Five Reasons Viewpoint Diversity Makes Academic Sense

By Jenna Silber Storey and Benjamin Storey
January 26, 2026

Everyone seems to be talking about viewpoint diversity—but it is often unclear what exactly we are talking about.  Do hiring committees need to look up the voter registrations of job candidates? Does a philosophy department that includes both analytic and continental approaches count?  What about a history department whose scholars specialize in Asian, African, and Australian history?  Would viewpoint diversity require seeking out QAnon aficionados or apologists for kleptocracy, as some have suggested?  Does it mean that departments need to hire people on the political right?  If so, would those people be worried about losing their jobs if they change their minds?  

As these questions indicate, it is not easy to pin down an academically serious vision of viewpoint diversity.  Nonetheless, the academy stands to benefit from being compelled to pay attention to perspectives it may be excluding from consideration.  Investigating possibilities that are marginalized by dominant paradigms profits our shared quest to understand.  For all the disruption they entail, paradigm shifts are necessary features of the development of intellectual life and the institutions that house it.

But paradigm-shifting conversations are, by their nature, difficult.  Old assumptions have to be questioned while new intellectual territory is just coming into view.  What follows is an attempt to chart the landscape of viewpoint diversity by distinguishing several, distinct ways in which it is beneficial to research and teaching–five reasons that viewpoint diversity makes academic sense.  

We focus here on what might be called the “thick” version of viewpoint diversity: the inclusion of areas and approaches to study that may be said to reflect a politically conservative disposition.  There are many ways that diverse views matter to academic discourse, and what exactly counts as conservative can be debated, of course.  But it is fair to say that the progressive-conservative duality is at the core of modern liberal politics, and gives definition to two of the basic dispositions of the era.  When a debate has lasted so long, it is reasonable to presume that each side of this enduring duality might have something serious to say.  

Moreover, several observers have noted that this duality coincides with a pattern of exclusion from contemporary academic conversation.  That sense of exclusion has helped provoke a political revolt against the academic-social contract that has prevailed for a century, a revolt that is having transformative consequences for higher education.  Those who care about the future of the American academy should be interested in the question of what scholarship and teaching might have to gain from good-faith efforts to respond to the present upheaval by broadening the academic tent.

1. Rival Hypotheses:  The most commonly used argument for viewpoint diversity invokes the need to consider rival hypotheses as we seek to explain a phenomenon or predict the consequences of a prospective action.  The dominant metaphor that characterizes a vibrant academy as a “marketplace of ideas” most directly evokes this vision of the benefits of viewpoint diversity, suggesting that a hypothesis proves its worth by outcompeting others. 

The need for openness to rival hypotheses is fairly straightforward and widely accepted in the academic world.  Considering different possible causal accounts is a normal part of the scientific process by means of which we seek to advance knowledge.  However, when it comes to questions near to politics, where explanations and conjectures often diverge along partisan lines, many wonder whether academic inquirers sufficiently consider hypotheses favored by political conservatives.  

Do political scientists sufficiently consider the possible downsides of public sector unions?  Have public health experts seriously investigated the benefits of marriage, or the costs of Covid-pandemic school closures to adolescent mental health?  Do sociologists fairly assess the efficacy of liberal urban reforms? To attend to one understudied set of rival hypotheses, for example, a study sponsored by the Johns Hopkins University-American Enterprise Institute Fellowship Exchange Program is examining whether or not Medicaid enrollees with mental health or substance abuse disorders benefit from work requirements.

 Questions like these can be investigated in ways that yield measurable results—data that often become part of political arguments and policy debates.  If academic debate tends to exclude a significant, politically-coded range of hypotheses from serious study, the picture of how things work that it presents will be partial and will court distrust.  John Stuart Mill is often evoked as the champion of this kind of viewpoint diversity, as he famously argued that “he who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”

2. Competing Claims:  A less frequently discussed reason universities should cultivate viewpoint diversity concerns matters about which consensus is unlikely ever to emerge.  For example, another project sponsored by the JHU-AEI Fellowship Exchange Program is a course on “Liberal Education: a Contested Question,” taught by a professor of post-colonial politics and a conservative scholar (one of the authors of this essay).  That course inquires into what it means to be an educated person—a question with no quantifiable answer, which thoughtful human beings have been debating for millennia, and will probably continue to debate for as long as human beings exist.

Aristotle might be named as the champion of this form of viewpoint diversity.  For as he argues in the Politics, understanding a subject such as justice requires holding two competing visions of it in our minds at once.  This is because justice is both equality and inequality, depending on which aspect of it we are considering.  Some people are disposed to perceive the aspect of justice that is equality, and others naturally focus on the aspect that is inequality—and we can develop an expansive understanding of this question only when we consider both of these perspectives.  Moreover, because deciding how these perspectives should be combined is itself a subject of contestation, and because questions about the just and the unjust, the good and the bad, and the beautiful and the ugly are not merely speculative questions but questions about how we should live, our arguments about them are inflected by conflicting human passions.  

In our era, one axis along which such passions tend to crystallize is a progressive-conservative axis.  With respect to justice, progressives tend to be more perceptive about its egalitarian aspect, whereas conservatives tend to be more attentive to the dependence of justice on order, and therefore on the inequality that attends all forms of hierarchy.  When it comes to civics, progressives incline toward emphasizing global human rights, while conservatives more often articulate the significance of citizenship in a particular nation.  With respect to the pursuit of knowledge, progressives tend to point out the virtues of expertise, whereas conservatives tend to emphasize the wisdom of common sense.  

