The moral economy of diversity: How the epistemic value of diversity transforms late modern knowledge cultures

Abstract

We may well be witnessing a decisive event in the history of knowledge as diversity is becoming one of the premier values of late modern societies. We seek to preserve and foster biodiversity, neurodiversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, and perspectival diversity. Perspectival diversity has become the passage point through which other forms of diversity must pass to become epistemically consequential. This article examines how two of its varieties, viewpoint diversity and educational diversity, have come to transform the moral economy of science. Both aim at multiplying perspectives on a given subject, but their political subtexts differ markedly. The valorization of educational diversity followed a US Supreme Court decision in 1978 that enabled universities to advance social justice, if they justified race-conscious admissions in terms of the pedagogic benefits of a more diverse student body for all. By contrast, the proponents of viewpoint diversity aim at the reform of scientific knowledge production and distribution rather than the reallocation of status and power among different social groups. We examine the political epistemology of viewpoint diversity by analyzing a controversy between social psychologists who, amid the American culture wars of the 2010s, debated how to rein in their political biases in a scientific field supposedly lacking political diversity. Out of this scientific controversy grew Heterodox Academy, an activist organization promoting viewpoint diversity in higher education. By relating and comparing viewpoint and educational diversity, we clarify what is at stake epistemically in the US-centric moral economy of diversity.

Introduction

Diversity has ascended to one of the most cherished qualities of late modern societies. We do not just recognize the fact of diversity in different walks of human and nonhuman life, we have come to see it as a value. While the appreciation of variety as an organizing principle of many areas of human life has had a checkered history since antiquity, it is only since the 1970s that ‘diversity’ has moved center stage. Historian and philosopher Georg Toepfer (2020: 130; our translation) succinctly captures the logic of the concept: ‘Its paradox lies in collectivizing individuals in homogeneous groups while simultaneously pluralizing these groups as juxtaposed units—expressly without aspiring to a more comprehensive universalization.’ This form is now sought across very different domains. We seek to preserve and foster biodiversity, neurodiversity, racial diversity, ethnic diversity, gender diversity, linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, and perspectival diversity. Perspectival diversity has become the passage point through which other forms of diversity must pass to become epistemically consequential. This article examines how two of its varieties, viewpoint diversity and educational diversity, have come to transform the moral economy of science.

Anthropologist Didier Fassin (2020) identifies two competing conceptions of moral economy. The first is derived from E. P. Thompson and describes the norms and obligations that regulate market activities. For example, the contemporary business world promotes a moral economy of diversity by diversifying goods and consumer groups as well as human capital. American university administrations manage the demographic diversity of their faculty and students with an eye to their institution’s moral reputation and its economic survival. This article is about the second conception of moral economy and that is Lorraine Daston’s ‘moral economy of science’ (Daston, 1995). Here, economy does not refer to the market but to an organized system that displays certain regularities and science is such a highly organized system. Originally, calling it a moral economy of science was somewhat misleading in that its constitutive values were not moral but epistemic values—even if many of them had evolved from originally moral values and were promoted (or fought) in a moralizing tone that passed judgment on those who embodied these values as virtues (or vices). The internal normativity of this system demarcated science as a semi-autonomous field with its own practices and social hierarchies. As a historian of science, Daston examined how a multitude of differently weighted, sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting epistemic values like objectivity, precision, accuracy, or replicability shaped scientific practices over time. The entry of a new epistemic value such as diversity does not replace other epistemic values, but it alters them in precept and practice (Daston and Galison, 2007: 41). For example, feminist epistemologists have declared the diversity of standpoints a precondition of objectivity and their trust in science (Oreskes, 2019). Sandra Harding’s Objectivity and Diversity (2015) proposes an integration of diversity into the logic of scientific research that changes objectivity almost beyond recognition from a ‘view from nowhere’ to a ‘view from below’. Instead of aspiring to an escape from perspective tout court, one seeks to escape the perspective of the privileged by including the perspectives of the oppressed. In the case of diversity, we witness the reworking of a highly moralized political value into an epistemic value in real time. In this case, the moral economy is worthy of its name because diversity has hardly shed its moral-political undertones. Its valorization in science may well indicate a reversal of the gradual autonomization of science from politics and religion that many historians understood as a hallmark of modernity. The ascent of diversity is part and parcel of the transition from high to late modern knowledge cultures and provides an opportunity to chronicle a potentially decisive event in the history of science.

Diversity has come to pervade every aspect of science and scholarship. Universities are prioritizing hires that increase the diversity of their faculty; at American institutions applicants are asked to submit diversity statements that explain their ‘being diverse’ and what they will do to further diversify the institution; diversity managers invite diversity consultants to offer diversity trainings in hope of reducing bias among an increasingly diverse faculty and student body; not just critical social researchers but also prominent natural scientists refuse to speak on ‘manels’, that is, conference panels exclusively filled with men; journal editors check submitted manuscripts to make sure they do not cite only white male authors, and, since journal editors serve as gatekeepers to what becomes peer-reviewed knowledge, critics demand that they themselves become racially more diverse to ensure a distribution of knowledge that does justice to human diversity. The bulk of diversity practices pursue the moral-political goal of social justice by making students, faculty, administrators, and researchers more representative of the general population.

But there is more to diversity. Hardly a matter of concern half a century ago, today, diversity is so widely claimed and called for that it serves a much wider range of projects. There is a true diversity of diversity. In this article, we focus on two related but also conflicting varieties of diversity, viewpoint and educational diversity. The controversy over viewpoint diversity is particularly suitable to study the specifically epistemic stakes in the valorization of diversity because the proponents of viewpoint diversity have made clear that their primary goal is to advance science, not social justice. 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 a leftist lens. Their disagreement had been triggered by Jonathan Haidt’s argument that, for epistemological reasons, their field needed more political diversity (Duarte et al., 2015; Haidt, 2011). Only a system of ideological checks and balances would enable them to rein in the otherwise unquestioned prejudices of the majority. We argue that this intervention represented a challenge to the discipline’s hitherto dominant epistemic value of value neutrality because it requires researchers to take 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 why 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 (Flis, 2019; Morawski, 2019). However, 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 it emerged in response to the American culture wars. Part of their political mission is the reconstruction of scientific knowledge production and distribution rather than the reallocation of status and power among different social groups. Since 2015, the nonprofit advocacy group Heterodox Academy has carried the demand for more viewpoint diversity into the wider moral economy of higher education.

