Connect the Dots 101

THE FORM OF DEI THAT’S ALIVE AND WELL ON CAMPUS

By Rose Horowitch, the Atlantic

No one would be surprised to learn that an elite university has a plan to counteract the structural barriers to the advancement of a minority group. Johns Hopkins University’s latest diversity initiative, however, has managed to put a new spin on a familiar concept: The minority group in question is conservative professors….

Johns Hopkins is part of a growing trend. Several elite red-state public universities have recently established academic centers designed to attract conservative scholars. And institutions that haven’t sought out conservative faculty may soon find new reasons to do so. The Trump administration has  demanded  that Harvard hire additional conservative professors or risk losing even more of its federal funding. (Even as it made that demand, it insisted that Harvard adopt “merit-based admissions policies and cease all preferences based on race, color, national origin, or proxies thereof.”) In response, Harvard’s president said that the university is expanding programs to increase intellectual diversity on campus. The era of DEI for conservatives has begun….

Academia has leaned left for as long as anyone can remember. For most of the 20th century, conservative faculty were a robust presence throughout the humanities and social sciences….but their ranks have thinned since the 1990s. At the same time, moderate and independent professors have been replaced by people who explicitly identify as liberal or progressive.

A traditional free-market conservative might interpret these statistics as evidence that right-wing thinkers simply haven’t achieved at a high-enough level to become professors…but [according to] Steven Teles, a political scientist who wrote a widely discussed article last year for The Chronicle of Higher Education titled “Why Are There So Few Conservative Professors?,” [and] one of the faculty members involved with the partnership: “The current injustice (sic) is a consequence of previous injustice… “You don’t deal with structural injustice purely through anti-discrimination,” he added. In other words, action of a more  affirmative  variety is needed.

Opinions differ on the precise extent to which conservatives are being excluded from academia versus self-selecting into nonacademic careers. But they clearly face barriers that liberal and leftist scholars don’t. Professors decide who joins their ranks and what research gets published in flagship journals. And several studiesshow that academics are willing to discriminate against applicants with different political views. One 2021 survey found that more than 40 percent of American (and Canadian) academics said they would not hire a Donald Trump supporter. [added: perhaps such support is prima facie evidence of anti-intellectual tendencies.]

Conservative underrepresentation has also hurt higher education’s standing with the country at large. Polls show that Americans, particularly on the right, are losing trust in universities. 

[the lack of trust has deep roots on the right.]

“When George Wallace ran for president in 1972, he blamed “pointy-headed intellectuals” for everything from rising crime and changing sexual mores to busing and the stalemate in Vietnam. Vice President Spiro Agnew had exploited the same theme in 1970 when he attacked the country’s “effete corps of impudent snobs,” those “nattering nabobs of negativism” who opposed the Nixon administration. Two decades earlier the vocabulary was different but the mood was similar. In the fall of 1952 the epithet “egghead” was coined, apparently by columnist Stewart Alsop, and enjoyed wide circulation.” https://newrepublic.com/article/91589/the-washington-intellectual

Hiring a conservative professor isn’t as straightforward as it sounds. At this point, few qualified conservatives are in the applicant pool in the humanities and social sciences, Teles told me.

Legislatures in red and purple states across the country have shoveled money into universities to establish schools of civic thought, which are marketed as the conservative answer to academia’s leftward drift and the rise of identity-oriented disciplines. 

[nota bene: African American studies developed as a direct response to the well-documented history of racist so-called scholarship at such places as Columbia University (see Teaching White Supremacy by Donald Yacovone.)]

The conservative politicians and right-wing donors behind these centers advertise them as a way to fight back against the excesses of the left. But Storey told me that they are not generally ideological; the goal is to teach students to debate across differences. Supporters see them as a safe space for conservative scholars who feel ostracized by the broader academy. There, they can hopefully generate work that earns recognition from researchers in the mainstream, just as disciplines such as gender studies and African American studies gained legitimacy over time, Teles told me.

[How naive are we expected to be? The right is using its political and financial muscle to tear down the very legitimacy of gender and African American studies it purports to aspire to?

It increasingly controls local media (Sinclair Broadcasting Group) and social media (X, Meta); national media (Washington Post); is attacking public media (NPR) and suing national broadcast media (CBS).

Having conquered public access to information they want to dress-up propaganda as scholarship.

Columbia has permitted Trump to define antisemitism to align with a genocidal political movement. The United States is abducting legal residents off the streets without due process and shipping them 1500 miles from home and the issue is how comfortable conservatives feel on campus?]

Juliana Paré-Blagoev, an education professor at Hopkins and the outgoing president of the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), told me that she’s in favor of affirmative action—just not for conservatives, because they haven’t suffered documented discrimination. “It doesn’t mean that everybody in that center isn’t a good scholar or that they can’t be competent and strong contributors, but if you look at the actuality of it, their CVs tend to be thinner than others,” Paré-Blagoev said. She is open to the possibility that conservatives are underrepresented because they don’t feel welcome, but she doesn’t think universities should make systemic changes to accommodate them. “I don’t think that an individual’s discomfort is a five-alarm fire,” she said….

Johns Hopkins has similarly repurposed techniques that are more commonly practiced by DEI offices. …The university first made funding available to hire a cadre of conservative and heterodox thinkers within the faculty of arts and sciences. So-called cluster hiring has been a popular way to create a support network for faculty of color who might otherwise feel isolated. The idea is to intervene earlier in the academic pipeline to keep right-leaning thinkers on the path to a professorship.

[…as the administration does its best to kill Head Start.]

François Furstenberg, a history professor at Johns Hopkins and the secretary for the university’s AAUP chapter, told me that Republicans have unfairly smeared affirmative action as a way to hire people “based on their race and not on their qualifications.” Now they’re the ones who want to hire professors based on their politics, not their fitness for the role. 

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/conservative-professors-dei-initiatives/682944/