Rival hypotheses and competing claims call for different modes of approach to viewpoint diversity.  At times, one hypothesis may be definitively ruled out, and can drop out of academic conversation.  When attending to competing claims, by contrast, both alternatives must be kept alive, for their overlap and conflict is the secret to the vitality of both politics and inquiry.  

No yardstick has ever been invented that can reduce competing claims to questions of measurement.  The academy should be a place not only for the ever more precise measurement of the measurable, but also for the ever more profound investigation of the unmeasurable.  It can be such only if its conversation includes the arguments about which the opposing dispositions of our divided politics are most passionate and perceptive.  

3. Unfashionable Ideas:   One such dimension of our political argument concerns tradition and innovation.  Universities’ special role as incubators of innovation is often emphasized, and is one reason why the progressively-inclined might feel especially at home in those institutions.  But universities also have a special role to play in the transmission of our intellectual inheritance—and perhaps especially elements of that inheritance that grate against contemporary sensibilities.

In its seminal 1915 Declaration of Principles on Academic Freedom and Academic Tenure, the American Association of University Professors pointed out that the university’s “distinctive duty” included serving as “the conservator of all genuine elements of value in the past thought and life of mankind which are not in the fashion of the moment.”  The archives, museums, and experts on many dimensions of history that universities house can allow these institutions to play a constructively countercultural role in keeping awareness of the human past and its wisdom alive in a relentlessly presentist commercial democracy.  

Nostalgia can be a vice, of course.  But cultural amnesia is a vice, as well—and as Alexis de Tocqueville noted in Democracy in America, it is the more common vice in a high-tech egalitarian society, whose sophisticated tools and moral sensibilities often lead it to think it has nothing to learn from what has come before.  Different eras cultivate different forms of greatness, however, from the theological greatness of thirteenth-century Paris to the technological greatness of twentieth-century America.  Renaissances happen when forgotten elements of the past are recovered and turn out to be the sources of revitalization in the present.  

Universities have a special role to play in fostering appreciation of the potential sources of such revitalizations, and making sure people know how and where to look for them when they are wanted.  The tweedy professor with his dusty books, lovingly recreating the intellectual worlds of the past, has an important role to play in keeping our sense of the range of human possibility open.     

4. Civic Self-Knowledge:  Contemporary American universities frequently celebrate their cosmopolitanism and describe themselves as “global institutions.”  Yet they are dependent on and therefore obligated to their host countries in a special way.  As such, they have a distinctive role to play in helping members of those host countries acquire civic self-knowledge, and in imparting knowledge about the host country to all who choose to study there.

Civic self-knowledge has two core dimensions.  First, universities should be places in which it is possible to acquire an accurate sense of the ideas and inclinations of the citizens of the country in which they find themselves.  That is much more likely to happen when people who hold a reasonably wide range of such views are present and audible on campus.  They should also be places that provide a robust introduction to the ideals and institutions that have shaped their host country, and which are intimately linked to the flourishing of that country’s academic culture.

Second, universities should be places in which the various strains of common opinion become more refined, more serious, and more suited to advance the common good.  As both professors and students have argued, the strange radicalism of young people on the contemporary right may be in part a consequence of their experience in academic communities where they do not receive the sympathetic cultivation of their political opinions that they need.  It is hard to develop your ideas if you feel that you cannot say them out loud in polite campus company.  Both progressives and conservatives are natural parts of every modern society.  The university’s proper role is not to put a thumb on the political scale, but to help all students become serious and self-aware versions of themselves.

5. Sympathetic Mentors and Challenging Counterexamples:  The cultivation of civic self-knowledge is related to the final reason academic communities would benefit from more viewpoint diversity:  that all students should to be both encouraged and challenged to realize the combination of confidence and humility that marks the educated mind.

On the one hand, students need to encounter sympathetic scholarly mentors:  people who share something of their political and moral instincts, but have refined and informed them through scholarly training and reflection.  Such mentors offer students aspirational models—better versions of themselves that they may hope to embody through time, study, and self-command.  On the other hand, students need to encounter challenging counterexamples:  people with evident intellectual and moral virtues who sit on the opposite side of the political divide.  Such encounters can provide a personal demonstration that people older, wiser, and better-informed than oneself can hold political positions with which one deeply disagrees.  

The paucity of sympathetic mentors for conservative students and challenging counterexamples for progressive students can lead the former to conclude that institutions of higher learning are not designed for them, and the latter to suppose that anyone who disagrees with them is ill-informed.  Both kinds of students would be better off if it was not possible to go through college without encountering people of different political dispositions who command intellectual respect.

Viewpoint diversity has become a blunt-force instrument in the Trump administration’s efforts to reshape the academic landscape, which has prompted some university insiders to call for resistance at any price.  But universities are institutions built for learning, not battle.  They should approach this problem by doing what they do best:  taking what is true and valuable in the arguments of outsiders, and making them beneficial to the inquiries the academy sustains.  By extending the range of hypotheses and claims considered on campus into some presently unfashionable territory, universities can serve their scholars, their students, and their nation better.  Imaginative efforts to include conservative perspectives in the academic conversation will make our universities truer to their best selves—and more welcome in the country that so generously supports them.