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Boston Globe
05-05-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
Trump and Harvard both want ‘viewpoint diversity.' What does it mean?
Harvard has rejected the Trump administration's demands, calling them a threat to academic freedom and the political independence of higher education. But in a letter to Harvard affiliates informing them that the university was suing the government, Harvard President Alan Garber echoed that vocabulary. 'We acknowledge that we have unfinished business,' Garber wrote. 'We need to ensure that the university lives up to its steps to reaffirm a culture of free inquiry, viewpoint diversity and academic exploration.' Advertisement The term viewpoint diversity, which also appears multiple times in Harvard's recent report on antisemitism, may be unfamiliar to many. But it has been circulating in higher education for the past decade, prompting debates of its own. For some, greater viewpoint diversity is needed to counter what they see as a rising censoriousness on many campuses, where intolerant students and an increasingly left-leaning professoriate stifle open debate. But to others, it's a vague, politically coded term that misstates the problem while helping to fuel conservative attacks on universities and on racial, ethnic and gender diversity efforts more broadly. Advertisement Harvard itself has been a hotbed of diverse views about the value of viewpoint diversity and its relationship to the bedrock value of academic freedom. But there's broad agreement that the Trump administration is weaponizing the term -- which its letter never defines -- in a dangerous way. 'Viewpoint diversity is a crucial, but difficult and subtle, ideal in intellectual discourse,' said Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker, a longtime critic of higher education's liberal tilt. But imposing it by government fiat, he said, opens the door to outcomes that are Orwellian, ridiculous or both. 'There's nothing to prevent the party in power from enforcing the teaching of ideas that are both flaky and congenial to the administration: vaccine denial in medicine, 2020 election conspiracies in history, creationism in biology, quack nutritional theories in public health, the benefit of tariffs in economics, and so on,' he said. The term viewpoint diversity began gaining currency across academia largely through the efforts of Heterodox Academy, a nonpartisan national group founded in 2015 to combat what it describes as 'the rise of closed-minded orthodoxies within scholarly communities.' In recent years, it has been picked up by Republican politicians as a new tool to support their long-standing argument that universities have been taken over by the left. 'Have institutions, including the university system, been so thoroughly captured by anti-American and illiberal ideology that the government must step in to restore viewpoint diversity, free thought and free expression?' Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., at the time chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, wrote in The Washington Examiner in September 2023. Advertisement Since then, at least eight states have proposed or passed legislation seeking to mandate viewpoint diversity (or 'intellectual diversity,' as some laws put it) at public institutions. The requirement is usually paired with demands that colleges ban diversity, equity and inclusion programs and restrict teaching on race and gender. A report last October by free expression group PEN America said viewpoint diversity, while a laudable goal, has too often served as 'camouflage' for the real purpose: stifling faculty members' speech. PEN America and others have raised particular alarm at a 2024 Indiana law that says professors at public universities, including those with tenure, could be disciplined or fired if they failed to 'foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression and intellectual diversity.' Last month, the state began what appears to be one of the first investigations under the law, involving a pro-Palestinian professor at Indiana University who had been anonymously reported for criticizing both the university and Israel during class. 'What we're seeing now is very dangerous,' said Jonathan Friedman, managing director of U.S. free expression programs at PEN America. 'When you attach these punitive potential actions to these concepts, you can comb through anything a university is doing and find fault.' Since getting the Trump administration letter, Harvard has emphasized its efforts to broaden discussion on campus. It has sponsored a welter of initiatives and committees relating to 'civil discourse,' 'intellectual vitality,' 'dialogue across difference' and the like, including some that began before the campus tumult associated with the Israel-Hamas war. Until recently, the term 'viewpoint diversity' rarely occurred in formal statements by the Harvard administration. And even as Garber has embraced it, it inspires some skepticism on campus, where to some it carries right-wing connotations. Advertisement Ned Hall, a philosophy professor who is co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom, a faculty group, said that while it is valid to worry about the ideological composition of the faculty, he finds the term vague and not particularly helpful. 