The Weekly: Viewpoint Diversity vs. Women’s & Gender Studies

Close, rebuild, or revitalize?

This week’s news presents an interesting through line for thinking about viewpoint diversity and the problem of ideologically homogenous departments on campus.

Many professors are seeking to change the way students engage with diverse perspectives in their classrooms, especially within disciplines that are lacking in viewpoint diversity. HxA member Abigail Saguy, for instance, presents an interesting spotlight for how gender studies, a field particularly beset by orthodoxy, can break from that. In addition to co-designing and teaching her sociology of gender course with colleagues from biology, genetics, and psychology to bridge scientific and sociological worldviews, she also uses Sway to help facilitate student conversation across disagreement.

The use of Sway — an AI tool developed by HxA researchers Simon Cullen and Nick Dibilla to facilitate conversation among students on contentious issues — is now used at over 80 universities, the impact of which was highlighted in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week.

But while many faculty like Saguy are trying to introduce viewpoint diversity into historically left-dominated disciplines, other actors are instead trying to shut down these types of courses altogether. We travel to Texas for these stories.

As reported by the The New York Times, “Texas A&M University said on Friday that it would end its women’s and gender studies program, and that the syllabuses for hundreds of courses had been altered under new policies limiting how race and gender ideology may be discussed in classrooms.” The university’s interim president cited low enrollment and difficulty of aligning the department with new system policies on the topic of gender in his announcement.

HxA staff had a spirited discussion on our Slack this week about how to handle departments that seem to have become narrowed and closed off to broad academic inquiry. Is it best to revitalize them through new hiring, co-teaching across disciplines and viewpoints, or improved pedagogy like what Saguy has brought into her UCLA gender course? Do we want identical “diversities” in every department, or can specialization sometimes be a good thing? And how should we think about who gets to set academic priorities?

Meanwhile, there’s growing evidence about the importance of genuine viewpoint diversity in the academic enterprise. HxA’s director of research Dylan Selterman wrote about a research study that demonstrates how viewpoint-homogenous research groups come to different conclusions when analyzing the same data, pointing to the essential value of viewpoint diversity for research. Solving for this can be achieved most directly through “adversarial collaborations,” pioneered by HxA member Cory Clark, in which a group of scholars with different perspectives on the topic at hand collaborate to help check biases during the research process.

Adversarial collaborations, revitalizing ideologically dominated departments, and other strategies to improve viewpoint diversity in teaching and research can only be achieved, however, if there is enough viewpoint diversity to pull from within the academy. And that may be changing, at least on the political diversity dimension.

This week, Princetonians for Free Speech called for alumni to advocate for viewpoint diversity, citing imbalances in partisan affiliation. And as the Chronicle covered this week, there may be a conservative “hiring boom” underway, driven in part by the rise of “civics centers” on campuses across the country and also by the waning of diversity-based hiring of faculty.

Musa al-Gharbi, an assistant professor at Stony Brook University and HxA research fellow, told the Chronicle that the current environment isn’t necessarily selecting for conservatives as much as for “a normie, moderate person who has some views that don’t align with the left.” This could have a long-term impact on the viewpoint diversity of faculty in highly progressive departments — emphasis on long-term. (Which brings us back to the above on how to handle ideologically dominated departments now.)

While “civics centers,” of which many focus on “western thought,” could be more friendly to outwardly conservative faculty, they also run a risk of siloing conservative faculty in newly created departments if the centers run autonomously rather than being integrated into other departments and programs:

Al-Gharbi of Stony Brook said heterodox scholars might find themselves insulated from the rest of academe. If they’re appointed in particular centers and not in, say, the sociology department, then they may not be serving on that department’s committees, hiring faculty, selecting doctoral students, and mentoring students. Without those activities, they won’t influence the next generation of scholars.

These centers may also only impact campus-level viewpoint diversity, rather than address ideologically homogenous departments like sociology or women’s and gender studies. Also given that these centers tend to be interested in areas such as political theory, history, and the U.S. Constitution, prospects for conservative faculty in left-dominant humanities and social science fields probably remain unchanged.

Viewpoint diversity challenges in these social-adjacent disciplines and departments are also occurring amid a broader public (intellectual) discussion on the “feminization” of higher ed, especially in these social-adjacent fields which tend to be heavily female-skewed. This conversation, which has waxed and waned over the years (most recently sparked again by this viral essay), suggests that the social justice orientation that has become prominent in recent decades is in part attributable to the high proportion of women in these fields. As male college enrollment continues to decline, addressing this aspect of viewpoint diversity will be an ongoing challenge. Ironically perhaps, this is a good argument for great scholarship about questions of gender — gender studies, if you will!

The most pressing question facing higher ed — and its leaders — right now is not necessarily whether ideologically homogeneous departments should be preserved as-is or dismantled altogether (though we’re seeing the latter already in some places), but whether universities are willing to do the harder work of reopening them to genuine inquiry. Viewpoint diversity is not just a box-checking exercise; rather it is a requirement for knowledge production and teaching. When it is absent, disciplinary progress stagnates, students unenroll, and the door is opened for political actors to step in to resolve the problems universities have avoided.