Yet viewpoint diversity cannot be adequately understood in isolation. It gains its significance in relation to other forms of diversity and the larger social context, in which diversity has become an apple of discord. Many diversity practices are not epistemically but morally, politically, legally, or financially motivated. But, since it is the primary mission of universities to produce and distribute knowledge, even their non-epistemic concerns are frequently presented in epistemic and pedagogic terms. In the United States, the most important non-epistemic concern has been affirmative action, especially in the form of race-conscious student admissions, which a series of US Supreme Court decisions allowed only for the sake of ‘educational diversity’—but not to redress past wrongs or advance social justice. Educational diversity shares an epistemological core structure with viewpoint diversity: both aim at multiplying perspectives on a given subject. But their political subtexts differ markedly in that educational diversity has come to serve social justice in the face of the Supreme Court’s original verdict. As we write, the court is expected to revise its earlier rulings that elevated educational diversity to a key value in higher education some 40 years ago. This may have significant implications for the place of diversity in contemporary knowledge cultures, especially in the United States. Considering that this is where most diversity research originates, but that this research is taken up by universities and corporations across the globe, it is important to understand the historical and cultural contingencies that have left their imprint on all things diversity. By relating and comparing educational and viewpoint diversity, we clarify what is at stake epistemically in the moral economy of diversity.

Viewpoint diversity: The advent of a new epistemic value

Before viewpoint diversity came to be problematized as an epistemic value of social psychology, social psychologists had discovered it as an object of study. This happened amid the turmoil of the American culture wars in the 1990s, which shaped the rearticulation of moral psychology as a new subfield of social psychology. Inspired by anthropology, social psychologists like Jonathan Haidt began to compare moral judgments across national cultures and social classes (Haidt, Koller, and Dias, 1993). The primal scene of this new moral psychology was the critique of what began to look like an ethnocentric construction of morality by an earlier generation of developmental psychologists who had reduced morality to the promotion of fairness, prevention of harm, and defense of individual autonomy—a view shared by their European and North American middle-class test subjects but not by Haidt’s lower-class Brazilians, who were equally concerned about sanctity, loyalty, and authority.

By 2001, Haidt had come to realize that American conservatives understood morality more like the Brazilian poor than like American liberals. Consequently, he moved from comparing moral judgments between national cultures and social classes to comparing how ideologically dissimilar Americans thought about sexual morality at a time when gay rights had emerged as the single most divisive issue between them. Haidt now sought to explain the complexity of conservative moralizing to his fellow liberals and argued that, if psychologists continued to confine the moral domain to concerns about fairness, harm, and autonomy, they failed to accurately explain how conservatives thought and felt about sexual mores (Haidt and Hersh, 2001). Among the uses of understanding diversity was more effective political messaging (which would lead Haidt to give campaign advice to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign against Donald Trump in 2016; Haidt, 2016b). As moral psychology became a science of culture wars, it came to be organized around political viewpoint diversity as its object of study.

Political viewpoint diversity did not remain confined to the object side of social psychological research, it also emerged as a problem of subject position when social psychologists came to problematize how their own political viewpoints informed their work on the viewpoints of others. Social psychology is a human science and shares with the other human sciences an epistemological structure first analyzed by French philosopher-historian Michel Foucault (2002[1966]): human beings are simultaneously the empirical object and the transcendental subject of social psychology. It is as people with political viewpoints that social psychologists study the political viewpoints of people. Despite Foucault’s wager, now more than half a century ago, that this ‘strange empirico-transcendental doublet’ called ‘Man’, which constitutes both object and subject of the human sciences, would be ‘erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’, the transformation of moral psychology in the 2000s injected new urgency into the question of how to stabilize this persistent yet persistently unstable epistemological structure (ibid.: 347, 422). What distinguishes human sciences like social psychology from the natural sciences, historian of knowledge Roger Smith (2005) argued, is that they translate the unease that researchers feel about being implicated in the subject matter of their investigations into scientific practices of reflexivity. Although his colleague Jill Morawski (2005) found a persistent resistance among early 20th-century psychologists to addressing their field’s reflexive dimension, individual researchers sought to implement the self-referential quality of their work from the start. A century later, however, it was no longer out of the ordinary to apply psychological theory and methods to psychological science. And this is precisely what happened in the liberal bias controversy that has shaken social psychology for a decade now.

Lack of viewpoint diversity among social psychologists came to be flagged as an epistemological problem at a time when increasing political polarization and intolerance toward conflicting ideological viewpoints was identified as a social problem, when distrust among conservatives in what they perceived as politically lopsided scientific knowledge grew, when diversity discourse and practices began to transform academic knowledge culture at large, and when the diversity of moral points of view had become an object of social psychological research. In 2011, at the annual meeting of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), Jonathan Haidt warned his colleagues that social psychology, just like the other two ‘very liberal sciences’, sociology and anthropology, had evolved into a ‘tribal moral community’ that lacked moral and political diversity and actively discouraged conservatives from entering the field. ‘Morality binds and blinds’, Haidt argued, which might be good for a religious community but not for scientists, ‘who ought to value truth above group cohesion’. In his eyes, this was not only a moral issue but first and foremost a scientific problem: ‘We are hurting ourselves when we deprive ourselves of critics, of people who are as committed to science as we are, but who ask different questions, and make different background assumptions.’ Haidt developed from his own research on moral psychology what historian and philosopher of science Ivan Flis (2019) dubbed a naturalized ‘indigenous epistemology of irrationality’. As a moral psychologist he cast a critical eye on moral psychology. Social psychologists had studied social psychology with the tools of their trade at least since the field’s disciplinary crisis in the 1970s, which had also reflected a larger crisis in American society in issues of methodology, social relevance, and theoretical orientation (Faye, 2012). Like many others in the science reform movement, Haidt derived from claims about how the human mind is working another set of claims about how the human sciences should be working. He concluded his talk with a plea that SPSP become 10% conservative by 2020 (Haidt, 2011). Assuming that it was as moral and political minds that social psychologists studied the moral and political minds of others, Haidt proposed to politicize the recruitment of researchers in order to depoliticize the results of their research.

