Although I’ve been very frustrated with the pointlessness of much DEI activity, I am sympathetic to most people I know who have taken it on in their workplaces. The fact is that they and the (non-corporate) institutions they work for are sincerely trying to do their part to solve a seemingly intractable social injustice on top of doing their regular jobs. I even have sympathy for some of the worst workshop leaders, who are not grifters, just people of limited insight trying to do an impossible job.
Everyone is working with the tools they have. The problem is that the tools don’t work and there’s not even a consensus about what success looks like. My sense is that many people are defending DEI out of a sense that we have to do Something, even as they have doubts about actual current practices.
I think the current impasse is an excellent opportunity to have honest discussions about inequality and propose and pilot new solutions. We can think of the “workshop phase” of DEI not as a failure or an insidious plot but as a first floundering effort before we really got serious. Of course, total consensus will never be reached and institutions and individuals will always twist things to serve their own self interests. But I’m ready to move beyond critique and hear about work on better alternatives.
Yeah, that's a more charitable interpretation and probably correct in most cases. While I think al-Gharbi is also right that DEI has gotten mixed up with status seeking/virtue signalling in some areas, especially in online activity, you're right that it's overly cynical to imply that it's just that. The few colleagues who have done the leg work at my uni are how you describe, the larger majority are more like how al-Gharbi describes it. So, it was unfair that I lumped them together.
I'm with you. I'd like to see paths forward too. A number of people have reached out to me in response to this post, and many with ideas and evidence regarding what could be the next stage of all this. I'll try to follow up in the next month or so.
I think status seeking is part of every human activity, so that doesn’t really distinguish DEI from anything else (including leaving comments on blog posts!). My wife has chaired the DEI committee in her school in a major university and from what I can see most people invoking DEI were white or Asian people doing so to promote a policy that would benefit themselves. Note that these weren’t the people putting in time on the committee, just folks (unconsciously) using DEI as another lever for self advancement. Ah, humans.
I look forward to reading about the solutions you find!
I think DEI just went too far, but the DEI Departments have to justify their existence.
It’s good to make people aware of our inherent biases. It is human nature to be more comfortable with those like us, we all do it. Quotas and struggle sessions, however, just make people angry and resentful. Perhaps, hopefully, the pendulum will swing back to the middle.
The symbols of D, E, and I have been misconstrued way before the popularity post-Floyd.
The 'E' in particular got taken over by social justice advocates who stepped into the unelected and unconfirmed role of moral authority. The approach taken was doomed from the outset because it didn't focus on the real issues; it went for the low-hanging fruit, racialization.
This wasn't just because of a focus on Kendian sleight-of-hand and DiAngeloesque gobbledygook. Their vapidness didn't help, but it wasn't THE issue, just convenient political references/touch points. Their brand of 'DEI' had little to no nuance to it but its popularity left it unquestioned. But the doom came before that.
The symbols were doomed because practitioners have been focused on group identity representation for years, and for most, that is all that inclusion and diversity mean. I.e., an increase in the number of people from a particular group (mostly those racialized as non-white, ethnicity, sex, gender) and thus "quantitatively fewer and/or qualitatively considered 'less than' in some way, therefore requiring more help than the majority."
Despite data saying that these approaches haven't worked, DEI advocates and grifters alike have spent a lot of time in the rhetorical boxing ring with anti-DEI actors and opportunists who are currently winning the battle. And are now controlling the narrative to such an extent that they aren't questioned, similar to how people were scared to question the anti-racism fallacies from 2020. That is, until right-oriented anti-DEI activists came with a more powerful and well-funded movement; at the same time, the anti-racism activists' momentum dwindled.
The anti-racist denouement was written from inception because those with the most significant influence focused on the moment. The priority was to capture as much as they could in that moment, not to reimagine the system with all actors influencing it.
Wisdom, thoughtful consideration of tradeoffs, and creating the conditions for something that was ACCESSIBLE for everyone (not just so-called marginalized groups and their ideologically captured "allies"), ACTIONABLE (such that companies could see the value and unambiguously prioritize inclusion because it is good for business), and ALIGNED with organizations' reason for being: bottom line and those things that enhance or need to be mitigated to elevate the bottom line (e.g., culture, people development, relational skills, etc.), was not the focus.
