Musa al-Gharbi March 29, 2018

Heterodox Academy strives to promote open inquiry, constructive disagreement, and viewpoint diversity in institutions of higher learning – and especially within social research fields.

This mission includes promoting diversity in terms of the oft-discussed categories of race, gender and sexuality – as well as the less-discussed (but also pressing) lack of diversity along the lines of class and geography — and of course, the intersections between these categories.

However, up to now many of our efforts have concentrated on the issue of ideological diversity in institutions of higher learning. There are a few reasons for this.

First, there is general social agreement that discrimination on the basis of gender, sexuality or race is wrong. However, many in the academy believe it is acceptable or even desirable to exclude non-progressive perspectives. In fact, while noteworthy progress has been made since the 90’s in terms of representation for women and ethnic or racial minority groups, the ideological underrepresentation problem is actually growing worse.

We were concerned about these trends primarily because the lack of ideological diversity seemed to be undermining the quality and impact of social research. Therefore, much of our initial labor was to help our colleagues recognize that the lack of ideological diversity is a real problem, and to commit themselves to being part of the solution.

However, a question has come up time and again regarding the relative scale of these challenges: how does the lack of, say, political diversity measure up when compared to underrepresentation by race, gender or sexuality? To get at this question, we can compare rates of faculty identification across different identity measures.

Overrepresented Groups

Comparing Underrepresentation Rates

In order to more easily compare levels of underrepresentation among groups, we can create a common representation quotient by dividing the percentage of representation each group has among full-time faculty divided by the share these groups comprise of the total U.S. population.

On this scale, approaching “1” would signal parity between representation in the academy v. the broader society. Exceeding “1” would indicate overrepresentation, while approaching “0” would indicate severe underrepresentation. In descending order, the breakdown is as follows: