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To any reasonable observer who's not already part of the in-group and selectively blind to conflict theory when it suits him, this is obviously DEI for conservatives.
Obviously this new emphasis of viewpoint-inclusion is intended to benefit conservatives here and now, and I’m fine with that. I would be much happier with race-based AA if the ratio of white to black had become 300:1 as with conservatives in the humanities.
To be fair, it’s technically viewpoint neutral. In comparison to DEI for BIPOC which very clearly names the beneficiaries, the beneficiaries here would depend on the composition of the field at any given time.
Thus:
Xi Jinping thought may be many things, but I’d be hard pressed to call it conservative. And I would be in favour of much of this - it seems clear that those in charge have been misusing their ability to label viewpoints as ‘stupid’ or ‘respectable’ to favour their side. See for example the ‘women are only weaker than men because of nutrition’ stuff that was going around. A lot of the stuff that is treated as absurd is vetoed by inertia and politics - for example I have no idea what Xi Jinping thought is, or what arguments creationists make.
Even assuming that it's 100% viewpoint-neutral, and even in a hypothetical scenario in which there isn't a raging culture war being wages - how would you even classify people? How do you measure viewpoint diversity? How do you quantify conservative-ness or liberal-ness? What even is the spectrum on which to measure viewpoints, and what is the target value for balance?
I think this is the same point that @FCfromSSC sometimes gestures at: this is a relatively straightforward problem to solve in a cooperative non-adversarial environment and a very difficult one in an adversarial environment.
Given a list of candidates, I’m confident that either of us would be able to put together a reasonable analysis of which candidates have views broadly in line with the current consensus and which don’t. I’m also confident we could work together and create a merged analysis with perhaps a bit of bickering and horse-trading but no fundamental issues.
I’m NOT confident that I could write a set of rules that would be serviceable and not easily abused at scale. Perhaps a mathematical sentiment analysis, but that’s obviously less ideal.
In general, I think that once you start thinking about how to do the latter, your civilisation is already in deep trouble. Thus the meme about law as an incredibly rickety construction propped up by one beam called ‘the word [reasonable]’.
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It absolutely is, and the response to it has left me feeling rather ambivalent and frustrated.
I oppose any kind of intervention like this. At the same time, I have been listening to voices on the left, even outside the US, objecting that this is like Russia, autocratic, despotic, McCarthyite, the government imposing an ideology, unconstitutional, violating the very principles of the American experiment, and so on.
And all I can think is - boy, I'm sure glad that the American government wasn't making ideological demands of universities in the name of diversity before this. Can you imagine how horrifying that would have been? Lucky nothing like that has ever happened before!
What the Trump administration is doing is bad, and pretty indefensible. However, it is only a fraction of what his opponents have been shamelessly doing for decades. 'Viewpoint diversity', while a good ideal in the abstract, cannot be imposed like this without horribly undermining the very purpose of a university as an educational and research institution. But the exact same things are true of racial diversity, gender diversity, and so on. May we at least hope that this will cause people to react against the entire notion of imposed diversity requirements?
Well, we may hope anything. But I doubt anything will happen. No one of significance is going to notice the hypocrisy. The right will keep on saying "it's okay for us to do it because they did it first", and the left will keep on saying "this is nothing like what we did how dare you even compare them", and principles will remain alien to this entire discourse.
When Arnaud Amalric said 'Kill them all, God will know his own', there was a recognition that at least some people in the city were good Christians and not heretics. It's an olive branch from the Red Tribe to have at least some tokens within the institutions to have them not recognized as partisan enemies: a university full of gay race communists has no Reds within it and can be attacked without regret or pause.
Well, congratulations, academia: you drove out all the witches, and now Trumpemort is here to destroy you. Universities have lost tax-free exemptions and their endowment because of racial prejudice before: certainly the universities have uncontroversially engaged in such as the Asian lawsuits have revealed. If they're not even capable of denouncing their own radicals then what are they good for? As Pol Pot wisely said: 'to keep you is no benefit: to destroy you is no loss.'
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Perhaps a steel man could be that if humans of different races are interchangeable then race-based quotas let you spread academic caress between races without affecting the serious business of thinking that goes into them. Whereas viewpoint quotas affect the actual business of the academy. But I don’t see how to square that view with ‘diversity is our strength’ and ‘lived experience’.
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