Ideological Diversity on Campus — This Sounds Familiar

There has been a lot of uproar recently about free speech on campus, especially concerning what can appear to be a negative bias against conservatives with some high profile incidents that have garnered heavy news coverage.

The best evidence suggests that this debate does not reflect reality and is a case of overreacting to non-representative events as in reality these incidents are quite rare (see here and here). Furthermore, the intellectual validity of some of these speakers and good faith in the instances is often quite suspect.

Still, the basic premise of these debates does have a valid point as conservatives themselves are a minority within university faculty. While there is significant differences across fields of study, there is consistently a much higher proportion of self-reported liberals compared to conservatives amongst professors.

Many speakers complaining about the incidents above have lamented this situation, arguing for a more supportive environment for conservatives as well as sometimes necessary policy changes to make universities more hospitable to conservative thought.

Obviously diversity is good, and it is especially important in research where thinking outside the box is necessary to discover the unknown (there are numerous other positive effects such as the spillover to underrepresented students).

Those points though have consistently been made by others in arguing for the importance of affirmative action and other similar policies designed to promote general diversity amongst the university population.

Just like conservative faculty are underrepresented in universities, there are few women and racial minorities amongst university faculty as well, especially in certain fields.

While affirmative action policies for conservatives would not really make sense because there is not the same economic justification as for affirmative action policies for minorities, general policies that make universities more open to discussion of ideas from across both the political spectrum and from individuals of different backgrounds is incredibly important.

Pushing for more ideological diversity because you recognize the importance of different ideas means that you should also support making universities more diverse in terms of racial makeup and gender.