Trump's Demand that Harvard Departments Have "Viewpoint Diversity"
On April 11, President Trump sent a letter to Harvard with various demands, threatening to cut off federal science grants if Harvard does not comply. Some demands related to ending racial discrimination in admissions and hiring, which is fine, since Harvard has blatantly discriminated against white and Asians in the past and continues to do so. He also asks Harvard to stop admitting foreign students who are anti-American, which I think is reasonable; we should not give visas to foreigners when giving out visas will hurt our country. Both of these relate to federal functions— enforcing anti-discrimination laws, and deciding who gets visas.
Others demands are improper, even if they are things that we think the university should do. He asks Harvard to check faculty publications for plagiarism. Maybe Harvard should do that, but why should the federal government condition cancer research grants given to Professor Smith on whether the university has audited Professor Jones’s publications? This is an intrusion onto the university’s internal management.
Even more dubious is the demand that Harvard require its departments to have diverse viewpoints. The letter says,
Harvard must abolish all criteria, preferences, and practices, whether mandatory or optional, throughout its admissions and hiring practices, that function as ideological litmus tests. Every department or field found to lack viewpoint diversity must be reformed by hiring a critical mass of new faculty within that department or field who will provide viewpoint diversity
This sounds good, but it isn’t. We have to be careful as to why it’s a bad idea, though. One professor reacted by saying,
"What Trump’s administration seems bent on doing is something more systematic than breaking: it is undermining all sources of independent thinking not confined to the MAGA worldview."
This demand is bad, but not because it has an ignoble goal. The clear intent is to introduce independent thinking, not to suppress it. The idea is not to eliminate everything but the MAGA worldview; it is more like requiring that 20% of faculty have the MAGA worldview rather than 0%. Liberal faculty think that if 20% of a department voted for Trump, that department is hideously conservative; they have lost sight of their own biases. And Trump is not even asking for “the MAGA worldview”. He is just asking that biology departments not veto job candidates who say that a man cannot become a woman and that economics departments not veto candidates who favor tariffs.1
Even imposing a little balance on a politicized university department, though, is still not the business of the federal government. Harvard has every right to say "Nobody who voted for Trump will be hired as a professor in the Government department". Private universities are entitled to have their own points of view. Some colleges just hire Christians, for example, and that is their right. Of course, Harvard does not have the right to fire professors if they vote for Trump, since Harvard says it protects academic freedom, but hiring is a different matter.
The public doesn't understand that private universities have a right to be partisan. They see that universities are leftwing and intolerant of rightwing views, and they think something should be done about it. I think something should be done, too, but I also believe in private property, and universities like Harvard and Yale are private nonprofit corporations. The government should not impose its view on them.
The situation in public universities is more difficult. What should be done if an Indiana University department has an express policy of not hiring anybody who voted for Trump? What if they have such a policy implicitly, but they do not announce it? I’m sure many departments have a critical mass of professors who veto conservative job candidates. That is true across the country, and professors with conservative views who slip through, hide them.
What can be done? Note that one of the chief problems is defining “viewpoint diversity”. Very few economics departments have any marxist professors— economics is opposite to the humanities in this way. Should economics departments be required to each hire one marxist? What about other obsolete schools of economics? The Trump demand for viewpoint diversity is not realistic, I think; it is intended to be aspirational. I can’t see how it would be implemented. It is, rather, a statement to universities that Trump and the majority of the country who voted for him are unhappy about the exclusion of their views from universities, and if the universities don’t reform, something drastic might happen.
Focussing on “viewpoint diversity” on schools of thought in a field of study like economics, history, or biology, is perhaps my mistake. Another way to think of the problem is as vetoing job candidates because of their political views, not because of the way they look at their subject matter. That kind of veto is clearly bad. If a department doesn’t hire an economist because he uses marxist methods or some oddball literary approach, that is a good thing. If a department doesn’t hire an economist because of his views on sex change operations or climate change, that is a bad thing. Where universities have gone most wrong is in refusing to hire people because they have conservative views on topics unrelated to their field of study. That is what we should aim to end.
Thus, think about a simpler problem. If we knew a department was blacklisting any candidate who voted Republican, what should we do about that? Or, if there are no Republicans in the department, how can we find out if the pattern is due to discrimination or just to the fact that there are no good Republican job applicants? If you were the university president, vested with full authority from the board of trustees, what would you do?
I am an economist myself, and like virtually everyone with a PhD in economics, I oppose the Trump tariffs. It would be difficult to find a critical mass of Harvard-quality economics professors who do support the tariffs. It is not that they would be vetoed for their political views; it’s just that very few economists, conservative or liberal, favor high tariffs for the modern USA. If one did, I don’t think most economics departments would refuse to hire him, though. Rather, they would think that he had an oddball opinion, but if his work was of generally high quality, that eccentricity would be a minor point, and might even work in his favor if he had novel arguments for his position.