Jonathan Imber, writing at Minding The Campus, writes that intellectual diversity on campus is not just about left versus right:

When critics of higher education complain about a lack of “intellectual diversity,” mostly what they deplore is the shortage of conservative professors. But there is much more at stake than that.

Consider climate change ….

It turns out the wholesale secular embrace of science insinuates its own range of pious beliefs.  Climate theory pretends both to the throne of reason and to public policies dictated as if they were royal decrees.  To question a royal decree in this case is construed as treason again reason.  But how did reason come to rely more on a consensus of belief than skepticism about such grand causal claims?

Unlike creation science, the advocates of social engineering who believe that science is equivalent to policy intimidate all doubters.  The absence of intellectual diversity is detrimental to public policy debate, not to mention how the stranglehold of environmentalism in colleges and universities also steers any debate toward predetermined conclusions.  Here the challenge becomes disentangling the science of climate change from the policies that should follow from that science….

When some conservatives argue that the solution to the problem of a lack of intellectual diversity in the academy can be solved by hiring more conservative faculty, my simple and respectful response is that who you hire presumably has a mind, and people, we know from experience, change their minds.  Hiring based on conviction is just as dangerous on the right as it is on the left….

What must be considered is how more faculty, other than a few who speak up, can impress on administrators and colleagues why real intellectual debate will keep away whatever version of barbarians at the gate they dread.

Point well taken, but isn’t balancing left versus right at least a starting point and an improvement?


 
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