A brief prehistory of the DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) pandemic

The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and M.I.T. unwittingly performed a considerable public service by demonstrating for Congressional questioners [1], the media, and the general public what DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) hegemony has done to American higher education, foremost at the supposedly most elite schools.

Many commentators however missed what was for long-time, informed, observers of academe the most glaring point of utter disgracefulness: The sheer hypocrisy and double standard shared by the three presidents, and that this comes to them so naturally that they could not begin to appreciate how it would seem to a general audience; unable to “think on their feet”, they revealed to the whole world their incompetence and misguided ideology.

The point is not so much a failure to tell students that calling for genocide for any group no more qualifies as protected speech than would calling “Fire” in a crowded theater. The double standard and hypocrisy are this: Those presidents and their universities would have behaved in an entirely different fashion if the calls for genocide had been directed at gay people, black people, brown people, indigenous people, or any other group regarded as qualifying for the category of protected or disadvantaged minority. Even using a pronoun other than the individually approved one brings troubles to students or professors at these elite institutions, where sizeable DEI bureaucracies devote much time to defining inappropriate words (“field” in any context, for example [2], or “supremacy” [3] about quantum computing) and other possible or potential triggers of possible offense — even microtriggers — felt by any individual belonging to a qualified “disadvantaged”, “under-privileged”, or “marginalized” minority. The only ethnic and racial groups whose individual members are not protected in academe, and who can be disparaged, denigrated, and criticized limitlessly at will, are Asians, Jews, and white males.

The totalitarian hegemony of DEI in American academe must seem unbelievable to any lay observer — as indeed it would seem to anyone at all if it had arrived suddenly out of the blue. In reality, however, it is a culmination of many decades of slowly creeping changes, so that people in academe, and informed observers, are no longer surprised as absurdity and illogic steadily attain ever greater heights.

That progression is a sad illustration that a road to hell can indeed be paved by thoughtless good intentions. It was possible also because American education has long forgotten that its purpose, its unique and essential role in society, is to enable and indeed to foster intellectual development.

Since perhaps the middle of the 20^th century, American schools began to place priority on social engineering rather than on the traditional “three Rs”. Then colleges and universities began similarly, with so-called “affirmative action”, to place priority on social engineering to the detriment of academic standards [4].

The misguided social engineering has been based unsoundly on statistical correlations, the mistake of taking correlations as demonstrating causation, and the implicit presumption that all human beings are essentially the same in what they want and are capable of achieving.

Cultural changes post-World-War-II, and particularly in the 1960s, may have sown the seeds for what later grew into political correctness  and DEI. Activists of counter-culture campaigned for universal fairness and equitably-behaving authorities, denounced past lack of fairness and equity, and demanded positive actions to undo past damages.

President Lyndon Johnson was not wrong in principle when he described affirmative action as recognizing that more needed to be done than simply the lifting of official restrictions. Unfortunately, that “more” was interpreted in misguided ways.

If poverty is a  bad thing, and more black and brown people suffer poverty than do white people, as is the case, the proper answer is to ameliorate the actual basis of poverty. Instead, what has actually been done is to seek to improve the general conditions of black and brown people, as though there were no white people suffering poverty. That continuing oversight, as well-paying manufacturing jobs were later moved overseas, will have been a significant element in the 2016 Presidential election, when the party traditionally associated with unions and middle-class workers lost out to economic conservatism cloaked in populism.

At any rate, a sense that traditional authorities needed to be replaced, that the newer generations could do better, manifested in many misguided, counter-productive ways.

A very small early harbinger had caught my attention. Exuberant youthful activists of the 1960s mis-interpreted “fairness” and “equity” inappropriately, by, for example, insisting that graduate students earning their keep by serving as teaching assistants should enjoy the same status, conditions, benefits, as faculty members, at least those with already terminal degrees appointed at the instructor level. But serving as a teaching assistant does not convert a student into a faculty member.

I had long been an admirer of what the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) had achieved in establishing principles of tenure and academic freedom, and I was appalled when the AAUP sided with the teaching assistants. In taking this false step, the AAUP foreshadowed the manner in which authorities that ought to know better have continually acceded to inappropriate demands that have progressively eroded intellectual standards and the freedom of expression necessary for intellectual progress.

Not long after that, the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky failed to give  tenure to one of its most talented and promising assistant professors, JW, whose research was  innovative and interesting enough that it was popular with undergraduate as well as graduate students. But JW had a flippant sense of humor. He would regale me with Jewish jokes, and our mutual friend Paul Corio with Italian jokes, and he would in private conversation refer to black people as “spear-chuckers” — all without malice or denigrating intention. But one of our most high-minded do-gooders made it known to the committees of the tenure process that JW was a bigot, and he did not get tenure.

