Stanford set up a program whose aim was to present diverse viewpoints on various topics but the program was criticized for not being "diverse" in terms of the race and gender of the speakers. But the two kinds of "diversity" are not the same, and the value of the first (call it Millian diversity) has almost nothing to do with the values of the second, which used to be called affirmative action before Justice Powell confused an entire nation, including its alleged intellectuals. Sensible reasons for affirmative action include compensatory justice, social inclusion, and providing role models. Millian diversity, by contrast, aims to promote discovery of the truth through exposure to competing ideas and arguments.
UPDATE: Philosopher John Dupre (Exeter) writes with an interesting observation:
As a former Stanford faculty member I was interested to read and briefly follow up your blog post on Stanford’s program of presenting diverse views to its community. While I certainly cannot argue with your distinction between Millian diversity of views and diversity of the identities of holders of the views (though both might be a good idea), you don’t mention the rather ironic fact that, at least as far as I can find out online, the failings with regard to the second point are dwarfed by the failings with regard to the first. An opening session with two billionaire funders of Facebook, one, Peter Thiel, a well-known extreme libertarian conservative, and the other apparently a good friend of his, chaired by the notoriously right wing historian Niall Ferguson, is hardly a paradigm of diverse perspectives.
According to the website subsequent speakers included the IQ and race theorist Charles Murray on inequality, and a conversation on sexuality and politics between the well-known anti-feminist philosopher Christina Sommers and a right-wing Catholic journalist. Francis Fukuyama looks about the most liberal speaker mentioned.
The critics may have got their criticism confused, but they certainly had much to criticise. As the Chronicle article suggests Stanford now recognises, a more diverse (sensu 2) planning committee might well have been a good way of getting a more diverse program (sensu 1).
Indeed, that program of speakers is not exactly a triumph of Millian diversity, although the way to get that is not with affirmative action on the planning committee, but Millian diversity on the planning committee, or simply a principled commitment to speakers with genuinely competing views. The Federalist Society in U.S. law schools is actually a good model of the latter: Federalist Society events always involve a commentator or respondent with opposing views to the conservative speaker. (The Federalist Society does, in my view, too often give a platform to mediocre academics simply because of their politics, but even when that happens, they still have a respondent with an opposing view.)
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