STANFORD ALUMNI
FOR FREE SPEECH AND
CRITICAL THINKING

 

December 22, 2025

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The Importance, Scope and Bounds of Intellectual and Viewpoint Diversity

 

Excerpts:

 

“In recent decades, the ideological diversity of faculties in the United States has declined considerably, and this has arguably had implications for a number of other aspects of academic life. Efforts to promote intellectual and viewpoint diversity are, however, often met with skepticism, and also with reasonable concerns over threats to the autonomy and integrity of academic disciplines and institutions. Clarifying the role, scope, and bounds of intellectual and viewpoint diversity within academic life in ways that respect the scholarly standards of disciplines is thus of critical importance....

 

“[In this paper,] I put forward proposals for educational leaders, faculty, and students for engaging with or, when appropriate, cultivating intellectual and viewpoint diversity in a manner that respects the scholarly standards of disciplines. I discuss what is at stake with these matters in the present context concerning the nature of the university itself, and its purposes in the generation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge....

 

[Followed by discussion of the differences of intellectual, viewpoint, ideological and political diversity; causes of the decline in diversity and data that demonstrate the decline; the typical denial and dismissal of the problem by campus leaders; the role and importance of intellectual and viewpoint diversity; and possible remedies.]

 

“Underlying many of the criticisms of higher education is the concern that some universities have themselves effectively become partisan institutions, wherein the vast majority of the work is devoted to, or comes from the perspectives of those aligned with, a single political party. Universities may deny this, and reaffirm their ideals. But the statistics are nevertheless troubling....

 

“With greater ideological homogeneity, the defense of academic freedom can become more difficult still because progressive ideologies can sometimes be accompanied by notions of a subjective or relativistic understanding of truth; by an understanding of the university that emphasizes activism; by a priority of power over the pursuit of knowledge; and by a strategy of suppression or refusal to engage with certain ideas if they are contrary to a progressive agenda. Open inquiry and the free exchange of ideas can seem like secondary values.”...

 

[Followed by discussion of specific corrective actions that might be taken.]

 

Full article by Harvard Prof. Tyler J. VanderWeele at MDPI (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute).  

 

See also our Back to Basics at Stanford and Stanford Concerns webpages where we discuss the need for Stanford's faculty, students, administrators and trustees to address these issues; the impact Stanford's bloated administrative bureaucracy is having on these issues; and the need to address what are primarily advocacy and other non-academic activities at many if not most of Stanford's 200 to 300 centers, accelerators, incubators and similar entities.

  

A Much-Needed Exposé of Academic Fraud

 

A new book reveals why academic-publishing incentives must change.

 

Excerpts (link in the original): 

. . . . 

“Professor Max Bazerman of Harvard Business School has done a great public service in writing Inside an Academic Scandal: A Story of Fraud and Betrayal. His book puts people on guard against believing an idea just because it comes in scholarly wrapping. It was inspired by Bazerman’s own experience as a co-author of a paper in which others had falsified data to make the conclusion look strong. Over a period of years, he came to suspect the data behind the paper and sought to have the other authors explain their conduct, which they never did. Besides telling his own lamentable tale, Bazerman recounts many other instances of scholarly fraud, but let’s begin with his story.

 

“. . .  with the big higher-education push starting in 1965, ‘publish or perish’ became a mass phenomenon, and the huge numbers of aspiring academics overwhelmed the system....

 

“Moreover, colleges and universities created many new academic ‘disciplines’ where rigor took a backseat to publishing ideologically correct papers on topics like ‘implicit bias.’ Our institutions were employing an army of professors whose main job was not to teach a body of knowledge but, rather, to produce research in avant-garde fields such as Women’s Studies. The result was an outpouring of extremely dubious scholarship -- a prodigious waste of resources.

 

“Here’s an analogy. Suppose that a country, acting on the belief that art is a public good that should be given government support, set up a system to subsidize the production of art. After a time, the country found that it was paying for a huge outpouring of absurd artworks, which it would then spend more money to store in warehouses. (The Dutch actually did that, as we read in this article.) Similarly, suppose that a country, acting on the belief that higher education is a great public boon, decided to subsidize college degrees and academic research. The United States has done that, with predictable results: far more degrees and scholarship than previously but with steadily falling quality.” ...

 

Full op-ed at James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal. 

 

90% of Undergrads Believe Words Can Be Violence

 

Excerpts (links in the original): 

. . . . 
“In 2017, when the conflation of words and violence was relatively new, Jonathan Haidt, a New York University psychology professor, worried that the false equivalence fed into the simmering mental health crisis among young people. He and FIRE President Greg Lukianoff wrote in The Atlantic that ‘growing numbers of college students have become less able to cope with the challenges of campus life, including offensive ideas, insensitive professors, and rude or even racist and sexist peers’ and that the rise in mental health issues ‘is better understood as a crisis of resilience.’

 

“Telling young people who haven't been raised to be resilient and to deal with the certainty of encountering debate, disagreement, and rude or hateful expressions in an intellectually and ideologically diverse world plays into problems with anxiety and depression. It teaches that the world is more dangerous than it actually is rather than a place that requires a certain degree of toughness. Worse, if words are violence it implies that responding ‘in kind’ is justified....

 

“Americans worry that the country is becoming less friendly to free expression. But the insistence of too many people that words and violence are the same thing is a big part of the problem.”

Full op-ed at Reason. See also article and link to the full poll at FIRE. 

 

Other Articles of Interest

 

They Graduated from Stanford; Due to AI, They Can’t Find a Job

Full article at LA Times: “‘There’s definitely a very dreary mood on campus,’ said a recent computer science graduate who asked not to be named so they could speak freely. ‘People [who are] job hunting are very stressed out, and it’s very hard for them to actually secure jobs.’ The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.”

 

We Should Teach Our Students How to Think, Not What to Believe

Full op-ed at NY Times: “We’ve been heading toward this moment for some time. For at least the past decade, political expression has become more and more ubiquitous in public schools. Schools effectively allowed political advocacy to become part of the curriculum when it was easy to ignore.... Now it isn’t so easy. It’s time to resurrect the idea that education and activism are not just distinct, but incompatible.”

  

Zero Republican Professors Found Across 27 Academic Departments at Yale

Full article at College Fix.

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The list: American Studies, Anthropology, Architecture, Astronomy, Black Studies, Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Classics, Comparative literature, Earth and Planetary Sciences, East Asian Languages and Literature, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Electrical and Computer Engineering, English, Environment, French, Germanic Languages and Literature, Global Affairs, History of Art, Italian Studies, Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, Music, Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Neuroscience, Psychology, Slavic Languages and Literature, and Sociology. In addition, “Across the 18 humanities departments, Democrats outnumber Republicans at a ratio of 72 to 1.”

 

See also the first article in today’s Newsletter re the importance of intellectual and viewpoint diversity, and how campus leaders continue to deny there's a problem.

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The Entry-Level Hiring Process Is Breaking Down

Full op-ed at The Atlantic. See also “America’s Schools Still Teach for Yesterday’s Jobs” at Minding the Campus. 

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