Unwinding DEI: Part II

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In this episode

Political opposition to diversity, equity, and inclusion programs has been building for years, but something happened last October that felt like a turning point. In a deeply reported article for The New York Times Magazine, Nicholas Confessore cast doubt on the effectiveness of one of the nation’s best-funded DEI programs. Titled “The University of Michigan Doubled Down on DEI. What Went Wrong?,” Confessore’s article added fuel to a debate over whether DEI programs are meeting their stated goals or actually making campus climates worse. In an interview with College Matters, Confessore talks about his investigation, and what it meant for The Gray Lady to take a critical view of DEI.

Related Reading:

• The University of Michigan Doubled Down on DEI. What Went Wrong? (The New York Times Magazine)
• Where DEI Efforts Are Ambitious, Well Funded, and Taking Fire From All Sides (The Chronicle)
• The Dismantling of DEI (The Chronicle)
• Statement from Tabbye Chavous, vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer at the University of Michigan

Guest: Nicholas Confessore, a political and investigative reporter at The New York Times and a staff writer at The New York Times Magazine.

Transcript

This transcript was produced using a speech-recognition software. It was reviewed by production staff, but may contain errors. Please email us at collegematters@chronicle.com if you have any questions.

Jack Stripling This is College Matters from The Chronicle.

Nicholas Confessore What I think it’s a little bit lost in that debate is that there are a lot of middle of the road people, people who vote Democratic, people who are liberal, who say, I support diversity…but. I heard that so many times in my reporting.

Jack Stripling We’re talking today with Nicholas Confessore, a political and investigative reporter for The New York Times and a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine. In October, the magazine published a deeply reported article from Nick, focusing on the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion program at the University of Michigan. The article, titled “The University of Michigan Doubled Down On DEI, What Went Wrong?” caused a big stir at Michigan and, more broadly, across higher education. The reporting raised questions about the effectiveness of one of the nation’s most well-funded DEI programs, and it added fuel to a larger debate about whether DEI might do more harm than good. That debate has only grown in the first weeks of Donald Trump’s presidency, which has in many ways been defined by efforts to eradicate DEI. My conversation with Nicholas Confessore was recorded in December, before Donald Trump took office for his second term.

Nick, welcome to the show.

Nicholas Confessore It’s great to be here, Jack. Thank you.

Jack Stripling So there’s a big national debate underway about diversity, equity and inclusion programs there, commonly known as DEI. A number of states have banned these programs, saying they promote left wing ideologies on college campuses, particularly as it relates to race. I’m curious, though, about what captivated your interest in this subject. You’re an investigative reporter with a broad mandate at The New York Times. You were part of a team that won a Pulitzer for your coverage of Governor Eliot Spitzer’s downfall. And you’ve been part of major investigations of Facebook and other social media companies. What makes DEI worthy of your time?

Nicholas Confessore Well, listen, it’s an important movement in higher education and business. And it has really reshaped workplaces and campuses across the country in a profound way over the last 20 years and even before. And I thought there was an absence of reporting on where DEI came from, how it works, and why so many people are angry about it. I had done a story looking at the anti-DEI movement on the right, and that was really focused on people in institutions who were on principle opposed to DEI. They oppose its aim and its execution. And what interested me next was to look at a big DEI program, a well funded, thoughtful DEI program at a big institution that was more immune to those kinds of political pressures and try to see what people thought about DEI on its own terms at an institution where pretty much everybody supports the broad idea. There’s no real objection to the pursuit of diversity at Michigan. There are not, you know, huge numbers of faculty and students who are against it in principle. The debate’s really over the execution. And so I wanted to go to one place where it was a big deal and evaluate it on its own terms. How was it working according to its own goals?

Jack Stripling So not focusing so much on the outside people who have made this a big political issue, but trying to go inside to a place and understand how it works day to day. This is a larger story, as you say, that affects not only higher education and business, but set the scene for me a little bit. How does Michigan fit into this larger debate over DEI?

Nicholas Confessore Well, Michigan has been at the center of national debates over education and inclusion and opportunity for half a century. It was one of the earliest schools to adopt affirmative action policies in the sixties because a person who went to Michigan’s law school was the person who helped draft the executive order from the Johnson and Kennedy administrations on affirmative action. He pressured the school to adopt affirmative policies for Black admission. In the 1980s, Michigan unveiled something called the Michigan Mandate, which at the time was one of the most ambitious diversity and inclusion programs in the country at a public university. You know, again, it was a national leader. In the 2000s, it was a defendant in one of these signal affirmative action cases. And the defense it used to successfully defend one form of affirmative action in admissions was to say that diversity is important for the educational experience of all and that everyone benefits from diversity. And we’ll come back to that. And yet what happened in Michigan was that the voters of the state disagreed, and they were among the states to ban affirmative action in that era in a 2006 referendum. So then Michigan had to figure out how do we get diversity in our campus without the tool of affirmative action? And they watched enrollment of Black students in particular plummet. And so they set about to creating something ambitious once again. And they said, let’s try and make a nation leading, higher education leading program that we can be proud of that will achieve the goals of diversity, equity and inclusion. And so in recent years, they have built what by some estimates is the largest program. It’s certainly among the best funded. They have spent almost a quarter of a billion dollars over ten years on DEI. And they really model themselves and hold themselves out to the world as a national leader on these kinds of programs and initiatives. So for all those reasons, I thought, here is a place, a campus where I can go and really understand the panoramic scope of these arguments in American society and in American higher education.

