Imagine being a faculty member on a university campus. Your job is to discover, produce, and disseminate knowledge. Now also imagine that you have no regular interactions with colleagues in which you have substantial disagreement about your area of scholarship and teaching. In fact, imagine having any job of public relevance where you have no disagreement with colleagues on matters related to your job. Something would certainly seem amiss if that were the reality.
Yet, for nearly 30% of U.S. university faculty, this is the reality. In a new survey, Heterodox Academy, in partnership with National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, asked over 3,500 faculty how many colleagues they regularly engage with who disagree with them on important scholarly matters. Twenty-nine percent of them said the answer was zero — zero. For faculty who are on contingent or adjunct teaching contracts, this number is 41 percent.
This amounts to a significant and non-trivial number of faculty effectively working in disciplinary echo chambers, which matters given the proliferation of criticism surrounding universities on how they shape student politics, the public dislike of campus political agendas, and the observed political lopsidedness among faculty. The fact that so many faculty tasked with teaching college students get no regular pushback from their colleagues about matters they are teaching or researching should be a cause for concern for every faculty member, department chair, and dean responsible for the education our students are getting and the knowledge our universities are producing.
This lack of engagement with any serious disagreement from colleagues can help explain, in part, why so many course syllabi lack viewpoint diversity on contentious topics of public concern, and also the absurd disconnect between what many professors espouse and believe to be irrefutable facts and what the average non-progressive American might. If you never engage in disagreement with other scholars — the peers whom you view as most credible experts — what cause would you have to challenge your own thinking, or question your own beliefs on a topic? If you’re wrong about something, how would you know? Surely, in fact, you’re right; everyone worth listening to agrees with you, after all!
When faculty don’t have regular disagreement with peers whom they trust to be experts, then outside pushback, say from faculty in different, less politically homogenous departments, or from ex-academics or public intellectuals — comes across as something not to take seriously, or worse, a malicious attack. The result is ever more daylight between the ivory tower and folks outside the campus gates.
There is not a single reason why so many faculty are working in echo chambers; rather, it’s a confluence of issues that have culminated in this problem, which has reached a fever pitch the past two years. Too many professors view themselves as scholar activists, subverting their scholarship to political ends, actively insulating themselves from disagreement they view as beyond the pale. There has also been a pervasive culture of self-censorship that prevents faculty from disagreeing with what is largely seen as progressive orthodoxy — faculty are fearful that they will get sanctioned by peers or administrators for voicing any heterodox viewpoints on contested topics.
There are also other, less pernicious structural reasons for this problem as well, that have more to do with bureaucracy than active or intentional siloing. COVID sent things into hyper-remote state on campus, which campus has still struggled to recover from. Faculty hiring is naturally a self-replicating process as most faculty come from a small sampling of graduate programs. Faculty searches prioritize “fit” which can lead to alienating diverse research perspectives. This can be especially true in newer departments, like those in the highly criticized “critical studies” genre that have proliferated since the 1990s, which are subject to founding population-like effects regarding theoretical frameworks. And finally, adjunctification of higher education has played a considerable role in this siloing. Adjuncts barely encounter other faculty on campus; when I was an adjunct at two institutions, I didn’t disagree with colleagues because I didn’t even have an opportunity to.
Despite these seemingly entrenched problems, breaking faculty out of their echo chamber can be done in a variety of ways. Some are longer-term changes that will take time to see impacts, but others are faster with more immediate impacts if we can scale them.
The longer term changes require the academy to rethink how faculty are hired and for what end. Faculty searchers should be hired on the basis of their work broadening the landscape of research and teaching within the department. Departments can broach genuinely new areas and viewpoints within the department instead of incentivising self-replication. This would also afford greater cross-breeding of disciplinary ideas, rather than inbreeding the same (or slightly modified) ideas ever deeper. Universities could also take a cue from Arizona State University and hire faculty to do radically interdisciplinary work on big questions, and use the department structure as a “tenure home” for them.
University leaders have a significant role to play here with their control over what they fund internally on campus. For research institutions, internal research funding could support adversarial collaborations on campus to directly incentivize faculty working closely on a long-term research project together. These intentional research projects help rein in questionable research practices and motivated reasoning, while reducing extremism in research conclusions.
For all institutions who value viewpoint diversity in teaching, fixing the bureaucratic registrar issues (e.g., credit hour allocation for instructors) that can be a hurdle to co-teaching is an easy way to not only incentivize faculty to teach with an ideological opponent, but also as a way to model viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement to students directly, every class meeting. There are even new AI tools like Sway that can guide student-to-student conversations across difference, leading to real shifts in perspectives on contentious issues.
On the campus programming side of things, leaders and faculty alike can spearhead campus speaker series, campus events, and other on the ground programming that showcases what smart scholarly disagreement looks like — both to students and to faculty. There are thoughtful, smart perspectives on a variety of topics that may only be pushed together if intentionally done so.
Breaking faculty out of their echo chambers doesn’t have to mean shuttering departments or condemning entire areas of scholarship as beyond reform. There exists a broad spectrum of actions that can make a measurable impact if scaled and incentivized. To accomplish this, institutions need faculty support but also administrative support to help shift incentive structures to embed constructive disagreement in the functioning of the university, rather than further incentivizing ideological homogeneity on campus. We have many tools available to get faculty constructively disagreeing — we just need to actually use them.
These are fine practical suggestions for fostering viewpoint diversity. The key question for me is whether most academics actually want to be in departments in which their colleagues—who could be around for decades—disagree with them. There can be real differences between what people say in polls and what they believe or want in fact. I have seen departments spin apart or become the equivalent of silent, loveless marriages because of disagreements over inconsequential matters. I can only imagine the internecine warfare or quiet, passive-aggressive hostility that could be engendered by real ideological disagreement. Prerequisites for having departments in which there is genuine viewpoint diversity are faculty willingness to be challenged, healthy self-esteem, decent social skills, and mutual respect, which are, sadly, too often in short supply.
My 50 years in and around higher education as a faculty member, administrator, and accreditation evaluator have taught me that we are all cognitive misers. Diversity of perspective and opinion is an essential asset not an impediment to higher learning, but it takes work. As Glenn McNair observes, faculty flee substantive disagreements and regularly settle for the mediocrity of classroom monocultures. This problem is particularly acute at “private” schools that can claim immunity from judicial review of their interpretation of academic freedom or due process. I was dismissed for creating a survey to collect data about perceptions of hostile environments and judgments about academic freedom at a private liberal arts college. It included scenarios that revealed both faculty and administrative educational malpractice. ( https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/an-open-letter-to-lyle-d-roelofs-president-of-berea-college ) Ironically, my 20 years of experience at the Air Force Academy provided many more examples of substantive engagement and collegial disagreement than anything I observed or experienced at other colleges and universities over the last 20 years.