The Era of DEI for Conservatives Has Begun
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No one would be surprised to learn that an elite university has a plan to counteract the structural barriers to the advancement of a minority group. Johns Hopkins University’s latest diversity initiative, however, has managed to put a new spin on a familiar concept: The minority group in question is conservative professors.
Between 30 and 40 percent of Americans identify as conservative, but conservatives make up only one of every 10 professors in academia, and even fewer in the humanities and most social-science departments. (At least they did in 2014, when the most recent comprehensive study was done. The number today is probably even lower.) Of the money donated by Yale faculty to political candidates in 2023, for example, 98 percent went to Democrats.
Some university leaders worry that this degree of ideological homogeneity is harmful both academically (students and faculty would benefit from being exposed to a wider range of ideas) and in terms of higher education’s long-term prospects (being hated by half the country is not sustainable). Accordingly, Johns Hopkins recently unveiled a partnership with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), a center-right think tank, designed to inject some ideological diversity into the university. Steven Teles, a political scientist who wrote a widely discussed article last year for The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?,” is one of the faculty members involved with the partnership. The institutions will collaborate on a number of efforts to integrate conservative and heterodox thinkers.
Johns Hopkins is part of a growing trend. Several elite red-state public universities have recently established academic centers designed to attract conservative scholars. And institutions that haven’t sought out conservative faculty may soon find new reasons to do so. The Trump administration has demanded that Harvard hire additional conservative professors or risk losing even more of its federal funding. (Even as it made that demand, it insisted that Harvard adopt “merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof.”) In response, Harvard’s president said that the university is expanding programs to increase intellectual diversity on campus. The era of DEI for conservatives has begun.
Academia has leaned left for as long as anyone can remember. But for most of the 20th century, conservative faculty were a robust presence throughout the humanities and social sciences. (In 1969, for example, even as anti-war protests raged across campuses, a quarter of the professoriate identified as at least “moderately” conservative.) But their ranks have thinned since the 1990s. At the same time, moderate and independent professors have been replaced by people who explicitly identify as liberal or progressive.
A traditional free-market conservative might interpret these statistics as evidence that right-wing thinkers simply haven’t achieved at a high-enough level to become professors. But some reformers have embraced a more left-wing theory for conservatives’ anemic representation in academia. “The current injustice is a consequence of previous injustice,” Teles told me. (Teles identifies not as a conservative but as an “abundance liberal.”) “You don’t deal with structural injustice purely through anti-discrimination,” he added. In other words, action of a more affirmative variety is needed.
Opinions differ on the precise extent to which conservatives are being excluded from academia versus self-selecting into nonacademic careers. But they clearly face barriers that liberal and leftist scholars don’t. Professors decide who joins their ranks and what research gets published in flagship journals. And several studies show that academics are willing to discriminate against applicants with different political views. One 2021 survey found that more than 40 percent of American (and Canadian) academics said they would not hire a Donald Trump supporter. Then there’s the fact that entire disciplines have publicly committed themselves to progressive values. “It is a standard of responsible professional conduct for anthropologists to continue their research, scholarship, and practice in service of dismantling institutions of colonization and helping to redress histories of oppression and exploitation,” the American Anthropological Association declared in 2020.
“Professors will tell you straight up that people who hold the wrong views don’t belong in universities,” Musa al-Gharbi, a sociology professor at Stony Brook University who studies progressive social-justice discourse, told me. “That’s the difference between viewpoint discrimination and other forms of discrimination.”
One result is that universities tasked with teaching students about the world they live in employ hardly anyone who represents views that much of the population holds. Ideological homogeneity affects which fields people study (military and religious history have gone out of vogue) and what views students are willing to express in class. (A recent survey found that only one-third of Harvard seniors—and only 17 percent of conservatives—felt comfortable sharing their opinions on controversial topics.) Liberal professors of course still teach Edmund Burke and Milton Friedman, Ron Daniels, the president of Johns Hopkins, told me. But, he said, learning from faculty who are immersed in the conservative intellectual tradition is a different academic experience.
Conservative underrepresentation has also hurt higher education’s standing with the country at large. Polls show that Americans, particularly on the right, are losing trust in universities. A Gallup survey taken last year, for example, found that Republican confidence in higher education had dropped from 56 to 20 percent over the course of a decade. Respondents attributed this in part to perceived liberal bias in the academy.
Daniels recognized these issues in a 2021 book, What Universities Owe Democracy. In it, he argues that campuses need a “purposeful pluralism” to train students to engage across differences. Jenna Silber Storey, a senior fellow at AEI and a former professor of politics and international relations at Furman University—where she estimates that “maybe 4 or 5 percent” of the faculty was conservative—read the book, and the two began discussing how to improve diversity of thought on campuses.
