1/ Faculty viewpoint diversity is a vaccine against groupthink and an antidote to groupthink where it has set in. The trouble is that, once groupthink HAS set in, it’s nearly impossible to persuade people who are in it of the need for the antidote.
2/ It’s certainly true that there is sometimes blatant, conscious, obviously deliberate discrimination against people who dissent from campus ideological orthodoxies. But the more fundamental problem and challenge is something else.
3/ We humans have trouble appreciating meritorious work when it challenges our own opinions, especially when we’re strongly emotionally attached to those opinions. This isn’t a distinctively liberal problem, or a progressive or left-wing problem. It’s a human nature problem.
4/ Anytime an ideological orthodoxy has hardened into place--it doesn’t matter whether it’s progressive or conservative--it’s difficult for people to distinguish between “work I disagree with despite its being really very good and challenging, and interesting, and important,” and
5/ “work that goes contrary to what I just know to be true on issues that are important and critical to me and, perhaps, bound up with my identity as a, fill in the blank: _______.” People will suppose that those who deviate from the orthodoxy must be either stupid or malicious.
6/ People will experience challenges to dominant opinions as attacks on them personally, indecent assaults on “essential values,” threats to what is good and true and right and just, intolerable violations of the norms of “our community.”
