to the full report in our chat if you haven’t had a chance to get to it yet. But Shiri, since you were one of the researchers knee deep in this project, can we just start with kind of the background?
What made Heterodox Academy interested in this set of issues? Why did we take the time to put this together? Just give us some of the genesis of this project.
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah, I would say I was eye-deep in this report. But yeah, so as you mentioned, this was not a report looking at, you know, the reality, the actual distribution of faculty political views or religious views, demographic, anything like that. There already exists a good amount of work on that. But what we noticed is that there wasn’t a lot of work that actually looked at how faculty themselves think about diversity in different ways in their work. And because faculty are just so heavily and directly implicated in any kind of reform we might want to pursue related to viewpoint diversity, and also because the conversation around viewpoint diversity has become so polarized and the heat has just turned so way up on this topic.
We thought that maybe our intuitive perception of the distribution of views is not true to the way the land actually lays and faculty’s private views about this issue. So that’s why we wanted to study faculty’s actual views about viewpoint diversity.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah, nice. It seems like we suffer from a kind of availability bias, where when you sort of self-reflect on whether or not your colleagues, your faculty at large, value diversity, you think of the most, you know, the last few interactions you had, or you think of the loudest voice in the faculty senate room or the like. So to take the time to get outside of our individual limited view and do a systematic survey seems like a really good idea to figure out what faculty really think rather than what we think they think about diversity. Can you give us like an executive summary? What’s the main shape of the findings? What do faculty value diversity? If so, what kinds? Give us some of the main findings from the report.
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Sure. So we sort of throughout the report, we were interested in eight dimensions of diversity that we landed on. And these were a mix of demographic forms of diversity as well as intellectual ones. So I have the list here. We asked about theoretical slash methodological diversity, socioeconomic background, race and ethnicity, disability status, gender identity, sexual orientation, political perspectives, and religious views. And for each of these, we randomly assigned people to answer whether they valued these in their in research or in teaching. But the patterns were virtually identical. So we really just collapsed across that.
But we asked people, do you think that each of these makes inquiry in your field better or doesn’t have an effect or it undermines inquiry in your discipline? And what we found was that the number one most widely endorsed form of diversity across disciplines was theories and methods. So over 80 percent of people answered that they think that that form of diversity improves inquiry in their discipline. You know, number two and number three were class and race and ethnicity. Although really every form of diversity was valued by at least 50% of the sample. And that includes religious views that had 53% of respondents saying it improves inquiry. But that’s really like the range of it.
53% to 84% for any given form of diversity, people said it improves their field.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah, interesting. So it is interesting that, you know, one of the takeaways is that faculty, by and large, think that diversity in a wide range of ways of understanding diversity is valuable for what they do, either in the classroom, you know, or for their research. And it’s also interesting, Shiri, that the report asks not just about demographic diversity, which I think sometimes when people just say the word diversity, they automatically hear demographic features, right? But you’re also asking about these intellectual features and trying to see how those two compare.
One finding that I wanted to ask you about in particular that I found striking and somewhat troubling, you asked faculty to indicate how many scholars they regularly interface with who disagree with them. On important disciplinary issues. You know, like, are you hanging out with other scholars who don’t think just like you do about particular issues? And you found that nearly 30% of faculty say they don’t regularly interface with people who disagree with them. And then that number was highest among adjuncts, contingent faculty, you know, faculty who may be teaching less humanistic fields like stem. Tell me something about that number, about what you found and why that unevenness in terms of interfacing with people who disagree with you matters.
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah. So being HxA, we think everybody should share this value, but what we believe that disagreement is like a superpower for inquiry. It helps us catch bad ideas and it helps us refine and sharpen good ideas. And so we see it as like a good that everybody should have if they’re invested in doing rigorous inquiry and teaching. So it would just be concerning to find that a lot of people somehow aren’t having this experience. They don’t benefit from these conditions that could really improve their inquiry. And we found that almost, you know, three in 10 don’t exist in those conditions. And then on top of that, to find that this good isn’t distributed equally is another layer of concern.
Because it’s not that disagreement is like less valuable just because you’re in STEM. There’s valuable disagreements to be had no matter what area of inquiry you’re in. And then I think we also found that generally the more disagreement people were reporting, more frequent disagreements were related to valuing all kinds of diversity more, but in particular political diversity.
And so if those, if valuing disagreement is in any way related to the way that you teach and like let’s say adjuncts are in this they’re particularly likely to be in this situation of not encountering disagreement very often then we might they might be at risk for having their teaching not be as broad or exposing their students to the true breadth of perspectives and meanwhile most students are taught by adjuncts And so there’s lots of potential problems that this could cause.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah, interesting. Jesse and Ashley, I’d like to hear from you, especially given your expertise as social scientists. Can you say something about how diversity of different sorts, whether we’re talking methodological, socioeconomic, political, and the like, how that diversity is actually valuable when it comes to teaching or research? Like, tell us something about the mechanisms or processes that explain how diversity sharpens what we do or improves what we do either in the classroom or in our research.
Ashley Rubin: I can go ahead and start for us. So I would say every perspective, and so that comes from, you know, like your positionality as a person with different demographics, experiences, and so on, as well as every methodology, every theory has both its contributions and its limitations. So they’re going to help us to kind of see certain variables or kind of think about different ways of getting to an answer that other kind of perspectives won’t necessarily have. But they’ll also have their blind spots. So to get to some version of the truth, we’ll be better off if we have this kind of kaleidoscope of perspectives where we can basically see what combination helps us get as close as possible to the actual truth.
To say that a little bit more concretely, you know, if you have scholars who use different methods or subscribe to different theories, that’s going to help us to stress test the claims that we make because they might say, you know, well, from my perspective, I would look at like this variable. So why aren’t you talking about this variable? Or you know, my understanding of methodology is, you know, you need to do if you’re going to do causal inference, you need an experiment. So here are the problems with your non-experimental design. Or conversely, you know, here’s what observational data can tell us that an experiment can’t do.
So kind of putting all of that together is going to help us get to some closer version of the truth and kind of identify the limitations of what we think is the truth.
Justin McBrayer: Nice. I just want to say, in particular, your mention of a kaleidoscope, like that’s a metaphor I’ve not heard before, but it’s such a neat idea to think about, you know, pivoting the kaleidoscope and recombining the same bits of material to yield a different pattern or a different, like, that’s a really nice way of thinking about how diversity, you know, helps us see things that we wouldn’t have seen otherwise. Jesse, what do you think? What are the mechanisms that make diversity valuable?
