DEI and the left critique

 

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.”

According to Confessore, UMich has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on DEI programs and expanding administrative positions and has had profound effects—largely negative—on campus culture and politics.

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.

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?" 

Also, isn't there a better word for woke?