The problematization of social psychology’s liberal leanings can be traced back to the early 1990s. Early in the US culture wars, Philip Tetlock (1994: 515) cautioned against the growing politicization of the field. If it merely echoed ‘the received wisdom of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party (or any other orthodoxy)’, it would generate ‘few controversies and even fewer surprising discoveries that enrich our understanding of human nature and politics’ (ibid.). Tetlock called for a commitment to value neutrality. As a student of people’s political psychology, he was under no illusion that value neutrality was ‘an impossible ideal’, but he insisted that it remained ‘a useful benchmark for assessing our research performance’. Calling value neutrality a useful benchmark was, in fact, a bit of an understatement considering the existential importance Tetlock assigned to it. For abandoning value neutrality in social psychological studies of symbolic racism (or waning Cold War concerns such as nuclear deterrence) would cost the field its collective credibility as a science:

We find ourselves in scientific hell when we discover that our powers of persuasion are limited to those who were already predisposed to agree with us (or when our claims to expertise are granted only by people who share our moral-political outlook). Thoughtful outsiders cease to look upon us as scientists and see us rather as political partisans of one stripe or another. (Tetlock, 1994: 510)

However, this was the early 1990s: while Tetlock decried a one-sided politicization of his field, the proposed remedy was still value neutrality and not yet viewpoint diversity.

Viewpoint diversity entered the problematization of liberal bias only in 2001, when 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 US 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’ (Redding, 2001: 212). The disclosure of political biases in the academy was precisely what value-neutrality—at least in Max Weber’s formulation from 1904—had discouraged (Weber, 2012[1904]). Redding’s creative misinterpretation turned value neutrality on its head. What set Redding and Weber apart was the advent of diversity. Redding (2001: 211) cited the 1978 Supreme Court ruling on Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, which had declared affirmative action constitutional if it took the form of ‘diversity’. Such diversity, Supreme Court justice Lewis Powell 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’ (Regents v. Bakke, 1978). Piggybacking on the American Psychological Association, which, in the 1990s, had made cultural diversity one of the profession’s core values, Redding (2001: 211) 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 this epistemic value as an alternative to what is today called viewpoint diversity. Value-laden science could be justified, he argued, only 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 universities, allowing those loyal enough to the monarchist state to have gained professorships to profess their moral and political persuasions turned universities into ‘theological seminaries’, Weber (2012[1917]: 308; emphasis in original) railed, ‘but without the religious dignity attaching to [such seminaries]’. Hence, Weber insisted that no partisan 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 up 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 devolution of universities into seminaries, but they seek to realize it through very different moral economies.

A decade before Haidt, Redding already modeled viewpoint diversity on racial and gender diversity by suggesting ‘affirmative-action-like practices’ to bring in more conservative graduate students and professors (fully recognizing the irony that most American conservatives loathed affirmative action). The resulting moral economy creates a species of scientist who defines her scientific self in ideological terms. After all, universities can foster viewpoint diversity through targeted recruitment only if they are made aware of the viewpoints of individual faculty, students, and staff. Affirmative action for conservative social psychologists would require job applicants to present themselves as conservative social psychologists (similar to the ways in which candidates belonging to racial and ethnic minorities currently signal these aspects of their identity in application letters). Whereas social psychologists committed to value neutrality just happened to be conservative or liberal and aspired to separating their political views from their scientific research, social psychologists committed to viewpoint diversity have to articulate their political standpoint as a perspective that they will carry into scientific forums such as lab meetings, peer review processes, or conference panel discussions, where their bias will help to advance knowledge. Thereby, viewpoint diversity transforms the researcher’s ‘scientific persona’ (Daston and Sibum, 2003) into a form of self-representation that hybridizes epistemic and political orientations.

However, whereas value neutrality was primarily a matter of self-cultivation, of internalizing the ethos of ideological self-restraint that Weber (1958[1919]) had articulated in his public speech ‘Science as a Vocation’, viewpoint diversity can be achieved only collectively. In the parlance of identity politics, speakers of American English can now say of a particular person that they ‘are diverse’, which means that this person represents a currently underrepresented social category. Yet diversity is not a property of individuals but of groups. In an article titled ‘Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science’, an, of course, politically diverse group of coauthors around Haidt and Tetlock argued that, individually, social psychologists suffered from confirmation bias: like all human beings, they tended to search for evidence that confirmed their beliefs while downplaying disconfirming findings. ‘Nobody has found a way to eradicate confirmation bias in individuals’, they noted, but people had proved very apt at detecting bias in those they disagreed with. Consequently, confirmation bias could be reined in on the level of the scientific community: ‘We can diversify the field to the point where individual viewpoint biases begin to cancel out each other’ (Duarte et al., 2015: 8). Although viewpoint diversity required of every single researcher to cultivate tolerance of ideological differences, its proponents conceived of it first and foremost as a collective undertaking. In line with this collectivism, the article had been coauthored by ‘one liberal, one centrist, two libertarians, one whose politics defy a simple left/right categorization, and one neo-positivist contrarian who favors a don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy in which scholarship should be judged on its merits’ (ibid.: 2).

Although Redding’s article had already made most of the points that Haidt would make again a decade later, its publication in 2001 did not initiate a controversy like the one following Haidt’s SPSP talk in 2011. Why did the liberal bias controversy not catch on in the 1990s and 2000s but in the 2010s? Of course, one can only speculate about things that didn’t happen. One possible explanation is that the political polarization of the United States increased steadily during this period and, as skepticism toward climate research was growing more and more pronounced on the right, the politicization of science came to be recognized more widely as one of the preeminent social problems of the early 21st century. This trust problem concerned not only the external but also the internal perception of science. At the time, scientists themselves sounded the alarm that many findings could not be reproduced, especially in medicine—and in social psychology (Ioannidis, 2005; Morawski, 2019; Open Science Collaboration, 2015). By 2015, Haidt and colleagues presented the lack of viewpoint diversity in their field as one overlooked cause of this replication crisis (Duarte et al., 2015: 1). While much scholarly attention has been paid to climate change skepticism, the liberal bias controversy represents another chapter in the history of the so-called post-truth era. In the 2010s, this crisis of trust in scientific knowledge gave fresh salience to the concerns that Haidt, a skillful popularizer with a wide-ranging social network, brought back on the agenda: if social psychologists wanted to produce valid truth claims about the minds of morally and politically diverse people they would have to become more morally and politically diverse themselves.

