The Challenge of Diversifying Voices on Campus

Coming shortly after the 2024 presidential election, the second Seattle University Presidential Speaker Series event of the academic year was timely, as Keith Whittington, the David Boies Professor of Law at Yale Law School, touched on the challenges universities have in presenting and encouraging diverse voices on campus.

It’s a challenge SU President Eduardo Peñalver says Jesuit universities in particular should rise to meet as they seek “to understand people we disagree with.”

“The result of the most recent presidential election underscores the importance of understanding people who think differently than many of the prevailing views on campuses,” Penalver adds. “It’s never been more difficult to explore these contours of civil disagreement, but never more important that we do that.”

Whittington, author of several books including You Can’t Teach That: The Battle Over University Classrooms, says that while it is vital institutions offer diverse voices on campus, the challenge to do so is only growing, especially as what it means to be conservative continues to evolve.

“If you teach a class on the history of conservative thought in the United States, there are real questions about what ought to be in that syllabus,” Whittington says. “It probably would look different than if you were to teach that class even 20 years ago.”

Whittington acknowledges that the majority of faculty on college campuses lean left and that has become even more pronounced in the past several decades. Even many right-leaning faculty, he says, are more Libertarian than traditionally social and religious conservatives.

And so finding faculty who hold views consistent with the incoming Trump administration is no easy task.

“Trump’s electorate is overwhelmingly non-college educated,” Whittington says. “Compared to even 15 years ago, it’s going to be much harder to find people with PhDs or advanced degrees who would self-identify as Republican, let alone identify as conservative. Who is going to come through that pipeline and potentially be interested in academia as a career?”

Whittington says universities should be less worried about who faculty are voting for and instead focus on what their intellectual perspective is, including what questions they ask, how they pursue answers and what viewpoints and perspectives they incorporate in their scholarly work.

Without faculty who are open to a variety of viewpoints, there will be too many perspectives and ideas that won’t be represented and potential research that won’t be explored simply because scholars don’t find them relevant or interesting.

“Ultimately, what you want is to try to bring back a wider range of questions and wider range of perspectives in academia and have academia be more open to a wider range of questions,” Whittington says. “But that’s a tricky and difficult task. Current faculty are often going to look at the questions that are being asked by outsiders as not very interesting.”

Whittington says because of that, it’s up to universities to convince existing faculty that areas that they may want to marginalize are in fact interesting subjects to explore. Unlike public universities, private universities such as Seattle University are under less threat to have federal or state governments impose standards and authority over who the institution’s faculty is and what they teach, but that means the college must take it upon itself to introduce diversity of thought on campus.

This also applies to issues of free speech, from speakers a university might invite to an institution’s policies on student protests. The key, Whittington says, is consistency.

That said, Whittington says universities have to be discerning about the voices they allow on campus. As an example, he said there are plenty of people who agree with the incoming administration’s claims about tariffs despite most mainstream economists agreeing that those claims are incorrect. Whittington says the goal shouldn’t be how to get people to speak on campus whose beliefs are widely believed to be incorrect, but instead how to hold a healthy debate about the subject with people engaging in good faith.

“How do we inform people around those issues and do it in a way that is productive and construction,” Whittington says. “The goal should be curiosity, not contempt.”

The Presidential Speaker Series will next feature Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, on March 12, 2025.