Jesse Smith: Yeah, it’s a great question. And my response would overlap quite a lot with Ashley’s. But I think for social science in particular, this could apply to other disciplines to different degrees. But social science, you’re dealing with the social world, you know, politics or culture or religion in or the economy or things that I think virtually everybody has some kind of stake in, some kind of knowledge of, and that virtually everybody cares about and has some kind of interesting perspective on, but very complex phenomena. So we’re trying to make claims about those things. And what these different kinds of diversity give us is a way to stress test our claims.
You know, we bring certain assumptions, we bring a certain angle or perspective to whatever we’re saying about these different things and we don’t necessarily know what our biases or blind spots are we don’t always know what the strongest counter arguments are and so I think that diversity of perspectives really brings that and as far as mechanisms in a way we already have a mechanism because we have things like peer review and workshops and that sort of thing but if you don’t have diversity among the people who are doing that then you’re not getting the a full benefit of it because you don’t have a group of people that’s actually maybe able to adequately stress test each other’s arguments. And so this is where I think the diversity contributes.
Justin McBrayer: That’s a nice framing too, that I’ve not, I’ve not heard before stress test. I mean, that’s what happens when you defend your dissertation in front of your colleagues, right? I mean, my advisor and the other colleagues, you know, that were on that committee, they stress rest tested my ideas. And it was stressful to go before them, right? And pitch your ideas and have them, you know, lean on particular assumptions and arguments and the like. But I think you’re exactly right, Jesse. That’s what we need if we’re going to try to figure out what the world is really like rather than what we, you know, naively assume the world is like.
So let’s pivot our discussion less from, you know, what faculty think to more about the title of this webinar, You know, like, how do we make this the norm on campus? And Shuri, I want to double back to you quickly because I think one of the report’s more striking findings is that it revealed this gap between what faculty personally believe and what they think their colleagues believe. So, you know, faculty support political and religious diversity in the sense that they think it’s valuable, but they also assume that their peers see it as less valuable than they do.
There’s like almost this silent majority kind of thing so tell us about that finding like what does it reveal about how politicized this conversation has become what does it reveal about how difficult it might be to make this kind of conversation the norm on campus
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah so with this finding I think it’s it’s helpful to compare the gap on like political and religious diversity to the gap that we didn’t see on other forms of diversity, like race and gender and sexuality. So when we asked about, you know, how much do you, how much do you value these demographic forms of diversity? And how much do you think your colleagues value them? People basically said, I value them. And I also think my colleagues do as well. But when we asked them about political and religious diversity, they were still likely to say, yep, I value these, but they were less sure that their colleagues share that view.
And so what my guess would be that there are some very loud critics of viewpoint diversity and or they also carry more social cachet than the proponents of viewpoint diversity. And this kind of creates a dynamic where people who do have positive views of these kinds of diversity, they don’t express them. And we get what’s called a spiral of silence, where we have this majority that isn’t being as open or forthcoming with their positive views as they privately feel. And then that distorts the information that’s available to everybody who’s trying to form an impression of like, okay, what views are prevalent among my peers?
And so once we take, you know, these kind of like normie moderate views out of the equation, all we’re left with is the vocal people on the extremes. And so, yeah, I think this is a problem that needs addressing. But I think there kind of have to be two, I don’t know, crucial ingredients to that response. I think one of them has to be, we need to make viewpoint diversity more visible by showing people positive examples of how they can do this. I think HxA makes a big point out of highlighting these positive examples.
You know, things like Sway, I’m thinking of Abigail Saguy’s gender course, positive examples of how you can do this and how it can go well, coupled with support from administration faculty need to trust that if they’re going to go out on a limb and do this thing that’s still a little bit risky, that might draw some backlash, they need to trust that they’re going to have the support of peers and the people in power.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah so I you know at the on the one hand the finding is distressing because our perceptions of others don’t match the reality we think that other faculty don’t value this thing when it turns out actually they do so that’s the distressing part but the silver lining part is in fact there’s wide agreement across faculty that this stuff really does matter so there’s a the good news is that there’s a majority the bad news is that it’s the silent majority so let’s think about how to connect with that silent majority and make some moves that would matter on campus Ashley you’ve thought about this cluster of issues you know more than most and you’ve got all kind of ideas for concrete things that we can be doing on campus and in fact one thing that you’ve written about is this idea that institutions can declare support for like other forms of diversity intellectual diversity or ideological diversity or the like without really doing anything on the ground, without changing anything.
It’s just sort of a virtue signal and then they move on. But if Shiri is right that the faculty support is there, what is it that departments and institutions can be doing? What can they be building? Or what should they quit doing if there are things they should quit doing? What are some concrete things we can do on campus to harness the fact that the experts themselves think that diversity matters?
Ashley Rubin: Yeah, thanks for the question. So I think part of the problem that we face is that viewpoint diversity means so many different things to different people. And as Shiri was saying, it’s kind of a right-coded concept at this point, which is also leading to these problems. But as part of the kind of ambiguities relating to viewpoint diversity and its different names, intellectual diversity and so on. I think we have to think about viewpoint diversity as a practice and not just as a value. So obviously viewpoint diversity is a really important value and to say like we support viewpoint diversity, I think that’s essential, but we can’t think that that’s the only thing that we’re doing. We also have to actually practice viewpoint diversity.
And the really key point here is that viewpoint diversity as a practice is something we’re just supposed to do as researchers, as scholars. We’re supposed to engage in this. This is just kind of fundamental to how we’re supposed to do scholarship. We’re supposed to engage and explore a range of explanations and, you know, look at the data, you know, seriously from those different perspectives. We’re supposed to say things or we’re supposed to ask questions like, you know, what do I expect to see if my hunch or my pet explanation is right? And what do I expect to see if it’s wrong? What if, you know, these other typical explanations people offer, what would I expect to see? Like, let me steel man them and see if they’re consistent with the data.
And this is something that we’ve kind of institutionalized kind of in the writing process, because we are supposed to discuss alternative explanations, contradictory data, and that’s kind of just supposed to be in our write-ups when we’re doing this, not just in the research practice, but we’re also supposed to show people that we considered these considerations. And if we don’t do this ourselves, editors and reviewers are supposed to point that out. So I would say, you know, we need to encourage people to practice this kind of pluralistic approach in our research, in our teaching, and even in our engagement with others.
