00:00Advocating for more diverse viewpoints on college campuses is now apparently akin to pushing a
00:05MAGA plot or even saying all lives matter according to some recent op-eds by elite
00:11university professors. This headline just came from a Johns Hopkins University professor
00:17and this op-ed by a Stanford professor alleges that saying that you want more diversity points
00:22is basically like saying all lives matter. This is a crazy take considering that the whole reason
00:28why colleges are losing public faith is that schools and their professoriate don't feel like
00:34they actually reflect anything resembling the general public and the general populace and
00:39when there's so many views on one side of the aisle it's hard to believe that there's really good faith
00:45debate and that people who are in the minority viewpoint feel necessarily comfortable expressing
00:51themselves politically. Take a look at this chart which is a sort of like meta-analysis of various
00:57studies of the compositions of faculty at different universities and you'll see that except for this
01:02one outlier here which is a viewpoint diversity initiative on a campus that the blue is left
01:09leading professors and that's just simply the vast majority at almost every school on almost every
01:15measure. In some disciplines like sociology and anthropology the ratio of left to right in
01:21professors can be as bad as 80 to 1 or even 100 to 1. I spoke to John Tomasi who
01:27is the president of
01:28Heterodox Academy a group that brings together professors who are concerned about viewpoint diversity
01:33and he told me that the attempt to politicize this effort is profoundly anti-intellectual and profoundly
01:39anti-scientific and the reason that that's anti-scientific is because the scientific method is based on
01:45the ability to debate to throw out different hypotheses to put your opinions out there without fear of
01:51retribution and to have them struck down without being attached to yourself and your own character
01:57which is not what happens when there's orthodoxy on a campus. In fact a recent survey found that 88%
02:04of students admit to falsifying more progressive beliefs in order to fit in so if you're not putting
02:09your genuine ideas out there we're not getting any closer to the truth and debating what people
02:14actually feel and think and believe. Now I can understand why some college and university professors might
02:20feel off put by politicians recently particularly on the right attempting to force viewpoint diversity
02:26on college campuses. The Trump administration has been doing this also certain conservative lawmakers too and
02:33in some ways that could feel like an assault on academic freedom but at the same time the question is
02:38why haven't professors been doing this for the decades that this has been a mounting problem themselves?
02:44Why couldn't they turn to these conservative legislators and say hey back off you know we got this?
02:49This is a profound failure on the part of academia. Change should be coming from within and not from
02:55lawmakers but unfortunately for a lot of people who are in the majority on campus they just simply
03:01don't see it as a problem which is really tragic and completely flies in the face of what the
03:06admission of a university really is.
Comments