No, Geology Departments Shouldn't Hire Flat Earthers

Viewpoint diversity isn’t a call to denigrate the epistemic standards of the academy.

It’s increasingly obvious that politicization is a problem in American higher education. You can see this in the public stances universities have taken on everything from the legality of abortion to the justice of the Israel-Palestine conflict. You can see it in the faculty they have hired. And you can see it in the syllabi they are teaching and the research they are producing. Some of today’s universities look more like political action committees than institutions of higher learning.

In response to this politicization, organizations like Heterodox Academy (HxA) are advocating a return to truth-seeking as the university’s central mission. One necessary condition for this work is viewpoint diversity on campus. Other organizations share this concern but use different terminology. For example, the American Council of Education uses the term intellectual pluralism in its statement on academic rights and responsibilities, while the Commission for Public Higher Education requires that accredited universities have policies and practices that “support the intellectual diversity of its faculty and students in academic and co-curricular life.” What these notions have in common is the idea that universities must cultivate a wide range of perspectives on campus to ensure scholarly inquiry and teaching proceed in an open and lively way.

Echo chambers are great for tribal mobilization but lousy for the discovery of truth and the generation of knowledge. When certain disfavored viewpoints are excluded from the university, dissenters are silenced, flawed ideas go unchallenged, research questions go unasked, and classrooms become places of affirmation rather than discovery. Viewpoint diversity is an antidote to this kind of stagnation.

While there are a number of objections to viewpoint diversity, perhaps the most common is the “flat Earth” objection. The objection comes in the form of a reductio ad absurdum: cultivating viewpoint diversity on campus would require a geology department to hire a flat earther, and what university would want to do something as silly as that? This charge has been levied both by faculty and advocacy groups like the AAUP. For example, a recent piece in The Stanford Daily argues that “If the discipline of Geology collectively determines that the flat-Earth theory doesn’t meet its standards, geologists do not, simply for the sake of “viewpoint diversity,” need to continue to hire flat-Earthers and provide lessons in flat-Earth theory to their students.”

Implicit in this objection is the assumption that there is an inverse correlation between viewpoint diversity and intellectual standards. Strengthening the one would thereby weaken the other. For example, a recent AAUP statement on the issue concludes that promoting intellectual diversity will “pressure institutions into teaching unsupported or discredited ideas.” And since a university’s highest goal requires rigorous intellectual standards, the call for viewpoint diversity represents a threat to the university’s purpose.

The steelman version of the objection can be fleshed out a bit further. The very point of a university is to winnow ideas on the threshing floor of reason. In that process, some ideas will go extinct. Others will survive or evolve. It’s appropriate to abandon viewpoints that are internally inconsistent, refuted, or poorly evidenced. To purposefully cultivate such viewpoints would frustrate the academic enterprise. We don’t improve the academy by hiring phrenologists, Lamarckians, or Ptolemaic astronomers even when that makes the campus more viewpoint diverse.

Despite its popularity, the flat Earth objection is a bust, as Jonathan Haidt pointed out in HxA’s very first blog post back in 2015:

We don’t want viewpoint diversity on whether the Earth is round versus flat. But do we want everyone to share the same presuppositions when it comes to the study of race, class, gender, inequality, evolution, or history? Can research that emerges from an ideologically uniform and orthodox academy be as good, useful, and reliable as research that emerges from a more heterodox academy?

The answer to these rhetorical questions is no: we should expect an ideologically diverse academy to do a better job thinking about controversial issues than their ideologically homogenous counterparts. So where does the flat Earth objection go awry?

First, it assumes that today’s university ecosystem has captured the whole truth and nothing but the truth. As the AAUP understands it, increasing intellectual diversity on campus increases the pressure to teach discredited ideas. But that’s true only if we assume at the outset that all underrepresented ideas are bad ones. There’s no reason to think this, and an institution that takes the discovery of truth seriously can’t afford to make such an assumption.