And so I would say a statement from a university or organization just kind of supporting viewpoint diversity as a value, I don’t think that’s going to do that. Instead, I think we have to create structures and incentives that are actually designed to check that we’re doing that and kind of putting some sort of backstop in place when we’re not.
Justin McBrayer: Nice. So I like this idea of living. What does it mean to live viewpoint diversity in your teaching, in your research? Yeah, that sounds right. Jesse, speaking of what it would mean to live viewpoint diversity, in your work, you’ve made the case that the magic happens, the real gains come from actual exposure to disagreements and not, you know, like kind of pretend disagreements or statements. Commitments or the like. Can you tell us more about that? Like, what happens to us when we’re exposed to disagreement or viewpoint diversity, you know, in some of the senses that we were thinking about in this report? Thank you. And as much as I wish I could take credit for that insight, I think John Stuart Mill beat me there by a little bit.
Jesse Smith: So he, I know people are fans of him around Heterodox Academy. So he talks about in On Liberty, the importance of having actual disagreement. And one point he makes that I think is really, it’s vital, but it’s not always intuitive, is he says it’s not good enough to have an argument presented by a teacher or an instructor. It needs to be presented by an advocate, someone who really believes it, because they’re going to, I think his phrasing is, they’re going to do their very utmost for the argument, force people to know them in their most plausible and persuasive form, and feel their whole force. And so I think what he’s really getting at, which I think is vital here, is the importance of engagement.
You know, in academia, we’re dealing with ideas all day long because what we do, so we’re reading things and scanning and mapping and kind of pulling what we can use for our projects. But we’re not necessarily engaging ideas all the time.
We mostly, in terms of like, Thinking through their implications, seriously thinking about how they apply to our subject matter and what all would follow from their arguments we really only do that for a select few ideas that we care about the most but I think that’s the most fruitful part of intellectual life is when we’re really engaging things and so I think what real disagreement does whether engaging a debate or whether you’re watching a debate and kind of feeling some of the drama of it promotes a more serious engagement with the different ideas and perspectives, which then leads them to yield the strongest benefits toward inquiry.
Justin McBrayer: Nice. And you’re exactly right. John Stewart Mill has this line about, it’s not just, you know, interacting with ideas, but seeing the ideas in the flesh, right? People who actually hold those ideas. And there’s something powerful about that. I, in fact, just ran across a paper that offers some empirical support to this million hypothesis. I’m It’s a it’s an old it’s 25 year old paper, but it compares people the effects of people who play devil’s advocate with coming face to face with someone who really believes it and how those two, you know, the devil’s advocate is sort of better than nothing. But it doesn’t have some of the real benefits, Jesse, that you were just talking about, you know, interacting with someone who truly believes something.
Thing. You know, I don’t know if that’s because when you meet someone who truly believes that it gives you some social permission to believe it too, or maybe they’re just more serious about their evidence or their arguments. But I think, you know, that there are studies that have borne out what John Stuart Mill, you know, advocated for many years ago. Let me ask one more question, then we’ll pivot to Q&A. Those of you who are watching, if you have questions, I encourage you to go down to the Q&A module at the bottom of your screen, drop in a question, go in and check out the questions that are there and upvote the ones that you want me to pitch to the panelists, and we’ll do that shortly.
So one final question then before we turn to Q&A for all of you. The report found that faculty who regularly engage with people who disagree with them, so people, you know, Shiri, who are not in that 30% of, I never meet scholars who disagree with People who regularly interface with other scholars who disagree with them. Those people are far more likely to value political diversity in particular. Given that, what would it look like to mobilize faculty to do more of that kind of engagement? I would love to hear an idea from each of you, like a real intervention, not just an aspiration. You’re like, I really want to push you here.
Like, what is one concrete thing you can do as a faculty member, as a department chair, as a dean, as a member of a faculty senate? Like, give me one idea that will move this, you know, move from valuing viewpoint diversity to actually embodying it or living it on campus. Shiri, can we just start with you and then we’ll just go kind of go round Robin?
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Sure. Well, I think incentives can go a long way. So maybe if you’re a dean or chair, you can offer some funding for faculty to put together maybe a debate or a panel convening scholars who disagree, or maybe fund them to go to a conference.
Justin McBrayer: Nice. Okay. Ashley, why don’t we do you next and then we’ll do Jesse.
Ashley Rubin: Sure, thanks. So I agree funding for colloquia, you know, speaker series that puts different viewpoints in conversation, or at least that features speakers from different perspectives over the course of the term or school year, providing funding for adversarial collaborations. But if you don’t have funding, like one smaller thing you could do is just institutionalize the idea of the 10th man. So this is an idea that comes from World War Z, both the book and the movie, I think. But the idea that, you know, if everybody in the room agrees, somebody has the responsibility to try to give the steel man version of the alternative argument or set of alternative arguments and kind of take that seriously.
And so to kind of normalize that approach, I think would be really helpful. And then finally, I would say just reminding people how to disagree. And I would, this is going to sound, you know, totally suck upy, but, you know, promulgating the XX way principles, because I found them really helpful as just a reminder of like, oh, right, like when I feel myself slipping a little bit too much into an ideological mode, the HX way is kind of helpful for kind of bringing myself back. And so I would advise, you know, chairs, deans, just to kind of circulate that or their own kind of updated version of it that I think would be really helpful.
Justin McBrayer: That’s a good suggestion. I did that in my classes, actually. You know, I’m a philosopher by trade. So we would talk about, you know, what does justice for transgender athletes look like? And what do we say about the abortion? Like really controversial things. And I would use the HX way in my classroom. And it was a beautiful model for how to engage with one another in constructive, but civil ways. Good suggestion. Jesse, concrete things we can do.
Jesse Smith: Yeah, you know, this one, it’s maybe not usually one you hear about in these conversations, but I think it would be both direct and relatively straightforward.
I think in the, just the ecosystem of journal publication, if you made it easier to publish critiques of existing work, and a very good example of that, I think Brain and Behavioral Sciences does this all the time, where they’ll publish an article, and then they’ll have like a whole series of different perspectives, different counter arguments on whatever the target article was actually very appropriately for this there was a very famous article I learned a lot from about political diversity and social science from jose duarte I think jonathan height and a few other people and I found that such an enriching thing to read I felt like I learned so much not just from their article but hearing like 20 different people respond to it and seeing all the different forms of pushback I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t you know scale that up or make it more of a journal norm and I think you would get a lot of traction that way.
