In January, Times reporter Nicholas Confessore published the results of his investigation of what he said was a concerted effort by “conservative activists” to abolish DEI on public university campuses. They had managed to get almost half the states to at least consider banning campus D.E.I. programs “even as polling has shown that diversity initiatives remain popular.”
Based on “thousands of documents obtained by The New York Times” including “casual correspondence” among “like-minded allies around the country,” full of “unvarnished views on race, sexuality and gender roles” in private emails, the report left the impression of a sinister right-wing conspiracy among racist homophobes against blameless and popular diversity programing.
After that report, Confessore decided he “needed to see D.E.I. programs up close,” so he traveled to the campus of the University of Michigan, home of a particularly extensive and longstanding DEI program.
It turns out that it’s not just far right, politically motivated conspirators who have a problem with Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs.
Some excerpts from his very long piece, published Wednesday in the Times Magazine, which I assume gets into today’s print edition.
Programs across the university are couched in the distinctive jargon
that, to D.E.I.’s practitioners, reflects proven practices for making
classrooms more inclusive, and to its critics reveals how deeply D.E.I.
is encoded with left-wing ideologies….
Some researchers argue that teaching students to view the world chiefly
through the lens of identity and oppression can leave them vulnerable
instead of empowered. Psychologists have questioned whether implicit
bias can be accurately measured or reduced through training. The notion
that microaggressions are not only real but ubiquitous in interracial
encounters is widespread in D.E.I. programs; a 2021 review of the
microaggressions literature, however, judged it “without adequate
scientific basis.”...
Some evidence suggests that the steady expansion of D.E.I. into campus
life is actually constraining student interaction across political and
cultural divides. One recent analysis by the political scientist Kevin
Wallsten found that the larger the D.E.I. bureaucracy at a university,
the more discomfort students felt expressing their views on social media
and in informal conversations with other students....
Even some liberal scholars believe D.E.I. looms too large. Amna Khalid, a
historian at Carleton College in Minnesota, argues that modern D.E.I.
is not, as some on the right hold, a triumph of critical theory or
postcolonialism but of the corporatization of higher education, in which
universities have tried to turn moral and political ideals into a
system of formulas and dashboards. “They want a managerial approach to
difference,” Khalid said. “They want no friction. But diversity
inherently means friction.”
These growing bureaucracies represented a major — and profoundly
left-leaning — reshuffling of campus power. Administrators were even
more politically liberal than faculty members, according to one survey,
and far more likely to favor racial preferences in admissions and
hiring. They promulgated what Lyell Asher, a professor of English at
Lewis & Clark College in Oregon, has called “an alternate
curriculum,” taught not in classrooms but in dorms, disciplinary
hearings and orientation programs.
Some administrators discovered that student activists could be a potent
campus constituency. The former president of one top research
institution recalled for me how students once came to his office with
demands, presented in a kind of theatrical performance, to enhance the
university’s D.E.I. program. The former president, who asked for
anonymity for fear of risking his present job, later learned that some
of the program’s senior staff members had worked with and encouraged the
students to pressure the administration on their behalf. “That was the
moment at which I understood that there was a whole part of the
bureaucracy that I didn’t control,” he said.
When I read Confessore’s January piece, I knew he was leaving something
out. It’s true that conservatives have used DEI and other examples of
what they call the woke ideology to discredit any policy or politician
they don’t like. While some of their criticism is affirmed by this new
reporting, much of it is cynical and dishonest.
The more incisive, measured, and accurate criticisms of both woke
ideology and diversity programs have come from the left or the center—or
from non-politicized subjects of DEI programming.
For example:
* Back in June of 2020, journalist/podcaster Katie Herzog interviewed with
Shannon Loys, a graphic designer who participation in DEI training at
the Seattle Repertory Theater, run by none other than Robin DiAngelo,
the “Patron saint of DEI.” At the end of the interview, Loys and Herzog,
both progressives, concluded that the training did more harm than good.
Loys said she became “more cautious” in her interactions with Black
co-workers, more likely to avoid interactions rather than risk causing
offense.
* Like many self-identified Marxists, Freddy De Boer, has been a
frequent critic of the woke left for its focus on racial and gender
identity (what fellow socialist Adolph Reed refers to as “ascriptive”
categories) to the exclusion of class. His book “How Elites Ate the
Social Justice Movement,” is a scathing and revealing explanation of how
Woke identity politics like DEI serve the interests of elites at the
expense of the truly disadvantaged. DeBoer and Reed see DEI as
essentially a conservative effort to coopt progressive movements. These
critiques are nothing new. Reed has been sounding the alarm for
decades, and in 2001, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn published Race Experts claiming that the race relations consultants that proceeded DEI had “hijacked the Civil Rights Revolution.”
* In 2022, Maurice Mitchell, national director of the very progressive
Working Families Party, which touts him as “a nationally-recognized
social movement strategist, a visionary leader in the Movement for Black
Lives, and a community organizer for racial, social, and economic
justice,” wrote an essay,
“Building Resilient Organizations,” in which he revealed how identity
politics like DEI had hampered the progressive organizations he has
served in.
* Other critics from the left that come to mind at the moment include
Tyler Austin Harper, Michael Powell, Jonathan Haidt, Greg Lukianoff,
Yasha Mounk, Sam Harris, Matt Yglesias, Catherine Liu, the socialist
magazine, Jacobin (sometimes), and Musa al-Gharbi.
* I wrote this piece in 2021 about how one staple of DEI training, getting white people to “check their privilege,” does more harm than good to the cause of racial justice.
And then there are very quiet critics, like those quoted in Wednesday's
article, who work or study at the institutions where these programs have
proliferated. One Michigan professor who had been investigated for
causing offense in his class said the school has created a “gotcha
culture,” in which students scrutinize their teachers’ comments for
offensive words or comments and the “Bias Response Team” launches
investigations based anonymous complaints, often for “offensive” or
“disrespectful” word choices.
Unlike the conservative anti-woke activists or the many left-leaning
critics outlined above, these mostly left-leaning folks keep
reservations about diversity programs to themselves to avoid conflict
or discipline imposed by administrators whose job is to enforce DEI
cultural norms.
Michigan may be an extreme example, but based on my own experience, and
the research Confessore did beyond Michigan, the problems catalogued in
the article seem to be typical of institutions that have introduced
these programs.
But Confessore's expose seems to be an indication that DEI and other elements of identity politics are on the wane at institutions like the Times itself. A burning question among observers: have we passed "peak woke?"
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