> The advocates of diversity in higher education claim that learning requires the robust exchange of ideas, which is enhanced when students and faculty have the greatest possible variety of backgrounds. They argue that exposure to people from different backgrounds breaks down unfair stereotypes and promotes understanding of those who come from different circumstances than oneself.
Huh. I thought that the advocates of diversity in higher education were saying that it is fundamentally wrong to have an applicant pool and a worker pool that is biased on some aspect that has no known scientific reason to be intrinsically biased in that way, no plausible hypothesis for why it would be intrinsically biased in that way, and plenty of known reasons to be extrinsically biased. You could say it's fundamentally wrong because it's morally unjust, or you could say it's fundamentally wrong because it's losing you out on a large fraction of qualified candidates, but either way it's not because of second-order effects like these people bringing new viewpoints and ways of thinking.
I would imagine, for instance, that if a hypothetical Harvard noticed that most of its current and prospective faculty were Boston Brahmin, it would primarily look to diversify its candidate pool because there are tons of other good candidates that they must be overlooking. There's probably also a secondary effect of diversity of thought, and there probably is a bit of explanation as to why it's easier for well-established, well-connected families in Boston to produce Harvard professors, and a tiny bit of that might even be genetic intelligence. But it seems implausible that a well-functioning recruitment process would primarily attract this crowd, and the conclusion would be that the process is poorly functioning, not merely that it is poorly accomplishing some secondary benefit of diversity.
If you accept this reasoning, then it's pretty clear why Prof. Hasnas' experience -- as the "executive director of the Georgetown Institute for the Study of Markets and Ethics, whose tripartite mission is to produce high-quality research on matters related to the ethics of market activity, improve ethics pedagogy, and educate the broader, non-academic community about ethical issues related to the functioning of markets" -- involves a lot of discrimination on political viewpoint, and there is no contradiction or hypocrisy in wanting discrimination on political viewpoint for a job in such an institute but not wanting discrimination on genetics. Candidates applying for such a job probably have an extensive academic history of expressing opinions on markets and ethics, and whether they are libertarian in those forums is absolutely relevant to the recruitment process. (Their political opinions they yell on Facebook is of course a different thing and much more off-limits, but I don't believe that's what the professor or his committees were referring to.) A well-functioning recruitment process for such an institute should be biased on what those candidates have written on these topics and what viewpoints they've argued in favor of.