The classical liberal tolerance of all ideas leaves institutions vulnerable to intolerant ideologues.

When I left graduate school in 1988, an English doctorate in hand, I had all the right political opinions. Republicans were greedy, women and minorities deserved special consideration, America was anti-intellectual, Reagan was a clod. I voted for Michael Dukakis without thinking. I didn’t have to; party loyalty was a no-brainer. Besides, I was taken up with career moves I had to make, and they didn’t affect my political leanings at all. I acted in a way that fits with how good liberals should operate in campus settings. 

Some readers of Chronicles may be surprised to hear, however, that liberalism in academia at that time required precisely the opposite of what it does today: the suspension of political opinion, not its application.

I’m talking about those occasions that called for an academic judgment: grading, admissions, hiring, peer review. Back then, decisions were supposed to rest on the intellectual quality of the work or person, not on agreement with this or that dogma. Liberalism was cosmopolitan and anti-tribal, the enlightened man’s posture. It favored progress and change, yes, but wasn’t anti-tradition, not when the tradition included Luther, Voltaire, Marx, Mill, and Darwin. The highest virtues were flexibility and disinterest. 

Lots of specialized theories were circulating in the humanities in those years, and liberalism told you not to get sectarian about them, not when making an official assessment. I was no Marxist, feminist, postcolonialist, or queer theorist, but when judging the writings or CVs of someone who was, I suspended my traditionalist preferences and relied on impersonal, apolitical, formal criteria. To do otherwise was unethical. Was the argument cogent, the presentation articulate, the handling of subject matter astute and informed, the overall record professional? Those were the proper questions, not, “Do I like what this guy’s saying?” A well-constructed essay that began with Frankfurt School premises was better than a sloppy study modeled on T. S. Eliot’s criticism. A smart and diligent Derridean beat a plodding New Critic every time.

I was proud of this habit. It was a mark of superiority. To seek colleagues just like oneself, who think the same way and believe the same things, was the mark of an insecure intelligence. In my first years as an assistant professor when I voted in favor of a job candidate who pushed a cutting-edge theory of one kind or another, I felt pleased that I could be so liberal, so open-minded. My yardstick was excellence, not affirmation; excellence of method, not rightness of content.

Again, I understood this as an achievement, just as Karl Popper treated the “open society” as an achievement that contained the lower, tribal impulses of mankind. Today, the mindset has a specific name: viewpoint diversity. That’s what recent liberal and conservative critics of political correctness call it. I thought it was a standard academic norm, not exceptional enough to merit a label, but now it does, and for an obvious reason: academics don’t exercise it. They don’t think that way anymore. If you described the disinterested posture to them, they’d reject it as fake (“You’re just hiding your biases behind a veil of neutrality”) or as false consciousness (“Wake up! Everyone’s captive to one ideology or another”). 

The mindset that held to proper procedures, execution, method, and quality of thought, that didn’t search for political compliance, has disappeared. That Ivory Tower ideal collapsed in a 50-year storm of cultural revolution. At this point, in fact, professors don’t have to reject it—they aren’t even aware of it.

Viewpoint diversity is the antidote, we’re told (or, in some versions, “intellectual diversity”). The monoculture of higher education stifles free speech and free thought. As John Stuart Mill warned in On Liberty, a deliberative body that expels dissenters slides into complacency and parochialism. Honest critics are blackballed while insiders relax in comforting mediocrity. Viewpoint diversity opens things up. When skeptics enter the conversation, dogmas are put to fresh tests, defenses of orthodoxy are strengthened, knowledge evolves. People think less about where they stand with their colleagues and more about the arguments on the table. Social dynamics go down, intellectual values go up. If everyone in the room believed and acted as I did 35 years ago, academia would be a better, happier place.

That’s the promise of viewpoint diversity, which sounds so healthy and just that only an illiberal ideologue could oppose it. But there’s a problem—not with the idea of viewpoint diversity, but with its practice, and the practice is all that counts. This becomes clear in the faculty meeting and the committee room, when a group decision must be made. Which applicants to admit to the graduate program, whether this assistant professor deserves tenure, which ones get a fellowship, what curriculum revision is best, et cetera. A collective with high viewpoint diversity fends off the oppressive psychology of the party line. It ensures that cases are vetted, uncomfortable questions are posed, assumptions are examined, and competence is maintained.

But what if some of the decision-makers in the room are not liberal types who exercise that kind of tolerance? These are people who consider viewpoint diversity a violation, the forced acceptance of beliefs and persons they regard as more or less wrongheaded or downright wicked. They commend individuals and work materials (a candidate, a reading list…) that reinforce their own viewpoints and nobody else’s. To judge on scholarly criteria alone is a mode of disempowerment. To them, academia is not a marketplace of ideas; it’s an institution that must be controlled.  

Others in the room recognize the passions of these few, but they can’t do anything about them. Such intruders have earned their seats in the standard way, clearing hurdles and winning approval from superiors and peers. Their general outlook, too, is acceptable to the rest because viewpoint diversity demands it. Their ideas and values don’t trouble the liberal majority, only their insistence that those ideas and values alone are valid. The rest of the deciders won’t ever convince them to lighten up and be inclusive, though. The ideologues stop only when votes are tallied and they lose.

But sometimes the ideologues win. Every year or two, they manage to enact an illiberal practice that fits their cause, for instance, a diversity statement that all applicants must submit; or, they persuade the liberals to accept their preferred job candidate, who may indeed prove to be the best choice on academic grounds (some ideologues do produce solid scholarship and perform as effective teachers).

Academic liberals approach these decisions with less fervor; they don’t like conflict, and so they give in if a couple of their sober colleagues now and then side with those whom Harold Bloom termed “the School of Resentment.” It isn’t part of the liberal temper to gaze across the table and conclude, “These people are pernicious—they don’t respect academic norms—they must be stopped before their influence grows.” 

Apart from that, there is the issue of moral force: the preservation of viewpoint diversity comes off as altogether feeble when set against the demand from administrators and department heads for more minority representation. Or, against an argument such as that students shouldn’t be forced to take a course on the ideas of men who owned slaves (meaning the Founding Fathers). Liberals take pride in being good people; academic ideologues are experts in guilt trips.

Over time, the incremental changes add up. In 1985, I would say, it might be common for four or five of the 25 professors in the English department to fit the ideologue mold. They tended to be young, not long out of graduate school. They had less standing than senior professors who had arrived before politicization spread from the anti-war movement of the 1960s to multiculturalism in the 1980s.

Now, in 2025, 18 or more of the 25 professors in the same department mix academics with politics. They vote as one and leave the principled “viewpoint diversity” liberals powerless and demoralized. In some departments, such as the “studies,” political advocacy has been planted into the very principles of the field, so that one’s political posture has the status of a professional qualification.

The transformation of many institutions is now complete. The many contests that liberals won over the decades defeated the ideologues but nonetheless allowed them to remain in the room and try again next year. Those that the ideologues won took office space or curricular practice away from liberals forever. Step by small step, they triumphed.

The outcome shows that the open debate and freedom of expression many liberals and conservatives raise as the answer to political correctness is no such thing. Viewpoint diversity can’t defeat anti-viewpoint diversity, not in the long run. The tolerance it espouses has allowed intolerance to prosper. Once the ideologues reach critical mass, which may be but 10 percent to 15 percent of the group, a slow but steady process of subversion will begin.

It is not enough for liberals on the faculty to vote them down and return to their offices. They must rebuke the ideologues for their dogmatism, vocally and firmly—which is precisely what liberals hesitate to do. The liberal neutrality that I prized long ago turned out to be a loser.