Jack Stripling And one of the things you mention about Michigan with this history is Proposal 2, this ballot initiative that banned racial preferences in public education and employment. That created some constrictions around how Michigan could approach this issue. And one of the things that people at Michigan talk about is that the Black enrollment for the undergraduate population has stubbornly been around 4 or 5%, even though they’ve put a lot of effort into this. What did you make of that as part of this story?

Nicholas Confessore Well, it was a focus of the story in two ways, kind of one is the origins of DEI before it was called DEI are really in the efforts to provide support for the new wave of Black students that arrived at selective college campuses especially, but college campuses in general in the sixties and seventies. These programs that are now much larger and more ambitious began as small programs to help those students in this world where they were really an obvious minority and still are in Michigan’s case. There’s been a battle in Michigan ever since to increase those numbers. This is a state, you know, Michigan now has, I think, still 14 percent Black people. It has never gotten close to that percentage of enrollment at its flagship state university. So that’s one reason that’s important. But the other kind of reason that’s important, I think, is there is this inherent tension, I think, in modern DEI between its roots as a form of reparations coming out of the civil rights movement, where the goal was specific to a specific group of people who had experienced something unique and terrible in American history. And over time, and partly because of the way education institutions like Michigan chose to defend affirmative action in court, that ideal became something broader and more fuzzy. And if you look at the DEI site at Michigan at the home page where it defines DEI, it lists 13 different kinds of identity. Everything you can imagine, diversity for all, diversity of all kinds. And the ethos here is all diversity is good and the more diversity, the better. And we celebrate all different kinds of identity, whether you’re a veteran or from a rural place or you’re Jewish or you’re Black. But in practice, often there is a strain in the world of DEI where there’s a sense that a real underlying goal, a primary goal, is Black representation. And it’s hard to do both of those things at once, to pay lip service to the broader idea, while trying to execute on the civil rights mandate. And so one of the tensions I think I explore in the story is whether and how a school can do both of those things.

Jack Stripling But are you immediately skeptical that if Black representation is a big part of the goal and the enrollment numbers are stagnant, that that might indicate a problem?

Nicholas Confessore Yes, I’m skeptical. But I think, again, the problem sheds light on DEI in a broader way. I think what I found in my reporting — and I’m going to generalize a bit from Michigan out to other schools — but I think that schools make these really grand promises to students. We are going to look like America. We are going to be diverse. We’re going to be also inclusive. You’re going to feel included and safe. You’re going to feel like part of the community. You will not face that kind of perturbance over your identity. But inevitably, things happen on a big campus and the school can’t really stop that, no matter how many administrators it has, how many programs it has. And over time, the students get very cynical: They said, but you promised us inclusion and diversity. And by the way, why are the numbers so low? And I think that gets to a bigger issue, Jack, which is a four year college, even a wealthy one like the University of Michigan can actually only do so much to change the outside world in the years that its undergrads pass through the gates. But they promise that they’re going to do it. They say we’re going to go into Detroit, middle schools and high schools. We’re going to do pipeline programs. We’re going to prepare these kids. We’ll get those numbers up. And what it turns out to be the case is, it’s extremely hard. Really, really hard.

Jack Stripling They’re not promising to cure racism from society, are they?

Nicholas Confessore I think if you look at the materials in the brochures, they create this expectation that we will do these things: we will create a certain environment. We’re going to create wraparound services, mental health, special accommodations, a center for this, a center for that. So they don’t say “we will cure racism,” but they say that we’re going to create an environment where you are included and feel included. And so you can be educated.

Jack Stripling So that’s the standard by which you’re evaluating this program. This is what you’ve said the program is for. And I’m going to sort of evaluate whether it delivers.

Nicholas Confessore It’s what the school says the program is for.

Jack Stripling Yeah, I meant that. Yeah. This is what Michigan says.

