Doubts about viewpoint diversity
On empty signifiers and truckling with the enemy
I wrote previously about discursive conflict — the fact that people fight over language. One kind of conflict is the fight to “relabel the players”. If, in some situations, people with a certain label get an advantage, then that label will be valuable and others will try to claim it. For example, in the middle ages, nobles have advantages. So then people will try to enter the nobility. The nobles will not want to dilute their advantages, so they want to put up barriers to parvenus. But they also face a collective action problem. No individual noble has a strong incentive to help his fellows keep the parvenus out. As a result, their struggle to preserve their exclusivity may fail. In the extreme, society might reach the Italian equilibrium, where large numbers of people claim noble titles. At this point, nobility would become an “empty signifier”. When everyone has it, it no longer carries interesting information. The desire to be part of an advantaged category has overwhelmed the interest of society — or of society’s powerful — in preserving meaningful distinctions.
At the moment, diversity is a label everyone wants to claim. It captures a social interest: maybe it’s a good thing to have many different kinds of people providing their perspective, or maybe it’s good to open up careers to groups who have previously been excluded.
Some adjectives qualify groups as a whole. A drunken crowd is a crowd of drunk people, but a tight-knit clique is not a clique of tight-knit people:
and a diverse group is not a group of diverse individuals. Still, there’s a set of categories that count as diverse in a lazy but reasonable shorthand — ethnic minorities, women, sexual minorities. And as with nobility, the advantages reserved to diverse people generate entry pressure. It’s hard to change your ethnic group or your sexuality — though some have tried — so a better approach is to expand the set of categories.
Say you are a white, heterosexual male with a problem: nobody will hire you to increase their diversity. (Maybe that is fair compensation for your myriad other advantages! I’m not commenting on the justice of the situation, just on its incentives.) But there’s a trick you can try. Suppose you’re a white heterosexual male with a Substack. You may not be an ethnic minority, a woman, or gay, but you are a conservative — a group which is rarer than hen’s teeth in certain fields. You can claim “viewpoint diversity”. After all, if the point of diversity is to have people who think different, it seems more important to extend the range of an organization’s ideas than of its skin tone.
So indeed, we find well-intentioned conservatives and moderates making this argument. In particular, Jonathan Haidt has founded Heterodox Academy to promote it.
Will viewpoint diversity get you a job? I don’t know. Is it a good idea? I’m not sure either. The argument is impeccable, as far it goes: sure, if diversity matters then viewpoint diversity must matter especially much, and we are taking no care of it right now!
The problem is that this position concedes too much already. Conservatives and classical liberals ought to make the case for hiring based on talent, and nothing else.
There’s much to say about this, of course. Progressives can respond that diversity itself will ideally make academia more productive, and that unconscious biases mean minorities won’t get a fair assessment. Conservatives in turn might point out that the evidence for any diversity premium, or for biases in academic hiring, is weak, and that the overwhelmingly left-wing social scientists who generate this evidence are, in effect, marking their own homework. The point is just that these arguments need making. Viewpoint diversity gives that up, in exchange for conservatives getting their own carve-out. In essence, it says “we’re fine with the diversity checkboxes, but let our political views count too”. It’s an easy pitch. It doesn’t require making anyone uncomfortable. It’s not changing the game, just relabelling the players.
To be a bit tendentious, this mirrors a wider shift in conservatism from a focus on the rules of how things are allocated, to a focus on getting their own share. As Jonah Goldberg puts it, “The new post-liberal types don’t object to the state imposing values, censoring speech, or picking winners and losers in the economy in principle. They merely object to the fact that they’re not the ones doing it.”
There are two arguments for diversity in hiring. One is about outputs. It says that having a diverse workforce will reap a dividend, making a company or an academic department more innovative. The other one is about fairness. It says that minority X deserves to be hired more. Both these arguments appeal to important values, and both may be true. But the fairness argument obviously also has a less avowable, but much more grounded and reliable appeal. It’s in a lot of people’s interest. If you’re a woman, an ethnic minority, or even an oppressed conservative, of course you’d like to be hired more. Ethical arguments which marry virtue with self-interest have great staying power, and I expect this one will outlast the idea of the diversity dividend. “Organize enough boy scouts and murder is wrong”, sang the Minutemen. Organize enough different segments of the demographic tangerine, and diversity is wonderful. Why not have a conservative segment too?
What the argument misses is that academia should not be organized so as to maximize the welfare of academics — not of a coalition of minorities, not even of all academics put together. Academia should be organized to maximize the welfare of society. This is the fundamental reason why we should hire on the basis only of talent. Our research makes Green Revolutions — yay! — and decides the central bank’s interest rate — oops. What we do matters to the world.
An academic department which is full of horrible toxic males but does good research is better than a warm-hearted rainbow department which doesn’t do good research. Of course, in reality, horrible toxicity probably mightn’t generate good research, but the principle is still true. Arguments about diversity of any kind should start from this goal, and make their case based on it.
Measured against that criterion, how would viewpoint diversity work out in practice? It is hard to be sure, but knowing contemporary academia, my mind paints a picture of a major social sciences department a few years from now.
Horrorshow University has just completed its 2030 hiring round. Here are the three successful candidates:
Jane Howard-Barth is a rising star and disability rights activist. From a mixed-race background, her parents are both academics, and she credits conversations in the kitchen for inspiring her first teenage urge to do a sociology PhD. Her own work analyses the discursive production of race and gender in truck drivers’ CB radio. It is exactly as dull as it sounds.
Baby Eagle Coed spent several years as a Silicon Valley founder before getting into cryptocurrency. After the crash of June 2022 wiped out his/her investors, s/he retrained as an academic. S/he has an RFID sensor implanted under the skin of his/her wrist which alerts him/her to the presence of his/her pet gazelle. Although s/he no longer parties as hard, s/he still DJs at the department’s silent disco and microdoses 2,5-dimethoxy-4-bromoamphetamine. In short, his/her life is pretty interesting! Not his/her work, though. It focuses on risk management in global supply chains. It’s dull.
The Department’s last hire is a real leftfielder. This is a step into the unknown, and has caused some controversy, but Horrorshow has always sought to be at the forefront of change:
Peter Joseph Brownhard grew up in hardscrabble Iowa and was the only sibling of 11 to graduate high school. He wrote his PhD at Notre Dame on aspects of corpse burial in Aquinas, or as he always calls him, the Great Doctor. After failing to get tenure at Harvard he became increasingly radicalized, with his book Get Up You Lazy Bones achieving a brief popularity among depressed male Redditors. A regular contributor to First Things and National Review, in 2027 he received the Claremont Institute’s Joseph Stalin Prize for Contemporary Conservative Thought. He will teach a course on 8000 Years of Western Civilization. His latest monograph, a study of Joseph De Maistre’s early pamphlets, was called “careful” and “thorough” by the reviewers, and it’s… well, you know.
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