A DEI storm is brewing
Happy New Year.
Over the winter break, the movement to dismantle diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts on college campuses accelerated tenfold, culminating in the ouster of Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay. The billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, who is perhaps Gay’s most vociferous critic, had suggested in a viral social-media post that she ascended to the university’s presidency because of her race rather than her merit.
Two conclusions have since been mainstreamed: that DEI officers fail to protect Jewish students, resulting in rampant antisemitism on some campuses, and that, in an effort to protect minority students, the administrators censor conservative voices.
A recent story by The Chronicle‘s Maggie Hicks and Katie Mangan explores whether colleges are capable of protecting Jewish students amid the continuing Israel-Hamas war and the pro-Palestinian protests.
From their story:
In an initial hearing on antisemitism, in November, House Republicans spent much of the time blasting campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion, accusing them of dividing students and fomenting hatred, especially against Jewish students. Some argued that such offices actually encourage anti-Jewish sentiments by dividing groups of people into oppressors and oppressed and failing to see Jews, whom many regard as relatively privileged white people, as among those oppressed. In the second hearing, with the college presidents, Republican representatives repeatedly raised questions about whether Harvard was disciplining students for racist acts but not antisemitic ones.
DEI advocates told Katie and Maggie that fighting all forms of discrimination is a tall order, especially when it comes to religious discrimination and at a time when their resources have been thinned by legislative attacks. There’s widespread disagreement among Jews about how to define antisemitism, and, unlike race, colleges aren’t required to collect data on religious identity.
From their story:
“Antisemitism doesn’t fit with what is generally DEI’s focus today — on structural issues of equity and inclusion,” said Berkeley’s [Ethan] Katz, who’s also faculty director of the [University of California] flagship’s Center for Jewish Studies. In 2019, he co-founded the university’s Antisemitism Education Initiative, which has worked closely with campus groups, including the university’s DEI office, to educate people about the roots and different forms of anti-Jewish bias and hatred. That kind of close cooperation with diversity offices, he said, is somewhat of a rarity across higher education, as well as corporations.
“It’s clearly very difficult for DEI professionals to figure out what to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” Katz said. “When attacks are coming from white nationalists shouting ‘Jews will not replace us,’” in Charlottesville, Va., “it’s much easier to wrap your head around it and get on board.” But when the hostile language is coming from the left, and the terminology is disputed, the connections to hatred and exclusion might be harder for diversity officers to grasp without additional training and education, Katz said.
How’d we get here?
In a thought-provoking essay, Len Gutkin, a senior editor of The Chronicle Review, digs into the evolution of campus activism this past decade. Citing several confrontations between administrators and students (including this infamous one involving the Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, who, along with his wife, Erika, oversaw student activities in one of the university’s residential colleges), Gutkin points out how DEI administrators came to be seen as prioritizing minority students’ feelings of belonging at the risk of censoring controversial speakers.
From his essay:
Still, there is some evidence that the proliferation of administrative bureaucracies like the Intercultural Affairs Council stimulates student protest against certain kinds of speech, especially conservative speech or speech, like the Christakises’, taken by student activists to be conservative. A recent study by Kevin Wallsten, a political scientist at California State University at Long Beach, finds that student tolerance toward conservative speakers is negatively correlated with the number of diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators, but it finds no such effect for tolerance toward liberal speakers. By the same token, Wallsten found, the student bodies at campuses with a high number of DEI administrators are more likely than those at campuses with lower numbers of DEI administrators to support disruptions of controversial speech. The perception that some administrators are soft sponsors of student protests has, in the last year, invited intense scrutiny and even official policy revisions. In a memo issued in March 2023, for instance, Jenny Martinez, then dean of Stanford Law, included a section called “Academic Freedom, Free Speech, DEI, and the Role of University Administrators,” in which she specifically focused on the troubled relationship between free speech and DEI.
College administrators over the last decade have struggled to publicize ways their DEI offices have improved campus culture, swat away accusations that DEI administrators play favorites, and properly navigate the friction between social justice and free speech, the contours of which have been upended by the emergence of social media.
For DEI, race, and free speech, this year will be a newsy (and pivotal) one. Congress is preparing more investigations, state legislatures are crafting more bills, and we’ll see this fall the demographic impact at selective colleges of last year’s Supreme Court ruling on affirmative action.
The Chronicle will try to keep up. Please forward news tips and your reflections to daarel.burnette@chronicle.com.
What I’m reading
- Two new books detail how white Republicans in the Reconstruction-era South were under constant violent threat for their attempts to advocate for the white and Black working class, according to a recent review in The Wall Street Journal.
- The bizarre practice of tipping in America got its start with Black pullman porters and today continues to be a source of the wage gap between Black and white service workers. A sprawling history in The New Yorker examines gratuity culture.
- Claudine Gay is “is now a symbol — scorned by some, hailed by others, caught in a whipsawing argument over merit, rights and race that seems to have no end,” Kurt Streeter writes in The New York Times.
