Harvard may create a center for (viewpoint) diversity and inclusion (of conservatives)

Under pressure from the Trump administration for left-wing bias, Harvard is considering creating a center to promote "viewpoint diversity," reports the Wall Street Journal. Officials are talking to potential donors about funding a nonpartisan thinktank -- at a cost of $500 million to $1 billion -- like Stanford's Hoover Institution.

Creating a corner of the university for the unwoke is unlikely to satisfy the administration, a source told the Journal.

Conservative academics are unimpressed with the idea, reports Jennifer Graham for Deseret News. Hoover’s Niall Ferguson said the center would have "no credibility whatsoever."

"Harvard sued the administration in April, claiming its constitutional rights were being violated," writes Graham. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue," Harvard's president, Alan Garber, said.

Admitting students and hiring professors with conservative views would backfire, argues Jennifer M. Morton, a Penn philosophy professor, in the New York Times. "A policy of hiring professors and admitting students because they have conservative views would actually endanger the open-minded intellectual environment that proponents of viewpoint diversity say they want," she writes. "By creating incentives for professors and students to have and maintain certain political positions, such a policy would discourage curiosity and reward narrowness of thought."

If universities would stop discriminating against conservatives, libertarians and other dissenters, "the very real problem of a lack of viewpoint diversity would solve itself," responded Princeton Professor Robert P. George on social media.

Some academics "are so deeply in the grip of ideology that they cannot appreciate even high quality scholarship in their field when it defends beliefs they disapprove of or questions beliefs they hold sacred," he writes. That's led to "stunning -- nearly unbelievable -- ideological imbalances on college and university campuses."

Only 3 percent of faculty consider themselves conservative or very conservative, according to a poll by the student-run Harvard Crimson, while 77 percent identify as liberal or very liberal. In my college days, I had a friend who liked to quote George Wallace about "pointy-headed professors who can't park a bicycle straight.")

"Instead of being places for free inquiry," universities have become "comfortable monocultures" and "engines of conformity," said John Tomasi, president of Heterodox Academy, at a New York City conference, reports Jacob Hess in the Deseret News.

A dramatic "collapse of trust" in higher education has left universities vulnerable, said social psychologist Jon Haidt, a NYU professor. “If you have two-thirds or three-quarters of the country souring on your brand, and then you have a president who’s attacking you, well, who’s going to support you? You’ve alienated most of the country.”

Heterodox Academy has recommendations for how to "build a stronger academic culture," that "honors the ideals of scholarly integrity, pluralism, and free thought."

Robert Nozick

Robert Nozick started out as a socialist before becoming a leading libertarian philosopher, notes Morton. He was hired by Harvard for his intellect, not to provide balance, she writes.

In a 2001 interview with the Cato Institute's Julian Sanchez, Nozick recalls his first year as a full philosophy professor at Harvard in 1969 during the height of anti-Vietnam War protest. He announced a course on“Capitalism," and was told by a graduate philosophy student to expect "interruptions or demonstrations in class.”

"I was then, you have to remember, 30 years old," Nozick tells the interviewer. "I said, 'If you disrupt my course, I’m going to kick the shit out of you.' He said, 'You’re taking this very personally!'”

Nozick suggested passing out leaflets outside the classroom urging people not to take the course. That never happened.