Can American colleges and universities manage their own reform, without being forced or nudged from the outside?
Of course, the proper professorial answer is: it depends on the meaning of “reform.”
If any major change counts, then higher education reforms all the time. For example, over the years at my own institution, Emory University, a dental school was abolished, a new program/department in quantitative methods created, admissions requirements changed (no, not to make them tougher), the chemistry curriculum and teaching methods revamped, a Voluntary Core Curriculum developed, and a course on race and ethnic diversity included in the General Education Requirements. That’s reform of a sort.
Money, the smell or the lack of it, also drives reform. If federal agencies or foundations go in new directions, leadership will nudge locals to take advantage; colleges at risk of going under may adopt a new business model, as Adrian College did in beefing up varsity sports; and if a college observes demand for econ rather than soc as a major, that will prompt a sensible administration to invest more in econ. Again, reform of a sort, though not purely “from within.”
But if by reform we mean that higher ed should by its own efforts, through rational deliberation and for the sake of academic goals, become a little less uniformly progressive, a little less narrow in its choice of agendas and priorities, a little less eager to politicize scholarship, a little less one-sidedly partisan, and a little less averse to viewpoint diversity, then the prospects seem less bright—not hopeless (see at the end), but fairly dim.
If we use viewpoint diversity as shorthand for that kind of reform, there are three main reasons to be skeptical:
Cultural lag: lingering wokeness
Pushback: faculty opposition
Inertia: reactionary habits
Cultural lag: woke ain’t dead
Wokeness may be past its peak, but in various precincts the progressive predilections of the past decade linger in a way that reduces the probability of soul-searching, post-woke, genuinely diverse self-transformation. A number of people and places don’t seem eager to join in. You be the judge:
The University of Minnesota Institute of Child Development advertises its resources on the “Whiteness Epidemic.”
The Ohio State University Department of Comparative Studies hired a scholar whose dissertation treats Mars as an “opportunity for feminist science” and Mars rovers as a material product of US settler colonialism.
In spite of woeful data on student math deficiencies at UCSD after it dropped standard admissions tests, as revealed in a much-publicized senate-administration report, a former UC admissions official tells us not to worry: the sky hasn’t fallen in California, and tests are merely a measure of inherited privilege.
Nature Reviews Psychology is “encouraging authors to include a citation diversity statement to draw attention to citation imbalances and confirm that they made efforts to cite publications from a diverse group of researchers.”
The University of Pittsburgh advertises a Social Work position as follows: “Regardless of substantive focus, we seek colleagues who embrace and amplify our school’s commitment to anti-racism, anti-oppression, collaborative engagement, and collective liberation.”
At Michigan State, required professional education courses in its Elementary Education program include “Social Foundations of Justice and Equity in Education” and several “Justice and Equity” seminars.
At Northern Michigan University, a presidential candidate was apparently eliminated after an activist used his paper on “Behavioral Economics and Perverse Effects of the Welfare State” to question his “respect for women, minorities and those in poverty.”
At Princeton, mandatory DEI training for dorm supervisors teaches the “four I’s of oppression.”
At St. John’s University (and other places), after the death of Charlie Kirk, student government denied a TP-USA club application.
The University of Michigan Faculty Senate voted 2,432 to 555 for a motion to urge Michigan Medicine to resume “gender-affirming care” for individuals under the age of 19, “in alignment with our University’s values,” considering that MM is “a diverse place that endorses a culture of equity and inclusion,” and asserting that “expert research . . . demonstrate[s] that gender affirming care is medically necessary and lifesaving.”
From 2020 to 2024, the American Political Science Review was edited by a team that called itself the “Feminist Collective” and apparently screened admissions on non-academic grounds, having declared the need for political science to “actively dismantle the institutionalized racism, sexism, heterosexism, ableism, and settler colonialism that continue to characterize and structure it.”
The English Department at Loyola University of Maryland still advertises (though only via a link on its home page) its “Commitment to Anti-Racism,” acknowledges “the centrality of whiteness in the history and evolution of literary canons,” commits to “reevaluating all of our classes and making anti-racist teaching central in each one,” and avoids “centering the experiences of white students in our teaching by interrogating the presumed invisibility of whiteness.”
Pushback: faculty opposition
As viewpoint diversity became the motto of reform, faculty pushed back: it’s a MAGA plot! it misses the point! it’s based on misinformation! we’re diverse enough already! More latent opposition is built into the partisan skew of academic personnel and preferences revealed in course material.
