I Support Viewpoint Diversity

Plus, Some Important News and Updates!

1.

You may have noticed the recent flurry of media discussion of “viewpoint diversity” in academic hiring and admissions. This seems to have been triggered by some new threats made by the Trump administration against the perceived enemy strongholds of the academic left. I’m not sure of the exact details of this latest round of our national Grand Guignol. I’ve been too busy reading Corneille’s Le Cid (1637), and reflecting on whether that great tragicomedian is right to insist that Aristotle’s account of the proper elements of tragedy amounts only to a set of guidelines, and not a list of rules. I find it perfectly compelling, anyhow, to present Chimène as unable to overcome her love for Rodrigue, even after he has killed her father.

Let me come right out and say, again, that I strongly believe in viewpoint diversity. I myself adopt a wide diversity of viewpoints on every issue I take up. These viewpoints are often mutually contradictory, yet they are all mine. Like any good American intellectual, I follow in the spirit of Whitman, and I contradict myself. I believe very strongly that all academic hiring and admissions in the United States should prioritize candidates with profiles like mine — self-contradicting, uncertain, vacillating, non-committal, restless belief-revisers. I am myself, in other words, exceedingly “viewpoint-diverse”. So yes, again, I say, three cheers for viewpoint diversity!

Oh wait, what is this then? My new intern/amanuensis/latte-runner/chimney-sweep, Pip, is telling me I’ve misunderstood what is at stake here. He’s only 4’8’’ but when it comes to staying on top of the news he is an absolute giant — that’s why I took him on. Someday I might even start paying him. Pip tells me the idea is that each new hire or admitted student should represent precisely one viewpoint. They should come in with a fully formed conception of what that viewpoint is, and they should, as a condition of their hiring or admission, be prepared to stick with it. What the fuck? What do these people think universities are?

Plainly, the idea that academics can be neatly and unambiguously characterized in this way is a further extension of algorithm-creep into our social reality. I knew an eccentric English fellow in Istanbul, in the early-Facebook era, who was deeply obsessed with Turkish electoral politics. He was somehow able to override Facebook’s pre-set range of options regarding “political views” —“very liberal”, “somewhat liberal”, etc.—, and to insert a long-winded paragraph about the enduring tension between the civic-minded Kemalists and those who are willing to place their hope for the survival of Atatürk’s vision in the power of the army. But that was a last stand, I see now, against what would become, by the time of Twitter’s ascendancy a few years later, a mostly extinct model of political engagement. Now, to have a political identity really is just to click on “somewhat liberal”, “somewhat conservative”, or whatever, and then to be done with it — and perhaps soon also to send off, with but one more click, your job application. Whatever job results from this, however, cannot be the job of an intellectual — or, if you think that label is too precious or belongs to another era, any job that results from such algorithmic plotting of the candidate’s pre-settled political views cannot be held by anyone worth listening to.

It is no argument to insist that for years the progressive left has been deploying its own strategies for viewpoint-based hiring, by effectively coercing speech from candidates in the form of their “diversity statement”. These statements were odious not because of the particular content of the coerced speech they sought, but because both the First Amendment and the values of academic freedom are incompatible with ideological litmus tests of any sort. That is so obvious that it’s almost embarrassing to have to say it, as if I’m back giving a class presentation in high-school civics. But, well, here we are.

One great difference anyhow between the diversity statements of the past years and the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy era is that the McCarthyites were accommodating enough simply to force you to sign their oath; the DEI offices, by contrast, forced you to write your own, and then to sign it. This is in keeping with broader transformations in academic bureaucracy, leading to a general bloat of language across all domains of activity. Many of us have heard of that old request made by Max Planck to his higher-ups: “I require 10,000 marks to continue my investigations into theoretical physics.” Whether or not this is apocryphal, it is certain that Planck had an easier time of it, as regards funding, than any physicist hoping to extract a subvention from the European Research Commission today, a task that can easily take two or three years of full-time commitment to the work of getting all the inflated verbiage of the application just right, according to the ever-changing standards of the committee, all in full knowledge that the effort could well fail.

It is in some sense a shame that the diversity statements they were coercing out of us until recently met their demise at the moment fully functional LLMs hit the market — there was an instance, if there ever was one, where it really did make sense to outsource our writing tasks to the machines. I hope that if the Trumpists succeed in their efforts to impose viewpoint-based scrutiny of our job applications in the coming years, AI will likewise rise to the occasion and enable us to say whatever it is we are supposed to say, simply in order to be able to make a living, without having to waste any of our precious human cognitive energy on it.