So, sustainability was impossible, despite huge momentum, from May 25, 2020 on.
Thanks for the insightful comment. I wish I could say that I saw this coming too, but I only felt an uneasiness with it that I couldn't well articulate. Something about the absolute certainty exuded by adherents didn't sit well with me.
The alternative that you propose is in line what I have naively hoped that universities might arrive at with DEI under fire. But it seems like there's a kind of zero sum thinking at work, as if it's not doing racialization (and it's equivalents for other group identities) then it must be blind to differences in accessibility. In any case, when I get the guts to revisit the issue with colleagues, I'll bring up your work. It sounds like it offers a promising way out of the morass.
Thanks, Taylor. The morass is deep. A colleauge always talks about the Law of Holes. The fifth law: The Fifth Law Of Holes — Trust your logic — “I must get out of the hole before I fall deeper” — more than your ego — “How could I be so blind to have gotten into this hole?” (Found here: https://medium.com/@SunShinepage/investing-and-the-five-laws-of-holes-476e8c86eee6)
I am not sure if many are seeing the logic, because if they had, perhaps they'd have followed the first law of holes (the only one that is on record): If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Brillant framing of how DEI debates have devolved into symbolic theater rather than practical problem-solving. Your point about al-Gharbi's findings is especially telling: if trainings are making cooperation worse and increasing resentment, we're not just wasting resources but actively damaging the relationships we claim to be fixing. The Harvard custodian wage freeze example cuts right to the heart of it. Maybe the real quesiton isn't whether to keep or scrap DEI offices, but why universities insist on expensive symbolic gestures whiel avoiding harder conversations about structural inequaity in hiring, admissions, and resource allocation.
To be fair to admins, they're probably under immense pressure to rectify inequalities, only a small portion (like resource allocation) of which are really under their control. But whatever material inequalities occur within in their walls, they too often don't collect enough data to know.
For other issues, like most underprivileged students not being ready to succeed at college, they can only do so much. Symbolic efforts look good when the problem is too big or esoteric for your office to understand, much less begin to correct.
This is an apologist article that confuses a forced and false two-sided-ness for nuance and wisdom.
DEI is enormously harmful and has a massive impact. Meritocracy is being undermined and that is enormously harmful. It's fundamentally undermining the tenants of civilization to hire someone because of their race and or gender (rather than their skills) while simultaneously congratulating oneself on being virtuous, and overwhelmingly that is what DEI initiatives actually do.
It is deluded to mention how there is little to no evidence DEI helps, and then have your eyes glaze over when they glance at the overwhelming evidence of harm, so you can then say, "oh, it's nuanced, people criticising it are also wrong." You are like a mother defending a schoolyard bully with platitudes about how "he means well."
For example, (e.g., the best candidate not being hired - just serve on a hiring committee, and you see this process of ignoring white male candidates, and 'enriching' the pool of minority and women) quality decreasing in many many areas (not just academia) (e.g., the quality of presidential candidates). There evidence that given identical CVs, the female named candidate is twice as likely to be hired (and the problem might well be worse now).
There is mountains of evidence of view point discrimination, of academics feeling that dissent from left-wing political dogma can be career ending (look at the FIRE institutes reports). You are essentially being an apologist for that. "Yes, they *are* misguided, but ..."
I'm sorry. I don't know how you got to that interpretation. I was very upfront about the clear harms. I received plenty of negative messages from DEI advocates, so I know that I hit the mark.
Sure, you could still say I pulled some punches, but if you came hoping to hear blanket moralizing condemnation of things we think readers don't like, you'll have to just read a different Substack. We don't do that here.
I've researched and been involved in these kinds of conflicts enough to know 1) there are reasonable people and nuance on both sides 2) preaching to one choir undermines the possibility for persuasion 3) even where the harms are assymetric between two sides, we get nowhere thinking that if we rage about those long enough that the other side will just disappear or no longer have power. If anything, fanatical confrontation just emboldens them.
I've learned that no amount of condemnatory articles will be enough to convert the world to a particular way of thinking and force change to happen. So, if that won't do it, what will allow us to make progress on the conflicts that divide us?