The liberal bias controversy

Haidt’s provocation led to an extended, still ongoing debate among social psychologists. In 2011, the publicist John Brockman organized a discussion forum on his online platform Edge around Haidt’s talk on ‘The Bright Future of Post-partisan Social Psychology’, and, in 2015, the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences invited 34 colleagues to comment on a more elaborate version of the plea for political diversity in social psychology (Duarte et al., 2015; Haidt, 2011). In several articles, social psychologists applied the tools of their trade to study how their own political psychology affected research in their scientific community (Inbar and Lammers, 2016; e.g. Jussim et al., 2016; Skitka, 2020). A systematic survey largely confirmed Haidt’s allegation that social psychologists were overwhelmingly liberal on social issues (with a little more pluralism regarding economic and foreign policy; Inbar and Lammers, 2012). Nobody called into question that American social psychology was an ideologically rather homogeneous field and most acknowledged that this makeup was a potential source of political bias. Thus, a liberal worldview ceased to be the field’s blind spot as it entered into what some of its members dubbed the Bipartisan Ideological Awareness in the Social Sciences moment (Clark and Winegard, 2020; Skitka, 2020). There was a widely shared sense that social psychologists should maintain a scientific orientation, even though individual respondents pointed out that, at least since the 1930s, many had conducted scientific research with the explicit goal to seek justice for disadvantaged people and saw no reason to abandon this activist tradition (Binning and Sears, 2015). While the survey data on social psychologists’ political orientations still has not been supplemented by survey data on their epistemological orientations, Linda Skitka offered an informed guess when she trusted that most of her colleagues strove to be ‘value neutral’, by which she meant that ‘they consistently make an effort to create a level playing field for hypothesis testing and explore both positive and negative normative spins for empirical results’ (Skitka, 2012: 508). At stake in the controversy was how to reconstruct or maybe defend this moral economy of value neutrality in the face of diversity’s steady ascent.

The commentaries on Haidt’s plea for political diversity can be roughly sorted into two equal camps: one considered viewpoint diversity an appropriate remedy for social psychology’s liberal bias, the other would prefer minimizing rather than pluralizing political bias in science. Many of the responses in favor of viewpoint diversity were still critical of particular aspects of the Haidtean argument, as presented by Duarte et al. (2015). One took them to task for their own liberal bias in reading the literature on the psychology of conservatives, but this line of attack amounted to a performative affirmation of the target article’s main argument that the field needed greater political diversity to reveal such biases (Charney, 2015). Other commentators argued that construing viewpoint diversity exclusively in political terms was too narrow because any lack of diversity could result in systematic error. Hence, the field would also profit from religious and methodological diversity and from the inclusion of citizen scientists not confined to an academic perspective (Motyl and Iyer, 2015). Yet others agreed that increasing viewpoint diversity was desirable but cautioned that it had to be accompanied by the cultivation of tolerance because otherwise people wouldn’t feel safe to also express and take seriously divergent viewpoints (Inbar and Lammers, 2015). Essentially, this camp supported the introduction of viewpoint diversity into the moral economy of social psychology.

Then there were commentators who welcomed viewpoint diversity in general but considered affirmative action for conservatives an unrealistic means to achieve it because it would be too risky for junior scholars to admit their conservative leanings (Everett, 2015). This resulted in a catch-22: as long as liberals dominated the university, search committees would not value conservatives as minority candidates, and as long as conservatives weren’t pursued as minority candidates, liberals would continue to dominate the university (McCauley, 2015). Other researchers argued that the overrepresentation of liberals was not simply a matter of discrimination but of self-selection based on biologically rooted personality differences between liberals and conservatives. This aspect of the human condition was not readily remediable, but made it all the more important that academics became more sensitive toward the fundamental differences between liberals and conservatives without pathologizing the latter (Hibbing, Smith, and Alford, 2015). This group of commentators valued the inclusion of non-liberal perspectives on philosophical grounds but felt pessimistic about the viability of Haidt’s activist strategy.

On the other side stood those who opposed viewpoint diversity on principle. Two commentators pointed out that there was no empirical evidence that viewpoint diversity could increase the replicability of social psychological studies (Gelman and Gross, 2015). Several took issue with the ethnocentric framing of those all too American pleas for a political diversity modeled on the United States’ two-party system (occasionally including libertarians as a third party; Bilewicz et al., 2015; Hilbig and Moshagen, 2015; Kessler et al., 2015; Seibt et al., 2015). Of course, this false generalization from the situation of American social psychology and the division of humankind into two types of people, Republicans and Democrats, could also be taken as a reason for doubling down on the need for even more diversity, especially cultural diversity (Jonsen, Maznevski, and Schneider, 2011).

The debate’s focus on the political landscape of the USA threw into relief some of the epistemological and political problems associated with viewpoint diversity. While Redding (2001) had introduced the idea of viewpoint diversity because he believed that the social sciences should not be missing out on the ‘wisdom’ of any political ideology, the liberal bias controversy of the 2010s drew attention to the fact that US conservatism had dramatically changed since the 1980s: what was excluded from social psychology and the elite academy more generally was a strain of conservatism deeply influenced by evangelical Christianity and resentment of America’s demographic changes (Ross, 2015). At the brink of the Trump Era, the point of view, which Americans called conservative, had come to encompass attitudes better described as radical in their anti-intellectualism and willful ignorance, which were not sufficiently reasonable to join academic debate, worried one American psychologist (Funder, 2015). A group of German social psychologists declared their opposition to the affirmative action approach to political diversity because the quest for diversity was inherently limitless and would eventually have to include even the most extreme positions: ‘We do not know how much diversity would be necessary to reduce these biases. Would it be enough to include liberals and conservatives? Or should communists, fascists, and even terrorists also be included?’ (Kessler et al., 2015: 30; emphasis in original). Another German group turned the question of why social psychologists should stop at political diversity into a reductio ad absurdum by asking why advocates of viewpoint diversity did not include religious diversity and hired fundamentalists as counterweights to the biases of an otherwise atheist faculty. Wouldn’t a collaboration between evolutionary theorists and creationists cancel out their respective biases and generate a more truthful theory somewhere in the middle? ‘Scientific truth is not a matter of political diversity and compromises unless one assumes a radical constructivist position’, they concluded (Pfister and Böhm, 2015: 35).

Politically, the problem identified by other commentators was that, even if one subscribed to such a constructivist epistemology, ideological polarization had grown so pronounced that it seemed improbable for American liberals and conservatives to actually form a community: ‘If our objective is to be as “value-neutral” as possible, I’m not sure how bringing together such strongly divided groups accomplishes this—it’s not as if, contrary to what Duarte et al. seem to think, liberal and conservative beliefs, if placed in close enough proximity to one another, will somehow cancel (or balance) each other out’, an American philosopher noted (Wright, 2015: 44). ‘Perhaps instead of undoing the profession’s homogeneity, we should strive to undo its politicization’, another philosopher recommended (van der Vossen, 2015). Many of these critics of viewpoint diversity believed that the institutionalization of bias would not lead scientists to converge on the truth but would open the moral economy of science to the political polarization of the ambient society (Ditto et al., 2015). Haidt’s former mentor, anthropologist Richard Shweder, joined this camp of the controversy as he argued that the ‘bureaucratic formalization of political and moral identities’ in the form of viewpoint diversity would only make things worse. Instead he relied on individual scholars cultivating an ideologically supple mindset: ‘Freely staying on the move between alternative points of view is still the best antidote to dogmatism’ (Shweder, 2015: 40).

