Pluralism in academia

Scientific practice benefits from diversity. Cardiology, for example – a veritable male stronghold – paid little to no attention to gender differences for a long time. As a result, the symptoms of a heart attack are often not recognised in women, and those misdiagnoses cost lives: in the Netherlands, more women die from heart failure than men. That is why organisations such as the National Network of Female Professors, of which I am a board member, have campaigned for years to increase gender diversity at Dutch universities.

Even far-right politicians embrace the idea of diversity. However, when they talk about a diverse academia, they mean something quite different. For right-wing politicians, it is not about diversity in terms of unchangeable characteristics such as gender or ethnicity, but rather about political beliefs – what Americans call "viewpoint diversity". According to the right-wing narrative, academics are all far-left, and universities are "wokism" strongholds. To make academia more diverse or “plural”, they claim that universities must focus on recruiting researchers with conservative or right-wing views.

Due to the growing electoral success of far-right parties, this narrative is becoming increasingly dominant in The Hague. For instance, on 16 April, the independent Member of Parliament Mona Keijzer tabled a motion to allocate more funds from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) to research into the disadvantages of migration or climate changes without human interference. Keijzer argued that this is necessary to counter "left-wing groupthink" on university campuses. Remarkably, the Minister of Education, Rianne Letschert, partly agreed with this line of thinking and promised to launch an investigation into academic pluralism.

It is true that university staff position themselves as more left-wing than the average Dutch person, according to research by the sociologist Herman van der Werfhorst. In particular, academics tend to be more tolerant of migrants than the rest of the population, but there is nothing surprising about that. “Professional groups socialise and select, and that does not apply only to academics,” Van der Werfhorst emphasises. “For instance, accountants are generally more right-wing, and they also exhibit little diversity in their views.”

The right-wing orientation of accountants seems to cause little concern to most politicians. Yet, according to far-right politicians, the fact that the same process of socialisation leads to scientists who are, relatively speaking, more left-wing is simply unacceptable. Keijzer and her supporters claim that their motivation stems from concern about the quality of Dutch science, arguing that left-leaning universities are problematic because self-censorship and conformism lead academia to lose its objectivity.

You may be wondering how real that fear is. A 154-page report by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) from 2018 – written in response to a motion by the right-wing party VVD – showed that there is no evidence of “self-censorship and a restriction of perspective diversity” in Dutch academia.

But let us assume, for the sake of argument, that pluralism in science does need to be better protected. Would Keijzer’s proposal contribute to that? I highly doubt it. By arguing that the NWO should allocate more funds for research highlighting the “drawbacks of migration”, she, as a politician, is stipulating in advance what the outcome of the research must be: that migration is bad. Clearly, not a recipe for good scientific practice.

The same applies to more general calls to employ "right-wing" scientists. Suppose a researcher is recruited to represent a conservative voice in a certain debate. Now suppose that, on the basis of objective research, the same researcher reaches conclusions that run counter to the conservative view. Is this researcher still allowed to publish that conclusion, or must they remain a “representative of the conservative view”, the role for which they were specifically hired?

In short, it is doubtful whether the more cosmopolitan attitude displayed by many scientists detracts from scientific quality. But even if that were the case, it is clear that the proposals of far-right politicians – aimed at subjecting scientific research to political censorship – would only exacerbate this problem many times over. Policymakers in The Hague would therefore be better off refocusing on the real diversity issue: the fact that Dutch academia is still largely a white men’s club.

On Staff's Viewpoint, UU's employees share their views with the UU community. The Professor of Modern Political History, Annelien De Dijn, is one of the columnists invited for this space. Her columns are published in Dutch and then translated into English by DUB. You can also read students' perspectives on Students' Viewpoint.