College profs are so liberal students have to pretend to be, too  — viewpoint diversity in crisis

Advocating for diverse viewpoints on campuses is now apparently akin to saying “All Lives Matter,” or pushing a supposedly sinister Make America Great Again plot.

That’s according to two recent op-eds, penned by professors at Stanford and Johns Hopkins, opposing efforts to get professors and students with different opinions onto campus.

Academia has lost public trust precisely because anyone not of the far-left is admonished on campuses. Accusing proponents of viewpoint diversity of being Trumpy conspiracists certainly doesn’t help.

Any professor who truly cares about academia should want more views on campus, regardless of their own politics.

“It’s profoundly anti-intellectual, and profoundly anti-scientific to politicize the question of viewpoint diversity,” John Tomasi, president of Heterodox Academy, told The Post.

“Without a diverse range of opinions, we will not be searching for knowledge. We will be leaning more towards something like indoctrination.”

The former Brown political science professor warns that, when certain viewpoints take over campus, minority views can become verboten.

“If you get to the point of imbalance where you can’t even ask a question without being attacked personally, then [something is] really going wrong,” he said. “That’s profoundly unhealthy for a university system.”

And yet Stanford professor Jessica Riskin argued in the Stanford Daily in early February that advocating “viewpoint diversity” is like saying “All Lives Matter” — a controversial counterpoint to Black Lives Matter — and that “adopting the slogan ‘viewpoint diversity’ legitimizes radical-right propaganda.”

“‘Viewpoint diversity’ is not a defense of viewpoint diversity, but an assault on it,” she writes.

An October piece by Johns Hopkins humanities professor and chair Lisa Siraganian similarly dubbed viewpoint diversity a “MAGA plot.” But can these professors honestly make the case that the composition of campuses is healthy — or in any way reflective of our society?

Tomasi, author of the upcoming book “Viewpoint Diversity: What It Is, Why We Need It, and How to Get It” (March 10), says that optimistically there might be 20 liberal professors to every one conservative in academia.

In some disciplines, like sociology and anthropology, the proportion could be as bad as 80 to one or 100 to one.

A Wednesday report from Heterodox Academy compiled different studies of viewpoint diversity across college campuses. It found that “consistently… left-leaning faculty outnumber right-leaning faculty” and that “nearly all studies point in the same direction.”

Anyone who has recently been on a college campus can tell you as much. They sense this imbalance — and they act accordingly.

An August poll of students at the University of Michigan and Northwestern University found that a full 88 percent said yes when asked, “Have you ever pretended to hold more progressive views than you truly endorse to succeed?”

When I was at NYU, I obscured my own beliefs, hiding Thomas Sowell books under my bed and parroting what I thought my progressive professors wanted to hear, for fear of retribution.

But Tomasi believes this obvious illiberalism is easy to ignore when you’re in the majority.

“People just are happy with the status quo, and they even deny the fact often, which is just unscientific and unfortunate,” he said. “If people on the left… saw this same thing happening in the opposite way, wouldn’t they be concerned?”

Of course they would. 

The Trump administration has tried to pressure colleges into promoting viewpoint diversity. Last year, the administration ordered Harvard to audit for campus political views and demanded it make changes to hiring and admissions processes if numbers were too skewed.

The Heterodox Academy report notes a 2022 survey of Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty found 82% are on the left, and 1% on the right.

It’s understandable why professors might reject government-enforced viewpoint diversity efforts. But it’s also deeply disappointing that, for decades, academia has largely neglected to meaningfully course-correct itself.

The correct answer to politicians attempting to get involved on campus is not, “It’s a MAGA plot!” It’s “You’re right that this is a problem, but we’re already taking care of it.”

Resisting efforts to foster dialogue and disagreement only confirms the impression that schools have lost sight of their mission: encouraging debate and challenging blind consensus.

Tomasi is calling on professors to embrace the challenge of viewpoint diversity, rather than shy away from it until politicians foist it upon them.

“Universities, to be truly reformed, to be deeply reformed, need to have agents on the inside,” he said. “Change, to be lasting, has to come from inside the university. At some point, you have to have professors who are willing to stand up and say something’s gone wrong.”