One of the students in my freshman-chemistry class was a black man in his early thirties who worked as a laboratory assistant in the University Hospital. He realized that he was quite capable of doing what the credentialed people in the lab were doing, and decided to get a degree. He was allowed time off for my classes, but had a family of several children and told me that he simply couldn't find the time to study his chemistry adequately. He was getting solid B grades [5] already, and I regarded him as a sure bet for a BS degree, if only he could get financial support. The university’s whole administrative apparatus, however, which disseminated all sorts of propaganda all the time about its “affirmative actions”, claimed to be unable to find money to support this individual.

Perhaps a decade later, the most popular and highly praised teacher at Virginia Tech was hounded out by feminist activists who chose to label him a sexual harasser because of the sophomoric humor that he had successfully cultivated during more than 20 years of nationally acclaimed teaching at three universities [6].

In half-a-dozen years as a Dean of Arts & Sciences, I encountered many instances of unfortunate “side” effects of “affirmative action” and the atmosphere of political correctness described so well by Dinesh D'Souza [7]; for example:

—> PhD physicists were a glut on the market. One of them came to see me every few weeks with the threat that if I did not get him a job, the university would lose his wife, who had a tenured position.

—> I had met with the activists of the Women's Network, and suggested that they should press the university to provide child-care for the many female secretaries and assistants who would be thereby relieved of difficult-to-meet expenses; to which it was responded that the Network’s aims were in a different direction, namely, that all the Deans should resign so that at least half of them could be replaced by women.

My administrative position made it possible to see at first hand the hypocritical differences between the administration’s public statements and their actual actions. Affirmative action consisted of goals not quotas, was an incessant mantra. In reality, positions would be left unfilled if the right minority or female individual could not be found, while on the other hand departments without vacancies, and in no need of more faculty, could acquire a position (sometimes referred to as Exceptional Opportunity Positions) if they could fill it with the right minority or female individual. Despite those practices, positions were publicly asserted to be always openly advertised.

After my stint as Dean (1978-86), I was a faculty member until 1999. During the 1990s I edited the anti-political-correctness Virginia Scholar (VS) [8]. Leafing through those newsletters now reminds me of such tidbits as the Chair of Biology at Stanford University saying in the 1990s that “There's a growing sentiment . . . that grades ought to be an honest reflection of student accomplishment” (VS#3, p.3); or the lawyer for a student accused of harassment remarking that “those are crimes so terrible that innocence itself is not an adequate defense” (VS#3, p. 5).

All that may well seem rather harmless, by comparison with what has become the pandemic of DEI hegemony in academe; but, little by little, that is how we got where our elitest colleges have ended up.

[1]   “College Presidents under fire after dodging questions about Antisemitism”;       https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/us/harvard-mit-penn-presidents-antisemitism.html
“Emhoff says 3 college presidents showed a 'lack of moral clarity' on antisemitism”;       https://www.npr.org/2023/12/07/1218022152/emhoff-says-3-college-presidents-showed-a-lack-of-moral-clarity-on-antisemitism
“How the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT testified to Congress on antisemitism”; https://apnews.com/article/harvard-penn-mit-president-congress-intifada-193a1c81e9ebcc15c5dd68b71b4c6b71#:~:text=WASHINGTON%2C%20D.C.,violate%20their%20schools'%20conduct%20policies.

[2]   “A USC office removes 'field' from its curriculum, citing possible racist connotations”;  https://www.npr.org/2023/01/14/1148470571/usc-office-removes-field-from-curriculum-racist
An acquaintance in the US State Department told me that the same prohibition has been introduced in that federal Department

[3]   “Letter to Nature denounces the term ‘quantum supremacy’ as racist”;       https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2019/12/12/letter-to-nature-denounces-the-term-quantum-supremacy-as-racist

[4]   Academic standards have also declined as universities sought “status” or “prestige” through size, seeking to attract students via success at sport, luxurious living arrangements, and easy grading

[5]   I never learned to grade “on a curve”; “B” meant getting at least 80% of the answers right

[6]   “Affirmative action at Virginia Tech: The tail that wagged the dog”, Academic Questions, 6 (1992-93) 72-84; “The trivialization of sexual harassment: Lessons from the Mandelstamm Case”, Academic Questions, 5 (1992) 55-66

[7]   Dinesh D'Souza, Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race & Sex on Campus, Free Press, 1991

[8]   https://web.archive.org/web/20131030115950/http://fbox.vt.edu/faculty/aaup/index4.html