A progressive Ivy League professor warned in a recent New York Times opinion piece that mandating viewpoint diversity on college campuses could create an “ideological echo chamber.” While she is correct that affirmative action for conservatives would do more harm than good, she fails to recognize just how bad the state of academia is.

University of Pennsylvania philosophy professor Jennifer M. Morton writes, “A policy of hiring professors and admitting students because they have conservative views would actually endanger the open-minded intellectual environment that proponents of viewpoint diversity say they want.” She is correct in the sense that requiring diversity at the expense of merit is a recipe for disaster, no matter whom it benefits. If standards are lowered for a certain group of people, everyone is harmed. This is precisely why conservatives have long opposed DEI or affirmative action programs. 

However, Morton doesn’t stop there. “By creating incentives for professors and students to have and maintain certain political positions, such a policy would discourage curiosity and reward narrowness of thought,” she writes. Professors hired for their political views, she predicts, will feel pressure to maintain their views. If someone is hired to be the token conservative, he will interact only with scholars who agree with him, read only publications that reinforce his beliefs, or “simply engage with opposing ideas in bad faith, refusing even to consider their merits.”

But this is precisely what happens in leftist institutions today. The shared governance model that most universities use means that faculty have considerable influence over hiring decisions. In places where professors are overwhelmingly progressive, such as the Ivy League, they can prevent conservatives from being hired altogether. Moreover, the stunning lack of conservative professors means that leftist academics rarely need to encounter opposing views.

Furthermore, Morton does not seem to understand conservative opposition to DEI programs. She writes, “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.” While this argument has surely been made at some point, it’s hardly a common one. Conservatives reject the notion that there is an inherent “Black or Latino view” on issues, and they reject the idea that the solution to past discrimination is new discrimination in reverse. 

Morton is probably well-intentioned and acknowledges that “there is not enough engagement with conservative ideas on college campuses.” This is far more than most of her peers would say, and she deserves credit for it. Additionally, Morton says she makes an effort to assign readings with conclusions she disagrees with, which, again, is more than her peers do. The unfortunate truth is that Morton’s open-mindedness is an exception among academics, not the rule.

Conservatives should not get special treatment; nor should they be shut out of the faculty hiring process. Higher education is in desperate need of reform, but if even the professors who recognize the problem have no real solutions, it will need to be saved from the outside.