You write “Going into the faculty senate discussion, part of me hoped that practical considerations about whether DEI was actually working might be part of the conversation. Instead, we sat through a half hour of culture warring. It didn’t help that the instigation for the debate was from a professor who referred to DEI as an ‘ideology’”
You are implicitly charactering strong criticism of DEI as engaging in a “culture war” and there by dismiss this form of dialogue as somehow unnuanced or incorrect. But criticising DEI (and it's adjacents) is the conservative ‘side’ of the culture war, and they have extremely good reasons for their vehemence (e.g., as you highlight these initiatives often harm the supposedly helped community).
You are essentially advocating for a handwringy anemic dialogue, while dismissing more ardent criticism. Implicitly you are endorsing the status quo of DEI. You think the question should be pseudo-empirical: "is DEI helpful in some nebulous sense" but the correct debate is innately political "is the idea of prioritizing a forced demograhpic ratios over meritocracy a sane one."
Your framing implicitly acts to minimise a valuable discussion, and instead focus on a nonsense red-herring, while simultaneously framing yourself as the more sophisticated voice, e.g., better than the professor who (correctly) described DEI as an idiology.
I'm am doing so such thing! I literally was the person who circulated the problems with DEI to my colleagues. I literally voted for the motion to remove it from our mission statement and replace it with something that worked. I took two hours out of my own day to try to persuade the conservative professor regarding how to broach the issue in a way that might be successful. How the heck could it be that I think all criticism of DEI is culture waring? You simply don't know anything about me.
The culture warring aspect is on both sides, and frankly it's what you're doing right now. You've made every effort to make me out to be a character in some existential battle between good and evil, rather than approach my argument with an ounce of curiosity and make the effort to understand my position in way that I would at least partly agree with.
It's not about accuracy when you describe DEI as ideology. The first issue is that it's a trivial statement, since all politics is ideological. The problem is when people get trapped in their ideology and can't recognize ideology in their own thinking. The second is that it's terrible rhetoric. If you want to get out of endless culture warring and actually make a change in the institutions that you are a part of, you simply have to treat your opponents are reasonable people rather than morons duped by false ideologies. That kind of framing is just as unhelpful in this situation as it is when Marxists do it.
Please, I encourage you to read what I wrote again.
My overall point is that, fundamentally, there is a political discussion that must be had (meritocracy vs demographic equity), but you seem to implicitly want to sidestep shove-under-the-rug this necessary polical discussion in favour of... What? Something I am not quite sure of. Sidestepping the fundamental issue (while being a bit superior about it) doesn't seem to me like "taming complexity."
First, I have not characterized you but you writing.
Second, I don't say that (in your article) you characterize all criticism of DEI as 'culture warring.' Instead, I said you characterize the strongest condemnation of DEI as 'culture warring.'
Third, not all statements are ideology, but DEI literally is an idiology, in the context of university, it is often the idea that the best society is one in which all demographics (e.g. of staff, of students) are equally distributed (e.g., the ratio of physics professor's must be equally distributed across gender and racial lines) and fundamentally this is incompatible with meritocracy.
I'm frankly surprised by that interpretation. Part of my beef with the debate was that it didn't deal with the on-the-ground concerns about DEI, and I feel that al-Gharbi's and Bright's takes are about as strong as you can get. And I didn't dismiss them as culturally warring so much as see them as unhelpful for actually reaching decisions in a practical sense, since they don't help us understand those involved in constructive way but rather diagnoses their problems as people.
That said, it's not going to be possible to reach consensus on the debate between meritocracy and advocates of various notions of equity. Maybe that's what you're picking up on. It's not at all my contention that one could be "above it all" in some condescending way, but rather that because that consensus is impossible, there's simply better terrain to have the discussion: what compromises could be hammered out between those two ideological positions.
Again, my contention is that dismissing your opponents as "ideological" is culture warring, which is separate from the academic discussion and from strong criticism, as "ideological" is often used as a pejorative rather than something that helps us understand the complexities of the issue before us. A person can express disagreement with something very strongly without culture warring, without resorting to pejoratives, political tribalism, and zero-sum thinking.
