Reforming DEI
Four university leaders on a better approach to diversity and inclusion
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives have come under increasing fire in recent months, with critics charging that, although many of the goals of the movement are good, the specific ways in which they’re being pursued are often illiberal, counterproductive, and damaging to the pursuit of knowledge.
A new piece in The Detroit News tackles the issue head on, arguing that DEI requires urgent reform. The piece is particularly interesting because its authors are advocates of DEI, and they include a university president - Ora Hirsh Pescovitz - and three faculty leaders: David Dulio, Mark Navin, and James Naus. All are from Oakland University in Michigan.
Below are some excerpts from the piece to whet your appetite. You can read the full piece here.
Critics from both the Right and, increasingly, the Left charge DEI with indoctrinating students, repressing alternative viewpoints and undermining academic values… Moreover, in the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks, many have also criticized DEI for helping to cultivate antisemitism…
[C]onceptions of DEI that prioritize some identities over others end up promoting simplistic and sometimes harmful approaches to complex social problems. Such identity-based accounts of diversity attempt to divide people into binary categories of racist versus anti-racist, white versus non-white, oppressor versus oppressed or colonizer versus colonized, and they often assigned blame or victimhood depending on which side of the identity divide a person falls. History illustrates the horrors that can follow from this kind of moral scapegoating; antisemitism is the most obvious example…
Colleges and universities generate knowledge through arguments based on reason and evidence. They must promote the free exchange of ideas to arrive at the truth... Expansive free speech promotes intellectual inclusion; it welcomes all voices to the table.
Some DEI programming can promote ideological conformity by presenting contested concepts around identity and oppression as indisputable. This can cause people who question those narratives to be labeled as bigoted or insensitive, which contributes to self-censorship, conformity and exclusion. We should judge ideas by their merits and not by their proponent’s identity and status. To do otherwise would be to reason in an insular circle that is immune to outside evidence, and which sacrifices the academic mission of higher education.
In a similar vein, here’s something I wrote a few years ago in response to a request for feedback on proposed EDI initiatives at my own university. (We put the letters in a different order in the UK!)
Inclusion and diversity are great goals. But I hope we’ll stick to well-evidenced strategies (e.g., social norm-based initiatives), and avoid the kinds of missteps we’ve seen on some American campuses - including interventions that research shows don’t work and may even make things worse (e.g., mandatory diversity training; implicit bias training; trigger warnings); practices that may inadvertently encourage students to think in ways known to increase the risk of depression and anxiety (e.g., emotional reasoning); and in some cases, a political worldview that many would consider extreme and divisive (e.g., seeing demographic groups as either oppressors or oppressed; claims that reason, science, and open inquiry are white, male ways of knowing, rather than useful tools developed by people all over the world and available to everyone). The Brauer Group Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has put together an excellent online resource summarizing evidence on which diversity-and-inclusion measures work and which don’t. See also this piece by
.
Here’s some related reading from the Archive:
In Other News…
now has a monthly column in The Boston Globe. His first piece came out today. It’s about why women are becoming more left-leaning than men, and it features a quote from yours truly.The gender-equality paradox can help to explain why the gender gap is largest at the most selective US colleges., where family income tends to be higher and sociopolitical equality tends to be especially highly prized.
In an interview in The Times of London, the psychologist Steve Stewart-Williams succinctly summarized the paradox: “Treating men and women the same makes them different, and treating them differently makes them the same.”
You can read Rob’s piece here. And here’s some more related reading from the Archive:
Follow Steve on Twitter/X.
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Jess from UofW was one of the 15-20 first openly gay, lesbian and bisexual users (the Cabal) of internet - using usenet's soc.motss (Members Of The Same Sex) just as internet emerged in its current form. Usenet was the forerunner of every social media and publishing system in operation today.
Only a handful of us are still alive. We came from Caltech, MIT, Stanford, University of Wisconsin, University of Toronto, Princeton, Harvard, Rensselaer, Berkeley, Johns-Hopkins, Bell Labs, Silicon Graphics, NASA/JPL, IRCAM, and a few other spots in the US.
The "cabal" was made up of several women, a lot of men, a gay father and his daugher, and several bisexuals. We knew the readership was huge even back in 1981-2-3, because we all had many private email conversations with people who were afraid of commenting publicly. ISP's and private email was yet to exist. Homosexual sex was still in many states in the US.
While PC world was coming into view, HIV was stil raging as internet emerged.
[ Total aside:
I "married" the most prominent bisexual woman on the internet in the early 90's during a trip to the US while I was living in Paris. She was actually the partner of Richard Stallman at the time. It was at a private house party event a friend of mine gave me and my French boyfriend at Harvard, along with many professors, students, and decorative gay men. I had some notoriety at the time, which continued up through the late 2000's with sightingts regularly reported.
I can vividly visualize the event still: She was slender, spectral and radiant in a black long-sleeved Lycra dress and shoulder length black hair, and I recall being near naked in gay-friendly bulging aubergine Lycra shorts and gold llame squeezed muscles, with my prodigious gold beard. Addams Family meets disco Grizzly Adams. We exchanged onyx rings. Several of us had put tiny squares of paper (furnished by a gay NYC Deadhead friend and his lesbian wife) saturated with delightful substances under our tongue before the event. It lasted well into the early hours of the morning... Those were the days. Happily my "spouse" is still alive.
]
University of Wisconsin was one of the very first institutions to publish acceptable “politically correct” institutional language, back around 1985/1986. It was risible then and is risible now, and in many ways started the ball rolling to where we are now.
A group of the original gay core of all internet on soc.motss within Usenet read it, and made fun of it after it was shared by a man named Jess Anderson, who was part of the staff at UofW. Little did we know how the cancer would spread.
I think common sense provides a better guide than guidance coming from the Death-Star.