Nicholas Confessore And so it’s really about exploring the tensions in these different goals and the ability of a school to try to achieve them. I would say, the story doesn’t make a case for whether DEI is bad or good. It tries to explain why DEI is hard and why some obstacles that schools are trying to surmount are really like, near impossible to overcome. In the case of Michigan, you asked about Black enrollment. Its a state university for a long time for a few reasons, it got most of its Black students from a couple places in Michigan, chiefly Detroit. That was a major feeder for Black students at Michigan. Well, the public school system in Detroit has declined by about 40 percent. So at the same time that Michigan is expanding its overall enrollment and trying to expand its proportion of Black students, the main place that it got Black students is turning out fewer students in general. And that is a product of forces that is just beyond the school’s control. But they have chosen to hold themselves accountable, and thus the students hold them accountable for those metrics. As you know, there was a movement called More Than Four. And that was the Black students union saying we need more than 4 percent. We’re not getting to that critical mass that experts say we need to not feel isolated on this big campus on account of our race.

Jack Stripling Right. So, this article is more than 9,000 words. I feel like I’m cheapening it by asking this question. But one of the big questions you’re asking is whether DEI works at Michigan. Does it make a positive difference on this campus? Do you feel like you left with a good answer to that question?

Nicholas Confessore I think so. And there are different answers to that question because the school will have one answer, my reporting arrives at some different answers. I think there are a few different ways to look at it. You could say that if not for the DEI program, representation of minority students would be worse. You could say it’s helping. It’s just a really hard problem to overcome. You can also say that some of the things the school is doing make things worse. And it’s very hard to say empirically, but what I can say is the school did its surveys. They commissioned internal surveys to monitor progress on DEI. One of the things they measured over the course of this program was whether students felt included, their sense of belonging, right? Which is a central part of a DEI program. And over the span that these two surveys were done, students actually reported feeling less included, less of a sense of belonging, less likely to engage across racial, religious, political differences, not more. So this is a really big school, Jack. It has a really distributed DEI program. It’s got 50 different units. They all have their own DEI program. It’s a central DEI program. It’s hard to pull out cause and effect for any one thing, but at an aggregate level, I think that’s a clue that something is not quite right, right? If those things are going down and not up. There have been increases in minority students on an absolute level. The percentage, the proportion of those students on campus is still increasing pretty slowly, and the proportion of Black students is increasing really, really slowly. Almost not at all. It’s a game of inches. But they basically were measuring the beginning of phase one of their DEI program, and then at the end of phase one. And phase one is called DEI 1.0 at Michigan. So they were measuring, they were benchmarking at the beginning and the end. And I thought those findings were pretty surprising. And they raise a couple of different questions that are relevant to the DEI endeavor. One is like, is it really possible for administrative programming to create that kind of cross-difference exchange that is the, essentially the justification for DEI. And another is, is the outside world just too influential to what’s happening on campus, that it just overwhelms anything that the school might choose to do, right? I’m talking about these intense four or five years, the MeToo movement, Black Lives Matter, George Floyd, COVID, the Donald Trump presidency, all of those things were things happening in the world that students had strong reactions to — many students had strong reactions to — that the school couldn’t do much about. And I think part of the complex here, right, is students are reacting strongly to things happening off campus and they are looking for response and solutions on campus and often finding that they can’t get what they want, that the responses are not enough for them and these expectations keep getting dashed. And that, I think, is part of what’s going on at a school like Michigan.

Jack Stripling So if something like the climate on campus as it relates to race is so heavily influenced by outside forces that Michigan, the university, can’t do anything about, and enrollment in some ways is tagged to things like the population of Detroit, there is a question, I guess, inherent in these observations about whether it’s worth spending $250 million on a DEI program that maybe can’t do much about the big forces that are affecting race relations in the country, the climate on campus. Is that what you’re suggesting?

Nicholas Confessore That’s one conclusion you can draw from the reporting. I don’t think you can say, well, that must be the answer. I think it’s, a story like this has to sort of explore different answers to the questions, right? One is we can’t move the needle much on this. Another possible answer, a reasonable answer is it would be worse if we didn’t do anything. A third answer is I think the school is going through a version of this answer right now is, let’s take a close look at what we’re doing, really focus on the things where we can move the needle and rethink the things that either don’t move the needle or create knock-on effects that create more division or anguish on campus. How they’re going to do it is up to them. I’m kind of curious to see it. It’s a really complicated problem. I don’t think there’s any clear answers. I don’t think anyone knows exactly how to solve the problems.

Jack Stripling We were talking a few minutes ago about these campus climate surveys, which are sort of snapshots of how students on the campus feel about things like belonging on the campus, which has major relevance to the work of DEI. That’s part of what they’re saying. We want to make people from diverse backgrounds to all feel welcome on this campus. And what you were reporting in your article is that, you know, this, these numbers actually look worse in some cases. It’s a striking thing to think about. And it’s something that you asked Tabbye Chavous, who’s the head of Michigan’s DEI program, about. I thought that was a particularly notable point in the article, and I think a lot of people really had reactions to the way she responded. Talk to me about that interview.

