What About Diversity Of Opinions?
Two institutions in American society academia and the media lead the way when it comes to talking about the need to promote greater “diversity” in their work forces.
As someone who spent the first 20 years of his career in academia and expects to spend the last 20 years in the media, I suggest that it would be wise to take such talk with a grain of salt.
Oh, sure, many schools have altered their normal employment processes to recruit more diverse faculties, and many media outlets have done likewise in hiring reporters. But the diversity that they have been aiming at involves skin pigmentation and/or sexual plumbing.
Such factors may be relevant in a few narrow circumstances, but they have little to do with the truly significant kind of diversity that ought to concern both institutions - diversity of viewpoints.
Consider a recent study examining the party affiliations of faculty members at Cornell University. (The study focused on the humanities and social sciences, where teachers are most likely to deal with ideologically controversial issues; civil engineering professors rarely discuss political topics while teaching, say, soil mechanics.)
The Cornell Review, a conservative student newspaper, tallied up the party affiliations of Cornell faculty members after examining the public voter registration records of communities in the vicinity of the school. The results (with the departments listed in alphabetical order, and with “D” meaning Democrat and “R” meaning Republican): African Studies (5D, no R); Anthropology (11D, 1R); Economics (10D, 3R); English (35D, 1R); Government (16D, 1R); History (29D, no R); Psychology (25D, 1R); Sociology (7D, no R); and Women’s Studies (33D, no R). Grand totals: 171 Democrats and 7 Republicans!
The situation at Cornell is far from unique. Nor do the people running our campuses seem to worry about that kind of lack of diversity. A few years ago, the dean of the law school of the State University of New York at Buffalo admitted, “As far as I know, there is not one conservative on the law school faculty.” But he had no problem with liberals having exclusive control of the faculty since, as he put it, “liberal implies freedom of exchange of ideas, which is what education is all about.” It seems not to have occurred to him that the exchange of ideas might be more meaningful if students were exposed to a faculty with more diverse viewpoints.
Now, let’s turn to the media. Delegates to the recent annual convention of the American Society of Newspaper Editors were told of the results of a survey, conducted by the Roper Center, of Washington-based bureau chiefs and congressional correspondents. These are not members of the corps of opinion-mongering commentators; rather, they are the men and women who are hired to bring the unvarnished facts about national political developments to readers around the country.
Roper asked them how they identified themselves along ideological lines. The results: 30 percent said they are moderate. But the interesting answers were at the opposing ends of the political spectrum: 22 percent said they are liberal; 39 percent, liberal-to-moderate; 7 percent, conservative-to-moderate; and 2 percent conservative.
In terms of party affiliation, 46 percent said they are independent or “other.” But 50 percent identified themselves as Democrats and 4 percent as Republicans. Asked whom they voted for in 1992, 89 percent - 89 percent! - said Clinton. (Bush got 7 percent, Perot 2 percent, and “other” 2 percent.)
These lopsided results didn’t seem to bother the bigwigs at the ASNE convention. Most were confident that the reporters surveyed are professionals who put aside their own politics when covering the news.
Yeah. Their political biases don’t affect which stories they emphasize and which they play down; the language they use to characterize the competing sides in political controversies; the positive or negative labels they affix to political participants; the interest groups they portray favorably and those they denigrate; the “think tanks” whose research studies they publicize and those whose studies they ignore.
You can believe that, just as you can believe the law school dean mentioned above. Or you can conclude that academia and the media have a peculiar notion of what’s most important when it comes to promoting “diversity.”
If college faculties are overloaded with liberals, it doesn’t help much to promote the sort of diversity that students need - exposure to differing viewpoints - if the women and/or minorities hired are basically ideological carbon copies of the teachers already on the staff.
And if most reporters are liberals, it does little to promote the sort of diversity that readers deserve - balanced treatment of current events - if the women and/or minorities hired merely reinforce the existing liberal dominance in the newsrooms.
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