Hrishikesh Joshi
The Academy's Blind Spot: Why Critics of "Viewpoint Diversity" Keep Missing the Point
In sociology and anthropology departments at elite liberal arts colleges, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios exceeding 40 to 1—and the gap has widened sharply since the 1990s. This piece makes the case that such lopsided politics in academia isn't just an awkward statistic but a structural problem, one that threatens both democratic legitimacy and the basic project of finding truth. Drawing on philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists, the argument holds that ideologically homogeneous groups ask narrower questions, gather less evidence, and fall prey to groupthink—exactly the dynamics Mill warned about when he said thinkers "go to sleep at their post" without opposition to sharpen them.
The piece then takes aim at three standard rebuttals used to dismiss calls for more balance: the "should we hire flat earthers" reductio, the demand for a precise target ratio before any reform counts as legitimate, and the charge that conservatives pushing for diversity are just hypocritically seeking their own DEI. Each, it argues, is a red herring that dodges the real question—not whether universities will achieve some perfect equilibrium, but whether basic discrimination against non-liberal scholars in hiring should simply stop.
The stakes, as framed here, go beyond campus politics: declining public trust in universities, a cratering sense that a degree is worth anything, and—more provocatively—the health of liberal democracy itself. It's a pointed argument about who gets to decide the boundaries of acceptable thought, and why those boundaries matter far beyond the quad.
Yuxuan JIA
A Taiwan Professor's Thought Experiment Is Testing Beijing's Red Lines
What happens when someone takes Beijing's invitation to "explore" a Taiwan solution literally? A Taiwanese professor decided to find out—and the answer has produced one of the more unusual exchanges in cross-Strait politics in years. Rather than simply rejecting "One Country, Two Systems," as 81% of Taiwanese do according to a recent survey, Ci-Ze Li asked a harder question: what institutional guarantees would Beijing actually have to accept to make such an arrangement credible? His answer, laid out across three increasingly detailed essays, is built on reciprocity—Taiwan would give up separatist options and foreign military alliances, while Beijing would have to convert political promises into enforceable constitutional law: protected elections, local judicial authority, fiscal autonomy, and mechanisms making those guarantees hard to unilaterally reverse. What makes this notable isn't just the argument itself, but where it's happening. The essays were published in full on a mainland WeChat platform, drew substantive pushback from mainland readers, and prompted Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office to publicly welcome the discussion—twice. That doesn't mean Beijing has accepted Li's terms, or that Taiwanese society is remotely ready to entertain them. But it does mean a conversation usually confined to slogans and ultimatums has briefly become something else: a detailed, technical argument about constitutional design, credible commitments, and exactly how far "autonomy" can bend before it breaks—conducted in public, on both sides of a divide that rarely allows such exchanges at all.