On July 10, 2025 a Dr. Jennifer M. Morton, who says “I am a philosophy professor whose views are, for the most part, politically progressive,” offered a New York Times op-ed, “Why Hiring Professors With Conservative Views Could Backfire on Conservatives”. She teaches at U. Penn, and Dr. Morton is worried.
She’s worried a conservative prof hired for being conservative might be rigid and inflexible in his or her thinking.
Me thinks she might be telling on herself. Of course, she’s not rigid and inflexible in her thinking. Oh no. She offers, by way of proof of her reasonableness, that she teaches one libertarian philosopher. And why does she do this, in her view, magnanimous thing? Because she wants her “liberal students to be challenged” and her “libertarian students to think carefully about the arguments that support their position.”
Kind of a lot to unpack there. That thought is heavy with implications. You’ll note the liberal students are not invited to “think carefully about the arguments that support their position,” only the libertarian students are invited or expected to do that. The liberal students will be coddled and calmed down should they be triggered, presumably.
And, of course, she says all this in a New York Times op-ed discouraging viewpoint diversity, but because this opinion is purportedly based on her concern that these poor conservative professors would experience a kind of existential angst about having to stay conservative to keep their jobs, we’re just supposed to overlook that, I guess. She must think they don’t know their own minds as well as she clearly does and could be easily swayed, I suppose? Once they are exposed to their colleagues’ progressive enlightenment?
Why is it when progressives talk about people who aren’t like them it’s always with a sense of pitying superiority? That if only these poor slobs would avail themselves of their enlightened benevolence, these rubes would discover what it is to be right with the world?
She also spends quite a bit of time talking about conservative students and professors admitted or hired for being conservative as being easy to spot somehow. Honestly it’s kind of creepy. Does she think they’ll all be wearing a scarlet letter? How would she know? Oh, to be sure, word would get around that one of “them” was on campus, but that, in and of itself, demonstrates the fragility of her position: “they” are distinct from the progressive establishment and must be treated differently. Sounds kind of rigid and inflexible to me. There is, of course, the available option of just being equally civil to every colleague, but I guess that’s outside the realm of possibility, in her mind.
She concedes that “many” people think having more ideological diversity on campus would be a good thing, reasoning that “certainly, there is not enough engagement with conservative ideas on college campuses.”
Conservatives have criticized identity-based affirmative action because, they suggest, it imposes an expectation on students of color that they will represent what is presumed to be, say, the Black or Latino view on any given issue, which discourages freethinking. Admitting students for viewpoint diversity would turn the holding of conservative ideas into a quasi-identity, subject to some of the same concerns. Students admitted to help restore ideological balance would likely feel a responsibility to defend certain views, regardless of the force of opposing arguments they might encounter.
“[R]egardless of the force of opposing arguments they might encounter.” Yet another thought heavy with implications from the good professor. One might read that to mean that the progressive argument, being so obviously right, should be accepted, and that should it not, it’s due to conservative intransigence, not progressive intransigence. Now who’s rigid and inflexible?
It’s important not to overlook her implicit admission here about race: that “the Black or Latino” view is expected. I’m sure she didn’t mean to admit that, but she did.
She admitted quite a bit in this op-ed, and none of it good. Either way, she gets what she wants: discouragement of diversity of thought, which was her point.
Image from Grok.