Thread by @JeffreyASachs

I've been thinking a bit lately about this article from @Musa_alGharbi and I think it gets something important wrong. Or rather, there's something it doesn't really grapple with, but should.

heterodoxacademy.org/why-should-we-…

Why do universities want a faculty that is racially, sexually, socio-economically, etc. diverse? Lots of reasons, but al-Gharbi focuses on the intellectual one: a diversity of experiences/backgrounds --> a diversity ideas --> academic excellence.

Al-Gharbi's claim is essentially that universities can/should cut out the middleman. If what they want is intellectual diversity, just select for intellectual diversity directly. Hire people with diverse ideas, not the race/sexuality they think are proxies for diverse ideas.

Seems reasonable! But there's a problem. Even IF background/experiences are an imperfect proxy for intellectual diversity (they are), we would still have a good reason to NOT select for intellectual diversity directly: namely, b/c we are really bad at identifying important ideas.

Conservatives should appreciate this point. The ideological marketplace is incredibly diverse, with many competing ideas, values, world views, etc. Some are starkly different. Others are virtually identical but nevertheless differ in some important respect.

Moreover, people mix and match in weird ways -- genuine ideologues, who accord to what we think a "conservative" or "liberal" ought to believe, are vanishingly rare. In practice, we would end up selecting for purity and consistency over nuance and flexibility.

Finally, how do we know which ideas are important and good (and therefore likely to produce innovation and creative frisson) vs. those that are trite and bad (and therefore likely to do the opposite)? Or put another way, how do we engineer the unexpected?

Like I said, conservatives should be able to appreciate these problems, since they're precisely the ones that economic planners face when intervening in the market.

All of this makes selecting for ideological diversity an incredibly daunting task. Selecting for background/experience avoids these problems. Yes, definitions of race/sexuality can also be contested. They too evolve. But the problems there seem minimal by comparison.

The pay-off, on the other hand, is vast. By selecting for background/experience diversity, we take our thumbs off the scales for any particular set of ideas while still increasing the likelihood that diverse and unexpected ideas will be represented.

After all, while the correlation between "diverse background/experience" and "diverse ideas" isn't perfect, it is real.

None of this is to say that that we shouldn't want more conservatives in the academy, that discrimination against cons isn't real, or anything like that. Nor is it to reduce the reasons for affirmative hiring practices to *just* intellectual diversity.

And finally, al-Gharbi could concede all of the above but conclude that it's still worth the cost in flexibility and nuance. I would understand!

But the problem I'm describing is (I think) real, and should be grappled with.