Without extrapolating too quickly from a few data points to general attitudes, here are some examples of significant faculty pushback:
Speaking on behalf of scholars who are “trained . . . to reflexively recoil from hegemonic views wherever we spy them,” Johns Hopkins literary scholar Lisa Siraganian dismisses viewpoint diversity as an answer to presumed group think, since it “only offers us another quota system.” Far from aiding the pursuit of truth—as we all know, the “cardinal value,” even in the humanities— viewpoint diversity opposes it! Since “[d]isciplinary standards are settled upon by the collective expertise of the discipline,” viewpoint diversity is illegitimately pushed by partisan interlopers. Advocated in bad faith, viewpoint diversity can only “ensconce more bad ideas.” Contrary to what we had been told about the politics of the humanities, it turns out, they are just like STEM in their pristinely-nonpartisan commitment to truth-seeking disciplinary expertise. From that hegemonic view Siraganian does not reflexively recoil. It follows that viewpoint diversity should be kept out: it’s a destructive MAGA plot, entirely “anathema to academic freedom.”
Under the telling headline “Viewpoint Diversity Misses the Point: The academy’s latest obsession mistakes political representation for intellectual agility,” JHU English professor Jeanne-Marie Jackson tells us in The Chronicle, ““Intellectual pluralism” is to many academics a glib euphemism, a way of smuggling conservatives in through liberalism’s squeaky back door.” That’s bad enough. Her own objection is that what “goes by the name of “viewpoint diversity,” identifies people by single, ready-made ideological positions — and it is therefore ironically in tune with the political calcifications it aims to reverse.” That’s so crude! “Properly understood,” intellectual pluralism is something quite different—which, she says unironically, “can spur us to revisit anticolonial history in more expansive ways,” as best illustrated, also unironically, but by the superior “perspectival suppleness” of an African writer. By her standards, it appears, any conservative authors just lack “suppleness” (and, unpardonably, fail to “revisit colonial history”).
In his book, Campus Misinformation (Oxford 2023), Penn State professor Bradford Vivian presents a kind of collective tu quoque: the “real threat to free speech in American higher education,” to quote his subtitle, comes from the authoritarian right and its “hyperpartisan” media. Viewpoint diversity, you see, is just a “new iteration of a longstanding reactionary conceit—that university diversity policies designed to welcome all views restrict conservative views—[which] has provided a faux intellectual basis for hyperpartisan invective,” and “a semantic repackaging of unscientific partisan polemics.” Insisting on inclusion of “one or two partisan perspectives” is really “a recipe for artificial viewpoint parity” [italics in original, which is not “truly diverse.” Diagnosing “orthodoxy” in higher ed is just a “highly contrived trope”—partly because, as reactionaries fail to appreciate, universities are actually more diverse than ever! What they really seem to object to is equal access and inclusion. Discarding the “dominant lens of partisan identity,” Vivian detects through his clear, nonpartisan lens not just hyperpartisanship but also ever-so-faint traces of racism among proponents of viewpoint diversity. Leaving the subtle smear aside, perhaps a lens that spots “Yale professor of jurisprudence Robert P. George” is cloudier than advertised.
So much for illustrations of explicit pushback—prominently published in the AAUP magazine, in the Chronicle, and by Oxford University Press.
If personnel is policy, that also doesn’t bode well for diversifying perspectives, agendas, and political identities in academia. Two prominent examples:
The Harvard faculty is down to 5 registered Republicans (will that be 4 after James Hankins leaves for Florida?), and only 23% of professors think Harvard should make a concerted effort to hire more conservatives.
A Faculty Political Diversity Report by Yale’s Buckley Institute found, well, not much faculty political diversity, though across all schools it identified as many as 30 Republicans out of 1335—more than Harvard! However, 27 departments had no registered Republicans. So far, there’s no sign they regret that lack of diversity.
