University leaders have roundly rejected the Trump administration’s Higher Education Compact. Good. One by one, they’ve echoed MIT president Sally Kornbluth’s explanation that “scientific funding should be based on scientific merit alone.” I certainly agree. But I’m sort of surprised to hear about their sudden mass conversion.

Not so long ago, university presidents were quiet as mice when the Biden White House issued executive orders (EO 13985 and EO 14091) mandating that scientific funding not be about merit alone but weigh considerations of “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility.” In response, the NIH urged “underrepresented” scholars to note their race on proposals so that their applications would be flagged for extra consideration “even if the quality score that peer-review panels award the proposals falls outside the cutoff for most grants.” NASA informed researchers that grant proposals would be evaluated partly on their DEI activities and willingness to hire DEI consultants (and to “pay them well”). The National Science Foundation, too, stipulated that some proposals would be judged, in part, on their diversity and inclusion plans.

I don’t recall hearing a peep of protest from the college leaders who are now so ardently insisting that funding should be “based on scientific merit alone.”

Heck, in 2021, Kornbluth’s predecessor at MIT stood mute as the institution disinvited esteemed University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot, whom the Department of Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Sciences had asked to deliver a prestigious annual lecture on climate science, after he was attacked on social media for criticizing DEI. Now, that was a chance for a university to earn some credibility on the commitment to “scientific merit alone.”

Elsewhere in Cambridge, biologist Carole Hooven, a lecturer in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology and the author of T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, was forced from her position in a DEI firestorm for asserting that there are two sexes. Hooven was deemed “transphobic” and subjected to dubious investigations and brutal harassment, in which campus officials were willing participants. Harvard’s passion for the integrity of scientific merit was notably absent.

In his new book, Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, longtime Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber dismisses concerns about campuses abandoning scientific merit in the face of progressive ideology. Those FIRE surveys showing that students are hesitant to speak up on fraught topics? Pay them no mind. Indeed, Eisgruber’s still quite sympathetic to that 2020 open letter in which many Princeton faculty insisted that he punish “departments that show no progress in appointing faculty of color” and discipline scholars who engage in “racist” research and publication. At the time, of course, Eisgruber’s ire was reserved for tenured Princeton humanities scholar Joshua Katz, whom he denounced for having the temerity to criticize the letter’s demands. (Katz was eventually fired.)

The thing about having principles is that you don’t actually have principles if you only bring them out of storage when it’s politically convenient.

That brings us to the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), which recently decided to take up the fight against intellectual diversity. You think I’m kidding, right? I wish.  The lead article (“Seven Theses Against Viewpoint Diversity”) in the new issue of the AAUP’s magazine Academe thunders, “Viewpoint diversity functions in direct opposition to the pursuit of truth, the principal aim of academia.”

The author, Johns Hopkins literature professor Lisa Siraganian, makes the takeaway crystal clear in a companion piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education (title: “Viewpoint Diversity Is a MAGA Plot”). You see, Siraganian argues, there is no need to encounter “debunked” views (conservative academics, after all, are akin to QAnon conspiracy theorists or biologists who thought DNA was a triple helix), and there’s no evidence of a progressive academic monoculture. Thus, she claims, efforts to promote intellectual diversity serve primarily to hobble the scholarly enterprise and impede academe’s march towards truth.

Where to begin? For starters, even Siraganian’s strawman musings on DNA are themselves problematic. And it’s tough to find serious disputes in the humanities or social sciences that can be deemed “settled science.” All sorts of claims about policing, affirmative action, immigration, marginal tax rates, or school choice are very much unsettled science. Oh, and as for just who it is that’s refusing to acknowledge documented “truth,” the evidence of an academic monoculture (which Siraganian denies) and its predictable harms is pretty compelling.