Beyond this principled epistemological debate over the value of viewpoint diversity several social psychologists also offered pragmatic methodological responses to the problem of liberal bias in social psychology. In the absence of ideologically oppositional collaborators, Skitka proposed practices that would still allow individual researchers to debias their investigation, for example, by developing multiple competing hypotheses, including one that inverted the main hypothesis the researcher originally wanted to test (Skitka, 2020). Tetlock (1994: 523–6) urged his colleagues to consider data that did not fit into the paradigmatic accounts of social and political psychology by vigilantly searching for counterexamples to the received wisdom. In the course of the liberal bias controversy, many such proposals to reduce ideological one-sidedness were discussed, from adopting a perspectivist philosophy of science that assumed that all hypotheses were true, as all were false, depending on the perspective from which they were viewed, to relying less on seminal articles and more on broadly based meta-analyses of the available literature (Jussim et al., 2016; McGuire, 2004; Skitka, 2020). While some of these measures sought to multiply the viewpoints from which an individual researcher looked at her subject matter, they did not require the targeted recruitment of heterodox researchers.

The moral economy of diversity that emerged from this debate comprised not only calls for quotas for conservatives and study designs less prone to researcher bias but also the fostering of epistemic virtues as the embodiment of epistemic values. There is no replicable procedure to be described in a journal article’s methods section that ensures that a scientist has explored both positive and negative normative spins for their empirical findings, that they have kept their eyes open for data that contradicted their preconceptions, that they have acquired the intellectual agility to go back and forth between competing perspectives, and that they develop the tolerance and curiosity necessary for hiring and listening to colleagues with very different moral-political outlooks. But if knowledge depends on the knower, then the knower’s habitual dispositions are as important as any scientific method and professional code of conduct. Consequently, the knower becomes the target of epistemic moralizing. For instance, in the moral economy of viewpoint diversity, there is no place for dogmatists and zealots, even if their spirited commitment would be highly valued in a field that prizes activist-scholars. One researcher’s epistemic virtue is another researcher’s vice (Hicks and Stapleford, 2016: 461–2). This inevitable moralization of epistemology explains the sometimes accusatory tone of contemporary debates over the epistemic value of diversity (a tone that historians of science recognize from the introduction of other epistemic values such as objectivity into the moral economy of science; Daston and Galison, 2007: 39–42).

The liberal bias controversy in social psychology deserves more systematic analysis than we can offer in this article. Such a study would make a valuable contribution to the body of literature known as controversy studies. Most controversy studies pertain to scientific controversies, in which researchers disagree over a particular scientific fact, some examine controversies over the design of new technologies (Sismondo, 2010: 120–35). A controversy over the moral economy of science is more closely related to ethical controversies. One important difference is that, in scientific controversies, laboratory experiments, clinical trials, or field observations will eventually lend additional weight to one of the conflicting positions. Evidence regarding psychological or genetic differences between people who today count as liberals and conservatives may or may not have bearing on how to evaluate their differences in opinion, but it certainly cannot tell researchers whether they should embrace viewpoint diversity, value neutrality, or politically more engaged forms of scholarship. These are normative questions at the intersection of ethics and epistemology. The debate over liberal bias is ongoing, so it is too early to do what many controversy studies have sought to do, namely explain its closure. It may even turn out to be in the nature of ethical controversies that they cannot be settled, at least not outside of decision-making bodies such as parliaments (Mulkay, 1994) or the Human Genome Organization (Reardon, 2001). Whether epistemic values are irreconcilable and represent a secular analogue of the eternal struggles between the gods that Weber (2004[1919]: 22–4) envisioned, or whether they inform more pluralistic virtue ethics, in which researchers aspire to the practical wisdom to find the right balance between multiple epistemic virtues in response to a given scientific problem (Daston and Galison, 2007), tensions between competing orientations may persist and even fracture a discipline, as happened in anthropology in the 1980s. At present, we can only chronicle how the ascent of viewpoint diversity is transforming the moral economy of social psychology. And we can observe how the resulting disagreements open the black box of the field’s theory of knowledge as participants in the debate articulate and defend their otherwise unspoken presuppositions and commitments. What this continuing controversy has already revealed is that the field may be politically homogeneous, but epistemologically it is not.

The politics of viewpoint diversity

While Haidt originally framed the liberal bias controversy as responding to an epistemological problem, its political significance had been obvious ever since Tetlock (1994) had expressed concern about non-liberal politicians and judges losing trust in what they perceived as ideologically prejudiced social scientific expertise. After all, the question of how knowledge relates to power is eminently political. As social psychologists continued to debate how to deal with their moral and political passions without SPSP or any other institutional body implementing affirmative action policies for conservatives, Haidt took his activism beyond the discipline. Together with professor of law Nicholas Rosenkranz and sociology doctoral student Chris Martin, he cofounded Heterodox Academy in 2015. Martin (2016) took issue with the ideological homogenization of his own field, challenged the propagation of an activist ‘public sociology’ by the American Sociological Association, and played devil’s advocate by confronting his colleagues-to-be with a selection of inconvenient facts that did not fit into the dominant liberal narrative spun by American sociologists. Rosenkranz (2014) was concerned that politically uniform law schools not only became intellectually lazy and produced unreflective, imprecise, and at times even erroneous scholarship but also failed to train future lawyers who understood conservative legal perspectives well enough to craft arguments that would persuade the judges they would actually encounter because these judges happened to be significantly less liberal than law school faculty. Having diagnosed the lack of viewpoint diversity as a problem that plagued not only their respective disciplines but the American academy as a whole, Haidt, Rosenkranz, and Martin sought to create a forum for scholars who sought constructive disagreement beyond the ideological guard rails of their fields. What the members of Heterodox Academy did agree on was that developing a widely shared commitment to one political orientation undermined the intellectual mission of any university or discipline, if only because ‘he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that’ (Mill, 2003[1859]: 104). This maxim of John Stuart Mill’s would come to define Heterodox Academy’s engagement for viewpoint diversity to the intellectual benefit of all parties to a disagreement (Reeves and Haidt, 2018).