'If you just latch onto a term, whether it's viewpoint diversity or inclusion, it's a placeholder where you get to fill in the details as you wish,' he said. 'And -- surprise, surprise -- it can be affected by a political agenda.' Hall said he prefers to emphasize what he calls 'collaborative disagreement.' 'You could imagine a campus that's really diverse, but nobody talks to each other,' he said. 'What we really, really, really need is a campus intellectual culture that makes use of that diversity.' Research cited in a recent report on Harvard's classroom environment gives a mixed picture of how much of that actually happens at Harvard. In a 2024 survey of seniors, only one-third said they felt comfortable 'expressing opposing views about controversial topics' in class or in their residential communities. About half as many conservative students said they felt comfortable. (Though some seem to relish the challenge. 'Being Republican at Harvard has never been better,' the president of the thriving campus Republican club wrote last year in the campus newspaper.) But a separate survey asking all undergraduates to evaluate their courses was more sanguine. More than 90% of respondents said they felt free to express their opinions in class, and 80% agreed that most fellow students 'listen attentively with an open mind.' Ari Kohn, a junior majoring in philosophy and social studies, said it can actually be easier to speak freely in courses than in dorms and dining halls, given that classes, particularly more specialized ones, tend to attract people with similar interests and outlooks. Advertisement 'I think I do stifle my opinions more when I'm not in class, or other places where I know other people have read the same things,' she said. But Kohn, who helps lead a campus group dedicated to fostering respectful dialogue, said news media accounts often exaggerate the rigidity of student views. 'There's a lot of talk about Harvard as a liberal bastion, and it is,' she said. 'But it's just as true that many students become more conservative or moderate. Over four years, you start to see things with greater complexity, and question your assumptions. That happens way more than the dominant narrative has it.' As the Harvard administration embraces the ideal of viewpoint diversity, it remains unclear what that means for the fraught topic of Israel and war in the Gaza Strip. The phrase 'viewpoint diversity' and close variants occur dozens of times in the university's report on antisemitism, which describes a 'disturbingly one-sided' view of Israel and the Palestinians in some academic programs. Many of the antisemitic events described in the report, it says, stem from 'insufficient respect for viewpoint diversity.' Such references occur less frequently, and more skeptically, in the university's parallel report on Islamophobia released at the same time. Some community members, the report notes, said the university's stated goal of balanced perspectives was being used 'not to foster a wider range of viewpoints but rather to suppress specific views.' For some on campus, recent moves by Harvard leadership have reinforced that impression. In late March, as pressure from the Trump administration was building, Hopi Hoekstra, the dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, sent an email to leaders of nondepartmental centers and institutes saying they should be prepared to answer questions about how their programs exposed students to 'diverse viewpoints.' Advertisement The next day, faculty leaders of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, whose programs had been accused by some prominent Harvard affiliates of promoting antisemitism, were dismissed. (Hoekstra, after an outcry from some faculty members, defended the removals as part of 'addressing the needs of our academic units.') The university also suspended a program at Harvard Divinity School that had drawn similar criticism. The next move in the standoff between Harvard and the government is unclear. But in a letter last week introducing the antisemitism and Islamophobia reports, Garber returned to a now-familiar theme. Among his pledges: to 'speed the establishment of a universitywide initiative to promote and support viewpoint diversity.' This article originally appeared in
Yahoo
11-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Israel-Hamas Conflict Convinced College Adminstrators To Turn Away From Politics, New Report Shows
Just a few years ago, it felt like every college in America was eagerly releasing statements about political controversies. Schools released statements on everything from police brutality to the 2020 presidential election to anti-Asian hate. But after Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel, universities were in a bind, unable to make a statement on the conflict that wouldn't anger either anti-Israel activists or risk getting university leaders hauled before congressional inquiries into on-campus antisemitism. Soon after, some colleges reacted to this pressure by announcing that they would no longer make official statements on political events that do not directly concern the university itself. "If the university and its leaders become accustomed to issuing official statements about matters beyond the core function of the university, they will inevitably come under intense pressure to do so from multiple, competing