Universities Can’t Pursue Truth Without Viewpoint Diversity
Tomasi and Haidt respond to the ongoing debate about the value of viewpoint diversity in the academy
Editor’s note: Below is a preview of an opinion piece published today, October 29, 2025 at Inside Higher Ed. To read the full article, click here.
As the president of Heterodox Academy (Tomasi) and as co-founder of the organization (Haidt), we are delighted that the issue of viewpoint diversity in higher education is now being so widely discussed. We just wish the most prominent antagonists on the right and on the left understood why viewpoint diversity is essential to the mission of a university — and thus how it can, and can’t, be brought about.
As Heterodox Academy has argued since our founding in 2015, the truth-seeking function of universities does not work properly without the presence of diverse viewpoints. This is especially true when it comes to contested social and political questions. As Haidt wrote in our very first post, “We academics are generally biased toward confirming our own theories and validating our favored beliefs,” and that’s usually fine. With a culture of review and debate among scholars, “the field will gradually sort out the truth. Unless there is nobody out there who thinks differently. Or unless the few such people shrink from speaking up because they expect anger in response, even ostracism.”
Over the past decade, that’s exactly the pattern we have seen, especially in the social sciences, humanities and some of the professional schools. Taboos, blind spots, groupthink and the politicization of scientific standards haven’t just made academic research narrower and worse—these trends have alienated the general public and reduced public confidence in higher education since 2015, not just on the right but across the ideological spectrum. Unsurprisingly, the increasing ideological conformity of the professoriate is reflected in the decreasing range of ideas that students encounter in the classroom. A recent national study shows a narrow range of perspectives included on undergraduate syllabi on such controversial topics as the conflict between Israel and Palestine, racial bias in the criminal justice system and abortion.
To advocate for viewpoint diversity is not to take the absurd position that every possible claim should be represented in the academy. It’s to recognize that monocultures are toxic to scholarly research and to responsible teaching alike. Professional training does not make professors immune to ordinary human biases. Today’s cohort of scholarly experts remains vulnerable to the same “tyranny of public opinion” and “uncritical and intemperate partisanship” that the founders of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) in 1915 warned academia to resist. This means that today’s arguments about viewpoint diversity must be considered and judged in their historical and political contexts.
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The paper you cite is not published nor peer reviewed and seems finded from AEI and Claremont McKenna, a rather biased institution. Please provide a more detailed analysis with references and sources.
In my personal opinion, the 1915 AAUP statement’s (which you reference) warning about the “tyranny of public opinion” was at very best naïve for thinking that democratic participation is the main threat to academic freedom while ignoreds the far, far greater dangers of elite, bureaucratic, and financial controls that would later dominate universities once they began to be insulates from the "public" after WW2. I'd, at this point comfortably, say that history since then has flat proved that universities were never oppressed by mass opinion or public access to their internal managerial and decision making functions but they instead became oppressed by dependence on centralized funding, philanthropic endowments, federal contracts, and professionalized guild structures that homogenized thought; and those things could not have happened absent their insulation from mass opinion and public access to their internal managerial and decision making functions