Viewpoint or Standpoint Diversity?

“Should a university provide a platform for all opinions, even if they run counter to the outcomes of empirical research?” The question was posed by Jan Willem Duyvendak, former director of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS), in an interview with NRC. Together with Leo Lucassen, former director of the International Institute of Social History (IISG), he warned about the growing politicisation of universities under the banner of “academic freedom”.

Duyvendak argued: “It is very worrying that, here too, radical right-wing parties in the House of Representatives keep coming up with the insinuation that the university is too left-wing or too elitist. In doing so, they themselves are politicising science. That is truly threatening. They are now doing it under the banner of ‘academic freedom’, but they fail to make a proper distinction between that and freedom of expression.” Lucassen made a related point: “You never hear politicians talking about ‘right-wing science’. I would think that just as bad an idea; good science is neither ‘left’ nor ‘right’.”

Both scholars thus argued that serious scholarship must remain grounded in evidence, methods and intellectual rigour rather than ideological loyalty. Their exchange touches on a distinction that has become increasingly important in debates about universities: the difference between viewpoint diversity and standpoint diversity. Although the two differ by only a single word, they rest on profoundly different ideas about what diversity is – and, more fundamentally, about how knowledge itself is produced.

The distinction is easier to grasp than the terminology suggests. Viewpoint diversity concerns the range of opinions people hold. It asks whether different political beliefs and ideological positions are represented within an institution. Standpoint diversity asks something different. It concerns the positions from which people encounter, investigate and come to know the world. Gender, race, class, nationality, (dis)ability, professional background, disciplinary training and life experience can all affect what researchers notice, which questions occur to them and which assumptions remain invisible. Put simply: viewpoint diversity asks what people think; standpoint diversity asks how the positions from which knowledge is produced may shape what can be seen, questioned and known.

The confusion between the two is understandable. In everyday language, viewpoint and standpoint sound almost interchangeable. In Dutch, this is even clearer: standpunt usually means someone’s opinion. Think, for example, of the radio segment Stand.nl, which invites members of the public to express their opinion on a proposition of the day. Within philosophy, sociology and anthropology, however, standpoint has acquired a much more specific meaning. And the distinction has become central to discussions about academic freedom, scientific objectivity and the purpose of the university.

Proponents of viewpoint diversity argue that universities lean overwhelmingly towards progressive politics, leaving conservative or heterodox perspectives underrepresented. Political leaders have increasingly portrayed universities as institutions in which certain political opinions are unwelcome. The extent and significance of that imbalance, and the claim that it makes conservative opinions unwelcome, are both contested. What is far less controversial is the broader principle often invoked in support of viewpoint diversity: scholarship benefits from the possibility of challenging established ideas. That principle draws on a long liberal tradition extending back to thinkers such as John Stuart Mill, who argued that claims to truth should be exposed to criticism rather than protected from it. Few academics would disagree with that.

The disagreement begins when ideological balance itself becomes an institutional objective. Universities do not normally appoint scholars because they are conservatives, liberals or socialists. They appoint them because of their expertise, the questions they ask, the evidence they bring to bear and the methods through which they produce knowledge. Political disagreement may certainly emerge from that process, but representing the political spectrum is not the same thing as producing epistemic diversity.

The controversy is sharpened by the political context in which viewpoint diversity is now invoked. In some of the political debates in which viewpoint diversity has gained prominence, radical-right parties and movements have presented it as the form of diversity universities ought to protect, while attacking initiatives intended to broaden participation across gender, ethnicity, class and other social backgrounds. Teaching and research on colonialism, structural inequality, diversity and equity have similarly become political targets. In this context, viewpoint diversity is not always advanced as one valuable form of pluralism among others. It can become an argument that political opinion is the only diversity that matters, while other forms are dismissed as ideological, discriminatory or politically suspect. That is precisely where the distinction between viewpoint and standpoint becomes consequential.

During the 1970s and 1980s, feminist philosophers and social theorists began asking a deceptively simple question: What if the production of knowledge itself has a point of departure? Standpoint theory developed through and alongside the work of scholars including Sandra Harding, Donna Haraway, Dorothy E. Smith and Patricia Hill Collins. Their central insight was that knowledge is never produced from nowhere. Every act of scholarship begins somewhere. No researcher enters an archive, laboratory or field site without a history, a language, a body, an education and a social world. These do not determine what someone will discover, but they can shape what becomes visible, which questions seem worth asking and which assumptions escape scrutiny. Around the same period, historians and sociologists of science were also challenging the image of science as detached from society, showing how knowledge bears the traces of the historical, political and cultural contexts in which it is produced.