sides on nearly every imaginable issue of the day," reads a Harvard faculty–led report whose recommendations were accepted by administrators last May. "This is the reality of contemporary public life in an era of social media and political polarization." "We embrace the guiding principle that the remedy for speech that some may find hurtful, offensive, or even hateful is not the disruption, obstruction, or suppression of the free speech of others, but rather more speech," reads another statement from last spring, this one from Syracuse. "Except under the most extraordinary circumstances…the University does not make institutional statements or pronouncements on current controversies." According to a new report from Heterodox Academy, a higher education organization that promotes viewpoint diversity on campus, they've been joined by dozens of others. By the end of last year, 144 colleges in the U.S. and four in Canada, serving around 2.6 million students combined, had adopted neutrality statements. Essentially all of these statements came after October 7, as only eight colleges had official neutrality policies in place before the attack. The report further notes that the vast majority of announcements cited factors like "community and inclusion," "free speech," and "public trust" for the shift away from official treatments. "The unprecedented increase in institutional statement neutrality adoptions occurring on campuses across North America is a move that strengthens open inquiry and viewpoint diversity," reads the Heterodox Academy report. "In times of social or political controversy, colleges and universities have a unique chance to elevate public debate when they refrain from taking their own stances and instead empower the varied voices of their communities." Not everyone supports the shift toward institutional neutrality among U.S. colleges. A recent article in The New York Times framed the change as schools "making it a policy to stay silent as political pressure mounts against higher education," writing that "the universities are adopting such policies at a time when the Trump administration has moved aggressively to punish them for not doing enough to crack down on antisemitism and for embracing diversity, equity and inclusion policies," even though the report exclusively studied neutrality statements that came before Trump's second term began. When colleges weigh in on controversial political issues, they end up chilling dissenting speech from students and faculty. Instead of allowing a university to fulfill its mission as the site of intellectual exploration and debate, administrators effectively settle controversial questions. The post The Israel-Hamas Conflict Convinced College Adminstrators To Turn Away From Politics, New Report Shows appeared first on
Boston Globe
11-03-2025
- Politics
- Boston Globe
More universities are choosing to stay neutral on the biggest issues
According to a report released Tuesday from the Heterodox Academy, a group that has been critical of progressive orthodoxy on college campuses, 148 colleges had adopted 'institutional neutrality' policies by the end of 2024, a trend that underscores the scorching political scrutiny they are under. All but eight of those policies were adopted after the Hamas attack. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'We must open the way for our individual faculty's expertise, intelligence, scholarship, and wisdom to inform our state and society in their own voice, free from institutional interference,' said Mark Bernstein, a regent at Michigan, after adopting the policy in October. Advertisement He said the university had historically refrained from issuing statements on momentous events, including the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, and during the two world wars. "So institutional statements are a modern phenomenon and a misguided venture that betrays our public mission," he said. The universities are adopting such policies at a time when the Trump administration has moved aggressively to punish them for not doing enough to crack down on antisemitism and for embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. On Friday, the administration announced that it was pulling $400 million from Columbia, a move that sent shock waves across higher education. The administration has said it is looking to target other universities. Universities ramped up issuing statements on hot-button issues about a decade ago, after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police shootings of Black people in places in Ferguson, Mo., and other places, said Alex Arnold, director of research at the Heterodox Academy. Some conservatives had long lamented such statements and believed they veered too leftward. Speech groups, including the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, worried that they discouraged dissent. For a while, the statements were hardly the subject of widespread controversy. Advertisement The Hamas attack and the war that followed changed the equation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always split the left, but the attack on Oct. 7 and the war that followed sharpened those divisions. The statements that universities issued on the attack and Israel's bombing of the Gaza Strip came under scrutiny and were often criticized for being too late, too weak, too biased — or