To understand the lack of viewpoint diversity in higher education, look beyond the five-alarm fires.

It’s the slow burn of ambivalence and indifference.

Photo by Justin Shen on Unsplash

The big stories about excesses in higher education tend to get a lot of press. These are the ones you may have heard about at UIC, Georgetown law school, Yale, and many other institutions, going back almost a decade. And they are concerning, to be sure. But if we only pay attention to this problem in higher education when a splashy story hits the news, we’re missing a big part of what’s going on.

I recently joined the Courses and Curriculum committee at the University of Illinois. It’s a two-year commitment to the college level group responsible for vetting new course proposals. So, if an instructor in a particular unit in the college of Arts and Sciences wants to get an official course number, they produce the required paperwork—including a syllabus—and this committee reviews it.

Often the proposals are for courses that have been taught previously under a generic shell number, but the instructor is now looking to regularize it. Regularization has the advantage of making the course more visible to students in the catalog.

I have been through this process as an instructor more than once over the years.

When the committee is preparing to meet, the course proposals to be discussed are uploaded to a shared folder for the members’ review. For the most recent meeting, we had six proposals to consider.

Four out of the six proposals had language in them that would shut down open inquiry in the classroom. As I read them, I thought, this is my chance to point this out to the committee. I can show them how doing nothing amounts to green lighting a classroom climate that will explicitly prioritize feelings of offense over viewpoint diversity. After all, if offense matters more than anything else, we can say goodbye to statements like “I oppose affirmative action,” “I don’t like DEI initiatives,” “I don’t support gender-affirming care,” or “I think trans women shouldn’t be allowed to compete in women’s category sports.” This outcome is the inevitable result of syllabus language that states:

The Department recognizes that we are learning together in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, that Black, Hispanic, and Indigenous voices and contributions have largely either been excluded from, or not recognized in, science and engineering, and that both overt racism and micro-aggressions threaten the well-being of our students and our university community.

Or:

The Departments of ____ are committed to the creation of an anti-racist, inclusive community that welcomes diversity along a number of dimensions, including, but not limited to, race, ethnicity and national origins, gender and gender identity, sexuality, disability status, class, age, and religious beliefs… Everyone is expected to help establish and maintain an environment where students, staff, and faculty can contribute without fear of personal ridicule, or intolerant or offensive language.

The committee members listened politely as I outlined my concerns and did my best to explain the implications of doing nothing. They nodded. They asked questions. Interestingly, no one disagreed that such syllabus language would have the effect I was saying it would have.

Some pushed back. One person said they understood but were more concerned about protecting students than they were about being open to a diversity of viewpoints. “That’s fine,” I replied, my words belying my feelings, “As long as we understand that itself is a decision. And we should be clear about what that means.”

Somewhere around this point in the discussion, they seemed to tire and wanted to move on. I understood. After all, we had five other proposals to review and the problem I was bringing up was not only huge, but the committee wouldn’t likely agree on what to do about it. Ultimately, they decided to do nothing. Well, almost nothing. They agreed to relay my concerns to the relevant instructors but didn’t feel that it warranted rejecting the course proposals.

On the one hand, what I’m describing might feel like much ado about nothing. After all, it’s one meeting at one university.

But these are the quiet decisions that add up to the continual erosion of trust and ideological diversity in higher education. They’re often made with good intentions, under the constraints of limited time, by people who—in part because their interests simply lie elsewhere—haven’t fully thought through the magnitude of the problem or its implications.

And to be fair, I get where they’re coming from. It might not be within the purview of a Courses and Curriculum committee to tackle a university-wide culture where free speech, open inquiry, and viewpoint diversity are regularly subordinated to concerns about students feeling offended. Although, that then raises the question of Whose responsibility is it?