Better yet, though, if you are in a position to circumvent all this shit, and live your life as an actual intellectual without subjecting yourself to the ritual humiliations concocted both by the universities and by the hostile parties besieging them — then by all means do that instead.

2.

But let me move on, now, to some pressing items of business, as well as some regular reminders. As part of the recently announced move into “Phase 3” of The Hinternet, you will be seeing me, JSR, taking back considerable control over our operations. This is why I took Pip on, among other things. As an orphan from some remote Balkan village, Pip arrives without any factional loyalties, and so can hardly be expected to engage in the sort of court intrigue and machinations that we’ve been seeing among some of the other behind-the-scenes players at our publication. I won’t name any names, HLG, but I will at least give acronyms.

I had ceded some power over the past year mostly because I was finding it difficult to maintain all the different plates I had spinning in my complex pastiche of a life. I was also, as I never made secret, dealing with some very real psychiatric challenges. Here I am reminded of John Nash, the Princeton mathematician who at some point, between being played by Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind (2001) and dying in a freak taxi accident on New Jersey’s Route 1 in 2015, determined he had simply had enough of living as a psychiatrically disordered person. “I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation,” he explained at one point. “I simply decided to think rationally.” Now, I’m not sure, as to myself, that I entirely want to give up irrationality for its opposite. But what I will say is that I agree at least with what seems to be implicit in Nash’s decision: that whether you are crazy or not has a great deal to do with the way you narrate, to yourself and to others, the particular character of your inhabiting the world. And narration is, precisely, a power, that crazy and sane people alike possess, enabling them to move across the fluid boundary between these two categories at will. So in Phase 3 of The Hinternet, I will not quite make a Nashian move, but I will at least drop my own insanity from the list of, shall we say, editorial leitmotifs that have given this publication its distinct flavor over the past few years.

3.

HLG, writing under the “Hinternet Editorial Board” byline on July 6, made some important announcements, but omitted other ones.

For one thing, she forgot to mention that we are in desperate need of an in-house cartoonist, someone who can come up with highly idiosyncratic, elegant, and minimalist illustrations to accompany our published pieces. Let us know if you are interested!

We are also looking for someone who has proven experience in the field of machine-learning engineering, with specialization in large language models. The nature of this project remains top-secret, for now, though I can say it is one we will be pursuing under the aegis of The Hinternet Foundation, the non-profit we are currently building, and which we expect to have official status by October.

4.

Have I reminded you, recently, to buy my new book? Do it! You’ll be glad you did!

Here is an interview I did with HLG on the book, back when she and I were on better terms.

And here is an interview I did on the same, with the very gracious Donovan Hohn, at the newly revived Lapham’s Quarterly.

Lapham’s also had the very nice idea of rerunning a piece I published at The Hinternet in April, and somehow, with just slight adjustments of title, image, and typeface, managed to make it that much better than the original. Read it!

5.

Soon I will no longer be giving these reminders, as the September 1 deadline is fast approaching, and anyone who is planning to submit to our Essay Prize Contest will necessarily have already got started. But for now it’s still not too late! Click on the image below to learn all the Contest’s details. Does the topic interest you? Are you thoughtful? Then try your hand! It’s not as if you have to pay us $10,000 if you don’t win!

6.

We have had two cancellations, and therefore find ourselves with two remaining openings, for the inaugural Hinternet Summer School, on “Scholarly Fabulation: Theories and Methods”, beginning next month. Please write to us (editor@the-hinternet.com) if you are interested, but do so quickly! You may download the syllabus here:

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7.

Starting in 2026, our Summer Schools and our Essay Prize Contests will be taking place within the institutional framework of The Hinternet Foundation, which is legally and financially a separate beast from The Hinternet. Our 2025 experiments in these domains are, so to speak, “test-runs”, and we are immensely appreciative of all you bold pioneers who are getting involved and helping us to get off the ground!

If you are interested in learning more about the Foundation, and you think you or your institution might be interested in collaborations, or in making a donation, please do reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you!

Finally, note that through the summer we are running a special subscription offer, with a 25% discount on the annual rate. Don’t pass it up! The Hinternet remains, and will remain, an entirely reader-supported operation, and without you we cannot possibly keep this up!

—JSR