Reinventing UVA: Intellectual Diversity

Two days ago, I made the case that the University of Virginia has a shot at becoming the most desirable university in the country to learn, teach and pursue knowledge. To do that, the Board of Visitors must recruit a president and a provost committed to building a faculty nationally renowned for its intellectual diversity. Only if there is pluralism in the professoriate can there arise a free-wheeling academic culture where ideas collide, mutate, propagate, die and synthesize into exciting new forms.

There are many obstacles to achieving such an outcome, both internal and external. The tenure system, though useful for protecting academic freedom, favors seniority and slows turnover. Moreover, many departments have been captured by ideologues, so even when positions open up, hiring committees have no interest in hiring colleagues whose ideas they find unsympathetic. In the political realm, Democratic legislators are mobilizing in defense of academic “freedom” and “autonomy,” by which they mean working to ensure the dominance of those who think like them on fractious culture-war issues.

Perhaps the biggest barrier to change is that conservatives themselves have given so little thought to what “intellectual diversity” means. No one — not Governor Glenn Youngkin, nor the Board of Visitors, nor even conservative intellectuals anywhere, as far as I know — has clearly defined the concept.

They’ll recognize it, apparently, when they see it.

What is the desired ratio in an intellectually diverse faculty between Marxists, leftists, liberals, moderates, conservatives, classical libertarians and free thinkers who can’t be confined to any ideological box? Should we vie for partisan parity, or is it sufficient to break the left’s lock on campus culture? Should there be a 50/50 balance of left and right? Should faculty viewpoints look like — or more to the point, think like — America? Or, as a state institution, think like Virginia?

Then, once we have defined intellectual diversity, how do we attain it?

There is no plan. There hasn’t even been a serious discussion. When UVA board members tried to raise the issue, President Ryan and his acolytes insisted that intellectual diversity was alive and well at UVA. They named three or four conservative professors (out of a faculty of 1,700) as proof of diversity and moved on to other topics.

With this post, I’m hoping to get a conversation started.

For all the difficulties, there is some good news. UVA doesn’t start from ground zero of a nuclear blast zone. There’s a lot of rubble, to be sure, but there are foundations to build upon: formal policies endorsing free speech and expression as well as some professors who do encourage wide-ranging discussion in their classrooms. But they don’t set the tone for the university as a whole.

How many independent voices are needed to change the broader campus culture? When students all along the philosophical spectrum feel free to express themselves? When professors and students no longer fear the Twitter Outrage Mob? When conservative professors start signing their names to petitions on controversial issues just like left-of-center professors do? Conservatives have no answers.

Leftists suggest that our goal is to create a conservative monoculture, replicating Hillsdale College, Liberty University or some other bete noire. This flat-out wrong. They fear, I suspect, that conservatives will marginalize the left on campus, just as the left marginalized conservatives. Turnaround would be fair play, but erecting a conservative monolith is not my intention, nor the goal of any of my Jefferson Council colleagues. Free-wheeling debate requires diverse points of view. There must be lefties on the UVA grounds just as there must be conservatives and free thinkers.

Perhaps our lefty friends worry that UVA can’t create ideological balance without firing a load of lefty profs. That also is not the case. Achieving intellectual diversity should not require sacking anyone — well, other than a few deans, perhaps. Attrition and “self-deportation” will do the trick.

Nationally, according to the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources, attrition ran 7% in 2022-23 for tenure-track professors and 11% for non-tenure track instructors. The attrition rate likely has slowed since the COVID crisis, and might be lower still at UVA, which has the reputation as a good place to work. Still, it’s not unreasonable to suggest that faculty turnover at UVA could approach 40% to 50% over a decade. That will open up a lot of positions.

Turnover could accelerate if UVA experienced what might, to borrow a phrase from the immigration debate, “self-deport.” Far-left faculty who can’t abide the loss of their intellectual primacy and dread a shift toward the middle in campus culture, might voluntarily depart to more comfortable climes, thus opening up even more positions.

Where will conservative professors come from? In a 2022 survey conducted by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, 50 percent of professors identified as liberal, 17 percent as moderate, and 26 percent as conservative. It turns out that the professoriat nationally is far less monolithic ideologically than it is the elite universities that dominate the public imagination. There should be no lack of qualified moderate and conservative faculty for UVA to recruit from.

UVA can draw upon significant resources to recruit star conservatives. The university’s Strategic Investment Fund (SIF) generates $65 million a year in discretionary funds at present. The university used the money in recent years as matching funds to win research grants, endow scholarships, and underwrite endowed chairs. If the Board of Visitors decides that achieving intellectual diversity is the highest strategic priority — even more important than joining dozens of other research institutions in the “billion dollar club” — then SIF funds can be redirected to faculty recruitment.

One strategy seen elsewhere is to create new centers and institutes, such as the University of North Carolina’s School of Civic Life and Leadership, the University of Florida’s Institute for Government and Civics, and George Mason University’s Mercatus Center. There’s nothing wrong with that approach. But UVA’s goal should not be to create a series of islands disconnected and alienated from the mainstream campus culture. The goal should be to change the culture so that students in any major can be exposed to a wide range of views in that discipline.

If UVA’s governing board does pursue intellectual diversity as a primary goal, it will have to confront a key leftist talking point head on: that conservatives believe in “affirmative action” for conservatives but not for minorities.

It’s quite the box they have put us in. After many years of systematically discriminating against conservatives and establishing a “progressive” orthodoxy, apologists for the leftist-dominated status quo are accusing conservatives of wanting to do the same thing in reverse. But there is a crucial difference. The consequence of leftist practice was to create an intellectual monoculture. By contrast, conservatives seek to revive intellectual diversity and a marketplace of ideas. The left is happy to extinguish conservatism from campus. Conservatives foresee a continued vital role for liberal and even radical leftists.

UVA’s board will have nothing to apologize for by picking a president and provost dedicated to the pursuit of intellectual diversity.