Who Cares About Diversity?
All across the Academy, schools are requiring “Diversity Statements” as a condition for new hires. Everyone has to submit a statement explaining how they are going to contribute to “diversity”. What you’re supposed to do in these, and what everyone damn well knows you’re supposed to do, is (i) talk about your race, gender, and other “identity group” traits that it would be illegal for the university to use in hiring decisions, and (ii) talk about your activism on behalf of left-wing identity politics. Note: If you write a statement merely explaining how you will scrupulously avoid discriminating, or explaining how you will contribute to intellectual diversity, your application will be tossed in the trash. No university will say this out loud (yet?), but, again, everyone knows that.
These Diversity Statements, as a recent commentator notes, are the secular version of the Statements of Faith long used by religious schools (www.insidehighered.com/views/2022/05/23/diversity-statements-are-new-faith-statements-opinion).
You can see the most obvious problems with this – (a) racial, gender, and similar forms of discrimination are wrong, (b) enforced ideological conformity is poison to any institution of education or research. There’s a lot to be said about those two obvious problems, but I won’t say it now. Because what I want to start with right now is this question: Who actually values diversity?
My claim: Most proponents of “diversity” do not value diversity. In fact, they are passionately against diversity.
1. What Is Diversity?
1.1. When did we start pretending to care about diversity?
Before saying what is meant by “diversity” in this context, let’s first remember the origin of the current use of that word.
It goes back to the Supreme Court case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke [438 U.S. 265 (1978), https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=4987623155291151023]. White medical school applicant Allan Bakke had sued the University of California for racial discrimination. He had been rejected from UC Davis, and he argued that, had it not been for the university’s affirmative action program, he would have been accepted. Bakke won his case, and the court struck down racial quotas in admissions; however, the court also allowed some affirmative action to go on. Justice Powell’s opinion explained that you needed a “compelling state interest” to justify affirmative action, then allowed that “the educational benefits that flow from an ethnically diverse student body” could form such a compelling interest:
"The atmosphere of “speculation, experiment and creation”—so essential to the quality of higher education—is widely believed to be promoted by a diverse student body. … [I]t is not too much to say that the “nation’s future depends upon leaders trained through wide exposure” to the ideas and mores of students as diverse as this Nation of many peoples."
That is when progressive academics started talking about how much they love diversity. Because they heard that that would be a legally permissible rationale for affirmative action.
1.2. Diversity is intellectual
Given that origin for the current usage, we have to interpret the meaning of “diversity” in light of that. “Diversity” is supposed to be good because it promotes good education through an atmosphere of speculation, experimentation, and creativity, which results from exposure to a wide range of ideas. Therefore, what diversity is must have something to do with that. Most fundamentally, in this context, diversity would be variety of ideas, experiences, and attitudes, especially those relevant to the things that people are learning about in school. Diversity would not mean, for example, having people with different birthdays, or different numbers of fingers. It means having people who think differently. (It could be that people of different races think differently due to their different experiences, etc. I'm certainly not ruling that out here.)
2. Universities Don’t Want Diversity
2.1. The argument for affirmative action
The diversity-based argument for affirmative action is this:
People of different races (& other ‘identity groups’) have different ideas, attitudes, and experiences. Therefore, by diversifying the racial composition of the student body, we will be indirectly producing intellectual diversity.
On the surface, that’s a possible explanation of how people who really value intellectual diversity would come to support some form of affirmative action.
But that’s just on the surface. If you stop and think for a second about exactly what such people would support, it totally fails to match what the universities are doing.
2.2. Ideology
If the rationale for affirmative action were as described, the first thing we’d expect is that, obviously, the strongest candidates for affirmative action would be people with diverse belief systems. In the academy, left-wing beliefs dominate; therefore, the affirmative action supporters would be first and foremost demanding preferences for conservatives, libertarians, moderates, fascists, monarchists, and other people who do not accept the current progressive orthodoxy.
Everyone knows that isn’t happening. Virtually none (maybe actually zero) of the woke, social-justice-warrior people support philosophical diversity. The most “woke” people are the ones who aggressively try to silence all dissent (https://fakenous.net/?p=2932) and to exclude conservatives, libertarians, etc., from the Academy. So they not only fail to value intellectual diversity; they are just about the most stridently anti-diversity people in the entire country.