Sure, HERI national faculty survey data are slightly less skewed, showing 12.7% of faculty identifying as on the right, though outsiders might smile at the 31.5% self-describing as “middle-of-the-road”—perhaps they mean the median to the left of the left lane? In the short run, the left lean may get worse, as a plurality of young academics in the social sciences and humanities now identify as “very left,” confronting a hardy but in fact slightly growing band of 8% on the right (all cautions about surveys apply):
Revealed preferences further inspire skepticism. In a well-publicized July 2025 working paper analyzing 27 million syllabi (not limited to but focused on the U.S.), Jon Shields, Yuval Avnur, and Stephanie Muravchik found that when progressive texts are required, “critics are not generally assigned along with them,” concluding that it is “the academic norm . . . that professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreement that shape these important controversies” (their emphasis). For example, in classes that cover Ta-Nehisi Coates’ memoir Between the World and Me, “no voices are assigned that fundamentally challenge Coates’s account of racial inequality in 21st-century America.” Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow is only infrequently accompanied by critical readings:
Inertia: “Whatever it is, I’m against it”
In his sobering book by that title, former Macalester president Brian Rosenberg lays out the many sources of “resistance to change in higher education”—his subtitle. His litany is long, mostly familiar, but nonetheless instructive. Message: any real reform in higher ed is hard. Elite institutions think they can afford to continue business as usual; nonelite institutions don’t have the resources to make meaningful change. Tenure can lock in a departmental direction for decades, even when intellectual and institutional priorities shift, which makes reform that much harder. Seemingly sensible reform—maybe faculty at liberal arts colleges should teach more, and research less?—meets determined opposition. Under “faculty governance,” even small changes trigger costly fights, as Rosenberg experienced when he tried and failed to cut a small department; an activist prof was delighted that the college had rejected “a cost-effective model, a capitalist model”—the kind of prof, one senses, who would be as unenthusiastic about viewpoint diversity as about the “capitalist model.” Overall, incentives are seriously misaligned across higher ed’s many constituencies—risking counterproductive stalemates.
Rosenberg diagnosis does not directly address the academic monoculture—if anything, he pooh-poohs the critique—but it bolsters the picture of resistance. While he strengthens the case for skepticism about internal reform, he may slightly underestimate the effects of external pressure. Elite institutions are not immune: even at Harvard, says a senior professor, “faculty will need to start teaching sections,” a sure sign the situation is “serious and desperate.” Whether emergencies trigger real reform remains to be seen.
Reasons for hope?
Advocates of viewpoint diversity have ample reason to be skeptical that higher ed will reform “from within.” Yet there are some reasons for hope.
There are positive signs at the top: A few reformist leaders, like Daniel Diermeier at Vanderbilt, recognize what needs to be done. Longtime university president Gordon Gee has similarly called for reform, on the Fox News website, no less—headline: “I’ve been a college president and higher education needs to embrace diversity of beliefs.” They have company. Rational administrators can use the threat of outside intervention to force needed internal change.
There are also positive signs among faculty:
Faculty pushback is itself getting pushback. Debate about viewpoint diversity is becoming fairly diverse. Siraganian’s theses triggered most responses. In Academe, Eric Weiner and Dale Miller respond critically (Joan Scott, less so). Siraganian’s colleague Andrew Perrin questions the facile distinction between intellectual and political matters. In Minding the Campus, Samuel Abrams counters with “Seven Theses for Viewpoint Diversity” and argues Siraganian “gets viewpoint diversity backward.”
Criminologist Ashley Rubin is “getting the sense that the tide is turning in academia—that more people are unhappy with the highly politicized nature of our work.” Political scientist Eric Kaufmann identifies an entire “vibe shift” away from decades of woke folly, upending the left’s previously “untrammeled” cultural power. That may be too optimistic. But a change in what academics are permitted, even encouraged, to think and say and do will favor reform more than in the past.
Even if nudged to innovate by public or political pressure, many academics are prepared to cooperate with new ventures like civic institutes. Though perhaps not in the Loyola English Department, there is a latent constituency for a slightly more traditional, intellectually diverse, non-woke approach to teaching and curriculum. How large? That’s not yet clear. But, for example, Johns Hopkins is collaborating with AEI on a civics initiative to boost intellectual diversity. (To Siraganian’s dismay: “such citizen-fashioning is a bad fit with seeking local academic truth”—a problem, apparently, that progressive programs do not have.)
Heterodox Academy, though still reviled by some leftists (Siraganian calls it the “conservative nonprofit”), is also playing a useful role, advocating seriously for viewpoint diversity in the pursuit of free inquiry, cultivating groups of faculty to promote it, and organizing events that bring the project to life. Believe it or not, HxA even has a small but lively sociology group. Such efforts have not achieved critical mass but move in the right direction.
Boredom may also spur reform. Viewpoint monotony is boring. For smart students, who tend to be more allergic to “hegemonic views” than many academics, encountering the same party line in class after class, and throughout their college experience, is dull. In an ever more difficult economic and technological environment, colleges can’t afford to be boring. Viewpoint diversity, the real deal, makes college less boring. That raises the incentive to pursue it.
Somebody tell the Feminist Collective and the Pitt social workers and the Princeton dorm supervisors and the Michigan Faculty Senate.
But let’s not get our hopes up just yet.