Nicholas Confessore You know, it was an interview towards the end of my reporting. I had been trying to get the interview for some time. I sensed a lot of reluctance to put Dr. Chavous on. When we got on the interview, it was by phone. Almost all my other interviews that were set up by the school were over Zoom. This was a phoner, and I sometimes got the sense that she had talking points in front of her because she kept interrupting her sentences to read from them. And she seemed worried about the conversation, about where it might go.

Jack Stripling Let me ask about that, Nick. I mean, I’ve been in this position as a reporter. You can pick up vibes, but when you say she seemed nervous and even the article says she seemed flustered. Unpack that for me. What gave you that impression?

Nicholas Confessore I mean, you’d have to listen to the interview on audio, but she had trouble finishing their sentences. She kept stopping and starting again. Her overall vibe was very, very nervous for almost the entire interview. And when I read the transcript, I, you know, you got the sense that this is a person who feels that a lot is on the line in this conversation, which I think is fair. It can be challenging to talk to a reporter. But when I listen to videos of her speaking in other contexts, much more assured way of speaking. So I think flustered was a generous term in some ways.

Jack Stripling In fairness, you’re coming at her with the hard stuff, right? I mean, you’re asking her to defend the program, I think, in some ways. Is that accurate?

Nicholas Confessore She heads the program. So I would say she was the main voice from the official university who was responding to some of the critiques that were in the story. But she’s also a highly compensated vice provost in a senior role at the university. So it’s appropriate that she’d be the person who answered those questions, I think. That’s just journalism.

Jack Stripling So for folks who maybe haven’t read your article, tell people how she actually responded when you asked her about the changes in climate data showing that things might actually look worse through that lens.

Nicholas Confessore Well, she answered in a couple of ways. One that we have in the story is that she said, well, you know, it’s not necessarily surprising when you introduce people to the idea — and I’m paraphrasing here — when you introduce people to the idea that there are wrongs in the world, that there’s racism or other kinds of oppression in the world, it makes them upset and they might get upset. And I think she would say, I don’t want to speak for her, but I think her perspective is that part of the work of DEI is managing those feelings, is creating programming that can turn that turmoil into something productive. Another point the school has made is, well, the first survey was a snapshot of students who were on the campus at that time. And the second survey was a snapshot of the students who were on campus four or five years later, not strictly longitudinal. All I can say is this is the metric they chose. This is the study they chose to do as part of measuring their own DEI efforts. So I’m just using their data.

Jack Stripling I think one reason a lot of people keyed in on it was it sounded like, at least in the answer as reported in the article, that, the portion that we saw, that to some degree Michigan is having it both ways. If the climate numbers are improved, then DEI must be working. If climate numbers are getting worse then DEI must be working. Was that how you interpreted that response?

Nicholas Confessore It’s certainly how a lot of people at the school interpreted it. I spoke to students and faculty who actually told me about taking, I don’t know if it was this survey or a different survey, but they talked about how these surveys always say, and I’m paraphrasing a student here: Are we doing enough DEI or should we do more? And I think one theme in the story and you see this kind of breaking out in the debate on campus right now is for all the talk in the DEI program about metrics and accountability, it doesn’t seem like there’s much form of self-correction. The answer is always to grow. The answer is always to do more. And in my reporting, I kind of locate that in a broader phenomenon in the world of DEI research. So if you look at the debate and the research on this, when the Supreme Court upheld a limited kind of affirmative action in Bakke, the argument was having diverse students on campus improves the educational experience. There wasn’t actually a lot of data around this. This was the argument that school leaders made. And in the late 1990s, someone finally got around to doing some empirical research on it and they found actually it’s not enough just to have the numbers, you have to have people interacting with each other, which makes some sense, right? If you want to harvest the so-called educational benefits of diversity, you have to have diverse students. They also have to talk to each other and interact. And then as the empirical work progressed, it became, well, they can’t just interact. They have to interact in positive ways, which again, makes some sense. But what this ended up as was a recipe for more and more administrative intervention, right, on campus. And not surprisingly, you see a huge growth, not strictly in DEI administration, but in administration more broadly. Campuses are overrun with administrators in American higher education. There are so many admin staff and that has not always been true. That is a phenomenon that’s unfolded over 30 or 40 years. And within that, a relatively small part of it, but within that is the growth of DEI bureaucracies, not just the DEI person for incoming students, but then you need one of those for every department or every unit in college. Someone’s got to oversee those people. So that’s a unit, right, and it grows. And I think that one of the things the story is exploring is the growth of that bureaucracy and what it really means, and how people on campus actually respond to it. And that goes back to the surveys. Because what does a bureaucracy do? It says well, we have to have data and metrics, let’s do a survey. But then the survey comes out, and if you read the school’s materials on the survey, it basically says, well, the numbers are down, but A, it’s the same students. And B, we can’t be held responsible for things that are happening off campus. It’s a hard time.