Justin McBrayer: I remember my first year in graduate school, my professor made the point that René Descartes was one of the first to publish work with responses to critics, you know, so he’s, he cycles the meditations across all of the main kind of big name thinkers in Europe at the time said, what do you think about this? They wrote objections, and he had replies. I just think reading through that dialectic as a graduate student, here’s what Descartes thought, here’s some pretty serious criticism of his work. Here’s what he thought. Just that back and forth was such a model of good thinking that, you know, we could do a better job of that in our own work and in journals and the like. So that’s a great suggestion, Jesse.
Okay, I’m going to turn to some questions and raise some issues that our viewers are raising. And I just, I have to tell you that Heterodox Academy viewers, they don’t pull their punches. So you’re going to get some, You’re going to get some good questions, and I’m excited to see what you have to say about them. So the first one comes from David. He says, I think that academic disciplines often carry political bias. For example, tongue in cheek, every historian is liberal, every civil engineer is conservative, and so forth. As universities have to replace faculty in specific academic areas, departments are likely going to propagate their bias.
And so repeated over many years, hiring is just going to intensify the viewpoint biases in faculty, not diversify them. What do you do about it?
Jesse Smith: I guess I can start on that one. I mean, that’s a very difficult question. I don’t think there’s any silver bullet to it. I do think it matters just kind of instituting viewpoint diversity or whatever diversity we think is helpful as a value and something that we should actually prioritize and potentially hire for, which is not, it isn’t something that comes naturally, I think, within the current structures. When you’re looking for who you’re going to hire, you look for who you’ll get along with and for who has a really impressive research agenda and CV. And of course, you should look at all those things. You don’t necessarily look for the person who’s going to challenge dominant assumptions. If anything, it’s the opposite.
That person is probably going to make things a little bit more uncomfortable around your department. So maybe subconsciously, you might not go for that person. And I think kind of adopting an ethic of like, no, we actually should be trying to bring in the critical perspective, even if they get on our nerves, because they might actually contribute a lot to our epistemic environment. Even just getting people on board with that idea would hopefully be a first step toward actually now following through on it.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah.
Ashley Rubin: You know politically demographically experientially diverse faculty but if they’re all in their own little silos that’s a problem conversely if you don’t try to do like the political litmus test of aversion but you think like okay well we’re going to hire in particular areas and that’s going to fix the problem because different areas are kind of right or left coded so let’s say we’re in a history department american revolution is kind of now right coded so we think like okay we’re We’re going to hire somebody who studies the American Revolution, and that’s going to kind of fix our political problems without actually looking for are you actually a conservative or a moderate or whatever.
The problem is you can study the American Revolution from a lot of different perspectives, and you might end up, as Jesse said, you might get somebody who is looking at it from the exact same perspectives as everyone else in the department. And so you’re not actually just because you’re looking at this, you know, right coded topic doesn’t mean that you’re not looking at, you know, kind of left leaning theories. So that’s not really going to fix the problem. So for me, I think the solution has to come back to just getting back to what scholarship is supposed to be in the first place, like that, that treating it as a practice, institutionalizing, we have to look at different perspectives.
And so for administrators, I think looking and kind of setting up structures that say, hey, chair of this department, you know, what evidence can you show me that you guys actually are looking at things from different perspectives and not just kind of a theoretical monoculture that you even if you have people from different perspectives in your department, what sort of engagement are they having? What sort of, you know, contestations are they doing? Or is everyone just basically going on their own little path and not looking at the other paths. So I think kind of setting up those structures is going to be really key.
Justin McBrayer: Shiri, would you mind if I pivot to the next question in our queue? Because it touches directly on the point that Ashley just made. Is that okay? And then we can circle back. So Ashley, you were just making this point about what administrators need to do. And when we’re hiring, we’re like, well, here’s the next question in our queue. It comes from Duane.
As an administrator, it’s very hard to push viewpoint diversity when the hiring process does not collect that information and at most places you know inquiring about political viewpoint for example is not allowed so if the key to if what we are trying to do is hire a viewpoint diverse faculty how do we institute that in hiring like what how are we I mean actually you were just giving advice this is what the administration do are you like how do you do that we’re not we don’t have an equal opportunity office it’s like coding people for their viewpoints and we don’t. So just concretely, what does that look like?
Ashley Rubin: Yeah. So again, like I don’t want to code people by their viewpoints. I think that’s, you know, like that seems very close to illegal if it’s not actually. Instead, I would say like, have, you know, like we, when we do hiring, we have to fill out these forms about like different questions and like mandatory, what is it? MQs and DQs, like mandatory qualifications and desirable qualifications. One of those qualifications should be, are you evaluating, are you critically evaluating multiple perspectives or are you just pushing your own perspective? When you give a job talk, are you showing kind of competing explanations?
Are you talking about here are the limitations, not like not in the, sometimes we see like limitation slides that are just really you know paltry and it’s it’s just kind of rote stuff that everyone says like oh this is an observational study therefore it can’t show causality or something Instead, are you seriously engaging other viewpoints? And by viewpoints here, I mean perspectives, methodologies. Are you seriously kicking the tires of your study and thinking about things from these different perspectives? And if you have a lot of campuses now have an advocate who’s part of the hiring process, the advocate can sit in on the job talk and say, like, you know, what sort of questions are we seeing the department asking?
And, you know, are they kind of asking questions from multiple viewpoints? And if they’re not, maybe that department needs a little reminder about, you know, like, here’s going to be a training session on just basic stuff that we’re supposed to do in research.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good. Thanks. Shiri, you have ideas for what we can do, you know, of just concrete things that we could do either in a hiring committee or the like?
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I mean, I agree with what Ashley said about just building the incentives into the structure, just because it is so hard to, it’s unintuitive to seek people out and invite them in who disagree with us and push back on our ideas. And so to the extent that in the hiring process, you can select for people who they don’t have to agree with your, you know, your disciplinary premises or methods or assumptions or conclusions, definitely not, but they should at the very least take a kind of pluralistic approach, like Ashley was saying, in their own research and in the way that they are willing to accommodate other approaches to similar questions.
