You’re an academic. Your Dean walks in. 

“We need viewpoint diversity,” she says. 

“OK,” you say. She’s your boss. She’s obviously just read some bullshit in CHE about viewpoint diversity, and feels the need to start Deaning. Deaning demands faculty uptake, so you’d better answer. “So what do we do?”

It’s a kosher question. As it stands, her claim has no action-guiding implications. We could need viewpoint diversity, but we might already have it. Or we might have too much of it. Or we might need more. “We need it” doesn’t resolve any of that. 

“Well, we need more,” she says. It’s a non-sequitur, but you let it go. “Pretending that stupid shit isn’t stupid” is your career-long coping strategy. It’s worked so far.

“I guess we do,” you rejoin. And then you have an idea. 

“What if we maximize viewpoint diversity?”

She brightens. This sounds promising. “Sure. I’ll make you chair of the Viewpoint Diversity Maximization committee. What do you have in mind?”

“What I’m thinking,” you say, intellectual wheels spinning, “is that we just set the students and faculty on a quest to generate novel, but totally trivial arithmetical truths. That way, we’re sure to get viewpoint diversity. I say, ‘1+1=2,’ and you say ‘1+2=3,’ and then Smith says ‘1+3=4,’ and Jones says ‘1+4=5,’ and so on, ad infinitum. Every one of those propositions is distinct, hence diverse, and we’ll insist that each person only sign on to the ones they assert, so that, at t, every person on campus believes something totally distinct from everyone else. What’s great is that there’s a potential infinity of integers! If we just get people to generate them faster and faster, we’ll have the best viewpoint diversity rating in the state! We’ll never run out! Maybe we can use AI!” 

You’re yelling at this point. You’re really on to something. Math is so awesome. Even if we ran out of truths about integers, we could move to rational and irrational numbers. 

The Dean looks annoyed. “That’s not what I had in mind,” she says.

“What do you mean?” comes the query.

“If we follow your stupid suggestion, the entire budget will end up going to the Math Department,” she says with asperity. “I mean come on. We’re trying to phase out the Math Department.”  

“Sorry,” you respond. “Maybe we should throw some qualitative parameters onto our quest for viewpoint diversity. Instead of maximizing, maybe let’s aim for lots of diversity of some particular kind.”

“Yeah, maybe,” she says. The sarcasm is right out there in the open. She’s not hiding it.

You’re on to your next flight of fancy. “So imagine we go through every department in the university, and hire two kinds of faculty: one dedicated to the existence of the subject matter of the department, and one dedicated to the negation of that claim. 

So we start with, I guess, African-American Studies. We hire one set of faculty who believe in African-American Studies, and another set who think it’s just woke tribalist bullshit. Then we move to African Studies. We hire one set of partisans of the work of Basil Davidson, and another set of partisans who think that King Leopold and Hendrik Verwoerd had the right idea but didn’t carry it out far enough. Then American Studies with one cringey hagiographer of the Founding Fathers, and one unreconstructed Soviet nuclear technician who wishes he could have pulled the trigger on Uncle Sam when the trigger actually worked. And so on, from Anthropology to Visual Arts.”

Basil Davidson (1914-2010): “Oh, so Africa doesn’t matter. But you matter?”

The Dean looks angry. “What next? A Program in Israel Studies staffed by a Zionist biographer of Moses Hess, and a partisan of Islamic Jihad?”

Your eyes widen. “Holy cow, what a great idea!”

“No,” she says, coldly. “It’s not.”

What a bitch. “I don’t get it,” you say, with resignation. “Isn’t that viewpoint diversity? It’s viewpoint diversity across radically incommensurable conceptual schemes. What fun it would be to adjudicate those disputes within those departments! One half of the faculty wants the department to exist, and the other half want to destroy it! Think how cool that would be! Think how much contestation and learning would take place!”

She seems unimpressed. “What you’re describing is a recipe for chaos and distintegration. We have a practical aim here. We can’t carry it out by treating the entire university as a dramatic backdrop for the working-out of a series of academic antimonies. What next? We recruit a Board of Trustees, one third of which wants to promote the existing mission of the university, another third of which wants to promote its negation, and a last third that wants to abolish the university itself?”

“Well, you’ve got to admit,” you say. “There’s a lot of viewpoint diversity there.”

She folds her arms.  Something about her reminds you of Kamala Harris facing down a bunch of Gaza protesters. Unlike Kamala, however, she’s not talking.  

“Fine,” you say. “Last try. Why don’t we narrow the focus of our university altogether so that we become a narrowly sectarian religious institution? Let’s become the Islamic University of New Jersey, but adopt a strict commitment to Hanafi jurisprudence. And then let’s encourage the proliferation of viewpoints within Hanafi jurisprudence. Women must wear hijab; women need not wear hijab. Jihad is obligatory; jihad is obsolete. The moon must be visually sighted on Eid; the moon need not be sighted on Eid. Interest is haram; interest is halal. Music is haram; music is halal. Etc. Instead of diversity within radically incommensurable conceptual schemes, we’d get diversity within a single commensurable conceptual scheme. But as an expert in Hanafi jurisprudence, I can tell you: there’s a lot of diversity there!”

“That’s ridiculous!” she blurts out. “In that case, we’d have to radically re-structure the whole university and promote a single sectarian doctrine.”

“So what?” you respond with not a little exasperation of your own. “You complained that my last proposal created chaos through the proliferation of incommensurable viewpoints. Well, I just solved that problem for you. There’s no chaos here at all and no proliferation of incommensurable viewpoints, either. It’s just: people committed to the same basic view of things disagreeing within a shared framework of agreement—and generating boatloads of viewpoint diversity. What could be better for institutional continuity and smooth self-governance? I mean, you really seem hard to please, if I may exercise my academic freedom to say so.”

“You faculty,” she says, spitting out the last word with all the contempt it deserves. “You don’t live in the real world. You really lack common sense. What we’re really looking for is moderate viewpoint diversity within a shared framework of broadly liberal, centrist values. We don’t want to literally maximize diversity, and we don’t want a chaotic outpouring of radical, radically incommensurable views incompatible with the practical side of the institution. But we don’t want a narrow, sectarian form of diversity either.”

“You needed to read some bullshit article in CHE to spit out that cavalcade of clichés?” you erupt, in rage, re-living a lifetime’s worth of David Lodge-level humiliations. “Face it: you just want to change the composition of the faculty, then ex post facto generate a ‘problem of viewpoint diversity’ so that your preferred change constitutes a solution to your self-generated problem.”

The Dean somehow ignores the outburst. “But, but…there are statistics about how left-wing the faculty is! We want to make the university more responsive to conservatism and centrist moderation! Do you not get that the disciples of Christopher Rufo, Yoram Hazony, and Jonathan Haidt feel unsafe on campus?”

“Your statistics are obviously cooked. They’re not drawn from an exhaustive sample of institutions. For instance, they mostly ignore community colleges, which constitute 40% of the whole, and which tend to be conservative. But why is that one dimension of diversity the most salient one? Why are you so fixated on Left vs. Right as opposed to any of a thousand other dimensions of similarity and difference that might matter to inquiry?” 

“I’ll ask the questions here,” the Dean says. “And now I have an on-ground meeting to get to.”

“What meeting?” you ask with some trepidation. 

“The Hiring and Promotions Commitee,” she says with a grim look on her face.  “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”