The question, therefore, is not whether knowledge is situated. It is how scholarship becomes aware of its situatedness and subjects it to critical examination. One way of doing so is by bringing different intellectual and experiential positions into conversation: assumptions that remain invisible from one position may become apparent from another. A greater diversity of standpoints can therefore broaden not only the answers scholarship produces, but also the questions it is able to ask.

At NIAS, diversity is therefore considered in relation to the production of knowledge rather than political affiliation. In composing cohorts of fellows, we look at several dimensions that can broaden the intellectual and experiential positions represented in the group. We aim for gender balance between women and men while being explicitly inclusive of genderqueer fellows; a balance across career stages and levels of research independence, with roughly equal representation of early-, mid- and senior-career scholars; geographical diversity, with roughly equal representation of fellows affiliated with institutions in the Netherlands, the rest of the Global North and the Global South; and disciplinary and methodological diversity, balancing the humanities and social sciences while also including researchers from other fields.

These are not proxies for political opinion, nor do they presume that people belonging to a particular category think alike. The point is not that gender, geography, discipline or career stage determines what someone will think. It is that different positions can shape what scholars encounter, which questions appear salient to them, what bodies of knowledge they draw upon and which assumptions they are more likely to notice or question. Bringing those differences into sustained intellectual exchange can make scholarship more reflexive about its own starting points and broaden the range of questions it is able to ask.

This is perhaps the most persistent misunderstanding of standpoint theory. Critics sometimes interpret it as claiming that only women can study women, only migrants can study migrants or only Indigenous scholars can produce knowledge about Indigenous communities. But that does not follow from the idea that knowledge is situated. A standpoint is not simply an identity, and having a particular experience does not automatically generate scholarly insight.

Experiences matter because they affect what people encounter and what may initially be visible to them. But experience still has to be interpreted, investigated and tested. Experiential knowledge is therefore more than simply having had an experience.

Nor are researchers imprisoned within their own identities. People can learn about lives radically different from their own, listen to the experiences of others and acquire perspectives they did not possess at the outset. Ethnography provides perhaps the clearest demonstration: researchers routinely study communities and forms of life very different from their own. What matters is not a shared identity but methodological rigour, reflexivity, sustained engagement and a willingness to have one’s assumptions questioned. Experience may be a starting point for knowledge. It is not its endpoint.

Standpoint theory has been enormously influential, but it has never gone uncontested. One long-running debate concerns the claim, present in some versions of standpoint theory, that marginalised social positions can offer particular epistemic advantages. Critics worry that this can slide into granting epistemic authority to particular groups simply because of who they are. Others worry that emphasising social position can slide into essentialism, as though everyone who shares an identity must also share a perspective. Still others fear that an excessive emphasis on positionality could fragment the possibility of shared knowledge or universal standards of evidence.

These criticisms have shaped decades of debate within philosophy and the social sciences. Contemporary standpoint theorists have responded by stressing that individuals occupy multiple, intersecting positions; that there is enormous diversity within social groups; and, crucially, that identity or experience is not itself an argument. Critical reflection on one’s position is the beginning of scholarly inquiry, not its conclusion.

The criticism of viewpoint diversity becomes clearer from this perspective. Universities are not parliaments. Their purpose is not to reproduce society’s electoral or ideological distribution inside every faculty. Nor is scholarship improved simply by ensuring that for every political position there is somebody employed to articulate its opposite. What matters is whether the community of researchers collectively possesses enough difference in experience, disciplinary formation, methodology and intellectual tradition to expose assumptions, discover blind spots and ask questions that a more homogeneous group might overlook. This is a form of diversity directly connected to the production of knowledge.

Ultimately, the disagreement between viewpoint and standpoint diversity is not a disagreement about whether diversity is desirable. It is a disagreement about what kind of diversity universities require – and why. This brings us back to Duyvendak’s question. Academic freedom and freedom of expression are not the same thing. A university should be a place where established knowledge can be questioned, controversial hypotheses can be investigated and prevailing assumptions can be overturned. The strength of scholarship lies in the multiplicity of questions, experiences, methods and intellectual traditions through which claims about the world are subjected to evidence, scrutiny and challenge.