Jack Stripling I mean, Nick, don’t we see this in other phenomenon, though? For example, sexual harassment and sexual assault. If you create an environment in which people feel more comfortable reporting these things and have confidence in the apparatus that’s handling it, those numbers often go up. That doesn’t mean that sexual harassment and sexual assault is getting worse. It means that people have more faith, perhaps in the campus’s ability to deal with it. Is that not the case?

Nicholas Confessore That’s one possibility, right? Just looking at Michigan: in 2015, the university office charged with enforcing Title IX complaints, that’s complaints of gender or sex-based discrimination, they got 200 complaints. By 2020, that number had doubled, right? So I’m not sure you can explain an increase of that magnitude strictly by people being more comfortable with reporting clearly kind of violative behavior in proportion to how often it’s actually happening, right?

Jack Stripling No. And I fear I’m sounding like a Michigan mouthpiece here and I don’t mean to.

Nicholas Confessore No, it’s OK. No.

Jack Stripling Other things happened in 2020, too. George Floyd was murdered. The pandemic happened. I mean, there were a lot of things people felt awful about.

Nicholas Confessore Yeah. So we see these huge upticks, huge upticks in formal complaints of discrimination. And I think you’re absolutely right. To some extent, that is a positive change in the culture. That’s people saying, I’m not going to take it anymore, right? But also mixed in there, and I report on some of these examples in the story, are complaints that for many professors especially, are just political disagreements turned into allegations of harassment and discrimination. And I think that’s really important. I heard so much about Title IX, Title VI reporting this story. So many stories, many of them not in the piece, about those processes being weaponized by people who didn’t like how something was taught or what was being taught or had an experience they didn’t like or just had a personal dispute with somebody. And, you know, I spoke to some other people who were involved in Title IX work and DEI work, and they said and they told me this off the record, but they said, look, like you’ll find that increase in a lot of schools. And the trick is it’s really hard to design systems that quickly weed out frivolous complaints but elevate and scrutinize genuine complaints so we can stop bad actors.

Jack Stripling Stick around. We’ll be back in a minute.

BREAK

Jack Stripling: One of the people you spoke with was Scott Lyons. He’s an English professor who was criticized by one of his students. Tell me what happened there.

Nicholas Confessore What happened, according to my reporting, was that there was a class, a professor named Scott Lyons read aloud a passage from Faulkner. And it’s a, I believe the story was called Barn Burning. It is a story about race and class in the South a long time ago. And the passage has a racial slur in it. You can guess which one. The passage makes a point, if you read it I think the interpretation would be, it makes a point about how racism in the south of that era was a way for white landowners, wealthy white landowners to redirect the sort of class rage of poor white tenant farmers towards Black people, right? That’s kind of the point of the passage. And he read it aloud, including the slur. And one student, Dylan Gilbert, was really upset by it. And she picked up her things and she left the class. And that happened in 2019, and then a year later, it’s the spring and summer of George Floyd, and Dylan Gilbert goes on Twitter to talk about this experience. She says that he said the slur multiple times, that she was unhappy with how the school processed it, and she made a complaint about it. And it’s not entirely clear where the complaint went. I think she was unhappy. She felt she got the bureaucratic runaround. But meanwhile, Scott Lyons has to deal with these accusations in public that he was sort of leeringly saying these words and it created quite an uproar on campus. There was a story about it in the Michigan Daily. I think Lyons felt really attacked and felt unfairly, treated. He felt that Dylan Gilbert was being unfair to him. She felt that she wasn’t getting the response she wanted from administrators. And as you can remember, that summer, 2020, was a time where a lot of these kinds of things were happening, these paroxysms on campuses and not on campuses, including in workplaces. And so that was like a signal event in that era of how the school was trying to manage these really contested and difficult issues of like how you teach controversial, difficult, perhaps even hurtful material in the classroom.

Jack Stripling And that’s obviously an age old issue in education, higher education, high school, wherever. You know, Nick, I haven’t interviewed either of the people involved in this article, so I want to preface that. But this was an area that I found myself a little conflicted about, to be candid with you. Because there’s an interpretation within the context of the article you’re writing here that this is an example of sort of knee-jerk racism police saying something horrible happened when in fact, a professor is teaching one of the great writers of American literature. There’s another interpretation of this, though, that I want to ask you about, which is: this person was deeply offended. They walked out. There are some email exchanges that you quote from, I think, in the article where she’s quite polite, but says, I hope you would consider the experience I’ve had as a Black woman hearing white people use the N-word. The professor then goes on to say, we’re not going to do that in this class anymore. No one says you can’t teach William Faulkner, he just says, I’m not going to read aloud passages that use the N-word. There is a school of thought that might look at that and say this was a successfully handled situation. The student was well within her rights to raise this to the professor and did so politely. Now, did she later, you know, blast him on X or Twitter at the time about this or however she made it public? Yes. Did a ton of people do that after George Floyd’s murder? Yes. I’m a little perplexed how we’re supposed to feel about this anecdote.

