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We should all be concerned by the growth of a university ideological monoculture. Scholars in the humanities and social sciences can help us solve real problems. What counts as progress, and are we achieving it? How big is the problem of racism in this country and how should we solve it? What is the best way to foster economic growth for all? How should we understand the gender wage gap and what should we do about it?

We should all be concerned by the growth of a university ideological monoculture

Yet how can we trust scholarship to give us useful answers if there isn’t genuine intellectual debate?

There are solutions. These include ensuring that viewpoint diversity receives equal treatment in hiring decisions. The whole point of diversity in hiring is to strengthen organizations by including perspectives that might otherwise be excluded. If people look different but think alike, this still doesn’t count as diversity.

If we don’t fix our universities, we all lose

Second, research funding agencies — especially in the humanities and social sciences — need to emphasize curiosity-based research. This is research aimed at discovering the truth. Scholars might like a certain theoretical approach (popular ones these days are anti-racist, “critical” studies of various persuasions, settler colonial studies) but researchers should not be funded for simply applying these world views to their research. Instead, they should be forced to test whether these perspectives are actually correct and useful. This means testing them against alternative perspectives. It means being open — from the very outset — to the idea that your hypothesis might not be correct. Research that merely confirms what scholars already think they know isn’t research.

If we don’t fix our universities, we all lose. And we are essentially inviting conservative governments to devalue and underfund research. We need to make it an orthodoxy that the best universities are heterodox universities.

Dr. Christopher Dummitt is a professor of history at Trent University.