Second, the objection assumes that minority viewpoints are in the minority because they are discredited, unsupported, unworthy, or intellectually dubious. In other words, it assumes that the sole reason that a viewpoint would be excluded from today’s university is a good one. Again, there’s little reason to think that’s true. Ideas can be winnowed on the threshing floor of reason, but they can also be winnowed by cultural fad, ideological fiat, or generational gatekeeping.

All of these options are likely thanks to a host of ingrained cognitive tendencies that undermine our ability to identify our own biases or give ideas we dislike a fair hearing. Worse, the political imbalance of today’s faculty makes it even more difficult to decipher why some ideas are championed and others neglected on university campuses. Faculty hire people and teach ideas for all sorts of non-epistemic reasons. And survey after survey shows that many faculty openly admit to discriminating against minority political viewpoints in everything from publication decisions to hiring. In other words, it’s not just a remote possibility that ideas are being filtered for non-intellectual reasons; it’s a near certainty. Simply knowing that an idea is disfavored doesn’t tell you all that much.

Third, the objection assumes that viewpoint diversity requires violating discipline-specific standards. Hiring a flat Earther would contradict the epistemic norms that govern the geosciences. That’s what makes it bizarre. But the analogy doesn’t carry over to many of the other minority positions excluded from the university. It’s hard to believe that the disciplinary standards of English literature require Marxism in the way that geology requires commitment to a spherical Earth, or that robust historiography requires left-wing ideology or that the epistemic framework of sociology requires a commitment to antiracism. In other words, the discipline-specific standards of today’s academic departments don’t explain the echo chambers we find there.

A thought experiment should make this point clear. Suppose in the future it turns out that nearly all historians in America are politically right wing. How should our future selves explain that fact? Should they conclude that this political distribution is required or even made likely by the disciplinary standards of history? Should they conclude that Stephen Colbert was wrong when he said that reality has a well-known liberal bias? Should they instead conclude that reality has a right-wing bias and that it just took us time to recognize it? I have a hard time believing any of these options.

The same lesson applies to today’s university. Pursuing the truth within disciplinary standards alone is unlikely to result in a politically skewed echo chamber. And yet that’s exactly what we see in many disciplines today. That means something else is also afoot. The upshot is that we can uphold disciplinary standards of evidence, excellence, and the like while still pursuing viewpoint diversity in our ranks.

Fourth, viewpoint diversity is as much about values and interests as it is about empirical beliefs and disciplinary conclusions. What faculty value and where their interests lie have profound impacts on what they teach and what they research. Take two geologists, both of whom eschew the flat Earth theory but hold different political values. One might spend her time researching petroleum reserves whereas the other investigates carbon capture. Both abide by the scientific standards of their discipline, but they have radically different research profiles. While the evidential standards remain consistent across the field, the spotlight of academic inquiry can be pivoted to many different projects. Where that light shines is largely a function of value and interests. The flat Earth objection assumes that the only kind of diversity at play is diversity of empirical commitments or disciplinary methodology. As this example shows, that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

The takeaway is that advocates of viewpoint diversity have never been in favor of hiring flat Earthers into geosciences departments. Instead, they want to ensure that all positions defensible by disciplinary standards and evidence remain discussable, even if only a minority of scholars hold them. If a position hasn’t been settled by a discipline’s own standards, it remains an open question. As Jonathan Rauch puts it, we want the funnel of ideas to be broad at the top and narrowed only by epistemically relevant reasons. Geology has settled the question of the shape of the Earth. But philosophy has not settled the question of what makes a government just. We would benefit from intellectual diversity on the latter score.

Further, advocates of viewpoint diversity want a university where faculty and students with values or interests at odds with the majority are able to shine the spotlight of academic inquiry in directions that make the most sense to them. Given this, we should encourage those with marginalized yet intellectually intriguing and defensible positions into the collective work of the university.

That’s why the flat Earth objection is a failure. Viewpoint diversity isn’t a call to denigrate the epistemic standards of the academy. Not all ideas are equally good. But neither are all minority positions epistemically wanting.

---