I have been a member of the law faculty at Vanderbilt University for nearly twenty years. Even though my faculty has grown over that time, there are fewer conservatives now than when I joined. We are down to four—a mere ten percent or so of the tenure-track faculty—and two of the four are nearly 80. Remarkably, that probably makes us the most ideologically diverse department in the entire University.

　　Everywhere I turn, I hear university leaders saying we need more conservatives in academia. There is little doubt anymore that they are right: scholars need skeptics to point out research weaknesses; students need provocateurs to help them engage with unfamiliar ideas; we all need balanced academic studies to help us make good public policy. But what I do not hear from many of these leaders is how they are going to do it. I have been thinking about this for many years, and I have some bad news: it is going to be difficult. I canvass the possibilities below and propose massive external pressure as the most promising course. But, first, it may be illuminating to break the problem down into its components: supply and demand.

　　The Supply Problem

　　The supply problem is that very few conservatives want to go into academia. I don’t blame them. Conservatives are discriminated against at every level. At the bottom, I have seen my colleagues refuse to interview an amazing legal scholar for a job because he went to a very conservative undergraduate institution when he was 18 years old. In the middle, a conservative member of my tenure-track faculty has not led any of our dozen or so academic programs—and that’s where the money is—in over fifteen years. At the top, how many university academic leaders are conservative? To my knowledge, there are none at my university and very, very few anywhere else: a former law clerk to Justice Scalia was made the provost at Harvard—after he left the Republican Party.

　　It’s not just my colleagues who discriminate. It’s the students, too. They can and do make anonymous accusations of racism or other ills against those who do not toe the progressive line. These accusations often lead to university investigations, and they sometimes require the faculty to hire lawyers. One of my colleagues endured a months-long investigation because a student complained that my colleague did not do anything when another student in class quoted from a Supreme Court opinion in the textbook that included the word “negro.” The opinion was from 1957. My colleague was not punished only because, the university investigator said, it was a “first offense.” Even if exonerated, it can be hard to move up the ranks or get a job at a better school once there is a complaint like this somewhere in your file.

　　It is not surprising, then, that the last time I was on the law school’s appointments committee, I could identify no more than ten entry-level candidates—out of hundreds upon hundreds of applicants—who were even a smidgen to the right of center. Those were the same ten candidates 200 other law schools would choose from, too. My effort wasn’t an exact science, but you get the point: even if my faculty wanted more ideological diversity, could we get it?

　　Yet, supply is the easier problem to solve. Supply follows demand. There hasn’t been any demand, so conservatives haven’t wasted their time trying to become professors. If demand materialized, I think supply would, too. Yes, we could make academia more welcoming by getting rid of anonymous student complaints (though that has costs) and by increasing due process protections during faculty investigations (that’s a no-brainer). Yes, we could juice the pipeline by shaking the bushes to find conservatives who might make good professors and connecting them to mentors. Some organizations like the Federalist Society are already doing this for law schools; I’m all for it. But it will mostly be for naught if faculties don’t want to hire them.

　　The Demand Problem

　　This is the bigger problem and also the harder to solve: no one gets hired unless a faculty in some department at the university votes to hire them. Even if university leaders want more conservatives—and I have my doubts—how can they get their faculties to vote for it?

　　One idea is simply to stop the discrimination I described above. It would be easy enough for university leaders to start appointing conservatives as deans and provosts; the fact that they haven’t is why I have my doubts about them. But this won’t get very far if faculties don’t vote to hire conservative professors in the first place. Is there a way to stop that discrimination? My university’s anti-discrimination clause is filled with characteristics we can’t consider—race, sex, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, just to name a few—but ideology is noticeably absent. Could we add it?

　　There are two potential problems with this idea. The first is that anti-discrimination clauses are hard to enforce. After all, despite the fact that we are prohibited from considering race, my colleagues consider race all the time. Merit is very subjective in academia, especially in the humanities. Getting published often depends on whether the anonymous peer reviewers like your work. Even if they do, members of a faculty can still say your work is not good: the reviewers missed this or that. Who is to say they are wrong? This discrimination is not even always intentional: the research on implicit bias shows it is stronger against persons of other political beliefs than against persons of other races or the other sex. The second issue is that anyone can use anti-discrimination clauses. If we tell faculties they can’t discriminate based on ideology or political views or the like, the most radical anarchists will be able to use the policy, too. Yikes.

　　Donors, alumni, and parents need to be organized to express their concerns at every opportunity and to vote with their dollars and feet if they don’t see annual progress made in the data and in the rankings.

