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Notes -
Question for academics.
FIRE and Heterodox Academy call for campus "viewpoint diversity" as sort of the implementation of Mill's marketplace of ideas. The president of FIRE says:
I'm not in academia and haven't spent much time on campus since I graduated 20 years ago. So everything I hear is secondhand. The message is always that there is a problem, but it's mostly isolated to the "usual suspect" departments: anthropology, sociology, literature, and The Studies.
Much of the "viewpoint diversity" discourse has dealt with which guest speakers and student protests are and aren't allowed. Those seem to me like sideshows. It seems the main problem is students in these usual suspect programs graduating without ever having been exposed to perspectives opposed to progressive orthodoxy. These students go out into the world not having any idea that the Overton window is much wider than they've been told. They don't realize there are sophisticated rejoinders to the claims they're hearing, and those rejoinders aren't all from right-wingers—many of them are from tenured experts on their own campus, most of whom stand politically left-of-center.
On many (most?) campuses do we need more Milo on campus to inject "viewpoint diversity" into the system? Or do universities just need to exploit the expertise that already exists on campus from faculty in other buildings? Implement a "dueling lecturer" class. So have your gender studies class, but bring in an evolutionary psychologist (and perhaps a biologist or an MD?) to lecture on the biological retorts to social constructionist claims. Have an economist to your sociology class to explain scarcity, and market forces driving meritocracy. Bring an analytic philosopher to Theory of Literature to show that words actually can mean things. And make the content of these "opposition lecturers" a real part of the coursework. To pass, you have to steel-man both sides of the argument to the satisfaction of both lecturers.
The point is to ensure students know that there are opposing viewpoints, and that they are mainstream and not "alt-right propaganda". And to do that, the university should break through its own departmental balkanization.
Again, I know little about university politics and the feasibility of this approach. But I've never heard it suggested, and I thought maybe someone here in the know could tell me why this would or wouldn't work/help.
(Tenured CS prof here.)
One thing that you're missing is the teaching/research split among faculty. At all of the most prestigious schools, research is the priority and teaching only secondary. I've never heard of a faculty member denied tenure for poor teaching at one of these schools; it's always about their research not being good enough.
This research emphasis means that you won't find any faculty members who want to participate in a scheme like this (of any political persuasion). Your proposed classes would require a lot of extra effort to teach, and generate no career benefits.
As an aside, I suspect you are also wildly underestimating the amount of effort such a class would be to teach. Trying to teach anthropology to an econ major won't go well because the econ major won't know how to read a 300 page book in a week (a typical anthro major at a top-tier school like Harvard will be reading >20 300 page books/semester); conversely, teaching econ to an anthro major won't go well because the anthro major won't have any intuition for calculus (and you can't reasonably teach any micro/macro econ without math). Developing material that actually is engaging for both of these audiences is hard.
Do econ majors have any actual intuition for calculus either?
A long running joke where I live has been that one degree program in a local technical university is ”business studies for people who know math”.
At my alma mater they took mathematician calculus, which was regarded as being on the same level of difficulty as the engineering calculus track, so I'd assume so.
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