No doubt there are non-ideological statements, but they're usually politically irrelevant. Meritocracy is itself unavoidably ideological. That doesn't make it bad. Just that it requires value commitments that can make its adherents blind to meritocracy's problems or to why people might disagree with it. Or, do you think differently? If so, what is your understanding of ideology?
Finally, I have found that the DEI advocates who have reached out to me are diverse, and not all of them think we can achieve an exact demographic matching of physics professors. I wonder how many would actually agree with it. It might be a case of letting the most extreme representatives stand in for the whole. Many of the people that I've talked to simply want to do better attracting and retaining people from non-traditional backgrounds. And many of their requested policies aren't incompatible with meritocracy (e.g., improved mentoring, etc.).
Part of what I want to do with this Substack, especially in my research on controversial issues within science and politics, is to deal with the complex middle between two polarized opposites. We don't need conversations about diversity in academy to become a fanatical confrontation between meritocracy and equity. In fact, it's better if its not.
As such, I'm not interested in what "answer" could be philosophically reasoned to, but the process by which we can hammer out clumsy, ideologically incoherent solutions that both sides would recognize as partial victories. We don't need to choose whether equity or meritocracy wins, but figure out what mixture of the two that most people can live with.
"Part of what I want to do with this Substack, especially in my research on controversial issues within science and politics, is to deal with the complex middle between two polarized opposites."
There is simply not a complex middle ground here, which is exactly my initial comment's point (that you are confusing nuance with both-sides-ism).
The idea of hiring someone on the basis of their race, their gender, their sexual orientation is insane and toxic. You are essentially saying, "well, I have talked to racists and non-racists and both have nuanced perspectives. we need to hammer out a middle ground"
What middle ground?! Let's only discriminate on Tuesdays? If you are a straight white man *but* your name is in the first half of the alphabet we will still consider hiring you? Insane.
Yes, you can consider things like increased outreach to the disadvantaged, but nobody is against this idea. It is crystal clear that A) DEI overwhelmingly, implicitly, explicitly, consciously, subconsciously, collectively and individually is about discriminatory hiring. The studies are clear (e.g., same CV the woman is twice as likely to be hired). and B) this distorted hiring is insane and harmful.
By both sides-ing you are just implicitly defending DEI. DEI in practice (in terms of what it is — racism — as opposed to what it claims to be) is not defend-able.
Dude it’s just another racial grift. AA and HR on steroids. The DEI admin/consultants want their salaries and minorities will take whatever sinecures can be rung out of it on their behalf.
Every twenty years or so a new generation notices black people do bad at stuff and tries the same old stuff that doesn’t work all over again but “harder this time.” People get tired of it after a few years but a lot of the salaries and budgets remain in place.
This is a great piece. I was a student when the staff member sent the meme about us all being the same on the inside. I, like most people, didn't spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it. The subsequent apology was confusing. We were in the middle of the pandemic. Weren't there other problems to address than a simple meme? Thank you for the inside look.
I can tell you what University DEI departments do because I have a college senior (male). The summer before he started his freshman year, he got hours of videos with tests attached and lots of surveys after watching videos. Driving him to drop off, he was taking another multiple choice "test" that he decided to answer every question as "C"....it wouldn't allow him to submit it. You want to talk about the angry, privileged white boy?.....the DEI department created that!
> which is to say that many people, especially loudest voices, seem incapable of having a reasonable discussion over it.
They won't ever discuss it. Every time they tried they were caught looking ridiculous so they gave that up after jbp schooled them. We've tried setting it up, but they are big into controlling narratives.
> And if they were incapable of a sensible conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion, what hope is there for the rest of America?
All the hope in the world. We've identified and studied everything after they debanked and cancelled us. We can have full convos and have had full convos. We have convos with ourselves and write articles on it. If they are the most educated people in america, truly, then maybe it's not education that is the issue.
> Their staunchest opponents, however, aren’t much better, seeking to downplay ongoing inequalities with insistences on color-blindness and efforts to avoid talking about race at all.
