I really am going to say more about teaching American government. Here’s one issue that I dealt with on class on Friday: How to make students genuinely attentive to the issues that concern Trump supporters without talking up the actual Trump. It’s an odd and toxic election when being for one of the candidates is almost a hate crime on campus. Trump turns out to have been a huge stimulus package for “political correctness.” Because of his “not a gentleman” brand, being indignantly against him has become equivalent to common decency. What’s the problem? We followers of Socrates know that you have tame indignation to get people to really think.

I was at the meeting of the American Political Science Association, which might be the most genuinely diverse academic conference in the country. There are lots of conservatives of various kinds, and they herd in big enough groups to have their own panels. This is not just a shot at the uniform leftism of most of the humanities and social sciences. Economists don’t have all that much “viewpoint diversity” either. And even among the political scientists, it might be more true to say that what we really see is a diverse array of fairly uniform experiences. They might be said to reflect truthfully the genuine diversity of American higher education.

In any case, I spoke on a panel on “campus protests,” and I think the consensus of the experts on the panel was that the main problem with the easy success of the protesters on mostly elite campuses is that the outcome is the narrowing of the tolerated “viewpoint diversity” (VD) on campus. In the name of diversity, there’s always less diversity. And there’s more scripting of campus life — including campus life — by the class of diversity administrators, who privilege their vision of campus community based on a kind of consumer sensitivity over the myriad micro-aggressions that fuel free and inevitably controversial discussion over perennial human issues. In order to tame indignation, you first have to have a safe space for it to be expressed as a clash of opinions.

So the dumb joke is: The panelists were all for more VD on campus.

But, you know, I barely talked about the threat to diversity that comes from the imperative of “diversity.” My bottom line was that the real threat to higher education is the project to reduce it entirely to the twin standards of competency (as measured by the contemptible pseudo-science of Student Learning Outcomes) and diversity. And those are less “leftist” standards than those of the scripting efforts of the corporate-foundation-government-administrative complex. I talked mainly about the tyranny of competency as a threat to the genuine moral and intellectual diversity that graces our exceptional American system of higher education.

I’ve also joined the Heterodox Academy founded by the great evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Haidt. According to Haidt, any genuine Darwinian knows that our liberals and our conservatives both express part of the truth about our social natures and that nature might give a slight priority to the conservative concern with social sustainability over the liberal concern with maximum conceivable individual autonomy. From this view, living in the truth means being a moderate or even a moderate conservative

In any case, to fight against misguided efforts to infantilize students by shielding them from the whole truth about who we are as natural beings, our campuses should knock themselves out to make sure all American opinions are represented by a “critical mass” of faculty and students on campus.

Why does Haidt seem to be wiser than most of his psychologist and other Darwinian colleagues? Well, his undergraduate major was philosophy, and so he knows all about Plato and Descartes and so forth and so has indispensable sources of psychological wisdom.

Here are some ideas for reform of some of the members of the Heterodox Academy, including mine.