Overall, he felt the class successfully walked the high-wire of an intense debate that has roiled U.S. college campuses around an idea that many call viewpoint diversity. Conservative think tanks have long advocated for it, Trump and his Department of Education have wielded it as a cudgel seeking to disrupt universities, and scores of professors have felt compelled to fight back for a competing vision of it.

But what exactly is it?

Defining the term 
Within higher education, support for open discourse and academic freedom is nearly universal, but some argue those goals cannot be achieved without a special effort to recruit and promote conservative voices at several schools, many of them highly selective, that skew, according to ample data, to the left.

One leading proponent for a conservative version of viewpoint diversity nurtured those views at Brown. John Tomasi, professor emeritus of political science, left College Hill in 2022 to lead the NYC-based Heterodox Academy, an advocacy group pushing universities to hire more conservative-thinking faculty. He cites data including a 2021 YouGov poll showing that 71 percent of “very right” professors feel hostility within their departments toward their views, compared to just 5 percent of “very left” faculty.

“Most professors want viewpoint diversity because of intellectual humility, because we’re trying to deliver a certain kind of experience to our students and to ourselves—of discovery and exploration,” Tomasi argued. “That our university at its best truly is a community of imperfect learners,” incomplete in their understanding but eager to fill in the gaps, “where we learn most when we encounter people who see the world differently than we do.”

But some in academia who advocate for what they see as genuine viewpoint diversity also suggest that, right now, the term is code for making campuses with progressive reputations move rightward. “Viewpoint diversity means wanting more conservatives,” Harvard government professor Harvey Mansfield wrote in the Harvard Crimson—before saying his university should do exactly that to get powerful conservatives off the school’s back.

His definition was echoed by Amanda Anderson, Brown English professor and director of the school’s Cogut Institute for the Humanities, in her October 2025 Chronicle of Higher Education essay sharply critical of the Trump push. She argued that viewpoint diversity wrongly “imagines that individuals occupy identifiable political positions aligned with stable and explicit beliefs that do not change over time,” while the reality is that there will be a “plurality of positions among individual scholars.” 

She continued in the piece: “The deluded attempt to enforce identitarian political assumptions enjoined by the administration cannot achieve such pluralism. On the contrary, it will narrow the ideological range of acceptable expression.”

But viewpoint diversity that happens organically is valuable. “I think it’s really important to have conservative thinkers and conservative students,” said Prudence Carter ’91, a Brown sociology professor who heads the University’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. She asks students in one of her courses to read the conservative thinker Charles Murray—even though she finds his views on race and IQ “an insult to my intelligence”—in order to pair Murray’s writing with that of his critics. 

Regardless of the debate about its merits, the Trump administration’s demand for a rightward shift in academia has been aggressive. It has mandated goals for faculty, admissions, and programs and threatened to revoke federal research dollars from noncompliant schools. 

That push intensified at the start of the current academic year, when a Trump administration–proposed “Compact for Excellence in Higher Education” promised additional federal dollars for targeted schools that agreed to incorporate the right’s definition of viewpoint diversity. This included “an intellectually open campus environment, with a broad spectrum of ideological viewpoints present.” But if that demand sounds anodyne, the compact also included an ominous assertion—“academic freedom is not absolute”—that was the ultimate deal-breaker for the majority of targeted schools that declined the compact. 

That includes Brown, the second university, after MIT, to reject the compact. Beyond the official refusals, many critics called the compact’s mandates for viewpoint diversity hypocritical when the Trump administration was seeking to ban campus efforts to make students, faculty, and staff more diverse in terms of race, gender, and other measures.

In some ways that event is emblematic of an emerging zeitgeist at Brown and other campuses: a passionate desire for free expression even amid the minefield of aggressive federal pressures and an often enraged progressive resistance.

Trying to do it right 
The uproar over the government’s proposed mandates—as well as negative public reactions to left-wing students shouting down conservative speakers to the point of cancellation at top universities—has also been met with a serious discussion across college campuses about how to improve free expression and develop programs where clashing views can be openly and civilly debated.

For example, viewpoint diversity was atop the agenda at a D.C. summit of leaders from Brown, Harvard, Duke, and other universities, where Brown President Christina H. Paxson told the gathering that “there is an acute need to sustain environments where everyone is treated with dignity, even and especially as they vigorously advance and contest opposing points of view.”