The brand of diversity advocated by Heterodox Academy emphasizes its orientation toward truth. Here, however, the pursuit of truth no longer required making the academy value-free. Instead, viewpoint diversity advocates for a meaningful representation of conflicting ideological perspectives. By meaningful, however, they do not mean demographically commensurate because their goal is not social justice for groups underrepresented in higher education such as conservatives or African Americans but to include enough divergent viewpoints to make a qualitative difference in the construction of truth claims: ‘We don’t give a damn about exact proportional representation’, explained Haidt (2016a) in an interview. ‘What we care about is institutionalized disconfirmation—that is, when someone says something, other people should be out there saying, “Is that really true? Let me try to disprove it.”’ Despite this emphasis on truth, viewpoint diversity is hardly free of political overtones. Its propagation has been a direct response to the increasing polarization of American society in the mid 2010s when universities became one of the main battlefields for the reignited culture wars.

Heterodox Academy started out as a website with a blog and quickly morphed into an organization of currently more than 5000 members, who exchange thoughts in discussion forums and meet at annual conferences. Its popularity shot up when, only weeks after its establishment, student protests against alleged racism in higher education erupted across the United States, most prominently at the University of Missouri, Yale University, Brown University, and Amherst College. Student protesters also articulated their demands to make the academy a more inclusive place in the name of diversity, but they called for racial rather than political diversity. From Haidt’s point of view, the form these altercations took—ultimatums given to university presidents, the diffidence of those presidents to argue back for fear of being perceived as blaming victims, the intimidation of faculty who did not support the protesters—amounted to ‘Maoist moral bullying’ and Rosenkranz warned against ‘the increasing hostility to free speech on campus’ (Haidt, 2016a; Morey, 2019). The opposition of Heterodox Academy to the emergence of what would soon be called ‘cancel culture’ drove up media attention and membership. The culture wars endowed a project that had grown out of a purely academic debate between social psychologists with increasing political significance, especially after the 2016 election of Donald Trump as US president fueled the political and racial polarization of Americans even further.

The political philosophy underlying Heterodox Academy is primarily that of John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (2003[1859]), excerpts of which the organization had republished with a new introduction by Haidt under the title All Minus One (Reeves and Haidt, 2018). Such classical liberalism required defending the right to freedom of speech even of people one vehemently disagreed with. But it was not only this long-standing tenet of liberal thought but also the political makeup of US universities in the early 21st century that put Heterodox Academy in the position of advocating for the conservative minority. The opposition to cancel culture had become a rallying cry of the new right and the old left. While Haidt (2016a) declared in an interview that he was ‘absolutely horrified by today’s Republican Party’, Heterodox Academy’s promotion of free speech on campus aligned it with the strategic interests of conservatives (even though many on the right would quickly abandon their commitment to free speech when it came to the question of how high-school teachers could talk about the history of American race relations in the classroom and which books on queer gender identities school librarians could put on the shelf). The activism of Heterodox Academy echoed a 2003 initiative by the right-wing David Horowitz Freedom Center, which had unsuccessfully lobbied Republican members of the US Congress to ratify an Academic Bill of Rights, which would have required universities to strive for greater ‘intellectual diversity’ among faculty and in their curricula (Horowitz, 2004). In 2022, Florida’s Republican legislature gave an intellectual-diversity survey to the state’s public colleges to determine whether they favored liberal viewpoints and repressed divergent political perspectives. A major faculty union denounced the initiative as an attempt at autocratic control and urged faculty, students, and staff not to participate (Long, 2022). While Heterodox Academy always presented itself as ideologically committed to the principles of classical liberalism but as not siding with any political camp and seeking to defuse the culture wars, its advocacy for viewpoint diversity inadvertently supported conservatives and libertarians as minoritized groups in the American academy. Unsurprisingly, the internet was teeming with allegations that ‘Heterodox Academy is purely a right-wing operation’ (Awesome, 2021).

While diversity is often framed as a value cherished primarily by the American left and only appropriated by other constituencies for instrumental purposes, the propagation of intellectual or viewpoint diversity by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Heterodox Academy could also be taken to indicate that diversity has become a value shared across the political spectrum. As far as the classical liberalism espoused by Heterodox Academy is concerned, the valuation of free discussion between people of different persuasions can be traced back to Mill. But there is also an intellectual history that connects contemporary conservative and far-right ideology to the appreciation of cultural pluralism by 19th-century critics of the Enlightenment like Johann Gottfried von Herder (Berlin, 1980; Holmes, 2000). Present-day controversies over how to diversify the academy draw from these different traditions and bring out the diversity of diversity.

As diversity has ascended to become the value that defines late modernity like no other, the most pronounced tension within the moral economy of diversity is that between proponents of political and religious diversity and proponents of racial, ethnic, class, and gender diversity. In a brief sketch of 100 years of viewpoint diversity activism on the Heterodox Academy blog, sociologist Musa al-Gharbi diagnosed a split among viewpoint diversity advocates into two hostile camps, one focusing on identity commitments and mostly associated with the humanities, the other focusing on ideological commitments and mostly associated with the social sciences:

Many within the ‘ideological commitments camp’ seem to believe that the people in the ‘identity commitments’ camps are the problem that has to be overcome, while many in the ‘identity commitments’ camps describe the ‘ideological commitments’ crowd as apologists, trojan horses or useful idiots of white supremacists, male chauvinists, and other reactionary agendas. Consequently, neither side has made much progress in their respective goals. (al-Gharbi, 2020; emphasis in original)

While al-Gharbi believed that, ultimately, they all really sought viewpoint diversity and only had to work together to achieve it, others saw these competing commitments as more divergent and even incommensurable. In their plea for political diversity in social psychology, Duarte and colleagues (2015: 7) recognized that seeking demographic diversity was valuable in its own right because it combatted effects of past and present discrimination, increased tolerance, and created faculty bodies that would be more appealing to students from diverse demographic backgrounds, but its effect on improving the validity of science was indirect at best: ‘Viewpoint diversity may therefore be more valuable than demographic diversity if social psychology’s core goal is to produce broadly valid and generalizable conclusions. (Of course, demographic diversity can bring viewpoint diversity, but if it is viewpoint diversity that is wanted, then it may be more effective to pursue it directly.)’

Educational diversity: Equality through variety

By contrast, critics of viewpoint diversity like German psychologists Hans-Rüdiger Pfister and Gisela Böhm (2015), who believed that psychology did not need political compromises but better scientific methods to overcome its epistemological problems argued against lumping together gender and ethnic diversity on the one hand and political and religious diversity on the other hand. In their eyes, increasing gender and ethnic diversity in the sciences was of no epistemological significance. But it was a legitimate social justice concern because people could not choose their gender, skin color, or ethnicity and it was widely assumed that these qualities had no bearing on academic achievement, so they could not be allowed to affect people’s chances of success in the sciences. By contrast, political partisanship or religious beliefs were not innate and, as the role of the church in scientific revolutions from Galileo to Darwin had shown, could prove an obstacle to scientific progress. There were good reasons for excluding certain points of view. Moreover, affirmative action for conservatives was too reminiscent of totalitarian regimes that selected scientists based on their political orientation. In this moral economy of value-neutral science, there was a place for the promotion of demographic diversity but not of ideological diversity.