2.3. Other countries
If people of different races think differently, presumably that’s because of their different experiences (rather than, say, because different beliefs and attitudes are genetically programmed into different races). In that case, the most diverse people would naturally be those from other countries. They’ve not just grown up in a different part of our society; they’ve grown up in a completely different society. So affirmative action proponents would greatly favor affirmative action for, say, African immigrants over affirmative action for blacks born in America.
2.4. Other races
And it wouldn’t just be people from Africa. Affirmative action would also apply more strongly to, say, immigrants from Iran, or Korea, or Israel, than to black people (or anyone else) from our own society. Again, a person who grew up in Iran is obviously going to have experiences and attitudes more different from the typical American student than a person who merely grew up in a poor neighborhood in the U.S.
In fields that are white-dominated (such as philosophy), there would also be affirmative action for Asians. In fields where there weren’t many Jews, there would be affirmative action for Jews.
2.5. Social class
People from different social classes would also be subject to affirmative action. A poor white person from rural America is going to have experiences more different from me than a middle class black person who grew up in the suburbs. So poor, rural white people would get more affirmative action points than middle class suburban blacks.
2.6. Proportionality
Educational benefits are supposed to be produced by exposure to a variety of ways of thinking. That’s plausible on its face. But nothing about that argument is tied to the percentage that each group makes up in the overall population.
In other words, say that groups A, B, and C think differently (on average). If you’re trying to get the educational benefits of diverse viewpoints, you could argue that you need some representation from each of A, B, and C. Or you could maybe argue that there should ideally be equal numbers of people from A, B, and C (maybe to maximize the chances that any given class will have all three viewpoints represented). Or maybe you could argue that there is some threshold number of people from each group that you want to be present in any discussion (enough to make those people feel comfortable contributing, say). But there just isn’t any argument to be made that you need a number of people from group A that is proportional to the current percentage of people in the general population of your society who belong to A.
2.7. None of that is happening
Of course, none of the above predictions are borne out: the current practice of affirmative action has none of these features that you would expect if its proponents actually valued diversity. Conclusion: By and large, they don’t care about diversity. They’re just lying, in a really transparent way, because they think it gives them a patina of legal legitimacy.
You might object that some of the above features should only be expected if diversity were the sole rationale for affirmative action. Maybe diversity is just one rationale among many. Briefly, I’ll just say that I don’t see any indication at all that most affirmative action proponents value diversity. It’s not just that, e.g., they prioritize AA for black Americans over AA for conservatives. It’s that they have no interest whatsoever in idea-based AA; indeed, most would be aggressively opposed to it. Similarly for foreigners: as far as I can tell, woke AA proponents, controlling for race, show approximately zero interest in whether a person grew up in a different culture. Etc.
3. Conclusion
This illustrates my general view that the Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity movement is Orwellian: it's the opposite of what it says it is. “Diversity, inclusion, and equity” refers to ideological uniformity, exclusion, and discrimination.
I was expecting more comments about this.
Hi Mike. I think it's extremely important and fruitful to refer to the actual content of DEI indoctrination programs, lessons, slideshows, etc. You're talking about it exogenously, tracking the logic of the dictionary meaning of words like "diversity", but I think it's the substantive content that really exposes what this is.
Most people probably imagine a vanilla sense of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that the implementation or instantiation of these concepts in the mandatory workplace indoctrination sessions is some sort of vanilla thing, maybe based on universal values around not being racist, benevolence, etc. If you linger on each word in the triplet, you'd probably know why "equity" and "inclusion" cannot even theoretically have vanilla implementations. It might be possible to know this if you didn't know about leftists and their ideology – I'm not sure. Equity isn't a word English-speakers used before in a core values or justice sense, but it carries the broad default momentum of goodness that equality/equal carry. Inclusion is oddly specific, structurally action-oriented, that we need to do something to "include" someone or some group, which wouldn't normally occur to us, and isn't something any other school would likely land on as a value. That's more of a childhood playground concept for most humans.
A lot of the content is Orwellian word use dictates. I expect it's extremely awkward for anyone well educated or maybe philosophically minded/independent. Like the recent Air Force Academy slides telling cadets to use alternatives to "mom and dad" (it's unclear if they mean in referring to one's own mom and dad, or if it's about other people's parents – the slides are junky in various generic pedagogy and intellectual clarity dimensions). On the same slide they say not to say things like "I'm colorblind" or "I don't see color" and "We're all just people". (I don't remember which of the first two it had, or if it was both – I'm sure of the third.)