And it just seems very hard to try to seek truth if not everybody’s on the same page about, you know, sharing that as a starting value.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good. Jesse, do you want to weigh in on Duane’s question about what are administrators supposed to do, given that you, in some ways, it’s very hard to measure whether changes you make as an administrator are making the faculty more viewpoint diverse or not? Like, suppose you’re one of the faculty who responded to this survey and you’re like, yes, I value this kind of diversity. Like, what is an administrator supposed to do? And they can’t do what Ashley thinks they shouldn’t do anyway, which is like try to slot people into views and code them. Like, what are you supposed to do then?
Jesse Smith: That’s a very thorny question. And one thing I think is in general challenging about viewpoint diversity conversations is that what valuable viewpoint diversity actually looks like is going to differ by every subfield, by every department. So we’re always trying to have these conversations at the 30,000-foot view, but it’s going to be completely different in cultural anthropology versus the sociology of religion or whatever it is we’re looking at. So I know something both the Yale report on higher ed reform mentioned and then the Vanderbilt report that actually helped write mentioned was about having departments engage in some kind of self-study where you look at, okay, what are the gaps in our inquiry, our research agendas?
What do we think is missing that would be helpful potentially? Which, again, isn’t something you necessarily just do naturally or intuitively. You might need to be prompted to do it. But so that may be something an administrator can do is just prompt departments to undertake that kind of like it’s almost like a meta analysis of like what it is that we’re doing here. Obviously, departments have to be on board with that to do it well. But if it is something they’re open to, then maybe they can give you the feedback and they can tell you what they would need to do to improve kind of the diversity and epistemic quality of what they’re doing.
Justin McBrayer: OK, good. I want to ask a question. And this is not verbatim from one of our viewers, but I’m piecing together several questions that are in this vein. And it’s also something that’s very much in the air right now when it comes to higher ed reform. What do you do when your department tells you everything’s fine, but you suspect that it’s not? So you do, Jesse, you ask them to go through this meta-analysis. They say, we’ve taken a look at our curriculum. We think it’s spot on. Ashley says, well, when you do a search, make sure people, you know, seriously kick the tires on other views. They’re like, oh, we do. This is the proper range of views. It’s only neo-Marxist views.
Outside of that, those aren’t even like, and within that range, they kick the tires on all four of the ways of reading Foucault or like, you know, like what, like, what do you do then? This is the really hard and uncomfortable question. I know, this is why I raised it for you. Yeah, I appreciate it.
Ashley Rubin: My personal take, you know, because there are some options on the table that I think make us all very uncomfortable that kind of feel authoritarian, top down and scary. And, you know, it’s not clear that they would work in the way that we would even want them to work. And so I kind of want to put those aside. And so my preferred solution is, you know, I think we need to work on incentives and make voluntary change and give people opportunities to do that. And if you have a department that’s just very reticent on doing essentially their job, my preferred solution is to create a new department that people can voluntarily go into where that new department has to be committed to, you know, the basic foundation of how we’re supposed to do scholarship.
We are supposed to do this, you know, stress testing approach. We are supposed to be open to different viewpoints. And as long as you can do that and you’re willing to stick to certain structures that are going to keep checking that you’re doing that it’s not just going to be like a one and done thing that I think giving people the opportunity to do that and then you put resources into that department so long as it’s doing its job and then you just don’t give new hires to the department that’s not doing that unless they start to change their behavior. And it’s still, you know, kind of an uncomfortable solution, but it’s at least it’s voluntary and it’s not actively penalizing, like they can keep doing their thing.
But it’s just, you know, hopefully at some point going to come to an end one way or another.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah. I appreciate both the clarity of your answer and your courage to make it so clear, but it’s the sort of build and then kind of let lie kind of strategy. So I appreciate that. Shiri or Jesse, would either of you like to weigh in on this? The question again is like, what happens when a department tells you that they’re kicking the tires on serious views, when they tell you that their curriculum’s covering all the valuable stuff, but there’s some kind of good reason to think that they’re not? What do you do, either as a faculty member in that department or as an administrator? Well, I’m also kind of scared of that question, but it also is one that I think can’t entirely be avoided.
And that actually the Vanderbilt report kind of touches on this too, when it talks about the difference between astronomy and astrology and yeah, when the astrology department, they’re telling you that everything is fine, then what do you do?
Jesse Smith: And I think the, at minimum, I don’t want to get into specifically what the interventions would look like, but you do at least want to be able to make the argument and say, okay, we don’t believe you. We have good reason and to think that things are not just as fine as you’re telling us they are. And so you would want some kind of criteria to be able to evaluate or articulate as an administrator what your problems are and ideally maybe get someone from maybe other departments in that discipline or adjacent disciplines. You might need some kind of external assessment, but you want that external assessment to be as close to the core of that discipline as possible in order to make it as authoritative as it can be.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah, nice suggestion on a review. And of course, reviews of that sort are part and parcel to your life as a faculty member, right? You’re reviewed by your peers, your published work is reviewed, your department is reviewed on a periodic basis every five years or seven years or whatever. So it does seem like that is a norm within higher ed to rely on outside experts. The question is just, you know, who counts as the experts and how do we identify them, especially if you have worries about the discipline writ large. Shiri, do you want to say anything else on that topic?
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I thought Ashley and Jesse gave great answers.
Justin McBrayer: Okay, great. Let me ask one other kind of hiring-related question, then I want to pivot to a teaching student-related question. The hiring-related question is this one. Is there a danger of preferential hiring or changing our hiring practices in ways that favor viewpoint diversity, but then they sort of melt into some of the same questions that we had during the DEI era or affirmative action era. I mean, is there a worry, this comes from Jeff, is there a worry that hiring for viewpoint diversity might fall prey to all the same kind of mistakes that we made when we were hiring for DEI reasons?
Ashley Rubin: I can go ahead and start us off. Yes, absolutely. I think this is the super lazy, sloppy way to go about it. And this is the way that I think a lot of us are worried that viewpoint diversity will be handled by universities. And so I think all of us would say, you can’t just go for this one thing and kind of prioritize it, that is support for viewpoint diversity or ability to practice it. You have to be looking across the board that this is a high caliber scholar who matches the qualifications you would expect in your department. As soon as you start prioritizing the support for viewpoint diversity above other things. I mean, I do think engaging in viewpoint diversity as a scholar is fundamental to scholarship.
