Diversity and Sustainability

I’ve had the occasion recently to reflect on the life cycle of various groupings of scholars. It is interesting how some institutes, some departments, some centers exhibit very different trajectories over time. Some reach a peak of influence and gradual decline. Others never achieve their potential impact.

It is common for the founders of a research group to be a special collection of entrepreneurs, who share a vision of how working together can effectively discover new knowledge, build new capabilities, and create new fields. Sustainability seems more likely when multiple minds with differing perspectives assemble in a joint enterprise versus building a group around the viewpoint of a single mind. Further, even multiple founding members can run into trouble. If all the founders of a group are homogeneous in skills and perspective, the long run impact of the group seems to be reduced. It seems that sustainability is a function of the complementary nature of the viewpoints. Units that become too in-bred atrophy.

Why is this?

Looking inside groups of scholars, a key ingredient, an engine of creativity, seems to be a dialectic of opposing viewpoints. When fields nurture controversies, progress and breakthroughs sometime follow. These can be strong debates about what theoretical perspective is most insightful to key questions facing the field. They can be new methods that yield different findings. Controversy is often a stimulus to progress in scholarly pursuits. Sometimes the controversies are fought out in academic journals, and certainly almost always in annual professional conferences. Sometimes the controversies arise from the importation of new methods or perspectives from another field. These often threaten the existing paradigms of the host field. New thought challenges old thought.

Academia thrives on different viewpoints within fields. Academics are trained to seek new ways of expressing thoughts, as well as discovering new theories and practices.

In that sense, the basic ethic of behavior within fields is hyper-critical and those within the field seek such criticism and aspire to countering the criticism of their own work. Civil (usually) discourse among those with different perspectives is the essence of academic debate. The norms within fields demand rational rebut to criticism as the price of respect for a new perspective.

The academic groups that fail to build in diverse viewpoints often fail to sustain the quality of their contribution over time.

This perspective on the norms that advance scholarly fields is deeply relevant to larger societies today. The world is suffering from too few of us confronting those with deeply different perspectives on a given issue. Many of us are trapped in a very homogeneous set of informational sources. In day-to-day interaction, we encounter those who are much like us. It is comfortable, but not healthy, for us. With the absence of the tension from hearing and living with alternative viewpoints to our own, we fail to sustain our own growth of insight, just like research institutes and departments that fail to bring in those with very different approaches to a given field. At a societal level, this breeds groups that can’t advance together because they cease interacting.

In life, as in academia, exposure to different ways of thinking is key to growth and sustainability. But in academia, such exposure is governed by norms that require listening and engagement, in order to seek new truths from opposing perspectives. So, how do we build those norms at a societal level?