Although I’ve been very frustrated with the pointlessness of much DEI activity, I am sympathetic to most people I know who have taken it on in their workplaces. The fact is that they and the (non-corporate) institutions they work for are sincerely trying to do their part to solve a seemingly intractable social injustice on top of doing their regular jobs. I even have sympathy for some of the worst workshop leaders, who are not grifters, just people of limited insight trying to do an impossible job.
Everyone is working with the tools they have. The problem is that the tools don’t work and there’s not even a consensus about what success looks like. My sense is that many people are defending DEI out of a sense that we have to do Something, even as they have doubts about actual current practices.
I think the current impasse is an excellent opportunity to have honest discussions about inequality and propose and pilot new solutions. We can think of the “workshop phase” of DEI not as a failure or an insidious plot but as a first floundering effort before we really got serious. Of course, total consensus will never be reached and institutions and individuals will always twist things to serve their own self interests. But I’m ready to move beyond critique and hear about work on better alternatives.
Yeah, that's a more charitable interpretation and probably correct in most cases. While I think al-Gharbi is also right that DEI has gotten mixed up with status seeking/virtue signalling in some areas, especially in online activity, you're right that it's overly cynical to imply that it's just that. The few colleagues who have done the leg work at my uni are how you describe, the larger majority are more like how al-Gharbi describes it. So, it was unfair that I lumped them together.
I'm with you. I'd like to see paths forward too. A number of people have reached out to me in response to this post, and many with ideas and evidence regarding what could be the next stage of all this. I'll try to follow up in the next month or so.
I think status seeking is part of every human activity, so that doesn’t really distinguish DEI from anything else (including leaving comments on blog posts!). My wife has chaired the DEI committee in her school in a major university and from what I can see most people invoking DEI were white or Asian people doing so to promote a policy that would benefit themselves. Note that these weren’t the people putting in time on the committee, just folks (unconsciously) using DEI as another lever for self advancement. Ah, humans.
I look forward to reading about the solutions you find!
Identity politics are increasingly less helpful. DEI is somewhat part of that so institutions should abandon rigid policies that no longer work
I think DEI just went too far, but the DEI Departments have to justify their existence.
It’s good to make people aware of our inherent biases. It is human nature to be more comfortable with those like us, we all do it. Quotas and struggle sessions, however, just make people angry and resentful. Perhaps, hopefully, the pendulum will swing back to the middle.
The symbols of D, E, and I have been misconstrued way before the popularity post-Floyd.
The 'E' in particular got taken over by social justice advocates who stepped into the unelected and unconfirmed role of moral authority. The approach taken was doomed from the outset because it didn't focus on the real issues; it went for the low-hanging fruit, racialization.
This wasn't just because of a focus on Kendian sleight-of-hand and DiAngeloesque gobbledygook. Their vapidness didn't help, but it wasn't THE issue, just convenient political references/touch points. Their brand of 'DEI' had little to no nuance to it but its popularity left it unquestioned. But the doom came before that.
The symbols were doomed because practitioners have been focused on group identity representation for years, and for most, that is all that inclusion and diversity mean. I.e., an increase in the number of people from a particular group (mostly those racialized as non-white, ethnicity, sex, gender) and thus "quantitatively fewer and/or qualitatively considered 'less than' in some way, therefore requiring more help than the majority."
Despite data saying that these approaches haven't worked, DEI advocates and grifters alike have spent a lot of time in the rhetorical boxing ring with anti-DEI actors and opportunists who are currently winning the battle. And are now controlling the narrative to such an extent that they aren't questioned, similar to how people were scared to question the anti-racism fallacies from 2020. That is, until right-oriented anti-DEI activists came with a more powerful and well-funded movement; at the same time, the anti-racism activists' momentum dwindled.
The anti-racist denouement was written from inception because those with the most significant influence focused on the moment. The priority was to capture as much as they could in that moment, not to reimagine the system with all actors influencing it.
Wisdom, thoughtful consideration of tradeoffs, and creating the conditions for something that was ACCESSIBLE for everyone (not just so-called marginalized groups and their ideologically captured "allies"), ACTIONABLE (such that companies could see the value and unambiguously prioritize inclusion because it is good for business), and ALIGNED with organizations' reason for being: bottom line and those things that enhance or need to be mitigated to elevate the bottom line (e.g., culture, people development, relational skills, etc.), was not the focus.
