10/20/2025
"THE SWEETHEART DEAL IS OVER FOR ACADEMIA"
The Washington Post · 20 Oct 2025 · MEGAN MCARDLE
As the Trump administration’s war on universities settles into its entrenched phase, it’s given new urgency to a long-simmering debate about whether, and how, academia should pursue viewpoint diversity. This conversation has been happening for decades, mostly between conservatives who want more of it and an academic establishment that wants to leave well enough alone. Now, that conversation has become existential.
The argument for viewpoint diversity, which this column has made many times, was pithily summarized by physicist Richard Feynman in Caltech’s 1974 commencement address: “The first principle [of science] is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.”Humans are experts at seeing what we expect to see, especially when we really really want something to be true, so it takes strenuous effort — and, often, an outsider with a different viewpoint — to keep us from making fools of ourselves.
I’ve spent less time writing about rebuttals to viewpoint diversity, such as “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity” just published by Lisa Siraganian in Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors. To sum up those theses very, very briefly, she sees claims of ideological bias in academia as unproven, and arguments for viewpoint diversity as weak, bad-faith, and inimical to the search for truth and academic self-governance.
Or as the headline of her companion essay for the Chronicle of Higher Education put it: “View-point Diversity Is a MAGA Plot.”
I won’t take on the theses here because a number of good rebuttals have already been written. Rather, I want to quarrel with that headline, not just because it’s empirically false — many devoted Trump haters favor viewpoint diversity — but because it correctly positions Siraganian’s argument as a strategic move in a political battle. It’s a rallying cry for progressive academics to repel the attack on their territory and a series of talking points to be used as propaganda.
As a rallying cry, it might be effective, but as propaganda, it stinks. It’s an argument made for the faculty senate, rather than the battlefield far outside the ivory tower where this war is being fought. So even if you think Siraganian’s arguments are correct in the abstract, they’re a strategic disaster.
In the wider world, asking whether academia really skews that far to the left makes you look like an idiot or, slightly more charitably, like someone so encased in a bubble that they don’t even know what they’re missing. As for insisting on your right to complete self-governance, free from “secondary, external aims,” as Siraganian puts it … well, if you expect someone else to pay you to pursue truth, at some point, you must accept some secondary, external aims.
Academics tend to recoil from such a crass and mercenary idea, and fair enough, but the world isa crass and mercenary place. We talk about pursuing truth for its own sake, but most academics are pursuing it in exchange for money they can use to satisfy their many less elevated needs.
The people who provide that money want something in return. Many will not be content to know that somewhere the global stock of Truth is increasing. Especially if one of the Truths you insist on is that they are dim-witted bigots.
This harsh reality has been hidden from academics because the 20th century gave them a sweetheart deal. (No shade intended: It gave one to journalists, too.) As a complexifying industrial society demanded more scientific research and knowledge workers, federal funds flowed into labs and tuition subsidies, while families paid more and more for that increasingly valuable ticket to a middle-class job. Few were inclined to poke too hard into the inner workings of thegoose that laid the golden eggs, lest she stop depositing the goodies.
That happy state of affairs let universities subsidize research with no obvious practical benefit. It also let the academy develop a left-wing culture that appeared increasingly hostile to the society paying its bills. Universities, once the custodians of Western civilization’s priceless gifts, now look more like the chroniclers and critics of its endless oppressions.
Obviously, that kind of social criticism is far from all that universities do, but it’s certainly more of what they do than it was 30 or 50 years ago. Powerful university factions have been pushing to enlarge that share. This was sustainable only as long as Goosey kept laying, and lately, she’sbeen dropping some duds.
The value of a college degree is stagnant and might fall as AI takes over much knowledge work. Experts who were supposed to guide us through the pandemic lost their heads and mistook personal opinions about which trade-offs were worth making for scientific judgments about the virus. Administrators began weighing in on every political controversy and let flourish a rowdy protest culture that outraged donors and legislators. Public trust in universities has plummeted over the past decade, among independents as well as conservatives, which is why Republicans now feel so free to attack them.
We can debate whether having more conservatives will elevate the quality of academia's research output. But at the very least, they might have checked the unforced errors that ravaged higher education’s reputation. That might seem a crude consideration against the lofty ideals of scholarship. But no one gets to pursue their lofty ideals until they have first taken care of basic necessities.
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