Those phrases are just things that annoy leftists, say from past conversations. They literally add arguments or sentiments or self-descriptors that annoy them to the list of things you shouldn't say. They might try to back it by saying something about "science says" that you can't be colorblind, maybe because of implicit association tests where college kids tapping on a keyboard in response to word pairs flashing on the screen imply a valenced association attached to a race (due to millisecond scale variance in the key press responses). Obviously that's not going to tell us anything about a human being's ability to be colorblind, or to accurately say they're colorblind in their behavior or what have you. Nor does an IAT finding debunk a implicit point in a claim about us all being people, much less support indoctrination telling people never to say such things. (That the IAT findings are contested on their own terms, and may not replicate, is a separate epistemic issue – leftists don't seem to know that most social psychology findings/claims are false, which just the replication attempts show. It's actually worse than that, but they don't engage with science or reality with the baseline rigor you'd need to explain the validity issues to them, even ignoring that they don't trust outsiders and won't actually believe anything we say anyway. I don't think leftists trust themselves to think independently, so it has to come from their leaders or media intermediaries.)
The last thing on that slide was "Model humility when you get it wrong". You'll find that they always include these injunctions of supplication. It's the creepiest cult... They're saying that if you "get it" "wrong" by saying some word they've told you not to say (or those phrases), or don't use someone's bizarre pronoun, or assume that someone's parents are the usual human male/female parents, or really anything that a black person, trans person, leftist at large type person rebukes you for, you should never argue, never question, but just accept that you "got it" "wrong", and "model humility". The Navy thing on pronouns was phrased something like "assume the error is yours and learn from it", don't question, etc. That's common in all the indoctrination materials, the supplication if you get it "wrong". And that is where humans really need to be able to recognize a cult and say no.
The Pentagon diversity lady who was in the news recently would proclaim to her captive audiences things like "I can't be racist – I don't have power" (because she's black). That's standard, not controversial to leftists. We see that recitation everywhere. Their abstractions and assertions are really distinctive, and we totally failed to characterize them and call this out as arbitrary junk a long time ago. They're implying that reality is the kind of place where a human being either has or does not have "power" depending on their race and other identities. It's ironically binary both in having power and in being able to be racist. Any thinking human could just situate themselves in a typical human life and consider the values, options, constraints that a person faces at various stages, the nature of a human life course, variance in contexts, and maybe what sorts of "power" a person might have at various stages, and how much (actual quantity now, not binary). Such a thinker would have no use for the leftist abstraction of "power" at any point, this wouldn't be a simple debunking of their ideology – it would be highlighting that we just don't care about arbitrary abstractions like that, and would need some sort of explanation and body of evidence to even begin to think about this "power" they speak of.
All that doesn't even touch on what it means to be racist, a psychological and moral model of a human being, the human mind, an account of moral responsibility for different sorts of behaviors in various contexts, what humans owe or don't owe to each other, or the downstream consequences of the leftist ideology here vs. alternatives. All that is just ignored by an ideology that has these binary and unclear abstractions and makes sweeping descriptive claims about the world and humans based on those abstractions. I think the best default answer to leftist ideology is to point out the arbitrary, sweeping assertions using proprietary abstractions, without evidence, and say "Let us know when you have something." As in, something we can even work with or evaluate, because this is just arbitrary junk.
It's also worth noting that you'd have to get people when they're young to get them to embrace this, and uneducated. How in the world would someone who had read the Stoics, Aristotle, random history books of all sorts, Kant, economics, psychology, etc. embrace these abstractions, and an ideology that doesn't realize how arbitrary its starting points and structure are? If we just waited until people were 25 to fill them in modern ideologies, which is mostly the left, I think few would embrace it (conservatives don't have much, mostly default human intuitions and patriotism, and a religion that releases them of ultimate responsibility for worldly outcomes, tempering their activism; Nazism isn't much to look at in terms of an ideology or scope). There's more to it than that, since leftist ideology is generally indoctrinated, not taught as part of an intellectual landscape. For example, when they "teach kids about racism" using CRT, they're asserting motives of long dead founders, the existence of "lingering effects of slavery", and using loaded leftist abstractions like "oppression" and "systemic racism" as *descriptive* terms describing the world, which is incredibly awkward. Leftists really don't differentiate between descriptive reality and their ideology, or betray any cognizance of the nature of normative philosophy and claims. It's almost like they're no longer aware of the existence of philosophy as a field.