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In an April 11, 2025, letter to Harvard University President Alan Garber and Harvard Corporation Lead Member Penny Pritzker, Trump administration officials from the General Services Administration, Department of Health and Human Services, and Department of Education outlined terms of an agreement between the administration and the nation’s oldest and wealthiest university. The multi-pronged proposal raised two major questions: Were the government’s complaints against Harvard justified? And did enforcing its demands for reform fall within federal government’s limited powers? The Trump administration observed that the U.S. government “has invested in” Harvard because the nation benefits from the university’s “scholarly discovery and academic excellence.” However, the letter stressed, “an investment is not an entitlement.” Because “Harvard has in recent years failed to live up to both the intellectual and civil rights conditions that justify federal investment,” the administration requested the university to undertake substantial reforms or lose federal funding. In particular, the April 11 letter called on Harvard to practice merit-based hiring and admissions; recruit and admit international students committed to America’s founding principles and constitutional traditions; stop university programs and faculty from promulgating antisemitism; discontinue diversity, equity, and inclusion programs (DEI); enforce student-discipline policies; establish reliable whistle-blower reporting and protection procedures; and create institutional mechanisms to facilitate transparent cooperation with the government. The Trump administration’s most controversial demand involved steps to enhance “viewpoint diversity” throughout Harvard. “By August 2025,” the administration’s letter specified, “the University shall commission an external party, which shall satisfy the federal government as to its competence and good faith, to audit the student body, faculty, staff, and leadership for viewpoint diversity, such that each department, field, or teaching unit must be individually viewpoint diverse.” Guided by the audit’s findings, the government would require Harvard to eliminate “ideological litmus tests” in admissions and hiring, and to achieve viewpoint diversity in the university’s departments, fields, and teaching units. Critics accused the Trump administration of overreaching. Even distinguished conservatives who advocate viewpoint diversity objected on free-speech and limited-government grounds to the intrusive oversight that the Trump administration sought over the mix of opinions and perspectives at Harvard. In “Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity,” published this fall in Academe (the quarterly magazine of the American Association of University Professors), Lisa Siraganian adopted a strikingly different criticism of the Trump administration. Her criticism was also surprising coming from a chair in humanities and professor in the department of comparative thought and literature at Johns Hopkins University, and JHU-AAUP chapter president. Siraganian neither maintains that universities already adequately feature viewpoint diversity nor does she press the case that the Trump administration overstepped constitutional and statutory boundaries by endeavoring to supervise viewpoint diversity on campus. Rather, she argues that viewpoint diversity is undesirable in higher education because it conflicts with the university’s mission. Siraganian anticipates that friends of viewpoint diversity will invoke John Stuart Mill’s “On Liberty” to counter her rejection of viewpoint diversity “in any of its guises.” In his 19th-century classic, Mill offers deft observations about human fallibility and corrigibility and adduces seminal historical examples of the persecution of heterodox figures. These inform his argument that the encounter with competing opinions advances the quest for knowledge because “very few have minds sufficiently capacious and impartial” to progress in understanding without testing their views against those who think differently. Despite repudiating wholesale the case for cherishing diverse opinions – Mill himself emphasizes dissenting opinions – Siraganian, with a touch of bravado, appeals to the professed Millian dispositions of viewpoint-diversity’s defenders. They, she asserts, “should be open to responding to and refuting” her seven theses. Accordingly, she challenges those who disagree with her “to defend their convictions openly, fearlessly, and logically.” Challenge accepted. Siraganian’s first thesis states, “Viewpoint diversity functions in direct opposition to the pursuit of truth, the principal aim of academia.” Citing the playful literary scholar Stanley Fish, she contends in all seriousness that “the pursuit of truth and the value of different opinions” not only “do not work together seamlessly,” which is true, but also that “they are directly opposed,” which is mistaken. Yes, as Siraganian notes, the science is largely settled – at least for now – on DNA structure. Then again, the contentious debates about viewpoint diversity do not generally concern elementary aspects of the natural sciences but rather usually revolve around the humanities and social sciences. And that’s for good reason. Like the natural sciences, the humanities and social sciences rest on and discover facts. But the natural sciences are decidedly closer