Nicholas Confessore You know, when I do a story like this, Jack, I don’t want to instruct you how to feel. I really want to lay out all the facts that I have and let you draw your own conclusions. I think a reasonable person could look at this incident in a few different ways, including the two that you mentioned. I think Lyons thought he had handled it properly. I think he got a complaint from a student. He didn’t appreciate the way she handled it. But I think in the emails that I’ve seen, he was also polite to her. And as you point out, he did say, you know what, I don’t want my students so rattled and hurt in an emotional way that they can’t learn. I’m going to add that to the list of words we’re not going to use in class. He already had a no cursing policy in his class, and I think he felt that he had handled it well. The trouble began a year later. When she said, I don’t think this was handled well and I’m still upset about it, right? And it’s one of these things and I think it’s unique to the social media age where incidents are stripped of their original context and appear before us on social media to an audience of the world, potentially, right? And as readers, right, as viewers of the incidents, we come to them without a lot of connection to the place, the people. We come with our priors, right? We come with what we’re kind of revved up to feel. But as I said, I think reasonable people can read those passages and come away with different feelings about what should have happened, what did happen. I don’t think there’s any one answer.

Jack Stripling You know, one of the delights of this story, Nick, is that you did sort of scour Michigan’s materials to look at how they talked about DEI. And I will say one of the knocks on this stuff is that, taken out of context, it often looks pretty cringy. And you have some examples of this, I’ll just highlight a few for folks who may not remember them or may not have read it. There are students in an art class complaining about, quote, curriculum based trauma. There’s a handout that describes, quote, characteristics of white supremacy culture that include, quote, worship of the written word. And there’s a strategic plan for Michigan’s arboretum and botanical gardens calling on employees to rethink the use of Latin and English plant names which have, quote, actively erased other ways of knowing. I think a lot of people giggled reading some of this stuff, that it seemed kind of like gobbledygook, that it seemed kind of snowflakey, quite frankly. And I’m just wondering what they add up to. Are these a few silly examples to you or do you think they reveal something deeper about how DEI works in practice on college campuses?

Nicholas Confessore Well, I do think they reveal something deeper, which is that, and it goes to the one theme of the story, which is that a lot of the underlying things that the DEI tries to solve are not within the power of institutions to solve. So then what do they do, right? And the administrative mandate to do something, right, to intervene, to be seen doing something, to have a list of things you can show people that you did, that creates a vacuum that has to be filled. And I think we’ve seen a lot of debates over language on college campuses, especially, what’s the right way to talk about things? You can’t talk about them this way, you’ve got to talk about them this way. And in a way, I think that’s a reflection of weakness. It is one of the only forms of power that administrators and their allies really have is to say, here are the ground rules for having a discussion. And I think one theme in my reporting is that when institutions are challenged to accomplish their underlying functional goals, the vacuum gets filled with a lot of, you know, fighting over language and language policing, and words, right? Reframings. Theory. And that example you’re reading from, the third one, the kind of actively erasing different ways of knowing, that comes from the arboretum. And the arboretum had a couple of problems identified in its own DEI plan. And one thing they wanted to do is have a more diverse array of visitors to the arboretum and gardens. And just for context, the arboretum is right near campus, but the gardens are some miles away. And they said, look, the reason people don’t come to the gardens is because it’s hard to get there. You can’t get there without a car. And they spent some time trying to figure out buses or vouchers for a car service, rides on demand, and they couldn’t get money for it. It seemed difficult and expensive. And so they didn’t do that. The thing that was actually most in the way of the goal they couldn’t tackle. So what did they do? Well, they say let’s rename the plants, right, because we can control that. And I think one of the ironies that happened there was they said, let’s stop using just English and Latin plant names. Let’s use indigenous names for these plants. And then someone looked and it turns out, not surprisingly, there’s not just one indigenous name for each of these plants. Even in Michigan, there’s multiple language and language families. So you’d have to pick one. You’d end up with like six or seven names or more, not just one or two in English and Latin. So they abandoned it because it was impractical and maybe because it didn’t do anything. It signaled something. It signaled an intent, a virtuous intent, perhaps. But it didn’t actually solve the barrier to participation, which is: well it was hard to get to that place if you don’t have a car. And there’s not much we can do about it unless we have a lot of money to spend on it.

Jack Stripling A sort of obsession with the superficial at the expense perhaps, or instead of the practical. I think it’s fair to say that your article catalyzed a swift response on Michigan’s campus. In December, it was just a couple of months after the article came out, the provost announced the university would stop soliciting diversity statements in faculty hiring, promotion and tenure decisions. These statements have become a political lightning rod in the larger DEI conversation. They often ask job candidates, How would you support our diversity goals? And there’s a question as to whether that’s asking the candidate to essentially adopt an ideology that is thought to be mostly a left wing ideology. What does this all tell you, this response, tell you about where DEI may be headed at Michigan?

