Ohio State Professor Michael Clune, who caused a bit of a stir in academia with hhis December 2024 essay "We Asked for It," has a new essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education responding to a recent critique of the push for heterodoxy and intellectual pluralism on campus. The essay, "Professors Can Be Ignorant. That's Why We Need Viewpoint Diversity," begins:
It's hard to succeed as an educator when you don't know what you're talking about. And yet many professors of the humanities and social sciences — teaching and writing on topics such as capitalism, police reform, and sexuality — fail a simple, classic test. To understand your own position, you must be aware of, and be able to respond to, objections to that position. We need greater diversity of political and social views in academe not because diversity is a higher value than truth, but because academics' intellectual isolation has compromised their capacity to pursue truth.
In an academic environment in which objections to the reigning political, social, and cultural assumptions are castigated as beyond the pale of academic discussion, professors find themselves dangerously isolated, ignorant of how their students and fellow citizens view their behavior. Discussing faculty posts on social media about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a student at the University of Texas at Austin writes: "I've learned that there are people on my college campus who would cheer if someone like me, a young person who openly expresses my traditional Christian beliefs and right-wing political views, were murdered."
This is not the lesson most faculty members intend to teach, but many professors simply don't know how they appear to nonacademics and don't know how to respond appropriately to ideas that differ from their own. Professors in many fields tend to think that disagreement with their disciplines' consensus (on, say, police reform, capitalism, or gender) is equivalent to Holocaust denial, or, as Lisa Siraganian puts it in a recent essay in Academe attacking viewpoint diversity, denying the double-helix model of DNA.
As Clune discusses (and those of us with heterodox views in academia often experience) the lack of intellectual diversity in many departments and disciplines produces an epistemological failure and undermines academic inquiry, and this is particularly problematic in the humanities and social sciences.