Hiring a conservative professor isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. At this point, few qualified conservatives are in the applicant pool in the humanities and social sciences, Teles told me. This has led some higher-education leaders to borrow tactics that were long used to redress the country’s history of racial and ethnic discrimination.
Legislatures in red and purple states across the country have shoveled money into universities to establish schools of civic thought, which are marketed as the conservative answer to academia’s leftward drift and the rise of identity-oriented disciplines. The effort started at Arizona State University, which established its School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership in 2017. The University of Texas at Austin, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the University of Tennessee at Knoxville have all done the same. Now the movement is spreading to elite private universities. Yale announced at a recent conference co-hosted by Hopkins and AEI that it will open its own center for civic thought.
The conservative politicians and right-wing donors behind these centers advertise them as a way to fight back against the excesses of the left. But Storey told me that they are not generally ideological; the goal is to teach students to debate across differences. Supporters see them as a safe space for conservative scholars who feel ostracized by the broader academy. There, they can hopefully generate work that earns recognition from researchers in the mainstream, just as disciplines such as gender studies and African American studies gained legitimacy over time, Teles told me.
Johns Hopkins has similarly repurposed techniques that are more commonly practiced by DEI offices. (Before she left her teaching job, Storey chaired her department’s DEI program.) The university first made funding available to hire a cadre of conservative and heterodox thinkers within the faculty of arts and sciences. So-called cluster hiring has been a popular way to create a support network for faculty of color who might otherwise feel isolated. Teles, in partnership with Storey at AEI, is also developing a mentorship program for conservative graduate students. The idea is to intervene earlier in the academic pipeline to keep right-leaning thinkers on the path to a professorship. Additionally, a fellowship program will send Hopkins professors to do stints at AEI, and vice versa. The university is trying to normalize conservative perspectives on campus and in the university’s research and public-facing statements, Daniels told me. He hopes that the effort will serve as a model for like-minded leaders.
If the right has discovered the language of systemic discrimination, some on the left have begun speaking in terms of identity-blind meritocracy. Juliana Paré-Blagoev, an education professor at Hopkins and the outgoing president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), told me that she’s in favor of affirmative action—just not for conservatives, because they haven’t suffered documented discrimination. “It doesn’t mean that everybody in that center isn’t a good scholar or that they can’t be competent and strong contributors, but if you look at the actuality of it, their CVs tend to be thinner than others,” Paré-Blagoev said. She is open to the possibility that conservatives are underrepresented because they don’t feel welcome, but she doesn’t think universities should make systemic changes to accommodate them. “I don’t think that an individual’s discomfort is a five-alarm fire,” she said.
François Furstenberg, a history professor at Johns Hopkins and the secretary for the university’s AAUP chapter, told me that Republicans have unfairly smeared affirmative action as a way to hire people “based on their race and not on their qualifications.” Now they’re the ones who want to hire professors based on their politics, not their fitness for the role. (Teles told me that he and Storey are focused on broadening the applicant pool for academic roles, rather than just giving people an advantage because of their political leanings.)
As with so many topics, the Trump factor has complicated the question of ideological diversity. On the one hand, the White House’s crusade against elite higher education has raised the pressure to recruit conservatives. The administration made the connection explicit in its shakedown of Harvard. After announcing that it would review $9 billion in federal grants and contracts, it issued a list of far-reaching demands that the university would have to meet in order to keep the funding. These included auditing faculty opinions and ensuring that every department and field is viewpoint-diverse. Harvard rejected the administration’s demands, but President Alan Garber has nevertheless acknowledged that ideological homogeneity is a problem on campus.
On the other hand, the viciousness and obvious bad faith of Trump’s attacks have made it more difficult for universities to pursue even changes they think will benefit their institutions, lest they appear to be capitulating to the president. “The fact that those extreme demands—for example, for government control over the curriculum—have come bundled with the notion that universities ought to be more politically diverse has tied those two things together in a way that has made political diversity much less palatable even than it was before,” Neil Gross, a sociology professor at Colby College and the author of the 2014 study on viewpoint diversity, told me.
Teles told me that the conservatives collaborating with Hopkins are intent on working within universities to reform them, not from outside to destroy them. “These are not the same people who are wrecking the financial basis of our university,” he said.
Daniels, the Hopkins president, told me that the hypocrisy of the messenger shouldn’t obscure kernels of truth in the message. As universities have debated how to respond to the Trump administration’s attacks, they’ve overlooked the fact that some of the critique is fair. “Defending the university,” he said, “actually requires that we demonstrate to America our capacity for self-criticism and self-repair.”