The Intellectual Monoculture of Higher Education
“It just won’t do to have an all-white university,” Harvard’s president Derek Bok said several years ago, attempting to justify the policy of favoring non-white applicants. The rallying cry for “diversity” proponents has long been that our institutions should “look like America” – that is, to mirror the composition of society with regard to racial, ethnic, and other classifications of individuals. Taking them at their word, what about diversity of philosophy? What about intellectual diversity?
In education, you would think that diversity of ideas would be at least as, if not more important than skin color or sexual preferences. But when it has been pointed out that college faculties tend to be very homogeneous when it comes to their beliefs on socio-economic questions, the response from the higher education establishment has mostly been that it’s a threat to academic freedom even to discuss the matter. No need for “all colors of the rainbow” when it comes to points of view on the proper relationship between state and society. Many academic departments are intellectual monocultures, with hiring preferences by those in authority filtering out any new professors whose opinions are much different from the norm. They think that is perfectly fine.