So, sustainability was impossible, despite huge momentum, from May 25, 2020 on.
Thanks for the insightful comment. I wish I could say that I saw this coming too, but I only felt an uneasiness with it that I couldn't well articulate. Something about the absolute certainty exuded by adherents didn't sit well with me.
The alternative that you propose is in line what I have naively hoped that universities might arrive at with DEI under fire. But it seems like there's a kind of zero sum thinking at work, as if it's not doing racialization (and it's equivalents for other group identities) then it must be blind to differences in accessibility. In any case, when I get the guts to revisit the issue with colleagues, I'll bring up your work. It sounds like it offers a promising way out of the morass.
Thanks, Taylor. The morass is deep. A colleauge always talks about the Law of Holes. The fifth law: The Fifth Law Of Holes — Trust your logic — “I must get out of the hole before I fall deeper” — more than your ego — “How could I be so blind to have gotten into this hole?” (Found here: https://medium.com/@SunShinepage/investing-and-the-five-laws-of-holes-476e8c86eee6)
I am not sure if many are seeing the logic, because if they had, perhaps they'd have followed the first law of holes (the only one that is on record): If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
Brillant framing of how DEI debates have devolved into symbolic theater rather than practical problem-solving. Your point about al-Gharbi's findings is especially telling: if trainings are making cooperation worse and increasing resentment, we're not just wasting resources but actively damaging the relationships we claim to be fixing. The Harvard custodian wage freeze example cuts right to the heart of it. Maybe the real quesiton isn't whether to keep or scrap DEI offices, but why universities insist on expensive symbolic gestures whiel avoiding harder conversations about structural inequaity in hiring, admissions, and resource allocation.
To be fair to admins, they're probably under immense pressure to rectify inequalities, only a small portion (like resource allocation) of which are really under their control. But whatever material inequalities occur within in their walls, they too often don't collect enough data to know.
For other issues, like most underprivileged students not being ready to succeed at college, they can only do so much. Symbolic efforts look good when the problem is too big or esoteric for your office to understand, much less begin to correct.
This is an apologist article that confuses a forced and false two-sided-ness for nuance and wisdom.
DEI is enormously harmful and has a massive impact. Meritocracy is being undermined and that is enormously harmful. It's fundamentally undermining the tenants of civilization to hire someone because of their race and or gender (rather than their skills) while simultaneously congratulating oneself on being virtuous, and overwhelmingly that is what DEI initiatives actually do.
It is deluded to mention how there is little to no evidence DEI helps, and then have your eyes glaze over when they glance at the overwhelming evidence of harm, so you can then say, "oh, it's nuanced, people criticising it are also wrong." You are like a mother defending a schoolyard bully with platitudes about how "he means well."
For example, (e.g., the best candidate not being hired - just serve on a hiring committee, and you see this process of ignoring white male candidates, and 'enriching' the pool of minority and women) quality decreasing in many many areas (not just academia) (e.g., the quality of presidential candidates). There evidence that given identical CVs, the female named candidate is twice as likely to be hired (and the problem might well be worse now).
There is mountains of evidence of view point discrimination, of academics feeling that dissent from left-wing political dogma can be career ending (look at the FIRE institutes reports). You are essentially being an apologist for that. "Yes, they *are* misguided, but ..."
I'm sorry. I don't know how you got to that interpretation. I was very upfront about the clear harms. I received plenty of negative messages from DEI advocates, so I know that I hit the mark.
Sure, you could still say I pulled some punches, but if you came hoping to hear blanket moralizing condemnation of things we think readers don't like, you'll have to just read a different Substack. We don't do that here.
I've researched and been involved in these kinds of conflicts enough to know 1) there are reasonable people and nuance on both sides 2) preaching to one choir undermines the possibility for persuasion 3) even where the harms are assymetric between two sides, we get nowhere thinking that if we rage about those long enough that the other side will just disappear or no longer have power. If anything, fanatical confrontation just emboldens them.
I've learned that no amount of condemnatory articles will be enough to convert the world to a particular way of thinking and force change to happen. So, if that won't do it, what will allow us to make progress on the conflicts that divide us?