But if that’s the only thing you have going for you, that’s that’s not a strong candidate. So I would say you still need to hit all of the other, you know, MQs and DQs, you know, like that still has to be there. This can’t be this can’t be something that overrides, you know, obvious problems with a candidate. It’s a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one. Exactly. Yeah. Thank you.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah. Jesse or Shiri, like, are there risks that hiring for viewpoint diversity might, you know, land us in the same kind of hot water that hiring for other kind of diversity might land you in? Thoughts?
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I think there definitely are risks, especially if we’re engaging in the same kind of demands as DEI statements engage in. For example, if we’re just substituting those kinds of statements with other attestations that we’re asking scholars to make, that seems probably problematic. Problematic, but I think that efforts to recruit, identify understudied topics in a discipline and try to recruit for those, that’s on much firmer ground, in my opinion, just because anybody can, you know, be interested in, for example, military history. You don’t have to be conservative. And in fact, many people might be interested in military history, you know, just because. And so that’s my opinion about a more legitimate weight.
And it’s also grounded in an epistemological argument about what would improve inquiry in our discipline. We’re looking for scholars who can fill in the blind spots that we have and push our assumptions. And yeah, in my view, that’s on way firmer ground than recruiting on a personal characteristic, like who you voted for, which is illegal, I would think.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah. Jesse, you should not feel any pressure to end. Do you want to chime in any way on this?
Jesse Smith: Oh yeah, I can say briefly, and I would actually maybe circle it back to the report because the, so in general, the report suggested that faculty tend to value diversity on these different metrics, but they value methodological and theoretical diversity really highly and other things less. And to me, the obvious distinction there is that, well, you can tell exactly how more theory and method are going to contribute to inquiry. It’s less obvious how those other things are going to do so. I think they can, but it’s not on the surface.
So to me, it’s whatever diversity you’re looking for, political or racial or demographic or whatever, you should be able to translate it into a theoretical and or methodological contribution and explain how it’s going to be valuable on that level, rather than expecting that the characteristic in itself is going to contribute something. And if you can’t really make that case, then it is probably not that valuable. Good thought. I’m going to pull moderator’s privilege and ask an uncomfortable follow-up question before I pivot to the pedagogy.
Justin McBrayer: Jesse, you made the point, well, you allowed that John Stuart Mill made the point that engaging with people who genuinely disagree with you is a good, an important epistemic good. Ashley and Shiri, I think the two of you each agree with that. Like it’s a really good thing to have people who are actually committed to these ideas because maybe they’ll put them in better light or whatever. But none of the suggestions that you just gave are guarantees that we will get people like that. Like, actually, we could invite people in to give job talks. They might all seriously. We could, Shiri, look at syllabi and they might be diverse in terms of ideas and whatever. And Jesse, you know, we might be able to look at some scholars profile and she’s published.
Like it all may look diverse on the surface but every faculty member on campus could be an evangelical christian or every faculty member like and by your own lights we’re missing a good there is there anything we can do about that or are you willing to just say there’s some good things we can’t rightly inculcate do you guys see what I’m pressing
Ashley Rubin: Yeah I can start us off yeah this is one of those things where we just have conflicting values. We have a legal structure and I think a fairly strong normative structure that we’re not supposed to hire people based on certain protected statuses and categories. And I think politics is often included as one of those. Or hiring somebody for their beliefs. There’s just something very icky about that. So even though we can all recognize that that is really important to do, to have that available, our legal system doesn’t allow it. And I’m not sure I’d feel comfortable advocating for doing that. If for no other reason, it’s really hard. I mean, people can also change their minds or you can be of a particular party. You can donate to a particular group.
You can vote for a particular candidate. But that’s, you know, there’s such a diversity within each of those categories that we’re not necessarily going to bring, you know, the person who actually, let’s just use abortion as an example. You’re, you know, just because you hire a conservative doesn’t mean they’re actually against choice or whatever framing you want to use. So there’s kind of also this risk of essentializing. So there’s kind of like a practical matter of just because you hire somebody you think is going to have this view doesn’t mean that they have that view or that they’re always going to have that view. I mean, we are supposed to be scientists and scholars. We are supposed to change our mind when we see different evidence.
So it’s very risky. So I would say at the end of the day, it’s just a tension between different values. Like it would be great if we could have that on offer for our students and for the world. But getting there, I think, is just practically and legally very challenging.
Justin McBrayer: Nice point. As a philosopher, I think about the distinction between those two, Ashley, is differences between your goal. You know what John Hite likes to call your telos, where you’re headed and then your side constraints. And your side constraints are the ethical parameters between which you agree to operate. And the point you’re making is we’ve got these side constraints that we’ve agreed to. And it might turn out that those side constraints block us from certain ways of achieving our goal. Like there are appropriate ways of achieving it, non-appropriate ways of achieving it. Earmarking people by their, you know, their voter registration or whatever is outside the side constraints. Nice. Jesse or Shiri, would you like to weigh in?
Like there’s the good of having genuine disagreement. And yet the interventions that we’re talking about don’t guarantee that you’d get them. Thoughts?
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Just really quickly if we’re if we’re willing to expand the scope beyond hiring for a second hiring is not the only mechanism it expands the pipeline you could say but you can also do things like invite you know someone with a different perspective to guest lecture in your course or to you know present at your brown bag speaker series so that doesn’t address the pipeline issue but it does address the people presence
Justin McBrayer: Good Yeah it does get you face to face with like true believers or whatever yeah good Jesse any thoughts yeah I guess I would let’s say I see the distinction you’re drawing and it in a theoretical sense I think it could be relevant and I would agree that you can’t you know hire or try and promote diversity based on like what people hold in their hearts you can’t really look at that But in practice, I’m not sure it would necessarily be
Jesse Smith: So difficult as it sounds like in practice. And just to take Ashley’s point about like your views on abortion. So if you’re a philosopher, if you’re like, say, an ethicist who explains why abortion might be a bad thing, and if you’re an ethicist who makes the pro-choice argument explaining why abortion might be a good thing, you don’t need to look at people’s hearts. You can look at their arguments and try and get the diversity of perspectives from that. And I guess it’s always possible that what people believe deep down is just completely out of alignment with the things that they’re arguing in their scholarship. But in general, I would expect those things to be aligned enough that you don’t need to try and peer into people’s hearts.
