The Faculty Union vs. Viewpoint Diversity

Higher education reformers have long argued that academia needs more viewpoint diversity among the faculty. One group that consistently opposes it? The faculty.

In particular, members of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), who should be devoted to defending and promoting a free and open academy, have argued that “Viewpoint Diversity Is a MAGA Plot” and likened calls for it to answering “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” Whoever runs the organization’s official X account suggested there are so few conservatives in academia not because of discrimination, but because “it’s the intellectual values of academia, which emphasizes critical inquiry & challenges traditional norms, that may be inherently less appealing to those with a more conservative worldview.”

The most recent example comes from Harvard’s AAUP chapter president Kristin Weld, who penned a critical response in The Harvard Crimson to a report that Harvard is courting donors to fund a couple dozen professors to increase viewpoint diversity on campus. Her main objection is that the proposal will undermine the “authority and autonomy of the faculty.” She worries the new hires will be appointed “at the University level” rather than at the department level, and “embedded across schools and departments,” to dilute what she calls the professoriate’s “purported liberal bias.”

Questions of procedure and governance are important. Professor Weld is right that the Harvard administration increasingly sees at least some of the faculty as a problem and is moving toward a top-down mode of governance to address it. Shared governance is a principle worth defending, and in an ideal world, faculty would have a significant role in hiring. But what is to be done when the faculty that caused the problem refuses to acknowledge it, is defiant when questioned, and won’t take responsibility or do anything to fix it?

Regarding Harvard’s “purported” liberal bias, as she puts it, the available survey data indicate that 10 percent or less of Harvard’s faculty self-identify as conservative while 63 percent identify as liberal. In the most recent survey, only one percent identified as “very conservative” compared to 29 percent who said they are “very liberal.” Yet, Professor Weld waves the issue away with a single word and never addresses it again.

And it’s not just Harvard. A recent Heterodox Academy report surveyed the available studies and concluded that “studies of faculty political diversity consistently find that left-leaning faculty outnumber right-leaning faculty.” The exact percentages vary from survey to survey, and it is fair to debate whether the skew is a problem and what to do about it. But the skew is real. Simply denying it, or asserting it doesn’t matter, is not a scholarly response. It’s political one and reinforces the public’s sense that there is a problem among the faculty.

The imbalance matters because ideological monocultures tend to produce groupthink, narrow research agendas, and lead to curricula that shield students from the kinds of disagreements that define serious scholarly inquiry and that a liberal education should entertain. A recent study by Jon Shields, Stephanie Muravchik, and Yuval Avnur drew on the Open Syllabus Project’s database of millions of course syllabi and found that, on contested issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, racial bias in criminal justice, and the ethics of abortion, professors routinely assign canonical texts without pairing them with their serious scholarly critics. Students encounter one side of the argument and rarely the other. That is not liberal education; it is the opposite. If faculty were exposing students to the full range of credible scholarship, the demand for viewpoint diversity in hiring would be far weaker than it is.

The case for viewpoint diversity is stronger still because there is plenty of evidence that faculty discriminate against conservatives and others with heterodox views. Survey research shows faculty admit to discriminating in hiring, promotion, and publication decisions. Scholars at Professor Weld’s own institution have been punished for taking unpopular positions. Some of her colleagues formed a Council on Academic Freedom in part because of the need to promote and protect it.

So, some faculty think political bias within their ranks is a problem. The public thinks it is a problem. Alumni, donors, and higher-ed reform organizations think it is a problem too. And yet the AAUP remains intransigently opposed to doing anything about it. Perhaps if its members exercised greater responsibility over their own house, they would experience fewer threats to their autonomy from outside it.

Yale faculty recently released a report in which they observed, “those of us in higher education have too often resisted calls to critically examine our own institutions, professions, and modes of thought. As we move forward, we must be willing to admit where we have been wrong and where we might improve.” The AAUP and its members should take this advice to heart before it is too late.

This piece was originally published by AEIdeas on April 21, 2026.