Earlier this month, my Review colleague David Wescott and I interviewed the University of California at Riverside sociologist Steven Brint, an expert in higher education, about what colleges should expect after Donald Trump’s restoration. (Last year, Brint wrote a very widely-read essay on the topic in our pages.) Among his most acute concerns: that incoming National Institutes of Health head Jay Bhattacharya will make funding contingent on “compliance with administration policies, which may be subject to a lot of political bias.” Our own Stephanie M. Lee likewise reports that “many scientists are nervous” about the funding environment under Bhattacharya and incoming Health and Human Services chief Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is notoriously attached to a battery of widely rejected theories about vaccines.
Brint’s criticisms weren’t only aimed at the new administration, though. In at least two ways, he said, universities have in the last decade or so pursued some “counterproductive” strategies. First, they have too often officially identified themselves with one side of the political spectrum: “For institutions to come out on political and social issues, especially when they’re almost exclusively taking positions that are favored on the left, does expose their flanks to backlash.” Second, they have pursued a doctrinaire and highly prescriptive version of diversity, equity, and inclusion — “all the bad guys have the same skin color and the good guys have a different skin color” — which they have installed at the center of the educational mission. Across the University of California system, Brint says, contributions to DEI came to rival or even displace “research contributions” as a criterion of merit.
Brint has made versions of these arguments before, most extensively in an article co-authored with Komi Frey and published in the house journal of UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education back in 2023. In “Is the University of California Drifting Toward Conformism? The Challenges of Representation and the Climate for Academic Freedom,” Brint and Frey answer the question posed by their title in the affirmative. Their abstract states their position clearly:
In this essay, we explore the consequences of the University of California’s policies to address racial disparities and its support for social justice activism as influences on its commitment to academic freedom and other intellectual values. This is a story of the interaction between two essential public university missions — one civic, the other intellectual — and the slow effacement of one by the other. The university’s expressed commitments to academic freedom and the culture of rationalism have not been abandoned, but they are too often considered secondary ... when confronted by new administrative initiatives and social movement activism related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).
A series of responses were published alongside Brint and Frey’s provocation. In one corner, David Hollinger, a Berkeley historian, expressed more or less full agreement; in the other, Uma M. Jayakumar, an education-policy researcher at UC Riverside, rejected the Brint-Frey thesis as depending on false dichotomies and misconstrued evidence. Other respondents accepted some but quarreled with other aspects of the original essay.
And then there was “A Thriving Intellectual Community Relies on Diversity,” by Sharon Inkelas, a Berkeley linguist and special advisor to the UC system chancellor, and Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of Berkeley’s law school. The anodyne title belies the essay’s fury. Inkelas and Chemerinsky, in effect, accuse Brint and Frey of racism: “Brint and Frey provide no evidence to support their despicable thesis that hiring faculty from previously historically excluded groups lowers the intellectual quality of the university.” Inkelas and Chemerinsky insist that Frey and Brint’s apparent interest in academic freedom is a smokescreen for more disreputable impulses — their “essay may masquerade as a defense of academic freedom, but at its core is a palpable fear that a more just and inclusive world will diminish the unfair advantage that some groups currently hold.” They deny that Brint and Frey have in fact identified any instances in which DEI concerns have impinged on academic freedom. The appearance of such trade-offs, they suggest, is itself a consequence of racism: “It is not a violation of academic freedom to disagree with a White person.” Moreover, “Brint and Frey repeatedly refer to imaginary policies as if they were real,” especially when it comes to what Brint and Frey call the “policy of winnowing applicant pools based on diversity statements.” In fact, Inkelas and Chemerinsky say, “no such policy exists.”
In his own “Response to the Commentators,” Brint denies the “despicable” thesis Inkelas and Chemerinsky attribute to him. He points out that he and Frey wrote that DEI efforts, at their best, resulted in “outstanding students and faculty members [being] recruited who would not have been recruited in the past.” Brint would say that he is opposed not to diversity per se — far from it, in fact; he has been a past champion of affirmative action — but to the intellectual and institutional culture promulgated by changes to diversity policy. In his Chronicle interview, he dates this shift to around 2012. Among other changes, the implementation of diversity statements in hiring and promotion has proved particularly divisive.
