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UO at rock bottom of college rankings for intellectual diversity

That’s the conclusion of the Heterodox Academy, a group of about 1000 professors interested in promoting intellectual diversity. (Chicago is #1). We lose points for our low rating from FIRE and for the related recent anti-free speech efforts of our administration – some of which have been beaten off by the Senate.

It’s a little unfair to criticize us for not endorsing the Chicago statement on academic freedom. The UO Senate has enacted much stronger free-speech and academic freedom policies than Chicago. It’s just that our administration feels free to break them when convenient.

The HxA website also links to this story about a $150M initiative that Johns Hopkins is launching to promote intellectual diversity:

The gift establishes the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University as an academic and public forum bringing together experts from fields such as political science, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, ethics, sociology, and history. Together, they will examine the dynamics of societal, cultural, and political polarization and develop ways to improve decision-making and civic discourse. They also will design and test mechanisms for strengthening democracy through dialogue and social engagement, and convene subject matter experts from a range of perspectives to explore new approaches to divisive issues.

Meanwhile here at UO our administration is in the midst of preparing a new set of expensive “Diversity Action Plans” with a narrow focus on racial and ethnic diversity – viewpoint and intellectual diversity barely get lip service.

The full list, and the bottom 6:

9 Comments

  1. dog 06/27/2017

    To make a very long story short, to which I think the typical academic will simply respond, “Oh, another fuckin’ stupid Dog Comment”:

    These days I describe academic intellectual diversity by the term
    System Thinking. In brief, this kind of thinking is an integrated synthesis approach to knowledge across systems – and not the compartmentalized knowledge that departments and traditional majors encompass.

    We have very little (and almost zero courses) programs etc related to systems thinking (and such thinking will be necessary for the Knight Campus to be successful – it can’t be just clones of our compartmentalized selves) – so it is not surprising we would not rank high on this scale, no matter how it is measured.

    The good news, however, is that our incoming Provost quite strongly appears to embrace Systems Thinking.

  2. Conservative Duck 06/27/2017

    “Meanwhile here at UO our administration is in the midst of preparing a new set of expensive “Diversity Action Plans” with a narrow focus on racial and ethnic diversity – viewpoint and intellectual diversity barely get lip service.”
    It won’t even go THAT far, it will treat everyone from northern Europe as one mono-cultural entity with no respect as to the differences within it.

    • UO Matters Post author | 06/27/2017

      OK, so the Welsh kicked your ass at Falkirk. Get over it already.

  3. Payroll Guy 06/27/2017

    Gender diversity is not an issue at the UO, according the DAP.

  4. reaction 06/27/2017

    The Heterodox Academy sounds like something worth ignoring and their ranking system has many arbitrary components. That being said, they do seem to have managed to detect a lack of balance at UO. Interesting seeing Chicago at the top. Given that Schill came from there, there is some chance he’ll increasingly steer things back toward the center.

    • Dog 06/27/2017

      It took this silly report to detect UO out of balance …?

  5. Anonymous 06/27/2017

    If Berkeley, Harvard, NYU, and Northwestern are our peer institutions, I will take it

  6. Environmental necessity 06/29/2017

    Can someone who beats this drum please explain their plan for increasing intellectual diversity? Are we going to embed some ideology test into our online app? Send recruiters to Young Conservative clubs at high schools? Recruit from the alt-right websites? Invite Richard Spencer to campus?

    If you don’t have a real plan you might consider setting down sticks.

  7. Oldtimer 06/29/2017

    In many fields on campus, the issue boils down to something as simple as insisting that graduate programs, and hence, graduate faculty, be broadly competent by natl and international standards, not just by the standards of their narrow subfield. Our strongest fields on campus tend to do this, our weakest tend otherwise. Not surprisingly the latter also tend to reflect their weakness in ideological imbalance.

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