Intellectual Diversity, Flourishing and the Pursuit of Truth
- Tyler VanderWeele
- Nov 25, 2025
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 5
Pathways to increasing diversity: We need each other to correct our thinking.
By Tyler J. VanderWeele Ph.D.
Key points
Viewpoint diversity is a means in the pursuit of knowledge, not an end in itself.
Ideological diversity in higher education in the US has declined dramatically in recent decades.
Appropriate intellectual diversity is consistent with high scholarly standards.
Properly understood, intellectual diversity assists in the pursuit of truth and flourishing.
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Refining Our Thinking
“Iron sharpens iron,” as the proverb has it. This is nowhere truer than in the realm of ideas: we all need our initial beliefs or unreflective convictions to be refined. Serious reflection and study can, of course, help with this, but so also can having our ideas challenged by others. When we engage with people with different ideas, we come to understand our own positions better and our own reasons for believing what we do. We also come to understand other people better, and their reasons for holding the positions that they do. Sometimes we realize that we are wrong and change our thinking. Sometimes we can help other people change their thinking. Even when we still disagree, there can be a better sense of what we hold in common, and also a better sense of the reasons for our disagreements.
These are just some of the potential benefits of interacting with people who have different beliefs from we do. Indeed, John Stuart Mill put all of this forward over 150 years ago, and it is as true today as it was then. In many ways, the university itself provides an ideal context for such discussions to take place, and this all aids us in our pursuit of truth. As our knowledge advances, we together come to better understand what ideas and approaches work, and which do not, and we are ideally thereby also enabled to flourish.
Declining Viewpoint Diversity
In the past decades, there has been concern expressed over an increasing lack of intellectual or viewpoint diversity within academic settings. It is sometimes argued that our academic contexts are now too dominated by liberal or progressive perspectives, and thus that viewpoint diversity and the free exchange of ideas have been stifled. For example, one recent paper tracked the liberal-to-conservative faculty ratio as changing from 2.3-to-1 in 1989 to 5-to-1 in 2017 to 7-to-1 today. Attention to these matters has been given in psychology, in law, and more generally, along with the potential implications. Claims have been made that conservatives are being discriminated against, that the environment has become too hostile, and that a culture of self-censorship has become dominant. There is, of course, a political dimension to these matters, but also an intellectual dimension. If we are not engaging with others with different perspectives, it can become easier to exist in our own echo chambers; it can be more difficult to understand others, to come up with new ideas, and to find common ground.
Intellectual Diversity and Scholarly Standards
Of course, what to do, if anything, about these matters, is complex. Academic disciplines pride themselves on their rigorous disciplinary standards and on their autonomy. Proposals to “force” viewpoint diversity can sometimes seem to compromise academic standards and the autonomy of academic institutions. In a paper recently published by the Human Flourishing Program, I put forward proposals to attempt to strengthen engagement with a diverse range of views while also preserving the scholarly standards and the relative autonomy of disciplines and departments. For example, instructors might try to ensure coverage of the range of views present in society, but also critically describe the best reasons for, and against, those views. If many people in society hold one view, and many others do not, then the strongest arguments for and against the view should be provided. Students can likewise, in essay writing or in debates, be asked to attempt to provide the strongest arguments for the positions they do not hold, before proceeding with their own positions or potential refutations. The scholastic practice of disputation—illustrated in, for example, Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae—required one to present the strongest arguments of the opposing view first, and such approaches could also be employed within classrooms today.
While faculty and departments should arguably have control and decision-making power over which new faculty are to be hired on the grounds of the quality of their work, their capacity to teach, and the depth of their ideas, more effort could be made to hire in a wider variety of research areas that might increase the intellectual diversity of the faculty. The choice of research topics on which faculty hires are made may be one of the reasons for the seemingly shrinking ideological diversity of campuses. For example, much research and numerous faculty hires have been devoted to matters of workplace salary gender equality, and this is an important topic. However, it is also the case that roughly half of American families would prefer to have one parent who stays at home rather than in paid employment. The research literature and the number of faculty devoted to work on how to support such families are vastly underdeveloped in comparison. Faculty hires on this or analogous topics may lead to greater intellectual development among the faculty, and thus also in research and teaching.
This would, in turn, provide students with exposure to a broader range of ideas, and would allow both students and faculty to better discern which ideas work well and which do not, to refine those ideas, to synthesize them, to find common ground, and to better work together to promote flourishing in society. Our increasingly polarized society has arguably in part resulted from a lack of interaction with others who hold different perspectives. Trying to understand others will help us work together towards common aims and to better understand and navigate our differences and disagreements.
Religious Perspectives and Scholarly Discourse
Much of the discussion on intellectual diversity is more political or ideological in nature. But these matters apply more broadly, for example, to the inclusion or exclusion of various religious perspectives. This is a complicated matter, especially in the context of a secular university. In pluralistic contexts, it is desirable to identify common forms of evidence and modes of reasoning. Presuppositions that come from faith commitments can complicate these matters. And yet there are arguably numerous ways in which religious perspectives could benefit scholarly discourse and our pursuit of truth together.
Even in the context of a secular university, it is arguably reasonable to bring religious understandings of various concepts into discussion: for example, how justice, or truth, or goodness, or beauty, or love is understood across different religious traditions. It also seems entirely reasonable to carry out empirical research on the distribution and determinants of various religious beliefs and practices, and on the effects of religious community participation on subsequent outcomes and behaviors, both for individuals and with regard to society more broadly. It is reasonable to examine the logical consistency of different belief systems. It is reasonable to study the historical development of religions and their role in the historical development of society. Religious perspectives should arguably thus be welcome, but should also be subject to the same level of rational critique, the same questioning of grounds of belief, the same scrutiny on internal consistency, and the same requirements of dialogue with those of different perspectives as their secular counterparts.
Through such work, the academy can also benefit from the intellectual diversity of religious perspectives, but conversely, religious communities can benefit from the scholarly rigor of academic work. As we’ve argued previously, social science research might well benefit from theological and philosophical perspectives, and theological and philosophical work can itself benefit from and be challenged by work in the sciences. All of this helps in the pursuit of knowledge and of truth. If we want to pursue a flourishing society, we need to engage with those around us who have other perspectives, to understand them, to learn from them, and to try, as best as possible, to work together.
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References
VanderWeele, T.J. (2025). Intellectual and viewpoint diversity: importance, scope and bounds. Education Sciences, 15:1592.
Case, B.W. and VanderWeele, T.J. (2024). Integrating the humanities and the social sciences: six approaches and case studies. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 11:231.
Better Together: Integrating the Sciences and Humanities. Psychology Today. Human Flourishing Blog. December 2024.