all three. University leaders, under pressure from donors, lawmakers, and the public, began to ask: Why put out statements at all? About four out of five colleges that adopted neutrality policies are public and face scrutiny from state lawmakers. Several states, including Texas, Utah, and North Carolina, forced their public universities to adopt such policies. Others, such as Tennessee, are considering it. Most of the new policies apply to senior administrators, including college presidents and provosts. Others also encompass units such as academic departments. And many apply to faculty members when they are speaking in an official capacity, but often make clear that faculty are free to express personal views, according to the Heterodox Academy. "The whole experience of coping with the campus controversy triggered by the Hamas attack has really gotten institutional leaders to think carefully and to reflect on what the function of our institutions of higher education is," Arnold said. "I do think this is probably going to be a pretty durable change." Critics of the neutrality trend have argued that administrators are merely sidestepping difficult debates on the Middle East conflict and scared of angering donors and lawmakers. Advertisement After Clark University in Massachusetts said it would shy away from taking positions, the school newspaper's opinion editor called the move a 'fake policy' designed to curb discussion of the conflict. Presidents are often stumbling over their new policies. During an October interview with the school newspaper, Harvard president Alan Garber called a statement by pro-Palestinian students 'offensive,' prompting criticism that he should follow his own policy. Last month, the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group, issued a statement on neutrality that was, more or less, neutral. It stated that the idea "is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it." The reelection of Donald Trump is now testing those policies. As the new administration, which has described universities as "the enemy," ratchets up its attack on higher education, colleges are under greater pressure to be voices of resistance. But many college presidents have been spooked into silence, said Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, a small Catholic institution three miles from the White House. "They look at what happened to Claudine Gay, and some of the other presidents," she said, referring to the former Harvard president who resigned last year after a congressional hearing on antisemitism. "And they're like: 'I don't want that to happen to me. So I'll just shut up and hunker down, and hope this cloud passes.'" This article originally appeared in
New York Times
11-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
More Universities Are Choosing to Stay Neutral on the Biggest Issues
Just a few years ago, university statements on the day's social and political issues abounded. When Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022, Harvard's president at the time called it 'senseless' and 'deplorable,' and flew the invaded country's flag in Harvard Yard. After George Floyd died under the knee of a white police officer, Cornell's president said she was 'sickened.' The University of Michigan's president described the Oct. 7, 2023, violence against Israel as a 'horrific attack by Hamas terrorists.' But over the last year, each of those universities has adopted policies that limit official statements on current issues. According to a new report released on Tuesday from the Heterodox Academy, a group that has been critical of progressive orthodoxy on college campuses, 148 colleges had adopted 'institutional neutrality' policies by the end of 2024, a trend that underscores the scorching political scrutiny they are under. All but eight of those policies were adopted after the Hamas attack. 'We must open the way for our individual faculty's expertise, intelligence, scholarship and wisdom to inform our state and society in their own voice, free from institutional interference,' said Mark Bernstein, a regent at Michigan, after adopting the policy in October. He said the university had historically refrained from issuing statements on momentous events, like the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy or during the two world wars. 'So institutional statements are a modern phenomenon and a misguided venture that betrays our public mission,' he said. The universities are adopting such policies at a time when the Trump administration has moved aggressively to punish them for not doing enough to crack down on antisemitism and for embracing diversity, equity and inclusion policies. On Friday, the administration announced that it was pulling $400 million from Columbia, a move that sent shock waves across higher education. The administration has already said it is looking to target other universities. Universities ramped up issuing statements on hot-button issues about a decade ago, after the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the police shootings of Black people in places like Ferguson, Mo., said Alex Arnold, director of research at the Heterodox Academy. Some conservatives had long lamented such statements and believed they veered too leftward. Speech groups like the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression worried that they