This CHE essay was quite interesting; an excerpt:
Where did viewpoint diversity come from? In the 2010s, American social psychologists began to argue over how to deal with the fact that most of them were liberals (in the American sense) and looked at human social behavior and cognition through that ideological lens. The quarrel had been triggered by Jonathan Haidt’s argument that, for epistemological reasons, their field needed more political diversity. Only a system of ideological checks and balances would enable them to rein in the otherwise-unquestioned prejudices of the majority.
This intervention represented a challenge to the discipline’s hitherto dominant epistemic value of value neutrality because it requires the identification of researchers with a political stance. Amid the widely discussed replication crisis of psychology and other scientific fields, many of Haidt’s colleagues took seriously the concern that their moral and political biases could be part of the reason that so many of their findings could not be reproduced. The liberal-bias controversy contributed to a larger push for reforming the institutions of science to curb the inherently biased thinking of human beings.
That the proponents of viewpoint diversity focus on science does not mean that their project is free of moral-political views. In fact, their political epistemology is very much rooted in the classical liberalism of John Stuart Mill and emerged in response to the American culture wars. Part of their political mission is to emphasize scientific knowledge production rather than the reallocation of status and power among different social groups. Beginning in 2015, the nonprofit advocacy group Heterodox Academy carried the demand for more viewpoint diversity into the wider moral economy of higher education....
Viewpoint diversity only entered the conversation about liberal bias in 2001, when the forensic psychologist Richard Redding made the case for sociopolitical diversity in psychology. Concerned that the American Psychological Association had expanded its advocacy efforts during the 1990s and that U.S. senators and federal judges had begun to express distrust in social scientific expertise, which they perceived as corrupted by a doctrinaire commitment to liberal values, Redding also called on his colleagues to provide analyses that are “as objective and value-neutral as humanly possible.” But, recognizing that humans could never analyze human life in a perfectly value-neutral manner, he also urged psychologists to “disclose their biases” and “foster a true sociopolitical dialogue in our research, practice, and teaching that would give equal time to opposing views.”
The disclosure of political biases in the academy was precisely what value neutrality — at least in the sociologist Max Weber’s classic formulation from 1917 — had discouraged. Redding’s creative misinterpretation turned value neutrality on its head. What set Redding and Weber apart was the advent of diversity. Redding cited the 1978 Supreme Court ruling on Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which had declared race-based preferences constitutional if they were justified by the goal of “diversity,” as opposed to social justice. Such diversity, the late Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. contended, brought “experiences, outlooks, and ideas that enrich the training of [students] and better equip … graduates to render with their understanding their vital service to humanity.” Piggybacking on the American Psychological Association, which in the 1990s had made cultural diversity one of the profession’s core values, Redding urged psychologists to expand their conception of diversity to include sociopolitical values, especially the hitherto marginalized values of conservatives. And thus, value neutrality had mutated, almost beyond recognition, to viewpoint diversity.
When, in the 1910s, Weber explained the meaning of value freedom in the social sciences, he explicitly advocated it as an alternative to what is today called viewpoint diversity. Value-laden science could only be justified, he argued, if “all partisan valuations will have an opportunity to assert themselves on the academic platform.” Since this was hardly the case in Wilhelmine Germany’s state-run colleges, allowing those loyal enough to the monarchist state to gain professorships to profess their moral and political persuasions turned colleges into “theological seminaries,” Weber railed, “without the religious dignity.” Weber insisted instead that nopartisan valuation whatsoever should be asserted on the academic platform (while encouraging his colleagues to voice their political views in other venues such as opinion pieces in newspapers or talks in public forums).
A century later, the propagation of viewpoint diversity has taken the path not taken by Weber: It seeks to create an academy where all partisan valuations are represented. The advocates of viewpoint diversity and value neutrality share the goal of preventing the degradation of colleges into seminaries, but they seek to realize it through very different moral economies.
I guess I am strongly on Weber's side of this debate, but I would be curious to hear from those better versed in the social sciences affected by this debate how it is playing out. Also happy to hear from philosophers who have thought about these questions.
