This history of the opinion pieces is an interesting one. I just wanted to point those two facts out to anyone who may have missed that in the headline.
The Opinion section operates editorially independently from the rest of the newspaper. It is the section’s unique mission both to be the voice of The Times, and to challenge it. The Op-Ed pages were born, in part, because of the closing of New York’s top conservative newspaper, The New York Herald Tribune. They were created to be opposite the editorial pages — and not just physically.
“The purpose of the Op. Ed. page is neither to reinforce nor to counterbalance The Times’s own editorial position,” the introduction to the newly created opinion pages stated in 1970. “The objective is rather to afford greater opportunity for exploration of issues and presentation of new insights and new ideas by writers and thinkers who have no institutional connection with The Times and whose views will very frequently be completely divergent from our own.”
Just to highlight that last bit: The opinions are frequently chosen to be completely divergent from those held by the NYT staff.