discouraged dissent. For a while, the statements were hardly the subject of widespread controversy. The Hamas attack and the war that followed changed the equation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has always split the left, but the attack on Oct. 7 and the war that followed sharpened those divisions. The statements that universities issued on the attack and Israel's bombing of Gaza came under scrutiny, and were often criticized for being too late, too weak, too biased — or all three. University leaders, under pressure from donors, lawmakers and the public, began to ask: Why put out statements at all? About four out of five colleges that adopted neutrality policies are public and face scrutiny from state lawmakers. Several states, including Texas and Utah and North Carolina, forced their public universities to adopt such policies. Others, like Tennessee, are considering it. Most of the new policies apply to senior administrators, like college presidents and provosts. Others also encompass units like academic departments. And many apply to faculty members when they are speaking in an official capacity, but often make clear that faculty are free to express personal views, according to the Heterodox Academy. 'The whole experience of coping with the campus controversy triggered by the Hamas attack has really gotten institutional leaders to think carefully and to reflect on what the function of our institutions of higher education is,' Mr. Arnold said. 'I do think this is probably going to be a pretty durable change.' Critics of the neutrality trend have argued that administrators are merely sidestepping difficult debates on the Middle East conflict, and scared of angering donors and lawmakers. After Clark University, in Massachusetts, said it would shy away from taking positions, the school newspaper's opinion editor called the move a 'fake policy' designed to curb discussion of the conflict. But even universities that adopted such a policy have not gone totally silent on contested political issues. At an Anti-Defamation League event in New York City last week, Michigan's president, Santa Ono, called the effort to boycott, divest and sanction Israel antisemitic, and said his response had been to invest even more in those partnerships. In an email, the university said the new neutrality policy adopted a 'heavy presumption' against issuing statements 'not directly connected to internal university functions.' 'Combating antisemitism and making sure we have an environment where all students can thrive and succeed is part of our moral and legal obligation, and absolutely connected to our internal functions as an institution of higher education,' said Colleen Mastony, a Michigan spokeswoman. Presidents are often stumbling over their new policies. During an October interview with the school newspaper, Harvard's president, Alan Garber, called a statement by pro-Palestinian students 'offensive,' prompting the editorial board to tell him to 'follow your own policy.' Last month, the American Association of University Professors, a faculty rights group, issued a statement on neutrality that was, more or less, neutral. It stated that the idea 'is neither a necessary condition for academic freedom nor categorically incompatible with it.' The re-election of Donald Trump is now testing those policies. As the new administration, which has described universities as 'the enemy,' ratchets up its attack on higher education, colleges are under greater pressure to be voices of resistance. But many college presidents have been spooked into silence, said Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, a small Catholic institution three miles from the White House. 'They look at what happened to Claudine Gay, and some of the other presidents,' she said, referring to the former Harvard president who resigned last year after a congressional hearing on antisemitism. 'And they're like: 'I don't want that to happen to me. So I'll just shut up and hunker down, and hope this cloud passes.'' No university is more associated with neutrality than the University of Chicago, where incoming students are furnished with the Kalven Report, the 1967 document that made the case for neutrality. The report, penned as violence upended college campuses during the Vietnam War, said the university 'is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.' Tom Ginsburg, director of the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression at Chicago, says adopting neutrality signals to lawmakers that colleges are committed to welcoming diverse viewpoints. 'Because the statements tended to reflect the majority views on campuses, which are overwhelmingly left-leaning,' he said, 'you can see how adopting it would be a way of saying to lawmakers: 'This isn't who we really are. We're not indoctrinating people with contested positions.'' But even the Kalven Report included a caveat that doesn't settle precisely when universities should issue statements. Neutrality, the report says, still allows colleges to speak out when 'the very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry' are threatened. That moment is now, said Ms. McGuire of Trinity Washington University. 'The erosion of knowledge and expertise that this administration has embraced is very, very scary,' she said, 'and higher ed should be calling it out at every turn.'
