Most Faculty Say Diversity Helps Their Field — But They Think Colleagues Disagree More Than They Actually Do

A new national survey of American college faculty finds that professors across the political spectrum are, by large majorities, believers in the value of diversity in their disciplines — including the more contested categories of political and religious diversity. Yet the same survey finds that faculty consistently misjudge how their peers feel, assuming a level of skepticism among colleagues that the data don’t actually support.

The report, published in July 2026 by Heterodox Academy in partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago, surveyed 3,563 faculty members at 80 U.S. colleges and universities, drawing from schools ranging from major research universities to small liberal arts colleges. Researchers asked faculty whether exposure to colleagues with different perspectives — spanning eight categories including political views, religion, race, gender, sexual orientation, disability status, socioeconomic background, and competing academic theories or methods — improved or hurt the quality of teaching and research in their field.

The headline finding: every single form of diversity was rated as beneficial by a majority of respondents. Methodological and theoretical diversity ranked highest, with 84% of faculty saying exposure to competing theories or methods strengthens their discipline. Even the least popular category, religious diversity, was still endorsed by 53% of respondents. Outright hostility toward any form of diversity was rare, with negative ratings ranging from just 2% to 11% depending on the category.

Political diversity produced some of the survey’s more counterintuitive results. While political diversity is often framed publicly as a conservative-coded cause, the data show the opposite pattern: 62% of left-leaning faculty said political diversity improves their field, compared with 46% of right-leaning faculty. The gap held up even within the same broad discipline groupings, suggesting it wasn’t simply a matter of liberal faculty clustering in fields more naturally suited to political variety.

That doesn’t mean the picture was free of partisan splits. Gender identity and sexual orientation proved by far the most polarizing categories: roughly three-quarters of left-leaning faculty saw these as beneficial, compared with only about a fifth of right-leaning faculty, with moderates falling in between. Notably, though, right-leaning faculty who rejected these forms of diversity mostly said they had “no effect” on their field rather than a negative one — outright hostility remained uncommon across all groups.

Perhaps the survey’s most striking pattern involves a phenomenon researchers call pluralistic ignorance — when people privately hold views that diverge sharply from what they assume is the group consensus. Faculty routinely underestimated how positively their colleagues viewed political and religious diversity in particular. Only about 38–40% of respondents believed their peers valued these two dimensions, even though the faculty’s own reported views were considerably warmer. Social science faculty showed the widest gap on political diversity — underestimating peer support by 15 percentage points — while arts and humanities faculty showed a similar-sized gap on religious diversity.

The disconnect went further than group averages. More than a quarter of all faculty personally valued political or religious diversity while believing their own colleagues saw it as harmful to the field — not just neutral, but actively damaging. Right-leaning faculty were about twice as likely as their left-leaning counterparts to hold this particular combination of beliefs, privately valuing these forms of diversity while assuming their department viewed them negatively.

The survey also examined how much faculty engage in scholarly disagreement day to day. Nearly 30% reported not regularly engaging with anyone who challenges their views on substantive issues in their field. That figure was far higher among adjunct and contingent faculty (41%) than tenured faculty (22%), and higher among STEM faculty (36%) than social scientists (23%). Faculty who reported the most frequent disagreement with colleagues were considerably more likely to view political diversity as beneficial — by nearly 20 percentage points compared with those who reported no regular disagreement — though the same group was somewhat less enthusiastic about demographic forms of diversity.

The report’s authors, Shiri Spitz Siddiqi, Erin Shaw, and Dylan Selterman, argue the findings undercut a narrative that has taken hold in some corners of the debate over “viewpoint diversity” in academia — the idea that pushing for more ideological variety on campus functions as a backdoor argument for hiring more conservatives. Since left-leaning faculty reported more enthusiasm for political and religious diversity than right-leaning faculty did, the researchers say, the framing of viewpoint diversity as a partisan project doesn’t hold up against their data.

Instead, the authors suggest that efforts to broaden the range of perspectives in academic departments might find broader support if framed as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, demographic diversity initiatives that already carry wide faculty backing. Given how many faculty already privately support these ideas, the researchers conclude, the challenge for advocates isn’t necessarily building buy-in from scratch — it’s correcting the mistaken assumption that such buy-in doesn’t already exist.

The survey was conducted between November and December 2025 and has a response rate of 7.3%, with researchers noting the sample’s demographic and disciplinary makeup was broadly comparable to national benchmarks for full-time faculty in the sampled institution types.