At Brown, many professors and student leaders say that despite the tense political moment and lingering memories of one decidedly censorious incident—the shout-down cancellation of a 2013 talk by then New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly—a series of thriving campus initiatives refute the stereotype of a left-wing university intolerant of debate. These include the long-running Janus Forum Lecture Series, which pairs speakers with opposing viewpoints on hot topics; the three-year-old Center for Politics, Philosophy, and Economics (PPE), which convenes and mixes disciplines with its provocative programs on weighty topics; and the emergence of the Brown Political Union, a student group staging debates on controversial subjects. 

 A “Twenty-First-Century Thing”
The term “viewpoint diversity” is a twenty-first-century concoction that gained wide currency after 2002, when the late conservative firebrand David Horowitz made the phrase a centerpiece of his so-called “Academic Bill of Rights.” But the question that underlies it—Does the academic world attract teachers and thus breed graduates with a more liberal outlook, and is this bad for society writ large?—is arguably as old as the American university itself. (Indeed, Cotton Mather, an early president of Harvard, left in 1718 to help found Yale because he thought faculty at the Massachusetts school were too liberal and pro-Enlightenment.)

In November 1969, with several hundred thousand anti–Vietnam War protesters about to descend on Washington, D.C., Vice President Spiro Agnew gave a speech in Des Moines, Iowa, that aimed to blame a restive nation on left-wing educated elites—especially college professors. “A spirit of national masochism prevails,” Agnew declared, “encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.”

The “impudent snobs” speech escalated the conservative complaint that left-wing academics training America’s future elites served to undermine the right’s vision of patriotism and religious faith as core national values—but it wasn’t exactly a new charge. 

Neil Gross—a Colby College sociology professor who authored 2013’s Why Are Professors Liberal and Why Do Conservatives Care?—said the controversy really heated up at the dawn of the twentieth century, as the German vision of the modern university as a seeker of new ideas and greater truths  found its way to American shores. 

“This was partially because there was all this money flowing into research universities, both public and private,” Gross said. “And oftentimes the trustees or donors wanted to make sure that the faculty weren’t advocating for busting up railroad trusts or whatever.” But there was also a religious aspect, as top schools drifted away from their often sectarian origins to emphasize free scientific inquiry.

Some see the 1900 backlash against Stanford University’s firing of sociologist Edward A. Ross, who openly embraced white supremacy and opposed immigration from Asia, as the birth of modern notions of academic freedom versus liberal orthodoxy and the catalyst for the creation of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). The complaint that liberal professors undermined U.S. conservatism went mainstream in 1951 when William F. Buckley established himself as a modern conservative thought leader with his polemic God and Man at Yale, which argued that New Haven academics were too liberal and anti-religion, and was published amid an anti-Communist “Red Scare” witch hunt that ruined the careers of dozens of liberal-minded professors. That segued into the tumult of the 1960s, when Agnew’s Iowa rant epitomized a broader view on the right that the surge of middle-class college enrollment after World War II was indoctrinating young people to radical views on issues like civil rights and U.S. militarism.

Early efforts at Brown
John Tomasi studied at Oxford in the 1980s under the famed theorist G.A. Cohen. His professor was a Marxist who both mentored Tomasi and argued frequently with his young student, who traces his free-market libertarianism to his upbringing as a son of a small-town Vermont pharmacist.

During his 27 years on College Hill teaching political theory, Tomasi eventually branded himself “a bleeding-heart libertarian” to describe his views that veered left on social justice despite his core economic conservatism.

But it was an out-of-the-blue phone call in the mid-1990s that sparked a eureka moment. The caller was a pollster doing a survey on the voter registration of Ivy League professors in the social sciences and humanities. Tomasi said he was not especially partisan but had registered as a Republican to vote in a recent primary—which caused the pollster to blurt out that Tomasi was only the second GOP voter he had found on the Brown faculty.

Tomasi recalled feeling surprised. “I was just beginning my career, and it was kind of striking,” he said. He had fallen in love with seeing students discussing ideas in clusters on the Main Green—but he saw the campus as torn between those who wanted the constant clash of viewpoints he had enjoyed with Cohen at Oxford and others who took comfort that almost everyone on campus walked in progressive lockstep.

Increasingly, Tomasi looked for ways to promote his Oxonian vision for the academy. In 2003 he launched the Political Theory Project at Brown to study the interplay between free-market philosophy and democracy, followed by a Janus Forum Lecture Series. He continued such efforts until he left Brown in 2022 to become founding president of the Heterodox Academy.

Last fall’s brief debate over the Trump administration’s “compact” seemed to harden a resolve that Brown work harder to forge its own vision for viewpoint diversity, free from White House mandates. 

