What Is The Value of “Intellectual Diversity”? - by Nathan J. Robinson

Found here. Our comments in bold.

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These 2203 words are a muddled mess of logical leaps and bare assertions. We refer the reader to several critiques we have made of Mr. Robinson's "superior" rhetorical and reasoning skills.

Mr. Robinson is an elitist, entirely convince of his intellectual and moral superiority. Thus intellectual diversity is a waste of time because all other viewpoints are inferior. He's already right, he's already determined the correct way of thinking, which makes other points of view stupid if not irrelevant.

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Multiple points of view are valuable in many domains, but consensus is often critical.


(...) Deleted long, irrelevant anecdote.

On some subjects, academics have achieved consensus. If you reject the Second Law of Thermodynamics, you’re probably not going to make it as a physicist. (Mr. Robinson begins by term-switching. First he described academics achieving consensus. Then he immediately pivots to physics. The two are not even close to being the same.)

If you think the Holocaust never occurred, you are (hopefully) not going to have a place in a university history department. Yet one alternate way we could describe this is to say that by demanding academics conform to the consensus, universities are enforcing uniformity of opinion and refusing to tolerate dissent. But we could say that of any attempt to apply a standard of intellectual rigor. (Rigor has nothing to do with consensus, which is not related to intellectual honesty.)

The existence of “standards” (The author keeps throwing out words as if they're synonymous.)

could be taken as a refusal to tolerate differences of opinion, an authoritarian insistence that some knowledge is “correct” and other perspectives should be ignored. (I should have used this as an excuse when I failed math quizzes in middle school.) (Irony alert. it is the political left that has decided that math is racist. The very standards Mr. Robinson offers as self-evident are being rejected by his peers.)

Conservatives sometimes complain that academia does not have sufficient “intellectual diversity,” by which they tend to mean that university professors are overwhelmingly liberal. State legislators have even introduced “intellectual diversity acts” that would require colleges to bring more conservative speakers to campus so that “both sides” of an issue can be heard. Florida Republicans have passed a measure that “would require public colleges and universities to survey students, faculty and staff about their beliefs and viewpoints” to test whether campuses are sufficiently intellectually diverse. George Mason University’s Institute for Humane Studies says that “if liberal arts colleges are becoming less and less intellectually diverse, that presents a serious problem.”

But does it? When “intellectual diversity” is described in the abstract, it seems like something desirable. Usually it is framed as “believing students should hear many points of view.” But as the examples of the TimeCube and Holocaust denial should tell us, it’s hard to actually have these conversations in the abstract. Should students be taught multiple points of view on whether phlogistons are real? They don’t tend to hear multiple points of view on that question, because one point of view is substantially more grounded in real-world evidence than the other. And it’s all right that the history department doesn’t let half of all World War II lectures be conducted by Nazi sympathizers for the sake of “balance.” Balance isn’t necessary or desirable on questions where an outmoded theory has been disproved by hard evidence, and “hearing both sides” on literally every question can lead to a kind of radical relativism where academics abandon their task of finding, preserving, and teaching the truth. (The author cites extreme examples as if they illustrate the folly of letting conservatives have a seat at the table. This is a typical tactic of the Left, represent extreme examples as being just like the issue at hand.)

It’s understandable why those on the right think the universities are not sufficiently “intellectually diverse.” If you are a conservative, and you look at academia, you will see a place where your beliefs are largely rejected. There are a couple of ways you could interpret this: (1) you could think that as people become more educated, and study the world more, they shed conservative beliefs, because conservative beliefs are outdated, being less well-founded in reason and contemporary evidence (2) you could think that universities are brainwashing factories that reproduce a leftist ideology and need to be stormed and taken over. (How about 3 -  you could think that leftists are arrogant and smug; 4 - you could think that leftists fear debate and prefer to mock, belittle, and suppress; 5 - you could think that the Left is ignorant of what conservatives believe, preferring their own caricatures instead.)

Obviously, (1) is unacceptable to the right, because it would involve admitting that right-wing beliefs are more difficult to hold onto when you learn about the world, so conservatives tend to go with (2) and present the university system as an indoctrination factory that forcibly excludes perfectly sensible and rational right-wing beliefs from being heard.

