How to Broaden the Academic Tent

Courageous university leaders are now publicly recognizing that university faculties have a viewpoint diversity problem. The range of opinions regularly represented on campus has become too lopsided, leaving important questions unasked and significant topics understudied. This long-simmering intellectual problem is now a political liability, as increasing numbers of people feel excluded from the scholarly enterprise, and Americans are coming to believe they are ill-served by institutions they are asked to support. The academy urgently needs to broaden its tent.

Without practical models for increasing intellectual and political diversity on the faculty, though, it will become tempting to ignore the problem. That would be unfortunate. Universities face the prospect of spending decades as a political football. Even if they develop some effective defenses against the Trump administration, they are unlikely to recover the bipartisan support they need to confidently operate if they don’t pull their institutions firmly back toward the American center.

Over the last several years, we have been developing a suite of models to bring underrepresented intellectual and political perspectives into the heart of academic discourse. All of our models seek to change the course of current university practices while going with the essential grain of academic life.

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