Nicholas Confessore It’s a great question. Well, I think what’s fascinating about Michigan is in a lot of states DEI programs have been banned or changed essentially under legislative fiat, right? You have laws passed that are very strict that actually just ban certain things completely. Or you have political appointees overseeing universities. And it’s mostly Republicans who put these policies in place. And those bans and legislatively directed overhauls vary a little bit. Some are more strict than others, but they’re mostly an expression of Republican political power in states where they are in power to change the institutions that are within their grasp, that are public institutions. What’s different about Michigan is it’s one of the, I think the first or the biggest instance we’ve seen, in which a generally liberal institution that is not being pushed around by the governor or the state leg’, not being directed what to do, is taking a look on its own and saying, what can we do better here? So it’s coming from the inside. And that’s another thing that was important in the story I think. You know, there’s a huge debate about DEI around the country. There is energetic, conservative and Republican opposition to it. What I think gets a little bit lost in that debate is that there are a lot of middle of the road people, people who vote Democratic, people who are liberal, who say, I support diversity, but. And I heard that so many times in my reporting. Another idea I heard a lot was, can we just go back to what DEI was ten years ago, which I think is not an incorrect instinct in the sense that things did really begin to shift a lot, I think, 10, 15 years ago. But Michigan is looking in the mirror and it’s difficult and painful for a lot of people. But I think that’s the significance of it, is that they are looking from the inside out. What can we do differently? Diversity statements, you mentioned that earlier, that is one of the things that you hear about over and over again that is the least popular part of diversity programming in schools.

Jack Stripling And diversity statements are hot button, as you say. They are something that I think gets condemnation across the political spectrum. I’ve seen people on left and right have an issue with them. There are other things the DEI office does at Michigan that I think are less controversial. One of them is the Wolverine Pathways Program, which is designed to give academic support to high school students in underserved areas. There was certainly a feeling from some of the responses I saw from the Michigan administration that these things sort of got short shrift in the overall assessment of DEI. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Nicholas Confessore Yeah. I mean, look, if you’re under the gun in a story like this, you’re naturally going to wish it was framed in a way that was most positive for you, that focused on the things that worked best or that you think are most popular. The story does talk about Wolverine Pathways and I think it’s an important program for them. It also illustrates, I think, one of the central findings in the piece, right? So Wolverine Pathways is a pipeline program, and it’s facially race neutral. So it’s not against Prop 2. But they focus on schools in school districts in Michigan that are predominantly Black — in Detroit, Ypsilanti, a couple other places. And they go in and they try to prepare students, I think it now goes into middle school in some places, but they try to create a pipeline of students who will be academically prepared for a selective state university when they apply. That’s a great idea. And in fact, I could not find a single person in Michigan who dislikes that program. They all love it. They all think it’s great. That’s sort of like the diversity program we all like, right? Pipeline programs are pretty, pretty popular because they’re pretty in sync with pretty broad American values. Give everybody a chance. Give a person a leg up if they need it, right? The Go Blue Guarantee is another one. That’s a tuition guarantee for low-income Michiganders of any background. It’s income based. But let’s go back to Wolverine Pathways. A big success of DEI 1.0 and 2.0 was to double the number of students from Wolverine Pathways that are enrolled at Michigan, double the output. So what does that mean? It sounds like a lot, right? That’s 200 to 400 people. They had 200 people, now they have 400. Now, not to make light of that; I think it’s a game of inches. I think making that increase took enormous effort. But think about what a drop in the bucket that is at a huge state school with tens of thousands of undergraduates and how all that effort still struggles to move the needle. Why does it struggle? Because the Detroit school district has been massively depopulated, right? So you can have a pipeline from point A to point B. And if point A is putting out fewer people, it’s just not going to have the impact that maybe you hope. And that, again, is the point, right? It’s not that you shouldn’t do this or that it’s bad. It’s that it’s hard, right?

Jack Stripling Well, I think we are in a political environment where people are saying don’t do this. And I think that’s the concern, is that this type of analysis creates an environment that is going to put a lot of pressure on boards to sort of throw the baby out with the bathwater. That because of some of the sins of DEI, we’re going to gut these programs, we’re going to cut funding, and the work we’re doing, which is hard and complex and maybe sometimes even defies conventional metrics, is all going to go away. I think that’s the concern that I hear from people around this conversation.