Brint flatly rejects the notion that applicant pools are never winnowed based on diversity statements. He observes that Inkelas and Chemerinsky themselves, in the very next paragraph, describe such winnowing in action when they write that “Brint and Frey take particular exception, as other opponents of diversity have done, with a search conducted in 2018 at UC Berkeley in which the search committee opted to read DEIB statements before reading other materials.” (In fairness, Inkelas and Chemerinsky choose their words carefully; one could argue, I suppose, that reading DEIB statements first doesn’t entail a first round of eliminations on their basis. In any event, Brint says the 2018 incident referred not to a single search but to a series of searches in the life sciences — and it seems pretty clear that the diversity statements were indeed used as an initial screening device.)
But beyond litigating specific aspects of their disagreement, Brint criticizes Inkelas and Chemerinsky’s tone. Their critique, he writes, “cannot be read as a normal scholarly exchange”; instead, “they engage in an unprofessional, ad hominem/ad feminam attack.” When upper administrators permit themselves such rhetoric, Brint writes, they risk chilling campus discourse more generally:
When senior university administrators use such unprofessional language, particularly to criticize a thesis that the authors not only do not make but argue against in several places, it is easy to guess that faculty members who hold less secure positions than we do will simply shut up and fall in line. This might be especially true when hostile language is advanced by such a person as Erwin Chemerinsky, who is the dean of a well-regarded law school and quoted frequently in the press. It is very disappointing that Dean Chemerinsky has decided to engage in this basement-level form of polemics. I would have expected much more from him.
If Brint is right that Inkelas and Chemerinsky breached scholarly norms — and I think it’s fair to feel that accusing a colleague of making a “despicable” argument is something less than civil — what might have motivated them? A clue can be found in one of Brint’s comments in his recent Chronicle interview. In 1996, Brint explains, the state of California outlawed affirmative action in both hiring and admissions. Administrators were largely in favor of affirmative action, “so they looked for work-arounds. The policies implemented to pursue diversity were a work-around. The idea was to maintain the value structure of the university while trying to create equality of opportunity.” Those work-arounds held the field for a number of years.
But beginning in the early 2010s, an expanding — and ideologically assertive — DEI bureaucracy moved DEI from a quiet work-around for affirmative action to something like a total program for the university itself. And over the past several years, it has predictably triggered a severe rebuke from conservatives, whose political ascendancy threatens to bring a new level of scrutiny not just to DEI’s more recent expansion but to its earlier (and never abandoned) function as affirmative action by another name.
Against this looming political backdrop, administrators like Inkelas and Chemerinsky felt strongly the need to defend DEI against the coming assault, which they worried would also dismantle the somewhat covert form of affirmative action practiced after state and federal bans. Indeed, in a surreptitiously recorded video that became a sort of cause célèbre among conservative commentators on higher education, Erwin Chemerinsky himself referred to DEI as a species of “unstated affirmative action”:
I’ll give you an example from our law school, but if ever I’m deposed I’m going to deny I said this to you. When we do faculty hiring, we’re quite conscious that diversity is important. And we say that diversity is important — it’s fine to say this. But I’m very careful when we have a faculty appointments committee meeting, anytime somebody says “We should really prefer this candidate or this candidate, this person would add diversity” — don’t say that. You can think it, you can vote it, but our discussions are not privileged, so don’t ever articulate that that’s what you’re doing.
Perhaps more than any specific policies themselves, the species of strategic reserve and complex double-speak here advised has proven enormously provocative to those already skeptical of the current culture of higher education. Will more forthrightness be forthcoming? (Chemerinsky did not respond immediately to a request for comment, but told Fox in 2023 that “I am sad that someone took a video of my class discussion and excerpted it in this way. The Law School strictly complies with Proposition 209 in all of its hiring and admissions decisions.”)
Read Komi Frey and Steven Brint’s essay; Sharon Inkelas and Erwin Chemerinsky’s response; Brint’s response to the response; and the whole special issue in which these debates played out.
