Last October, at The Eternally Radical Idea, academic freedom fighter Greg Lukianoff pointed to a featured article in the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) journal Academe which argues that viewpoint diversity is a threat to academic freedom. It’s still worth a look because the issue certainly hasn’t gone away.

The article, by Lisa Siraganian, a Johns Hopkins professor of comparative thought and literature, “problems with arguments for intellectual pluralism”:

There is always some background conception at work, some assumption about what makes a good, valuable university, some categorical definition that permits (for example) the University of Austin to “aspire to intellectual pluralism.” That background assumption, like Milton’s extirpation of Catholics, gives the lie to the commitment to a diversity of viewpoints. Its proponents are simply advocating for diversity in a particular direction and type that differs from the current reality and status quo. Once again, you cannot simultaneously defend rigorous arguments in support of the university’s striving for truth and support rigorous arguments for ideological (or intellectual or viewpoint) diversity. The two aims directly conflict.

“Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity,” Fall 2025

She argues that “Viewpoint diversity has already been used, both in the United States and abroad, to attack higher education and stifle academic freedom” and that the “Viewpoint diversity is an argument made in bad faith.”

Lukianoff and colleagues respond,

The piece starts out with this genuine banger. Siraganian treats “viewpoint diversity” as a threat to truth-seeking itself, tossing out caricatures about “flat-earthers” and “QAnon believers” (because of course it does) to avoid addressing the real question: How can you find truth in a system that systematically excludes dissenting voices?

The answer, of course, is obvious: you can’t. Every period of intellectual stagnation in human history, from the medieval university to Lysenkoist biology in the Soviet Union, has begun with the same conviction: We already know what is true, and those who doubt it are either fools or heretics.

Today’s academy, dominated by an overwhelming ideological consensus on many of the most contested political and moral questions of our time, risks the same fate. You don’t need to hire conspiracy theorists to recognize that the absence of serious dissent makes error invisible. If a department of theologians once all believed the sun revolved around the Earth, the best cure was not more theologians — it was a heretic with data.

Greg Lukianoff, Samuel J. Abrams, and Adam Goldstein, “Is higher education even interested in reform?”, October 10, 2025

Both articles are well worth reading. The background to the discussion is the current U.S. administration’s attempt to ensure that universities are not stifling academic freedom in order to protect the beliefs of the majority of academics.

One issue that may become a hot button topic is this: The reason universities care what government thinks is that they get tax money to carry on. It’s a good question why taxpayers should be compelled to support them if their attitude to diversity of opinion — as outlined by Saraganian — is that of a strict church.