Today, Tomasi backs up his work at the Heterodox Academy with data aiming to show that conservatives on college campuses feel isolated and discriminated against—and are wildly underrepresented. He shared one study that showed that while conservative or far-right professors had been nearly equal in number to liberals and leftists for a short time in the mid-1980s, today 74.2 percent identify on the left, with just 10.8 percent on the right and 14.9 percent as “middle of the road.”

Yet even critics like Tomasi acknowledge there are many students on campus who have sought out open dialogue about tough issues. He said the idea for the Janus Forum debates evolved in the early 2000s after two students—one conservative, one liberal—came to Tomasi with an idea for a seminar class on modern right-wing thought. “They said to me, ‘You know, we didn’t come to college to become more skillful defenders of any particular inherited ideology,’” Tomasi recalls. “‘We came here to think for ourselves.’”

Making tough conversations happen 
Growing up on New York City’s Upper West Side, a longtime bastion of progressivism, Malcolm Furman ’27 supported both Democrats and Republicans, depending on the issue. When he arrived at Brown in 2023, he connected with older students who were founding the Brown Political Union (BPU), a debate-oriented society modeled after groups at Oxford and Cambridge and U.S. versions at Dartmouth and Yale.

“I liked having discussions on difficult issues with people I disagreed with,” said Furman, now BPU’s president. The BPU has grown more quickly than Furman expected—sponsoring debates around sensitive issues and hosting speakers including former presidential candidate Andrew Yang ’96, who drew a crowd of 600.

It has not been a completely smooth flight. In 2025, the BPU announced an event taking on a hugely distressing issue: Should local law enforcement cooperate with federal agents pursuing mass deportations of undocumented immigrants? The Brown Dream Team, a campus group supporting undocumented Brown students, called the very premise of the event “inflammatory.” An hour before the event, the BPU postponed it, claiming it was due to a technicality.

But, said Furman, after conversations among the BPU and the Dream Team, a debate took place in front of about 100 people, including some of the activists who had objected. “There was obviously tension in the room because everyone knew the context,” he said, but the impassioned conversation that night included Dream Team members offering their views instead of shouting the event down.

In some ways that event is emblematic of an emerging zeitgeist at Brown and other campuses: a passionate desire for free expression even amid the minefield of aggressive federal pressures and an often enraged progressive resistance.

Amber Marcus-Blank ’27, the BPU’s vice president, worked on progressive issues like climate justice while in high school, but at Brown she wanted to expose herself to broader views—and to pursue compromise rather than confrontation, she said. She conceded that not all students share her desire to have their political ideas challenged. Also, she said, some are scared to speak up: “People are so intelligent and plugged into politics here that you almost censor yourself because you don’t want to debate someone who knows the topic better.”

A Brown Daily Herald student poll last November found that 46 percent of respondents said they felt uncomfortable expressing their political beliefs at Brown, more so among conservative students. In that same survey, as a reminder that the Brown student body has long tilted heavily left and often attracts students for that reason, 78 percent identified as liberal or progressive, and just 7 percent conservative. About 68 percent said political perspectives are important in forming friendships.

Professor of Political Economy and PPE Center Director David Skarbek said that despite the controversies that have roiled college campuses recently, he feels optimistic about viewpoint diversity across Brown—in part because of groups like the BPU and programs like the PPE Society, in which 35 fellows meet for regular, spirited conversations around sometimes difficult topics. He also sees that energy in his own class on the politics of crime—the same fraught subject that triggered 2013’s Ray Kelly incident. He presents progressive and conservative critiques of law enforcement, including a discussion of political scientist James Q. Wilson’s controversial “broken windows” theory, popular among conservatives, that cracking down on small crimes prevents larger ones.

After that discussion, when Skarbek offered the class in 2021 in the wake of nationwide protests following the police killing of George Floyd, he worried that many of the 50 students would drop out; instead, enrollment doubled. Brown students are “hungry to hear interesting ideas that are more nuanced than political platitudes,” he said.

Last fall’s brief debate over the Trump administration’s “compact” seemed to harden a resolve that Brown work harder to forge its own vision for viewpoint diversity, free from White House mandates. That resolve was on display at a PPE-sponsored forum on academic freedom, at which Brown professor Anderson called such federal demands “a direct attack on University autonomy and academic freedom.” 

“There are fascinating different viewpoints being expressed at this event,” said Matthew Guterl, professor of Africana Studies as well as Brown’s head of diversity and inclusion. “You don’t see this on Capitol Hill or in Congress—a kind of ideological difference manifested on this panel performed with comity and kindness. Where else does one see that now but here? If we don’t defend that, then where else will young people see what that looks like?”

Will Bunch ’81 is a national opinion columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer and author of several books, including 2023’s After the Ivory Tower Falls.