You can probably judge pretty well based on their scholarship, whether they’re going to offer something valuable.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good thought. Okay, let’s pivot to pedagogy. This question comes from Pilar. Can you help with this? Yes, my students have expressed that it’s more important to be kind and not hurt people’s feelings rather than risking being uncomfortable with a potentially contentious discussion or raising viewpoints or perspectives that would challenge people’s identities or their, you know, their core beliefs. What do I do about this?
Ashley Rubin: I can jump in. That’s a thorny question. I mean, I think that one of the things that I wrestle with, and I think everyone in heterodox wrestles with is, you know, like, we want to be open to different perspectives. But sometimes those perspectives are antithetical to the core perspectives of what we’re supposed to be doing. And, you know, like, yes, kindness is important. But at the end of the day, we have to tell the truth, we have to be willing to look at different perspectives. And, you know, if you have this idea that certain perspectives are just they can’t be on the table, you can’t address them. That’s a really dangerous, you know, approach to take.
And I realize like my own, you know, like I could be being hypocritical, you know, by saying that because I’m saying like this is a dangerous perspective. So it becomes kind of circular, but we’re not circular. But anyway, so I think this is really challenging. And so I think one way to handle this is maybe to have an open conversation. You know, if you haven’t already, this might have resulted from that very conversation. But have, you know, a discussion and have students offer kind of like, OK, so give me the steel man for the other view. Like, why might it be important to hear arguments that might be uncomfortable and that might make people, you know, uncomfortable, basically?
And, you know, one argument that I like is if we really think a view is problematic, then exploring that view should give us the chance to actually see that it’s problematic. So we shouldn’t be afraid of ideas because if there really is a bad idea, we should be able to figure out through a debate or a discussion or through evidence that it’s a bad idea or that it’s wrong. So this is one reason why, for example, I think we absolutely should test hypotheses that we find personally insulting. Resulting, because if we truly believe that that hypothesis is wrong, factually or morally, we should find some data in the course of doing a systematic analysis of it. And just to be clear, I’m not saying like, go and find proof that it’s wrong.
I’m just saying like, you know, do a real investigation. And if we truly believe, you know, we’re right, then the data should, you know, hopefully come out that way. And if it doesn’t, then that should also cause us to reevaluate our position. So I think there’s a way to get to this kind of point that we should always be investigating even the most offensive ideas because, you know, hopefully truth will prevail.
Justin McBrayer: Nice. I’m tempted to put your point in like slogan form. It depends on whether your goal is truth or preserving what you already think. If it’s preserving what you already think, then it’s going to be scary to test things or whatever. Your goal is the truth. There’s nothing to lose. Yeah.
Ashley Rubin: And, you know, like, why are you in college if you’re not here to be exposed to different ideas and to ultimately try to find the truth, you know, and follow, you know, the data wherever they go.
Justin McBrayer: Nice. Jesse or Shiri, advice on students who, you know, want to prioritize kindness or niceness over contention?
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Ashley’s comments reminded me of one of my favorite Atlantic op-eds ever, and I’m going to send it in the chat here. But it’s a piece by, I think, Princeton political scientist Lauren Wright. Right. And she did this kind of qualitative project with Princeton students where she asked undergraduates to describe the opposite political view of the one that you hold on various issues. Conservatives could tell you front and back what a liberal thinks about Stein or abortion or any number of issues.
Issues the liberal students could not tell you what you know in any meaningful sense what a conservative honestly thinks about these things and a lot of them said you know I really don’t like to think about that that just feels too icky or you know things like that they just avoided engaging with it and what she found I mean as these you know these experiences from students would suggest is that conservatives were leaving college much more equipped to advocate for their views than the liberal students and so I sometimes like to say that you can make a completely self-interested almost I almost think of it as like harm reduction kind of argument for viewpoint diversity like some students I don’t know if you can ever get them to buy into the idea that they, you know, they should expose themselves to disagreement because, you know, eating vegetables is good for you.
And so is exposing yourself to difficult ideas. But you can buy them into the idea that do you want to be a good advocate for your beliefs? Do you want them to be based in good reasons and not be flimsy and fall apart with the slightest pressure? This is why you should talk to people you don’t agree with. You know we can kind of we don’t have to put on blast that oh maybe you will also change your mind about some things or maybe you’ll realize you weren’t 100 right about this or that but for me that’s like the entry point just to get them to even consider it
Justin McBrayer: I Love it I’m trying to put together in my mind like the “too long, didn’t read” you know to the answers to pilaf’s question so Ashley gave an epistemic reason you’ll do a better job finding the truth she was giving a like psychological reason. You’ll be more resilient. You’ll be a better, like a thinker, like you yourself will process information and understand things better having been exposed in the right, like a kind of exposure therapy kind of.
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: You’ll be rhetorically a better, a better advocate.
Justin McBrayer: Agreed. Nice. Yeah. So there’s also that, a rhetorical advantage to doing that. Nice. Jesse, you want to add?
Jesse Smith: I wouldn’t add a whole lot, I suppose. I guess I’d just say you can’t force students to do or believe anything. But if you’re the instructor, you do set the norms and to some extent the practices for the classroom. So just make the case up front to the students why this is ultimately a good thing. And having, you know, ground rules for how to communicate so you can work through disagreement without excessively stepping on each other’s toes.
And potentially modeling, too, if you think your students just aren’t really going to do it, but you really want them to see the value in it, and maybe be intentional or present something provocative and see if you can go admit a participation or have another faculty member who disagrees with you on something important come and debate you or maybe you can expose them to the value of it that way if they’re not initially on board.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah, nice. So we’re moving towards the tail end of our discussion. We’re winding down, but I can’t help but wanting to slip in one more question from our Q&A.
And we’re going to return all the way to where we started back to like research questions and figuring out what the world is like this question comes from elizabeth and I’ve been puzzling over this myself elizabeth so I’m so glad you raised it two studies were released in the last few days that contradicted one another so there’s this one and the studies have to do with like why is it that sociology majors are so liberal and why is it that business majors are so conservative rid of them like what are the causal mechanisms driving that you know is it self-selection or is there some kind of you know change happening to these students once they get in the measure so one study found that disciplinary coursework seemed to change students political leanings that that paper was featured in chronicle higher ed like two days ago there’s a write-up on it but then there’s a working paper from brown university that found that actually student self-selection was a much better prediction rather than coursework or what happened with faculty.