to mathematics, in which, as Mill in “On Liberty” observes, “there is nothing at all to be said on the wrong side of the question.” In contrast, as the great English liberal explains at length, in ethics, politics, and religion there is typically much to be said on the many sides of their hard and enduring questions. Siraganian’s second thesis states, “Viewpoint diversity can work only as an instrumental value.” She’s right that viewpoint diversity serves as a means to an end. That, however, is no more an argument against viewpoint diversity than it is an argument against valuing the learning of Greek as instrumental to understanding Plato. She further objects that viewpoint diversity is summoned in support of two competing university goals – seeking truth and forming good citizens. The former depends on acquisition of technical knowledge and questioning ruthlessly, while the latter, in the United States, involves gaining an appreciation of, and cultivating the virtues that support, freedom, democracy, and American constitutional government. Yet far from undermining the claims of viewpoint diversity, its importance to both seeking truth and forming good citizens underscores viewpoint diversity’s versatility and doubles its value. Siraganian’s third thesis states, “Viewpoint diversity assumes a partisan goal based on unproven assumptions.” Contrary to her insouciant assurances that there is little or no reason to suppose that universities have excluded conservative scholars and ideas – and notwithstanding her sly insinuation that conservatism amounts to QAnon – evidence abounds of such exclusion and of the damage it has done to scholarship and teaching. For example, in 2024 in “Beyond Academic Sectarianism,” Siraganian’s Johns Hopkins University colleague, political scientist Steven Teles, examined how the paucity of conservatives scholars has resulted in the decline of scholarship and teaching in vital topics that progressives tend to neglect and disparage. These include American political ideas and institutions, and diplomatic, military, and religious history. A 2024 Foundation on Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) survey provides additional evidence that universities have constructed censorious progressive monocultures. And a July 2025 working paper by professors Jon A. Shields, Yuval Avner, and Stephanie Muravchik demonstrates the drastic left-wing slant of college syllabi on contentious issues. Two of the coauthors discussed their findings in an August Wall Street Journal op-ed, “Evidence Backs Trump on High-Ed’s Bias.” Siraganian’s fourth thesis states, “Viewpoint diversity undermines disciplinary and specialized knowledge and standards as well as the autonomy of academic reasoning and scholarship.” She again observes that debate has ended about DNA structure. But inquiry into and arguments about human nature, justice, virtue, regimes, citizenship, friendship, romantic love, family, the soul, and God differ from inquiry into and arguments about molecules. That’s in part because molecules do not have opinions, much less divergent opinions about good and bad, right and wrong, noble and base. Siraganian’s fifth thesis states, “Viewpoint diversity is incoherent.” This, though, does not follow from the key observation she offers in support of the thesis. She rightly maintains that background assumptions about what constitutes a sound argument and a well-ordered university limit the range of viewpoint diversity on campus. To identify an idea’s or a practice’s limitations, however, does not to refute it but rather clarifies it. Siraganian’s sixth thesis states, “Viewpoint diversity has already been used, both in the United States and abroad, to attack higher education and stifle academic freedom.” On occasion it has. But on occasion science has been used to justify eugenics, enlightenment has been invoked to subjugate peoples, and tenured professors have been known to enforce ideological conformity on students and untenured faculty. Abuses of science, enlightenment, and academic authority discredit the abuser, not the thing abused. Siraganian’s seventh thesis states, “Viewpoint diversity is an argument made in bad faith.” Sometimes it is. But Siraganian ignores or suppresses the substantial evidence that universities ignore or suppress empirical data, rational arguments, and research paradigms that conflict with – and stymie and shun scholars who depart from – progressive pieties. This represents a failure of scholarly inquiry and moral imagination on her part, and a betrayal of what she herself regards as the university’s principal mission, which is pursuit of the truth. Siraganian could have avoided these numerous miscues of reason and rhetoric by studying the arguments on the other side of the question. If she had had better opportunities to run her categorical pronouncements by colleagues – in her department, university, and disciplines – with perspectives that differ from her own, perhaps she might have discovered the weaknesses afflicting her opinions and the strengths contained in theirs. What goes for the attack on viewpoint diversity goes also for its promotion. The Trump administration would do well in its justified efforts to encourage viewpoint diversity on campus to consider views on the other side of the question, particularly arguments concerning the federal government’s limited role in managing opinions and perspectives at the nation’s wayward universities.