To this end, the right believes it is justified in trying to adjust the balance between right-wing ideas and left-wing ideas in the academy, even if this means using outside money or legislation to do it. Conservative groups have, according to the New York Times, “funded new professorships in topics like ‘the history of capitalism’ and poured money into speaker series and academic programs that propagate libertarian policy ideas.” (I am all for teaching the history of capitalism but I suspect there is a bit more Rand than Marx on the syllabus.) (Mr. Robinson is troubled by potential bias in this, but the conservative who is troubled by actual bias in academia is simply dismissed.)

In Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, investigative journalist Jane Mayer documents the alarmingly widespread effort by right-wing groups to establish professorships that push free-market ideology, including at public universities. ("Alarmed?" Well, we just can't have anyone know about free market ideology, can we?)

But they insist that this is just an effort to ensure that Diverse Perspectives are represented, and that “propaganda” of left-wing college professors is countered.

Rejecting the “intellectual diversity” concept can sound elitist or exclusionary. (Because it is.)

But many conservative ideas have struggled in the academy in part because they do not always pass important tests of intellectual rigor. (That is, the leftist gatekeepers reject conservatives because they're leftists.)

For example, when the Third World Quarterly pulled a paper defending colonialism, it was portrayed by the right as a politically correct refusal to hear alternative points of view. In fact, the paper was as shoddy as something written by a Holocaust denier. It was poor scholarship. The stuff that gets churned out of right-wing think tanks is often pseudoscientific rubbish. (What, exactly, does this have to do with universities understanding and properly teaching conservative points of view?)

Conservatives often seek to portray this as censorship or a failure to hear them out, because they do not see themselves as pseudointellectuals, (Conservatives are stupid, and leftists are smart. Oh, but Mr. Robinson is not an elitist...)

but if an argument in favor of colonialism is as factually shoddy as a Holocaust denier’s pamphlet, then it is justified on the grounds of scholarly rigor to retract it from a journal. (Mr. Robinson is sure wanting to run this one example into the ground as if it was representative.)

The call for academia to be more open to “diverse political perspectives” sounds compelling, but we should understand that it may involve treating “things that are false” as a “perspective.” (This already happens. Leftist professors are happy to teach that marxism is a great economic system, that Critical Race Theory is true, that corporations are evil, that capitalism is exploitative, etc, etc, etc.)

This is the very kind of radical epistemological relativism that conservatives so frequently decry, the belief that because there are multiple views on a topic, all views should be treated as equally legitimate for the sake of diversity. (Never will Mr. Robinson tell us who should get to decide what is legitimate.)

All of a sudden, conservatives have gone postmodern. Their beliefs should be taken seriously because they are beliefs, without having to be subjected to any objective test of accuracy. (Never will Mr. Robinson tell us who should get to decide what is accurate.)

Now, I do think there’s a serious problem when people undergo a university education and don’t hear conservative arguments or understand how they work. (Mr. Robinson himself doesn't understand how conservative arguments work.)

I actually think studying Holocaust denial literature (Holocaust denial is not a conservative position.)

can be an important part of studying history, because it is important to see how fabricators function. I think Ayn Rand’s works should be assigned. I took a sociology class that assigned passages of The Bell Curve so that the professor could show how the statistical distortions and faulty extrapolations occurred, and this was very valuable. I don’t think it’s necessary or healthy to pretend the conservative point of view doesn’t exist. (Hmm. That's exactly what leftists do, unless they're forced to respond to a thoughtful conservative. Then they turn to name-calling and mockery.)

Nor do I believe in censoring alternate views; it is always possible that an unusual or heterodox view, particularly in the sciences, may someday become the new consensus. (Try to dissent from climate change and see where that gets you, Mr. Robinson.)

I am, as a general rule, a believer in the principle that student groups should be able to invite any speakers they like to campus. And I also think that scholarship that distorts the truth in order to push left ideas is a betrayal of the core principles of academic inquiry. Everyone’s work needs to be subjected to scrutiny and no consensus should survive merely because it is the consensus. I have read some real dreck during my time in universities. (Oh, so there is leftist dreck? But Mr. Robinson has engaged no crusade to deal with the left's folly, but he's happy to invent an issue regarding conservatives and write endless drivel about that.)

But this does not mean that academia should itself be drawn from “intellectually diverse” perspectives solely for the sake of contrarianism. The solution to the existence of some biased dreck is not more diverse biased dreck. As an abstract matter, there is no automatic value to having multiple points of view on a subject.