What complicated the relationship between viewpoint and demographic diversity in the United States was a series of Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action in university admissions between 1978 and 2016, which struck down explicit quantified versions such as racial quotas or extra points in admission scores for underrepresented groups but allowed the qualitatively based consideration of applicants’ racial identities if it was justified in terms of educational benefits to all students. Universities were not allowed to favor, say, African American students over Euro-American students to make up for the disadvantages the former continued to suffer as a group from structural discrimination or the history of slavery. Columbia University president Lee Bollinger, who had been a party in the 2003 Supreme Court cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger, complained about the legal repression of saying out loud what actually motivated the pursuit of diversity: ‘We’re deprived of the context that gave it a sense of mission’, he said. ‘Every college leader is told, “Do not refer to history.” I think we have a meaningless, abstract conversation about diversity without a rationale’ (quoted in Newkirk, 2020: 119). The rationale that the Supreme Court rendered unconstitutional was social justice. In 1978, it decided in the landmark case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke that it was illegal for a university to reserve seats for members of particular racial or ethnic groups because such reverse discrimination would violate the Fourteenth Amendment, which guaranteed to every individual equal protection of the laws: ‘The guarantee of equal protection cannot mean one thing when applied to one individual and something else when applied to a person of another color’ (Regents v. Bakke, 1978). Legal scholar Jamal Greene (2021: 199) noted that this American approach to law, which focused on the rights of individuals, not groups, led courts to forbid public and private institutions alike to openly acknowledge structural inequality as the basis for their decisions.

What the Supreme Court did recognize, however, was academic freedom. It was protected by the First Amendment and gave universities the right to select their students. At Harvard, since the 1860s, a key selection criterion had been the diversity of the student body. Inspired by the political philosophy of John Stuart Mill (2003[1859]), the university had a long tradition of compromising on high school grades and test scores to provide its students a richer opportunity to learn from each other’s experiences. Initially, Harvard administrators had also hoped this would reduce the risk of civil war as it brought into conversation students from Northern and Southern states. The university’s conception of diversity was broad but, originally, it did not comprise racial diversity. The goal was to create a marketplace of ideas where students from different parts of the country—city dwellers and farm boys; violinists, painters, and football players; biologists, historians, and classicists; future stockbrokers, academics, and politicians—pursued truth by arguing over freely expressed ideas. In the mid 20th century, especially from the 1960s onward, including racial and ethnic minorities in the mix became an increasingly important aspect of the university’s admissions policy. Based on an amicus curiae brief submitted by Harvard, the Supreme Court presented Harvard’s model of educational diversity as a permissible justification of race-conscious admissions (Oppenheimer, 2018). Admissions officers were allowed to consider race or ethnic background if they treated it as ‘a ‘plus’ in a particular applicant’s file’ just like ‘personal talents, unique work or service experience, leadership potential, maturity, demonstrated compassion, a history of overcoming disadvantage, ability to communicate with the poor, or other qualifications deemed important’ (Regents v. Bakke, 1978). This compromise allowed universities to effectively continue practicing affirmative action if they ceased to present it as countering the effects of societal discrimination and instead gave the classically liberal rationale of facilitating debate between people of diverse points of view, developed from diverse backgrounds and experiences. From 1978 on, if American universities wanted to increase demographic diversity, they were legally compelled to present their efforts in terms of perspectival diversity.

Nicholas Lemann’s investigative reporting on the Bakke ruling suggests that, at the time, the Supreme Court’s compromise between affirmative action and equal protection was not popular among any of the stakeholders. African American organizations would have preferred if universities had been allowed to reserve seats for their constituency. Jewish organizations worried that affirmative action would effectively bring back a Jewish quota, which had been part of Harvard’s diversity policy in the 1920s and 1930s when the university administration sought to cap the quickly growing number of Jews admitted to its student body based on their high academic achievements. White liberals considered affirmative action an interim solution, which should be abandoned as soon as the playing field between different racial groups had been leveled. White conservatives rejected any kind of affirmative action as a solution to the problem of underrepresentation, no matter whether it took the form of explicit quotas or holistic diversity assessments. And legal scholars were harshly critical of the legal reasoning underlying the diversity justification of affirmative action (Lemann, 2021).

Initially, few commentaries on the Bakke decision even mentioned its use of the diversity concept. In the following decade, however, more and more universities adopted the Supreme Court-approved Harvard model of educational diversity, and it began to reorganize the moral economy of American higher education—and not just of higher education but also of the business world and the military. By 2003, various Fortune 500 companies and retired army generals petitioned the Supreme Court alongside elite universities not to reverse its diversity ruling (Oppenheimer, 2018: 197–201). What had started out as a value of higher education remade American culture at large. In his book Diversity: The Invention of a Concept, anthropologist and conservative critic of diversity Peter Wood (2003: 20) noted:

To find any ideas of comparable sweep in American society, we have to go back to such antique concepts as the notion that all men are created equal, and that one of the fundamental human endowments is liberty. These ideas, like the idea of diversity today, were understood not as narrow technical or merely legal doctrines, but as basic claims about the right ways for humans to behave toward one another.

As the epistemic value of diversity, mediated by the Supreme Court decision, came to transform American culture and began to be adopted in other countries and by global corporations, not only did it transform the ambient culture, but the ambient culture also transformed diversity. From Mill’s On Liberty published in 1859 via various Harvard memoranda to Justice Powell’s controlling opinion in the 1978 case of Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, diversity had been framed as the epistemic and political value of tolerating and engaging with different perspectives, especially those that diverged from an orthodoxy. In the wake of the Bakke ruling, however, it was not an appreciation of nonconformism that reshaped American universities. It was the pursuit of social justice in the name of diversity. Both conservative and progressive critics noted the intellectual inconsistencies—Wood (2003: 380) spoke of ‘hypocrisy’, Greene (2021: 201) of ‘hogwash’—that have plagued diversity discourse since it began to proliferate in the late 1980s. The disproportionate focus of recruitment efforts on Black and Hispanic students betrayed that ‘diversity’ stood in for another value: ‘Members of these racial and ethnic groups may have an interesting perspective to bring to a seminar room or a lunch table, but so do Maoris and albinos and Alaskan fishing boat deckhands and diabetics’, argued Greene (ibid.: 201–2). ‘One senses less urgency in attracting critical masses of such people to Ivy League classrooms.’ Advocates of viewpoint diversity exploited this contradiction in diversity discourse and took university administrators at their word when they demanded that academic institutions pursued these other groups, but especially people contributing underrepresented political perspectives, just as vigorously. But the value that ‘diversity’ had come to stand in for, Greene contended, was not the perspectival diversity originally cultivated by Harvard, then prescribed by the Supreme Court, and now insisted on by Heterodox Academy. Instead, the pursuit of diversity aimed at the mitigation of structural inequality through a project of social reengineering (a project that Greene embraced, and Wood held responsible for the erosion of American higher education). Toepfer (2020: 130; our translation) put his finger on the contradiction inherent to diversity: ‘The word means variety but aims at equality.’