You write “Going into the faculty senate discussion, part of me hoped that practical considerations about whether DEI was actually working might be part of the conversation. Instead, we sat through a half hour of culture warring. It didn’t help that the instigation for the debate was from a professor who referred to DEI as an ‘ideology’”
You are implicitly charactering strong criticism of DEI as engaging in a “culture war” and there by dismiss this form of dialogue as somehow unnuanced or incorrect. But criticising DEI (and it's adjacents) is the conservative ‘side’ of the culture war, and they have extremely good reasons for their vehemence (e.g., as you highlight these initiatives often harm the supposedly helped community).
You are essentially advocating for a handwringy anemic dialogue, while dismissing more ardent criticism. Implicitly you are endorsing the status quo of DEI. You think the question should be pseudo-empirical: "is DEI helpful in some nebulous sense" but the correct debate is innately political "is the idea of prioritizing a forced demograhpic ratios over meritocracy a sane one."
Your framing implicitly acts to minimise a valuable discussion, and instead focus on a nonsense red-herring, while simultaneously framing yourself as the more sophisticated voice, e.g., better than the professor who (correctly) described DEI as an idiology.
I'm am doing so such thing! I literally was the person who circulated the problems with DEI to my colleagues. I literally voted for the motion to remove it from our mission statement and replace it with something that worked. I took two hours out of my own day to try to persuade the conservative professor regarding how to broach the issue in a way that might be successful. How the heck could it be that I think all criticism of DEI is culture waring? You simply don't know anything about me.
The culture warring aspect is on both sides, and frankly it's what you're doing right now. You've made every effort to make me out to be a character in some existential battle between good and evil, rather than approach my argument with an ounce of curiosity and make the effort to understand my position in way that I would at least partly agree with.
It's not about accuracy when you describe DEI as ideology. The first issue is that it's a trivial statement, since all politics is ideological. The problem is when people get trapped in their ideology and can't recognize ideology in their own thinking. The second is that it's terrible rhetoric. If you want to get out of endless culture warring and actually make a change in the institutions that you are a part of, you simply have to treat your opponents are reasonable people rather than morons duped by false ideologies. That kind of framing is just as unhelpful in this situation as it is when Marxists do it.
Please, I encourage you to read what I wrote again.
My overall point is that, fundamentally, there is a political discussion that must be had (meritocracy vs demographic equity), but you seem to implicitly want to sidestep shove-under-the-rug this necessary polical discussion in favour of... What? Something I am not quite sure of. Sidestepping the fundamental issue (while being a bit superior about it) doesn't seem to me like "taming complexity."
First, I have not characterized you but you writing.
Second, I don't say that (in your article) you characterize all criticism of DEI as 'culture warring.' Instead, I said you characterize the strongest condemnation of DEI as 'culture warring.'
Third, not all statements are ideology, but DEI literally is an idiology, in the context of university, it is often the idea that the best society is one in which all demographics (e.g. of staff, of students) are equally distributed (e.g., the ratio of physics professor's must be equally distributed across gender and racial lines) and fundamentally this is incompatible with meritocracy.
I'm frankly surprised by that interpretation. Part of my beef with the debate was that it didn't deal with the on-the-ground concerns about DEI, and I feel that al-Gharbi's and Bright's takes are about as strong as you can get. And I didn't dismiss them as culturally warring so much as see them as unhelpful for actually reaching decisions in a practical sense, since they don't help us understand those involved in constructive way but rather diagnoses their problems as people.
That said, it's not going to be possible to reach consensus on the debate between meritocracy and advocates of various notions of equity. Maybe that's what you're picking up on. It's not at all my contention that one could be "above it all" in some condescending way, but rather that because that consensus is impossible, there's simply better terrain to have the discussion: what compromises could be hammered out between those two ideological positions.
Again, my contention is that dismissing your opponents as "ideological" is culture warring, which is separate from the academic discussion and from strong criticism, as "ideological" is often used as a pejorative rather than something that helps us understand the complexities of the issue before us. A person can express disagreement with something very strongly without culture warring, without resorting to pejoratives, political tribalism, and zero-sum thinking.