　　Another idea is to try to force the faculties to hire conservatives. Faculties generally can’t hire anyone unless university leaders authorize money to hire them. University leaders could tell us that they are authorizing money only to hire a conservative. A softer way to do it would be bribery: they could promise “extra” money to hire a conservative. An even softer way would be to give extra money for someone who studies a particular field, perhaps a field that conservatives just happen (wink, wink) to be more likely to study. For example, university leaders could give law schools extra money to hire someone in “originalism.” The softest way of all might be merely to force us to interview conservatives. In the National Football League, teams can’t hire a new coach without interviewing a black candidate; this is known as the “Rooney Rule.” We could adopt a Rooney Rule for conservatives.

　　But therein lies the issue: the Rooney Rule is a DEI initiative, and all of the variations above smack many people as “DEI for conservatives.” Aren’t these special efforts exactly what we did to get more black professors into academia all these many years? Special lines for black hires or for scholars studying “race and” this or that? Yes, it is. True, initiatives based on viewpoint are on firmer legal ground than initiatives based on race—although public colleges do have to worry whether the First Amendment would prohibit viewpoint initiatives—but you see the concern. I am not sure many conservatives want to carry the burdens of affirmative action.

　　A final idea is to circumvent the faculties altogether by creating entirely new ones. A number of universities have done this by creating new schools of “civics.” This has enabled university leaders to construct a faculty from scratch. If you pick the leaders of the new school wisely, it is a very effective way to hire a bunch of conservatives. But then what? We have a school of civics filled with conservatives, and schools of everything else without them? Does that really solve the problem? I don’t think so.

　　That doesn’t mean most of these things aren’t worth pursuing. Pockets of conservative faculty here and there are better than nothing. Indeed, I suspect it would be easy to find donors to foot the bill for most of these ideas. But these things will only get us so far. We need a pervasive solution to a pervasive problem.

　　The Solution?

　　In the end, I fear that to make real progress, we will have to change the hearts of existing university faculties. I don’t think we need to change their minds. I believe most of my colleagues understand the intellectual merits of surrounding yourself with people who think differently than you do; they have just been unwilling to lift a finger to do anything about it (including simply taking steps to counteract their own implicit biases). How can you change someone’s heart? The heart is an emotional instrument, and I think it needs an emotional technique: embarrassment. A more polite commentator would probably call what I propose below something like “transparency and accountability,” but I don’t think we have the time to beat around the bush any longer: we need to make existing faculties feel bad about the fact that they have been so closed-minded.

　　Below is a four-part plan, but the upshot is this: we need to gather data, remind faculties every day of every week of what the data says, and bring pressure to bear on them. University leaders could do all this, but they won’t because it will make their schools look bad. State legislators could do it for public schools, and they very well may. New higher education accreditation organizations might eventually pop up and do it for everyone else. But, in the meantime, outside organizations will be needed.

　　First, every single year, we should gather data on the ideological distribution of every faculty of every department in every school of every university. I realize people already know there are very few conservatives in academia, but there is no substitute for seeing how bad it really is in black and white. Some outside organizations are already doing this, like the Buckley Institute at Yale University. We need a Buckley Institute at every university—or, perhaps even better, interscholastic organizations that can gather the data for many campuses at once, organizations like the Federalist Society, Heterodox Academy, the Manhattan Institute, or the American Enterprise Institute.

　　Second, this data needs to be publicized constantly throughout the year. It needs to be distributed to the media. It needs to be bandied about on social media. It needs to be mailed and emailed to faculty, donors, alumni, and parents. People shouldn’t be able to wake up in the morning without a reminder that there are no conservatives teaching in the English Department at their alma mater.

　　Third, the data needs to be incorporated into college rankings. In my experience, there has been no single force in academia more powerful than U.S. News World Report’s higher education rankings. They are even more powerful than billionaire donors, if you can believe it. It may be impossible to get U.S. News interested in this data anytime soon, but there are other influential rankings, such as the Wall Street Journal’s. But even if none of the existing rankings are receptive, that just means new rankings need to be created. Indeed, the same organizations that collect and publish the data could also create college rankings based on them. For example, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) now publishes its own rankings of universities based on their free speech policies, and I know these rankings are discussed by university leaders.

　　Finally, donors, alumni, and parents need to be organized to express their concerns at every opportunity and to vote with their dollars and feet if they don’t see annual progress made in the data and in the rankings. Merely giving people information will not be enough. There is more promise in concerted action: you feel like you can make a difference if you are part of a group. We need to facilitate letters to former professors, questions on campus tours, appearances at alumni events, and the nuclear option: campaigns to withhold donations. One model is the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard: in 1994, a group of alumnae started a campaign to collect donations to Harvard into an escrow account that would not be released until the number of female faculty increased there. The money was released to Harvard six years later.

　　Even all this, I admit, may not be enough. Many conservative academics believe their colleagues cannot be embarrassed, that their hearts cannot change. They might be right. But I am more optimistic. Even if some will never be moved, I believe most still can be. In my experience, there is still a reasonable middle within most faculties at most universities. But we may not have much of a choice. If we care about this, we need to try everything.