Why should those on the left care about open inquiry in higher ed?
Freedom to research, teach, and express unpopular ideas should be what we all want.
Despite a long-running – and troubling – stereotype among some that intellectual freedom is solely a right-wing cause, many of us who think and vote on the left have cared about threats to open inquiry for a long time. While more on the left may now be getting active in this area due to new threats from the right, left-of-center scholars have long been concerned about restrictions on research, teaching, and expression, including those originating on the left. Heterodox Academy’s diverse membership stands as Exhibit A on this point.
Four years ago, in a post entitled “Why Progressives Should Support Heterodox Academy,” HxA cofounder Jonathan Haidt urged progressives to heed warnings from leaders like Barack Obama and Nicholas Kristof about the leftist stifling of ideas in academics. Haidt wrote, “HxA was not created to help conservatives or liberals. It was created to help universities guard what makes them the crown jewels of American society.”
Following up on that theme in an op-ed just published by the Boston Globe, HxA President John Tomasi writes that, at least in HxA’s conception, “viewpoint diversity” is not a partisan rallying cry but a scholarly one. He explains why scholars of all politics ought to care about opening inquiry up:
“To associate viewpoint diversity only with conservative representation is to reduce it to a demographic box-checking exercise. That’s not just wrong — it’s also dangerous. At its core, viewpoint diversity is not about political affiliation. It’s about the conditions that allow knowledge to grow: intellectual humility, curiosity, and the willingness to engage with dissent constructively. It means listening to colleagues with different moral frameworks, cultural experiences, theoretical commitments, and life histories — not just those with different voting patterns.”
Last month, at HxA’s conference in New York, a panel of scholars engaged specifically with “The Left-Wing Case for Open Inquiry, Viewpoint Diversity, and Constructive Disagreement in Higher Education.”
In opening the session, moderator Edward Remus of Northeastern Illinois University read from the program, which noted, “During recent years, the concept of viewpoint diversity in general, and the organization Heterodox Academy in particular, have been accused by some progressives of amounting to little more than an academic ‘trojan horse’ through which to propagate right-wing ideas on college and university campuses.”
Remus asked three panelists, all of whom identify as left-wing, whether they had experienced anything along the lines of cancellation or censorship. The answers all came in the affirmative – and all described the problems coming from “within the house,” i.e., from the left.
Historian James Livingston of Rutgers University recalled being “censored and cancelled” during a 1974 panel on labor and the left where he was challenging views of a major national union. More recently, he was threatened by university officials with termination for alleged racism expressed in a Facebook post in which he cheekily resigned from the white race after being irritated by what he described as a badly-raised group of white children. Chris Cutrone of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a self-described Marxist, talked about his organization being subject to boycott calls for inviting Paul Berman as a speaker.
Benjamin Studebaker, who earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge, said he expects the unpopularity of his ideas on how American democracy is working – while he’s on the left, he doesn’t think President Trump a fascist – could be why he’s been turned down for academic jobs. But he noted that, for people his age (the younger generation of academics), “you can never really know,” because there are so many people applying for so few jobs. Still, he wondered aloud if he’s too far left for the right and not enough left for the left in power.
Remus also asked the three panelists to make a left-wing case for freedom of expression and against cancellation or censorship in society at large.
While challenging naive notions of liberated “marketplaces of ideas” Livingston said that, “If we begin with the premise that nobody knows who they are or what they might be able to become without being able to articulate what that is,” then we arrive at support for free expression and inquiry.
Cutrone historicized the value of free expression, noting that he is “very aware” of his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago being the product of the gilded age of robber barons, but argued “basic civil liberties have to be a leftist and socialist value” and that “the Left is wrong” to “too readily” associate libertarianism with free speech.
Fascinated by big abstractions (like freedom, equality, peace, prosperity, God, nature) and how they work in cultures, Studebaker said, “I do think that if we eliminate the possibility of discussion, that eliminates the possibility of change. It marks it much more likely that you’ll be stuck in particular abstractions, past the point at which those abstractions are appropriate for your own time and place.” Studebaker criticized overly entrenched leftists closed to criticism and change, saying that while the right thinks it has the right answers and thinks those answers are transhistorical, the left “has to be committed to the possibility of new abstractions and conceptualizations and it has to have the humility to know that this generation does not know what the next generation needs.”
Not surprisingly given the title of the session, the moderator also asked the panelists why those on the left should support open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement on campuses.
Cutrone answered with what he called “a challenge” to the left, namely to see that the left in academia “might be the conservatives now” by holding onto power and being unwilling to change core ideas. What if the left in academia is in “the curious position of having to defend a status quo that may not actually be worth defending”?
For his part, Livingtson argued that perspectival diversity in academia is “one of those self-evident public goods….[The] more points of view you have, the more facts you have, the more facts you have produced, and therefore the [greater the] likelihood that you might modify those concepts that you’ve inherited in view of new circumstances.” But, he said, increasing political viewpoint diversity in practice is difficult. He asked how we will “recruit conservatives to higher education, which doesn’t pay very well and the security of which is disappearing right before our very eyes.”
Taking a different approach to considering the economics of higher ed, Studebaker argued that a big part of what constrains research in academia is the "homogeneity of funding” at many institutions, whether that be funding from the state or capitalist industry. He worries about attempts to promote viewpoint diversity “devolving into wars of funding…with nobody actually committed to viewpoint diversity as such….That we’re just seeing different conglomerates of rich-people money promoting different viewpoints with no real substantive commitment” to knowledge-seeking. “Are there any institutions left at this point or anybody with money left at this point who is really actually committed to a robust array of views?” Studebaker asked.
In the lively Q&A period, challenged by an audience member who raised the concern that too much intellectual humility could lead to doubting obviously real things, Studebaker reiterated his commitment to being open to different ideas, saying we must “leave open the possibility that some idea could emerge in a room like this subsequently in time that initially might be unimaginable to us but could lead us somewhere genuinely valuable.”
“I don’t think that that’s an abdication of a commitment to human values,” Studebaker concluded. “I think it is an affirmation of human potential.”