No doubt there are non-ideological statements, but they're usually politically irrelevant. Meritocracy is itself unavoidably ideological. That doesn't make it bad. Just that it requires value commitments that can make its adherents blind to meritocracy's problems or to why people might disagree with it. Or, do you think differently? If so, what is your understanding of ideology?
Finally, I have found that the DEI advocates who have reached out to me are diverse, and not all of them think we can achieve an exact demographic matching of physics professors. I wonder how many would actually agree with it. It might be a case of letting the most extreme representatives stand in for the whole. Many of the people that I've talked to simply want to do better attracting and retaining people from non-traditional backgrounds. And many of their requested policies aren't incompatible with meritocracy (e.g., improved mentoring, etc.).
Part of what I want to do with this Substack, especially in my research on controversial issues within science and politics, is to deal with the complex middle between two polarized opposites. We don't need conversations about diversity in academy to become a fanatical confrontation between meritocracy and equity. In fact, it's better if its not.
As such, I'm not interested in what "answer" could be philosophically reasoned to, but the process by which we can hammer out clumsy, ideologically incoherent solutions that both sides would recognize as partial victories. We don't need to choose whether equity or meritocracy wins, but figure out what mixture of the two that most people can live with.
"Part of what I want to do with this Substack, especially in my research on controversial issues within science and politics, is to deal with the complex middle between two polarized opposites."
There is simply not a complex middle ground here, which is exactly my initial comment's point (that you are confusing nuance with both-sides-ism).
The idea of hiring someone on the basis of their race, their gender, their sexual orientation is insane and toxic. You are essentially saying, "well, I have talked to racists and non-racists and both have nuanced perspectives. we need to hammer out a middle ground"
What middle ground?! Let's only discriminate on Tuesdays? If you are a straight white man *but* your name is in the first half of the alphabet we will still consider hiring you? Insane.
Yes, you can consider things like increased outreach to the disadvantaged, but nobody is against this idea. It is crystal clear that A) DEI overwhelmingly, implicitly, explicitly, consciously, subconsciously, collectively and individually is about discriminatory hiring. The studies are clear (e.g., same CV the woman is twice as likely to be hired). and B) this distorted hiring is insane and harmful.
By both sides-ing you are just implicitly defending DEI. DEI in practice (in terms of what it is — racism — as opposed to what it claims to be) is not defend-able.
The problem with DEI (well, one of many): witchfinders are going to find witches. It’s their entire purpose for existing.
Dude it’s just another racial grift. AA and HR on steroids. The DEI admin/consultants want their salaries and minorities will take whatever sinecures can be rung out of it on their behalf.
Every twenty years or so a new generation notices black people do bad at stuff and tries the same old stuff that doesn’t work all over again but “harder this time.” People get tired of it after a few years but a lot of the salaries and budgets remain in place.
This is a great piece. I was a student when the staff member sent the meme about us all being the same on the inside. I, like most people, didn't spend more than 5 seconds thinking about it. The subsequent apology was confusing. We were in the middle of the pandemic. Weren't there other problems to address than a simple meme? Thank you for the inside look.
I can tell you what University DEI departments do because I have a college senior (male). The summer before he started his freshman year, he got hours of videos with tests attached and lots of surveys after watching videos. Driving him to drop off, he was taking another multiple choice "test" that he decided to answer every question as "C"....it wouldn't allow him to submit it. You want to talk about the angry, privileged white boy?.....the DEI department created that!
> which is to say that many people, especially loudest voices, seem incapable of having a reasonable discussion over it.
They won't ever discuss it. Every time they tried they were caught looking ridiculous so they gave that up after jbp schooled them. We've tried setting it up, but they are big into controlling narratives.
> And if they were incapable of a sensible conversation about diversity, equity, and inclusion, what hope is there for the rest of America?
All the hope in the world. We've identified and studied everything after they debanked and cancelled us. We can have full convos and have had full convos. We have convos with ourselves and write articles on it. If they are the most educated people in america, truly, then maybe it's not education that is the issue.
> Their staunchest opponents, however, aren’t much better, seeking to downplay ongoing inequalities with insistences on color-blindness and efforts to avoid talking about race at all.
You are d e why. We did a lot.