The epistemological arrogance is puzzling, given that Siraganian works in a discipline where what’s “true” has been debated for millennia and where competing views tend to reflect competing value systems. The academic norms of her field would seem to argue for the value of heterodoxy. But the truly bizarre thing is that, just last year, the AAUP issued an impassioned defense of racial diversity, arguing: “Progress toward diversity goals has resulted in better knowledge production that has started to fill in some of the gaps, expose and correct blind spots, and open entirely new vistas of inquiry that were not possible without it.”

Greg Lukianoff, Sam Abrams, and Adam Goldstein wryly observed, “If viewpoint diversity by racial proxy is good because it enriches the conversation, then direct diversity of viewpoints should be celebrated, not considered ‘direct opposition to the pursuit of truth.’” Right? It’s odd to argue that changing the racial makeup of the professoriate exposes “blind spots” and opens “new vistas of inquiry” but that broadening its intellectual and ideological makeup won’t.

This summer, Claremont McKenna’s Jon Shields and two colleagues examined the perspectives college students are assigned to read when it comes to controversies like racial bias in the American criminal justice system, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the ethics of abortion. On these topics, Shields et al. identified the most heavily cited and widely assigned texts, like Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Edward Said’s seminal pro-Palestinian volume Orientalism, and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion.” The study then asked how frequently “these canonical works were assigned with their most important intellectual critics.”

The answer: rarely. The New Jim Crow, which holds that criminal justice should be seen as a facet of a larger struggle between white supremacists and advocates for racial justice, has been assigned 5,389 times in the Open Syllabi Project database. More than 90 percent of the time, it’s unaccompanied by a competing scholarly perspective. Instead, it’s more likely to be assigned alongside works by authors with similar views, such as Coates, Michel Foucault, or Angela Davis. As Shields et al. explain, “It seems that professors generally insulate their students from the wider intellectual disagreements that shape these important controversies. That is the academic norm, at least in the cases we studied.”

Asked to explain what’s driving these results, Shields mused:

In some cases, professors may not sincerely know that the book they’re teaching has been the subject of scholarly controversy. If you’re a literature professor and you’re teaching The New Jim Crow, you might not be aware, earnestly and honestly, that James Forman Jr. wrote Locking Up Our Own and Michael Fortner wrote Black Silent Majority. But I suspect that mostly what’s happening is the politicization of the faculty. Some professors just . . . very consciously develop courses that have a particular agenda.

I received a note the other week from the dean of one of the nation’s public policy schools. He’d attended a convening of fellow deans where one had presented some data on the ideological imbalance of faculty and asked how it might impact teaching and research. He reported that the whole topic was met with general dismissiveness, with some deans challenging the premise that there exists any imbalance and others explaining that their priority is ensuring the safety and well-being of their students and faculty. (I think the implication was that a conservative intrusion would threaten that safety and well-being. Sigh . . .)

As I see it, the point of merit-based science and academic inquiry is to enable scholars to challenge received wisdom, students to wrestle with uncomfortable questions, and the academy to serve as a place of exploration rather than ossified groupthink. As Yale’s iconic “Woodward Report” put it in 1974:

The primary function of a university is to discover and disseminate knowledge by means of research and teaching . . . The history of intellectual growth and discovery clearly demonstrates the need for unfettered freedom, the right to think the unthinkable, discuss the unmentionable, and challenge the unchallengeable.

Safeguarding that tradition demands a consistent, principled defense. On that count, campus leaders have fallen short time and again over the past decade, bowing instead to progressive politics and campus convention. The truly maddening thing is that they kept brushing off calls to do better. Today’s posturing is a day late, a dollar short, and, unfortunately, far too politically expedient to take seriously. It’s not that I disagree with what elite campus presidents have said over the past week or two—it’s that these leaders have no standing to say it with a straight face.

You know that old saw, “Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets”? Campus leaders may be making the right call on Trump’s Compact, but they’ve an ocean of work to do before their stance deserves to be deemed anything more than a conversion of convenience. It’s a deeply unfortunate state of affairs for all of us who believe in the promise of higher education.

Frederick Hess is an executive editor of Education Next and the author of the blog “Old School with Rick Hess.”