DEI of what?
"Diversity" and "inclusiveness" only look uncontroversially good because they're vague.
Opponents of DEI departments and DEI statements claim that these are tools of political repression in the university. DEI statements ensure that none but candidates drawn from the 10% most progressive slice of the population get hired at a major university. DEI departments assure that any student or staff member who doesn’t loudly repeat progressive pieties whenever called to could be subjected to a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare. Accordingly, the DEI apparatus is completely inimical to academic freedom.
Defenders of the DEI apparatus tend to make two arguments in response. The first is that a commitment to DEI is an academic value. The second is that diversity, equity, and inclusion are such obviously good things that it’s odd at best and evil at worst to argue against DEI. These are related arguments. The idea is not that a commitment to DEI is a distinctly academic value that is part of the particular mission of the university: that particular mission is, pretty uncontroversially, the production, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. It’s more like saying that the university is committed to rejecting the value of axe-murdering. That’s not a distinctly academic value, it’s a value that everyone shares. But that doesn’t mean this value should be absent from academic life or is unrelated to the distinctively academic values. We won’t get much production, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge done if people are going around axe-murdering on campus all the time. It’s clearly in the university’s interest to keep axe murderers off campus, and it would be odd at best and evil at worst to object to measures designed to keep the axe murderers away. DEI initiatives fulfill a similar role.
This is a familiar enough debate that I was struck by how Jenny Martinez addressed the topic of DEI in her now-famous letter defending academic freedom at Stanford Law.1 Martinez declared herself to be both a defender of academic freedom and DEI. In doing so, she didn’t attempt to seek out a squishy compromise position, as so many other university officials in similar situations have done. Rather, Martinez argued that DEI, properly understood, is another way of stating the value of academic freedom. We need diversity of viewpoints, and inclusiveness of people with different viewpoints. The progressive hecklers at Judge Duncan’s talk certainly weren’t acting in an inclusive manner towards Judge Duncan! And if they had their druthers, conservative and even moderate opinions would be chased off of campus, leading to an intellectual monoculture: this is hardly a commitment to diversity (of thought)!
I agree with this line of argument from Dean Martinez. But it’s a bit weird! This isn’t what people mean when they talk about DEI. Martinez isn’t being naïve, though. She’s being strategic. The DEI bureaucracy isn’t going anywhere, unfortunately. So Martinez is trying to impose a new framework for thinking about what DEI means that is more consistent with academic freedom. I hope she succeeds.
The thing that interests me here is the fact that this alternate framework is possible at all. The typical framework of DEI thinks of diversity and inclusiveness as primarily addressing diversity across the usual categories (race, gender, disability, etc). Martinez is urging us to think of diversity and inclusiveness as primarily addressing viewpoint diversity. Both of these are perfectly consistent ways of talking about diversity and inclusiveness. But this reveals that the typical defense of DEI is entirely hollow.
“Diversity, equity, and inclusiveness are good things. Who could be against them?” But diversity of what? Inclusiveness of what? There’s no such thing as a value of diversity or a value of inclusiveness. It matters very much what kinds of diversity and inclusiveness we’re talking about. The commitment to DEI is framed as being akin to a commitment to keeping axe murderers of campus. But in keeping axe murderers off of campus, we’re not being very inclusive towards axe murderers. Nor are we fostering diversity with respect to axe-murdering, creating a campus that contains murderers and non-murderers alike. And nor should we. That kind of diversity and inclusiveness would be very bad.2
It’s not the case that “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusiveness” refer to uncontroversially good things. Those are all vague or contextually-variable terms. They could refer to things that are good, but they also could refer to things that are quite bad.3
Because of this, it makes no sense to talk about the value - much less the obvious, uncontroversial value - of DEI. we need to look at how the “DEI” slogan is interpreted and implemented by the bureaucracy at a typical university. And looking at that, it’s hard to disagree with DEI’s critics.
If anyone needs a refresher on the circumstances that led to the publication of that letter: a conservative judge, Stuart Kyle Duncan, was invited to speak on campus by a conservative student group, the Stanford Law chapter of the Federalist Society. Progressive students spent the weeks leading up to the talk posting fliers naming and shaming the members of Federalist Society for inviting Judge Duncan. On the day of the talk, they heckled Judge Duncan loudly and incessantly, preventing from delivering his prepared remarks. Duncan, in exasperation, gave up and started arguing with the students. The DEI dean for Stanford Law, Tirien Steinbach, who was on the scene stepped forward to help restore order. But her method of restoring order was to read prepared remarks that strongly sided with the protesters.
What about “equity?” There’s a similar problem here, but the dialectic is a bit more complicated. If equity is just a fancy way of saying “equality,” then obviously the same problems arise. “Equality of what?” is a famous problem in egalitarian theory. Equity is supposed to be different from equality, but different how? I’m persuaded by Matt Bruenig’s theory: Equity is just equality of the thing(s) that should be equal. So talking about “equity” only “solves” the “equality of what?” problem at the cost of triviality.
Again, this is what makes “equity” a bit of an outlier; per Bruenig’s theory, it refers to the good kind of equality so, by definition, it can’t refer to anything bad. But it still lacks any sort of determinate content; to know what is equitable, we need to first solve the “Equality of what?” problem.