Pathetic. Public universities can’t do anything when their legislatures create institutes and schools for the purpose of hiring right-wing faculty. But Harvard departments will need to stand firm in what looks to be massive push for affirmative action for faculty with the right “politics” but not the right scholarly bona fides to be appointed on their merits. As I wrote on a prior occasion:

Diversity, including viewpoint diversity, is not an academic value.  First:  Affirmative action did not come into being to promote “diversity”:  it came into being to remedy the malign effects of American apartheid.  “Diversity” blather arrived on the scene in the late 1970s just when the attack on affirmative action was reaching a crescendo.  It succeeded in keeping affirmative action alive (by arguing that it was “good for business,” including education), but at the cost of honesty and candor in hiring and admissions, and diluting its focus on the victims of apartheid.  Second, viewpoint diversity is irrelevant in serious academic disciplines; in less serious ones, it may be relevant, but there is no way to impose it without violating core academic freedom.  Academic disciplines presuppoes the unequal worth of different viewpoints, and the job of scholars is to assess those viewpoints, and discount the unworthy ones.  Here I find myself in full agreement with Stanley Fish:

“I teach Milton’s poetry as an extension of his theology. Must I in the name of diversity devote time to feminist or postmodern readings of “Paradise Lost”?

“Diversity is not a classroom virtue unless my class is labeled “Approaches to Milton.” Surveying what’s “out there” would be obligatory in such a course. In any other course my obligation is to tell what I think is the truth about the material. Cluttering up the syllabus with paths of inquiry I consider unrewarding just to be “diverse” would be pedagogical malpractice. It would commit the sin of substituting a political imperative for the academic imperative of getting it right.

“This sin is cheerfully embraced by those who argue that because faculty members in the humanities and social science skew left, the imbalance must be redressed by recruiting right-leaning scholars. But this makes sense only if ballot-box performance correlates with classroom performance. It doesn’t. I am a slightly left-of-center Democrat, yet just about every position I take in academic disputes is the conservative one.

“In any of its versions, viewpoint diversity is a sham and a cheat, a rhetorical engine for the political takeover of higher education. The Trump administration uses it as a Trojan horse. The president of Harvard should be ashamed of taking it seriously.”