So like, how is a lowly philosopher supposed to figure out what’s going on? Like, I’m not an expert at this. Like, how are we supposed to read, you know, between these kind of two different studies that seem to contradict one another? And how might your study, Shiri, either help us understand what’s happening here with contradictory findings or like, how should we be thinking about this?
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: Yeah, I became aware of both of those and yeah, I’ll be honest that they seemed to, I think, point in slightly different directions, at least on their surface. I’ll be honest, I tried to read the studies and I was like, this is, I’m not super familiar with the methods they used. I gave them to Claude and asked them, Claude, like where do these papers Where do they disagree? And it gave me this very nuanced like threading the needle. Here’s how. I’m not sure I totally followed it, but what they agreed on was that, OK, there’s a leftward skew among faculty. Self-selection does drive part of the effect here. It’s not clear whether faculty really have like an influence. I think they both reject the indoctrination idea.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah. So how that can be - So are you saying that maybe what they differ on is like percentages? Like one paper saying that selection effect explains more of that skew than influence or because - It could be - Yeah, go ahead.
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I think it’s also that they were different methodologically. Like one of them looked within the same, they held the course constant and they looked to see whether like the ideology of the faculty member teaching it affected students maybe voter registration changes and but the other one was much bigger in scope looking at way more schools and it looked the focus was just different I don’t remember off the top of my head but I think maybe these methodological differences the measurement differences there are ways that the findings can be kind of reconciled but I think maybe there’s others that they don’t quite agree on
Justin McBrayer: Fine points here yeah Jesse Ashley other thoughts like what do we do I mean how do you think about this as an expert and how should I be thinking about it as a non-expert you know as a humanist who’s trying to read social science findings and try to figure out what’s driving some particular phenomena.
Jesse Smith: And I would say, so Shiri did more work than I did. I’m aware of both of those studies, but I didn’t actually undertake to try and like tease apart what the differences are. I wouldn’t necessarily read that much into them in the sense of thinking about what your responsibility is as an educator. I think all the principles we’re talking about here would still apply fly, whatever the data says about it. And I don’t see any contradiction. It could be you could self-select into sociology because you feel like it sort of fits with your worldview and then have that worldview continually reinforced as you go through your major. So both things can be happening at the same time.
But I think in either case, if you think that kind of stress testing or presenting different perspectives is valuable, both pedagogically and as an approach to scholarship, then it’s always going to be a, that’s always a positive thing to implement in the classroom in either case.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah, good. Ashley?
Ashley Rubin: Yeah, I would say, you know, I think if you have two contradictory studies, it just means we need more data. This might be a methodological difference, it might be just a basic data difference, like studies don’t always replicate. And that’s why we need so many studies. So, you know, we can see how much of this is just by chance it turns out to be different. You know, like when we use a 0.05 distinction for significance, like one in 20 times that we just might be, you know, wrong by chance. So I would say, you know, this just means we need more data.
Justin McBrayer: Elizabeth, thank you for raising that question. I now want to do a study where I map faculty ideology and which study they shared on social media. Like, were the right-leaning faculty quick to share one and the left-leaning family quick to share the, and not right. Cause I do think that we see evidence through our own prism and we’re anyways, I’d love to do that study. Okay. We’re, we’re wrapping up. Can I give each of you a minute to give us like a final takeaway, or if you want to talk about stuff that you’re doing or offer our viewers suggestions for where to find more of your thoughts on these areas, a couple of things they should be looking at. Let’s just go around. Everybody can give us a wrap up. Shiri, we’ll start with you.
Shiri Spitz Siddiqi: I guess what I’ll say is what we saw from the report is faculty don’t personally distinguish between these different forms of diversity all that much. Each form of diversity was positively correlated with each of the other ones. That’s not something that we reported in the report, but there were just support for one predicted support for each of the others. And so I think that we would probably do well to think about diversity broadly construed because that’s how faculty seem to think about them and yeah as far as what HxA is doing or what I’m doing you know check out my articles on Free the Inquiry I like to digest psychological science, give my take on it.
Justin McBrayer: And thank you all for coming. It’s been great. Shiri, will you drop your Substack subscriber link in the chat while everybody else is talking? That way our viewers can have that. It’ll be easy for them to just click on it and follow you there. Thank you. Jesse, let’s go to you next. Final thoughts, wrap up. What are you working on? How people can connect with you or stay in touch?
Jesse Smith: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve written a fair amount on political diversity in particular and what that actually looks like and how we translate that to something that’s epistemically valuable that actually aids inquiry rather than being some kind of representation thing or a political litmus test thing. So I guess in addition to other sources, I can shamelessly promote my sub stack. The next turtle down has a few pieces on this general topic. And just kind of a general thought. So I’d say I think it’s important to have these high level conversations like we’re having about just what the principles look like, how this plays out in practice.
But to me, the very logical next step is more focused on how these things play out on the ground as well and what this actually looks like in any given subfield in any given department. I think there’s a gap there that can be bridged, but that would really be the next step to turn this into practice to, I think, live the diversity, as Ashley put it.
Justin McBrayer: Yeah, that’s a nice thought. If you don’t mind, put your Substack link in the chat, too, to make it easier for folks to follow you. Ashley, you have the final say.
Ashley Rubin: Great. Thank you. Thank you so much for hosting and organizing this. It’s been really great. Right. Yeah, I would say, you know, I think just reiterating what I said earlier, we have to, you know, it’s not enough to celebrate viewpoint diversity, either in lip service or like to truly mean it. We have to actually engage in it. And importantly, we have to encourage each other to hold up the practice and, you know, like help each other to do that. And, you know, right now we talked about a lot of like principles and abstract stuff. And as Jesse said, you know, we’re going to need data to see like, okay, so what happens? Like maybe we have to change our mind when we get more data.
Maybe it turns out that, you know, a lot of the stuff that we said from a kind of principle perspective turns out to be wrong if, you know, three years from now we’ve taken our advice and it turns out not to be good advice. So basically stay tuned. And I’ll go ahead and drop my sub stack in the chat as well. Jesse and I spar on Substack about viewpoint diversity sometimes. And it’s really fun.
Justin McBrayer: I love that. I’m also going to add Ashley, the link to your Vanderbilt–WashU report on scholarly standards in sociology. So everybody has that. Thank you to my esteemed panelists, Jesse, Ashley, Shiri. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us. Thanks to all of our viewers. I look forward to seeing you tomorrow at our virtual event and in April at our national conference. Ciao. Thank you.