This is how educational and viewpoint diversity began to grow apart. As diversity itself diversifies, its different conceptions and practices generate palpable tensions, which cannot be resolved by calling for unity between diversity activists with ideological and identity commitments—unless the latter would subordinate their concern with structural inequality to the pursuit of viewpoint diversity, as al-Gharbi hoped, or the proponents of ideological viewpoint diversity would accept the view of standpoint epistemologists like Sandra Harding (2015) or Donna Haraway (1988) that diversity is about mobilizing the perspectives of the oppressed but not of their oppressors to build supposedly more objective ‘sciences from below’. Yet Heterodox Academy member al-Gharbi (2020) insisted on symmetry: ‘Both the dominant and subaltern positions are distorted by positionality. It is not the case that the dominant position is riddled with biases and blind spots while the subaltern position represents objective truth.’ Such symmetry is incommensurable with an epistemology that aims at elevating certain subordinate or marginalized standpoints. Haidt (2016c) took the opposition to such partial knowledge production one step further and argued that universities had to choose whether they were committed primarily to social justice or to truth. At the beginning of the 21st century, a general commitment to diversity had become the common battleground on which diversity activists clash over the diversity of diversity.

Conclusion

The meteoric rise of the value of diversity is transforming the moral economy of science and scholarship. Viewpoint diversity has come to serve as the legal justification of affirmative action in student admissions even though critical observers doubt that the diversity policies characteristic of American progressive institutions are motivated primarily by a valuation of perspectival pluralism. Considering recent right-wing efforts to censor the discussion of critical race theory and LGBTQ literature in schools and colleges, one might also question whether viewpoint diversity is what motivates conservative initiatives like the Florida viewpoint-diversity survey in 2022. However, what the instrumentalization of diversity to different ends shows is that, despite deep hostility between the culture war parties, they all consider the value of diversity self-evident enough to package their political projects in diversity discourse. In the emergence of this expansive apparatus, the controversy over viewpoint diversity among social psychologists might appear as a rather marginal event. Yet it unpacks what is at issue in the valorization of perspectival diversity as the very value that all sides profess. Maybe it is because of social psychology’s long-standing commitment to value neutrality that its actors have engaged in a serious epistemological and methodological debate over the challenge that viewpoint diversity poses to their knowledge culture. By opening the normative black box of their scientific practice, these researchers rendered visible to themselves and outside observers the stakes in the current restructuring of the moral economy of science. In the process, perspectival diversity has lost its self-evidence. One conclusion to be drawn from this article is that disciplines other than social psychology would equally profit from open debate over the place of diversity in their respective conceptions of good scholarship.

A second conclusion is that the discourses and practices surrounding diversity have been shaped in the image of American society. Nevertheless, they are now widely adopted in other Western societies and by multinational corporations that also operate outside of North America, Europe, and Australia. This is striking given how closely the growing valuation of diversity has been coupled to the contingencies of a 1978 US Supreme Court decision. The more recent controversy over viewpoint diversity in social psychology and the creation of Heterodox Academy also make sense only against the backdrop of America’s reignited culture wars. In 2011, a group of researchers from a Swiss French business school reviewed the scientific literature on diversity and found that 90% of the authors were American, Canadian, Australian, or British and rarely cited non-anglophone literature from Germany, France, or China. But the values, assumptions, and approaches of the English-speaking world were not necessarily appropriate for European business environments or in other parts of the world. European countries did not share the American emphasis on racial differences, which, they worried, fostered rather than contained racism, and collectivist cultures disapproved of the celebration of difference associated with diversity. ‘One of the important reasons why diversity research is unhelpful to diversity practice’, Karsten Jonsen, Martha L. Maznewski, and Susan C. Schneider (2011: 37) argued, ‘is that it itself is not diverse, especially with respect to its cultural assumptions’. In their eyes, the US-centric diversity literature was symptomatic of an ‘intellectual imperialism defined as “the domination of one people by another in their world of thinking”’ (ibid.: 52). One does not need to share the polemical impulse of these authors against the ethnocentrism of diversity discourse to recognize the epistemological and political paradox at the heart of diversity, which pertains not only to the business world but also to higher education: that ideal diversity would need to be inclusive of the many forms that non-diversity and even anti-diversity can take. In reality, however, diversity is always selective and advances the viewpoints and interests of some groups at the expense of the viewpoints and interests of others. A ‘view from everywhere’, as Daston (2021) called it in a talk on objectivity in the humanities, is no more realizable than a view from nowhere and can function as a regulative ideal at best.

This chronicle of diversity’s ascent to one of the highest values of late modernity breaks off, as chronicles do, in medias res, more precisely in November 2022, right after the US Supreme Court heard the case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. By June 2023, the court’s new conservative majority will have reconsidered and potentially revised the diversity justification of race-conscious admissions programs, which, some four decades ago, have made educational diversity a central concern of American higher education (Liptak and Hartocollis, 2022). The demographic fallout of a revocation of Bakke has been predicted: a reduction of Hispanic admissions to Harvard by more than one third and of African American admissions by half (Greene, 2021: 197; Lemann, 2021). However, what abolishing the legal incentive for educational diversity would mean for the moral economy of science is impossible to tell. Will universities decouple the morally motivated pursuit of social justice from the epistemologically motivated pursuit of perspectival pluralism? Or has diversity become so entrenched in American universities that they would continue its promotion, even if it ceased to make their social justice goals legally defensible? How will diversity reorganize the moral economy of 21st-century knowledge cultures? Historian Hayden White (1987: 22) once remarked that it is usually the passage from one moral order to another that brings narrative closure. But this passage is only happening as we write. No chronicle can offer a moral of the story. A chronicle of the moral economy of diversity is no exception.