Government Regulation of "Viewpoint Neutrality" is a Daft Idea
Conservatives should not have to be reminded that the state has no business in the seminar rooms of the nation.
Photo: Darya Tryfanava, Unsplash
Throughout the English-speaking world, the idea that the dominant progressive bias of humanities and social-science faculty must be met by “enforced viewpoint neutrality” is gaining ground practically daily. The idea has made the greatest gains in the U.K., where Toby Young’s Free Speech Union has successfully pressured the British government to appoint “free speech and academic freedom champions.” Their job? “To reverse the trend of deplatforming and disparaging academics for their controversial views on university campuses.”
The U.K. example has inspired North American imitators. In a recent op-ed in the National Post, for example, two Canadian humanities instructors argued that “structural discrimination against conservative perspectives is pervasive” in the United States and Canada. Citing data from the Centre for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology, they claimed that the hegemony of progressive orthodoxy triggers conservatives, preventing established scholars from following their own intellectual lights and locking newly minted ones out of the competition for scarce jobs.
A majority of conservative academics in the social sciences and humanities report a hostile work climate. In order to avoid discrimination and negative social repercussions, conservative academics regularly censor their ideas and their research. The report also suggests that one reason universities are so heavily skewed to the left is because conservatives self-select out of academia to avoid this hostile climate.
It all amounts to “political discrimination,” the co-authors concluded. What’s needed is a safe space for conservative scholars—enforced, as in the U.K., by the state. Canada’s provincial governments should consider adopting the British model, but the feds, too, must act:
The tri-council granting agencies (CIHR, SSHRC and NSERC) should ensure that research is subjected to scrutiny from opposing political perspectives. Universities should not create whole programs or advertise particular jobs that have a built-in political bias from the outset. Instead, universities should be required to create neutral environments where the ultimate objective is not a particular political aim, but the truth.
Even more astoundingly, perhaps, some conservative American intellectuals are today calling for state-enforced viewpoint neutrality. A feature article in the National Review from late June, for example, argued that the situation is now ostensibly so dire in the U.S. that government must take the lead:
To counteract the rising threat that progressive authoritarianism poses to freedom of expression and conscience, conservative policy-makers will need to lose their 1980s libertarian blinders and embrace government-led, civil-liberties-focused intervention in the elite institutions of society. If conservatives persist with utopian fantasies about creating a new ecosystem of universities, schools, corporate cultures, and technological platforms while believing that cuts to university budgets will win the culture war, they will only hasten the rise of progressive authoritarianism.
Self-styled conservatives are right to be worried about mounting evidence that academic freedom and especially free speech on campus are under threat. And they should indeed be standing four-square against cancel culture, the silencing of dissent, and the rise of progressive authoritarianism.
But the notion that the state should be enlisted to regulate or enforce intellectual “neutrality” on university campuses should send chills down the spines of conservatives. That’s because modern conservatism is itself a species of classic liberalism, which privileges rights, reason and the rule of law—all of it in the service of the Enlightenment precept that the sanctity and freedom of the individual person rank as humanity’s highest ideals. The state has no business in the seminar rooms of the nation, in short. That some conservatives have to be reminded of this is one of the most remarkable, if ironic, inversions of philosophical first principles in the era of “woke” hegemony.
Here’s an alternative strategy for hastening the demise of progressive orthodoxy in the humanities and social sciences: Let it perish, in true Darwinian fashion, from natural causes.
If the dominance of this or that intellectual orthodoxy contradicts the universities’ historic obligation to their own traditions, to their students and, above all, to what we have always understood as the pursuit of knowledge and truth, such a contradiction will out sooner or later. It always does.
This is not mere wishful thinking, but a question of self-preservation. First—as is already evident—the academic disciplines straightjacketed by narrow orthodox thinking will inevitably suffer declining enrolments, intellectual irrelevance, and loss of prestige. Second—as is also evident today—the universities in which these phenomena appear to be institutionally endemic will suffer the same sort of decline, and for the same sorts of reasons. As any Western university administrator is apt to concede, the dog-eat-dog world of competition for students, funding, institutional prestige and public approval is itself almost purely Darwinian.
Conservatives must therefore abandon simplistic statist fixes and reacquaint themselves with the courage of their own convictions. The moment progressive orthodoxies run their course in the classrooms and the boardrooms of the Western world—as they did in the 1960s and surely will again—intellectual natural selection (or Hegelian dialecticism, if you prefer) will ensure a restoration of balance, and likely sooner than we think.
In the meantime, it’s crucial that conservative intellectuals stop whimpering in fear on the sidelines of the culture wars—if that is indeed what they're doing. Surely this is the most important lesson on which conservatives have been schooled by the very “social-justice warriors” whose ascendency they deplore. The suggestion that conservative-led “free speech and academic freedom champions” will be any better for the intellectual progress of the West than the dictates of their adversaries is patently daft.
Bad ideas must be fought with better ideas.