Georgetown University professor John Hasnas has a fine Wall Street Journal op-ed today, “The One Kind of Diversity Colleges Avoid,” pleading for intellectual and philosophical diversity in faculty hiring, alongside the racial and sexual kind. There’s something missing, though.

He begins:

Many universities are redoubling their efforts to diversify their faculties in response to last fall’s wave of protests from student groups representing women and minorities. Yale, for example, has announced a $50 million, five-year initiative to enhance faculty diversity. Brown has committed $100 million to hire 60 additional faculty members from historically underrepresented groups over the next five to seven years. America’s institutions of higher education seem committed to faculty diversity. But are they really?

In the more than 20 years that I have been a professor at Georgetown University, I have been involved in many faculty searches. Every one begins with a strong exhortation from the administration to recruit more women and minority professors. We are explicitly reminded that every search is a diversity search. Administrators require submission of a plan to vigorously recruit applications from women and minority candidates.

Before we even begin our selection process, we must receive approval from the provost that our outreach efforts have been vigorous enough. The deans and deputy deans of each school reinforce the message that no expense should be spared to increase the genetic diversity of our faculty.

Yet, in my experience, no search committee has ever been instructed to increase political or ideological diversity. On the contrary, I have been involved in searches in which the chairman of the selection committee stated that no libertarian candidates would be considered. Or the description of the position was changed when the best résumés appeared to be coming from applicants with right-of-center viewpoints. Or in which candidates were dismissed because of their association with conservative or libertarian institutions.

That is all fine, as I say, and he’s of course right to push for fair consideration of “right-of-center viewpoints.” But I wonder where Hasnas (or for that matter the editors of the Wall Street Journal) would come down on the question of philosophical diversity when it bears on thinking about cosmic and biological origins.

Because with debates on origins, the dividing line between the politically correct view (orthodox Darwinism) and the politically incorrect one (Darwin skepticism or intelligent design) is scientific only as a secondary matter. The divide begins with a difference of perspective on what kind of scientific conclusions are to be permitted in the first place. As the ultimate driver behind the story of life, may intelligence or creativity be considered — or must it be ruled out before investigations even commence? That’s not a scientific question — it’s a philosophical one. Maybe an aesthetic one. Even simply a matter of personal inclination.

Honest brokers and critics looking in from outside acknowledge this. A distinguished philosopher, atheist and Darwin foe Thomas Nagel, for one, candidly admits his “ungrounded intellectual preference” in favor of an “immanent natural explanation” for biological order. You have to credit him for being totally honest with himself, a rare quality.

Advocates of ID insist there is no reason to exclude mind as an ultimate explanation behind the cosmos. For that, they are branded as thought criminals. On the other hand, for those who embrace the exclusionary principle, the scientific evidence must confirm a materialist understanding. The conclusion is built into the premise.

I’ll regard the university faculty hiring system as healthy when even diversity on this question is regarded as a positive good. We’re a long way from that now.

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