Cynical Attacks on DEI

There is a legitimate way to take shots at the Diversity/Equity/Inclusion departments on campuses. It is that they are cynical attempts to “solve” racism through hiring more administrators instead of, you know, requiring the teaching of Black history or such things that would force students into situations where they would actually have to talk about race in a real way around people who don’t look like them. As college is the only time in their lives where that could ever happen, that would be useful. But no, DEI ends up looking more like “how can we solve racism through more assessment and workshops.”
But that’s of course not what the Republican Party is doing here. They are attacking DEI for talking about race at all. And this is cynicism of the worst kind. It’s so bad that it puts me in the position of defending university administrations, which is not a place I am ever comfortable. The historian Eddie Glaude explores what is really happening here:
The debate about the terrible war in Gaza has taken on an odd face: an attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). It requires a tricky magic to transform DEI into the latest bogeyman and the reason for the rise of antisemitism on college campuses. Those full of passion who rail against critical race theory and applaud the Supreme Court’s decision upending affirmative action now believe that DEI initiatives undermine the true mission of higher education with a so-called left-wing orthodoxy that stifles free speech and mocks merit. That argument, or some variant of it, has joined with strident criticisms of student protests against the war in Gaza. The protests reveal, they argue, that American universities and colleges are hotbeds of antisemitism, where “social justice warriors” dictate what can be said and hurl words like decolonization and settler colonialism to batter, silence, and threaten their opponents.
DEI is the Frankenstein monster. For these critics, policies around diversity result in the hiring of unqualified people to lead our most elite institutions who then fail to respond appropriately in moments of crisis. DEI also distorts the application of speech code policies. After the murder of George Floyd, for example, universities and colleges bent over backwards to respond to the demands of Black students and now, when Jewish students feel threatened, administrators hide behind free speech. Here DEI singles out some students for special treatment, the critics claim, while leaving others vulnerable and allowing antisemitism to flourish. The student protests in support of Palestinians, some believe, are a consequence of what Alan Bloom called in 1987 “the closing of the American mind.” For over thirty years, the argument goes, there has been an assault on classical liberal education. Radical professors indoctrinating students. Activism displacing the cultivation of critical thinking. Political correctness suffocating free and open inquiry. With the ascendence of left-wing orthodoxy Israel can be seen as an oppressor while students ignore the reality of the history of Jews.
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The motivations of right-wing critics like Representative Elise Stefanik, Ed Blum, and others seem less about wrestling with the diversity that has always been there but can now no longer be ignored, than about reasserting a certain view of the country and of higher education. I am uneasy when I see, hear, or read them. Their voices sound familiar, an echo of an ugly past. Twain was right, history rhymes.
Under the guise of a commitment to a classical liberal education, right-wing critics are pursuing illiberal ends that deny the value of diversity all together. They ignore or downplay the history of exclusion that has defined much of the history of places like Princeton, Harvard, or Yale. For them, meritocracy alone resolves historical inequity. Color-blind equality, the equal treatment of individuals regardless of group identity, is the only remedy to generations of policies that have produced our society. And, for these critics, diversity initiatives occasion only the compromise of standards, an attack on merit and, for some, an assault on the idea of whiteness itself. DEI is the latest bogeyman; George Soros and the globalists had their turn. Who knows what “monsters” wait in the shadows.