Nicholas Confessore Look, as a reporter, all I can do is tell the truth and write facts. And you can’t not write things because somebody might misinterpret them and do things you don’t like with them. You got to tell the truth. For the record, I have not heard anybody at Michigan talk about defunding those two programs except people who are campaigning to preserve the programs in their entirety. I don’t think that’s on the table. I do not know, and you don’t know, what the Trump administration will do, what kind of policies will come out of the federal government. But there is no internal constituency in Michigan for defunding those programs. In fact, the regents just voted to expand Go Blue, the tuition guarantee. And I think they would also like to expand Wolverine Pathways. What’s meaningful is that over half of that quarter billion dollars I talked about earlier, over half of that spending on DEI has gone to administrative staff and salaries. A quarter of it went to Pathways and to the Go Blue Guarantee. And I think certainly at the regents’ level, they’ve made very clear they want more money in that second bucket and less in that first bucket. But I don’t think you can shy away from reporting on complicated subjects because somebody will seize on something in a misleading way and try to do something with it. That’s just not, it’s not good journalism. It’s not good for society.

Jack Stripling Yeah, and I couldn’t agree more with that, Nick, if it wasn’t clear. But I do want to ask you about The New York Times as an institution, though. You know, I’m a reporter with The Chronicle of Higher Education. We’ve written a lot about DEI. My own colleague, Katie Mangan, did her own deep dive into the Michigan program. But I brought you on the show because I think it matters if The New York Times writes a major story about something as touchy as this in higher education. And I think it’s without question that some critics of DEI are holding this up and saying, look, even “The Gray Lady” thinks this stuff is bogus. Chris Rufo, you know, who was responsible for writing some of the model legislation that is banning DEI programs in some states, was very complimentary of this, and talked about how it really reflected a change in the conversation, that this used to be something that people dismissed as a hard right wing position, that DEI programs are bad. And now a newspaper that is thought to have a progressive ethos, or at least not a far-right wing ethos, is calling out the problems as well. I just wonder what you make of that. I know you said you can’t control how people respond to this. But as a reporter, surely you’ve noticed it?

Nicholas Confessore Yeah. I mean, look, anytime there are stories in a major newspaper that validate a conservative worldview in some sense or seem to, there’s always that kind of reaction, you know? A ha, finally. Sometimes people will say, oh, The Times admits, right? There’s this tendency to think of The Times as an intentional political actor. And then I see that on the left, too, frankly, that people sort of think we do stories to achieve certain political ends. Like I said at the beginning of the program, Jack, I started doing this story because of my reporting on the anti-DEI movement on the right. And in fact, I had done a story last summer that involved Chris Rufo in part, and he was very upset with my story; kept saying I’d misquoted him and was unfairly treating him….

Jack Stripling Well, welcome to the club, Nick.

Nicholas Confessore You know, and look, the Rufo perspective, as I understood it, is we don’t believe in intellectual pluralism on campus for its own sake. We think students should be taught certain things, and the right should use its political power to make that happen. And to me, that’s actually like the mirror image of the more hard left policies you see at some campuses where you have these arguments over what you have to teach or what you can’t teach. And in the middle, I think, are most people, most professors, most faculty, who are looking for some balance between academic freedom and basic competencies and educating students, preparing them for the world. And I just think that when I do a story like this, I’m really just following my reporting from one thing to the next. And like I said, what interested me about this topic was to understand the other side of something that I had written about on the conservative side. I had written about their perspective and how they’re going about it. But look, there’s no question that like, we have a big audience and we take that really seriously. And just as a function of having a really big audience in a world where audiences are so fragmented, when we, you know, kind of take a deep dive on something, it has meaning. That means a lot to me, actually. I think it’s important. I take it really seriously. There’s a lot of gravity that comes with that right, to get it right. But trying to shape your stories in advance to affect how they’re going to play on social media, is a really bad road to go down for journalists. You just got to report the facts and have them fall where they may.

Jack Stripling Well, Nick, I really appreciate the work you did here, and this has been a really great conversation. Thank you for having it with me.

Nicholas Confessore It’s great to be here, Jack. Thank you.

Jack Stripling: After the publication of Nicholas Confessore’s article, Tabbye Chavous, the University of Michigan’s Vice Provost for Equity & Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer, released a statement that was critical of the piece. You can find a link to Chavous’ statement in this episode’s show notes.

Jack Stripling College Matters from The Chronicle is a production of The Chronicle of Higher Education, the nation’s leading independent newsroom covering colleges. If you like the show, please leave us a review or invite a friend to listen. And remember to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss an episode. You can find an archive of every episode, all of our show notes, and much more at chronicle.com/collegematters. If you like, drop us a note at collegematters@chronicle.com. We are produced by Rococo Punch. Our podcast artwork is by Catrell Thomas. Special thanks to our colleagues Brock Read, Sarah Brown, Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez, Laura Krantz, Carmen Mendoza, Ron Coddington, Joshua Hatch, and all of the people at The Chronicle who make this show possible. I’m Jack Stripling. Thanks for listening.