(Now comes the next ridiculous comparison...) A medical school comprised half of those who do believe in the germ theory of disease and those who do not is technically more diverse, but it is also likely to kill more people. It can be valuable to have lots of points of view, but it depends on what the subject is and what the views are. 

(Back to a previous ridiculous example...) Back to our friend the phlogiston: many scientific theories run their course, and lead to better theories. It may be necessary to teach phlogistons as part of the history of science, but phlogistons are not a useful point of view to teach alongside generally accepted particle physics. Particle physics itself will also flow and change, and new theories may at first be regarded with skepticism. But again, that does not mean universities should teach TimeCube in a serious manner. Consensus helps us weed out quackery. (No, consensus helps us repress dissent.)

Of course, an academic discipline where everyone held the exact same beliefs would be intellectually barren. (There are no such disciplines.) (Notice the weasel words "exact same beliefs." No one is claiming academia has the "exact same beliefs." But there is clearly a uniformity of political perspective all across academia, a phenomena that can only be explained by self selection and exclusion.)

And there are plenty of areas of gray where debate flourish. (We are not interested in where debate flourishes, because if this does happen it is still irrelevant to the issue before us.)

But not every area is a gray area, and part of the point of scholarship is to try to create a category of thought that is more careful and thorough than random opinion. (Is politics not a  gray area? How so? What about economics? In what way? Can a consensus be wrong? How is a consensus in any way scientific? Mr. Robinson does not, and probably cannot answer questions like this.)

It doesn’t always work, and it only does work when challenges to consensus opinion are accepted, but this is different from saying that the challenges should be put on the same level because they are challenges rather than because they have shown themselves to be valid. (No one is saying this. This is typical leftist rhetorical manipulation. Obfuscate, misrepresent, denigrate, and dismiss.)

We should study the arguments made by slaveholders to defend slavery, but we do not want professors who romanticize the Old South with easily disprovable myths and lies. (Again, no one is advocating for such things. These things are not on par with ideas about the benefits of a free market economy or the political and moral benefits of a constitutionally limited government.)

I happen to think climate scientists should spend more time publicly refuting the arguments of climate change deniers, and reviewing their books, but that does not mean that I think climate change deniers should make up a greater fraction of university faculty. (A perfect example of the author's intellectual snobbery. First he pejoratively labels the thoughtful dissenters to the status quo, then he dismisses them with a wave of the hand.)

Here at Current Affairs, I encourage writers to engage with right-wing views, by reading conservative books, quoting them, and refuting them, but I do not publish right-wing writers, because I believe the things we publish ought to have intellectual merit. (Mr. Robinson is a treasure-trove of smug superiority and elitism, entirely convinced of his own merit above those he would deem his inferiors. But as we mentioned above, Mr. Robinson has amply demonstrated his ignorance.)

We should reject the notion of “intellectual diversity,” to the extent that this means “granting equal legitimacy to two political perspectives without regard for whether one is intellectually sound,” (Who gets to decide what is sound?)

but we should also reject the idea that we can simply shun and ignore ignorant opinions. (Who gets to decide what is ignorant?)

It’s important to study why people hold onto beliefs that are outdated or unfounded. (Who gets to decide what beliefs are outdated or unfounded?)

It’s also important to recognize when people are pushing those outdated or unfounded beliefs not because they believe in “intellectual diversity,” but because they are attempting to push an agenda. (We just can't have any competition when it comes to pushing an agenda...)

Conservatives like to portray the left as a sinister cabal of idealogues trying to replace the truth with their feelings through ideological indoctrination. In fact, that is a much better descriptor of the right’s attempt to control university education, to undercut the authority of teachers and professors and to teach the version of history that Republican state legislators prefer rather than the version historians themselves reach consensus on.

The concept of “intellectual diversity” is a clever one, in that it poses as something benign, when in fact it is a quite radical call to re-engineer the academy to include views that serious scholars overwhelmingly reject. Instead of intellectual diversity, we just need intellectual seriousness: it is perfectly fine not to have many right-wing professors, if there are clear refutations and responses to the right-wing positions in question that can justify the demographic gap. If right-wing ideas are exposed as discredited and flimsy, then they have no place in the academy. But to make that case, we have to do the work of discrediting them. They cannot be legitimized because they are widely held, but nor can we reject them simply because we dislike them.