On intellectual diversity and differences that may not make a difference

Abstract

Calls for diversity in higher education have been ongoing for, at least, a century. Today, the diversity movement in higher education is in danger of being co-opted in the US by a move to make ‘intellectual diversity,’ i.e. the diversity of political opinion, on par with the cultural and historical diversity that one finds within differently racialized populations. Intellectual diversity is thought to track different modes of thinking between conservatives and progressives that need policy interventions to promote and protect. Here I offer an account of a mode of thinking to probe what conservative, libertarian, progressive, and critical theory orientations, as modes of thinking, should show in order to present themselves as tokens of ‘intellectual diversity.’ Ultimately, I gesture to the conclusion that intellectual diversity as a mode of thinking degrades into either infinite particularity or impossible singularity that do little establish a call for policy intervention.

Keywords:

• creative imagination
• Toni Morrison
• Beloved
• diversity
• collective memory

Acknowledgment

Many thanks to the editors of this special issue for their invaluable feedback on several drafts of this paper. Thank you also to the audiences at the 2014 Summer Institute of American Philosophy and NY-SWIP for their feedback and engagement with some of the ideas in this essay.

Notes

1. I owe the term ‘racialized as white’ to Nathaniel Coleman’s use of the term in his earlier statements of the lack of Black-centered curriculum in higher education in a UK context. (Also, for a brief, but significant, recounting of the dominance of populations racialized as white in professional philosophy, see Coleman 2015).

2. (See, for example, Jones 1977–1978; Harris 1989, 1997; Moulton 1996; Nye 1998; Mills 2005; Walker 2005; Yancy 2007; Haslanger 2008; Salamon 2009; Marcano 2010; Dotson 2012; Alcoff 2013; Erlenbusch forthcoming).

3. Of course, it is important to note that the call for ‘diversity in higher education’ exists in various national contexts and in many areas of study, interdisciplinary studies, and transdisciplinary contexts besides.

4. The so-called ‘Academic Bill of Rights,’ started as a call for safeguarding conservative positions in the academy and, early on, found some measure of legislative support. For example, the House of Representatives in Missouri (Jaschik 2007) and Pennsylvania (Jaschik 2005) attempted to move towards monitoring colleges and university to ensure the protection of conservative views as an outgrowth of protecting ‘intellectual diversity.’ The intellectual diversity movement in the US has been building for almost 15 years and has finally culminated in so-called ‘progressives,’ like Michael Roth, adopting the clarion call of ‘affirmative action for conservatives’ (Roth 2017c). There are dissenters, however (See, for example, Fish 2004; Rees 2017).

5. This charge cuts, at least two ways. First, there is the position, reminiscent of Horowitz, that claims that intellectual diversity refers to diversity existing between conservative and liberal people, for example (Horowitz 2004a, 2004b). The second use of intellectual diversity is deployed by Glenn Geher to refer to the ‘intellectual diversity’ between ‘men’ and ‘women’ (Geher 2017). The difference between these two positions on intellectual diversity is quite wide, though Geher seems to collapse them together. To explain this collapsing will take this paper too far afield. Rather, this paper focuses on the first position. Intellectual diversity, here, refers to significant differences among political orientations, which is a far more pervasive positon today (See Boyers 2017, for an attempt to offer a, presumably, ‘balanced’ understanding of the call for intellectual diversity on US campuses today.).

6. Theoretical archeology, here, ‘refers to a process that takes fragments of concepts and/or theoretical frameworks and reconstructs the philosophical investigations [or conceptualizations] that these remains imply,’ (Dotson 2017, 418). For a fuller explanation see, ‘Theorizing Jane Crow, Theorizing Unknowability’ (Dotson 2017).

7. I owe the use of ‘ingredient’ here to Xhercis Mendez’s work. She writes, ‘the word ingredient conjures up the idea of cooking, an activity that is often linked to female bodies and often includes creatively bringing very different things together in order to create something new (a meal) that both contributes to life and is life sustaining,’ (Mendez 2015, 49n9). I take the term ‘ingredient’ to be a closer approximation of how Morrison outlines a theory of creative imagination than other words generally used in the academy.

8. For a fuller exploration of the ‘outsider within’ as a researcher position, see Patricia Hill Collins’ articulation in 'Learning from the Outsider Within,' (1986).

9. I owe these insights about the use and value of future-directed engagements to many conversations with Yomaira Figueroa, a consummate decolonial futurity scholar and friend (See also, Figueroa 2015).

10. Margaret Garner was a runaway, US, black, enslaved woman who, upon imminent recapture, in January 1856, tried to kill her children and herself rather than return to slavery. At least, this is how her story is usually told. The details of Margaret Garner’s actions are hazy. What is clear from historical record is that Margaret Garner, succeeded in killing her 2-year old daughter, Mary Garner, in January 1856 by slitting her throat with a carving knife.

11. Margaret Garner was separated from her family and sold further south.

12. It is important to note that affirmative action programs were not created to ensure intellectual diversity (Harris and Narayan 2007). And even relatively conservative people in US professional philosophy understand that reality (Leiter 2017). So, this conclusion does not impact affirmative action programs as they were traditionally conceived in the US.

13. This, of course, can be overcome by warrantedly establishing what types of difference make a difference for intellectual diversity within a mode of thinking. It is unclear whether conservative, libertarian, progressive and critical theory orientations can offer such signposts. In any event, these kinds of arguments need to be made and cannot be simply assumed.