To the President of Brown University,
I read with interest your recent commitment to increasing diversity at Brown University spending $100 million over the next 5-7 years in order to hire 60 more faculty members is an immense undertaking.
You wrote, “Many of the efforts detailed in our plan are focused on faculty diversity through targeted strategies such as early identification programs, postdoctoral programs and cluster hiring. By hiring the best and the brightest from a full range of backgrounds, we’ll put Brown in a position to attract exceptional students and scholars into our applicant pools.”
This is truly fantastic. Thus, I would like to know just how many conservative and libertarian professors Brown has hired or plans to hire as part of this initiative?
You also enthusiastically and “explicitly rejected mandatory ‘diversity training’, and cite diversity as “a key element of our core mission of education and discovery” being “integral to our commitment to cultivating an intellectual environment in which a wide range of views are represented and all individuals are treated with respect.” Agreed! Without libertarian and conservative point of views, you unequivocally cannot have a full, diverse point of view for learning. You certainly cannot possibly have a wide range of views if you have twice as many Marxist-leaning professors as the rest!
Supporting the necessity for diversity in higher education as a means for open conversation, a free exchange of ideas, and mutual respect. Without belittling the need to increase representation from historically underrepresented groups, it would be rather flawed to only focus on genetic diversity, while completely ignoring the expansion of diversity in political and ideological thought.
I look forward to hearing about your diversity expansion will include those that are politically and intellectually underrepresented at such a prestigious institution of higher learning.