If Johns Hopkins University wanted to signal its seriousness about creating an alternative to the left-leaning orthodoxy that permeates higher education, it couldn’t have done better than the recent hire of economist Peter Arcidiacono. 

Arcidiacono, a devout Roman Catholic, faced campus protests and sleepless nights after publication of his empirical findings that affirmative action can be harmful to minority students who aren’t academically prepared. He was in the spotlight again for providing the evidence in the landmark 2023 Supreme Court ruling against Harvard that effectively killed affirmative action in higher education. 

Yet few realize that Arcidiacono supports affirmative action if it’s targeted properly, making him the kind of unpredictable conservative thinker, eager to engage contrary views, that appealed to William Howell. The dean of the new School of Government and Policy, Howell was so smitten with the economist that he also made Arcidiacono vice dean over the faculty.

The school, which plans to open in 2027 or 2028 in Washington, D.C., is part of Johns Hopkins’ ambitious and uncharted journey to transform itself into a citadel of ideological pluralism. It’s an experiment based on an untested theory: The hiring of conservative and heterodox thinkers will change the university culture, forcing scholars out of ideological ruts, spurring uncensored intellectual debates on campus and toppling orthodoxies along the way. But a big obstacle to the spread of pluralism is faculty opposition, highlighting the challenge of returning the university to its tradition of open-ended inquiry. 

Dean William Howell is eager to recruit faculty who engage contrary views to the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins. 

JHU

“We are bringing in people like Peter who are really interested in learning from other scholars who think very differently from them,” said Howell, who left a comfortable tenured position at the University of Chicago for the challenge of building a school from the ground up. “This is not a place to huddle with your tribe. When we tell them about the new kind of intellectual community we are building, they light up.”

While many universities have started civics schools that welcome conservative professors, Johns Hopkins has done more to promote ideological pluralism than most, placing it near or at “the top of the leaderboard,” says higher education scholar Neil Gross. No elite university leader has pushed harder for change than Johns Hopkins President Ron Daniels, ensuring a degree of compliance if not buy-in from his administration and faculty. An early mover, Daniels made plans for the first of two schools devoted to viewpoint diversity in 2017. He then wrote a book in 2021 – “What Universities Owe Democracy” – underscoring the need to train students in pluralistic thinking to help close the nation’s dangerous partisan divide.

Like most pluralism advocates, Daniels, a law and economics scholar, fits in the middle of the political spectrum. Beyond creating the two standalone enclaves for heterodox scholars, the president last year pressed his case for campus-wide change, forming a partnership with the conservative American Enterprise Institute to encourage collaboration between its scholars and researchers throughout the university.

Sense of Urgency

Perhaps the proximity of Hopkins’ main Baltimore campus to Washington, D.C. helped Daniels see the political trouble coming before other university presidents. And if his drive to bring conservatives to campus was meant in part to shield Hopkins from Republican attack, it didn’t seem to make much difference. Hopkins lost more than $800 million as part of the second Trump administration’s cuts in federal research and agency funding that hit elite universities hard.

Daniels’ influence within the Hopkins community also has limits. At all major American universities, departments have almost total control over hiring faculty, and they fi…