By some measures, the University of Michigan has the most comprehensive program for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the US. But even though the school has spent, by its own reckoning, $250 million on DEI efforts, NY Times reporter Nicholas Confessore found that nobody is satisfied.
Princess-J’Maria Mboup, the speaker of the university’s Black Student Union, told me that “the students that are most affected by D.E.I. — meaning marginalized communities — are invested in the work, but not in D.E.I. itself.” Mboup called Michigan’s efforts “superficial.” For all their spread and reach, she told me, the school’s D.E.I. programs betrayed “a general discomfort with naming Blackness explicitly.”
Her discontent reflected a tension I found threaded throughout D.E.I. at Michigan, a pervasive uncertainty around whom — and what — D.E.I. is really for. Like most schools, Michigan officially celebrates diversity of every kind and inclusion for all; the school’s own definition of D.E.I., which cites 13 distinct kinds of identity, is as sprawling as the university itself. On campus, I met students with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives. Not one expressed any particular enthusiasm for Michigan’s D.E.I. initiative. Where some found it shallow, others found it stifling. They rolled their eyes at the profusion of course offerings that revolve around identity and oppression, the D.E.I.-themed emails they frequently received but rarely read.
Michigan’s own data suggests that in striving to become more diverse and equitable, the school has also become less inclusive: In a survey released in late 2022, students and faculty members reported a less positive campus climate than at the program’s start and less of a sense of belonging. Students were less likely to interact with people of a different race or religion or with different politics — the exact kind of engagement D.E.I. programs, in theory, are meant to foster.
Instead, Michigan’s D.E.I. efforts have created a powerful conceptual framework for student and faculty grievances — and formidable bureaucratic mechanisms to pursue them. Everyday campus complaints and academic disagreements, professors and students told me, were now cast as crises of inclusion and harm, each demanding some further administrative intervention or expansion. On a campus consumed with institutional self-criticism, seemingly the only thing to avoid a true reckoning was D.E.I. itself.
Professors and administrators who spoke critically of the program insisted on anonymity, because, as one administrator (a “woman of color”) put it, “no one can criticize the D.E.&I. program — not its scale, its dominance.”
The one measurable outcome of the program has been a rise in disputes:
The conflicts over inclusion were not limited to petitions and tweets. Increasingly, students and professors were turning to more formal remedies. In 2015, the university office charged with enforcing federal civil rights mandates like Title IX received about 200 complaints of sex- or gender-based misconduct on Michigan’s campus. By 2020, that number had more than doubled. Last year, it surpassed 500. Complaints involving race, religion or national origin increased to almost 400 from a few dozen during roughly the same period. (The office itself has nearly quadrupled in size in recent years.)
Then came October 7 and campus disputes in which both sides accused the other of racism and the DEI bureaucracy did exactly nothing to smooth things over or promote dialogue.
It's a sad tale of bureaucratic overreach and the deep truth that sometimes “fighting” what you hate is pointless or worse.
Interesting, but causal? We don't get to have a controlled trial, where one University of Michigan implements this DEI program and one doesn't; or, better yet, one doesn't live through the Trump years, Fergusson and its ilk, #meToo, and Oct. 7 and its aftermath. Hard to argue that those might not contribute to radicalization, ideological segregation, and unease, whatever a university might or might not do.
ReplyDeleteI.e. -- I too can find DEI clumsy and intrusive, but is it fair to write an analysis that indicates it's the problem?
I think it's a bit strange that instead of thinking "Maybe we're going about implementing this in entirely the wrong ways", the conclusion people seem to leap to instead is "This doesn't work, and will never work, let's get rid of it forever".
ReplyDeleteOf course, a cynical explanation for this trend in thinking would be that the people who are actually in charge of these programs don't actually want / know how to make them to succeed. That would fairly neatly explain a lot of the details of the situation.
The people in charge make a token show of effort that looks good on paper - they can cite big dollar numbers, and employ a list of key buzzwords to describe their programs to influential parties, and generally make a show of "taking the issue very seriously". But then they don't actually institute anything that creates meaningful change (either out of ignorance, or out of intentional self sabotage), and when the situation doesn't improve after a few years, they get to throw their hands up and say, "Whelp! We tried! Guess it was a waste of time! Now, let's axe the program and put that money somewhere else instead!".
Meanwhile, people on the ground are criticizing the program as shallow, stifling, et cetera, because it actually is. Despite all the funding and fancy marketing terms, the program itself doesn't work, because the people making the decisions either don't understand the problem and how to actually address it, or they simply don't actually care in the first place. Thus why you get so many people complaining that the programs "don't go far enough" - it's a Band-Aid approach to a sucking gunshot wound, and many people feel insulted to have their grievances met with such obviously inadequate responses.
And this also ties into the prohibition on criticism of said programs. They're spending all this money on stupid initiatives that won't do anything to help, and people on the ground ask "What idiot though this up?", but the higher-ups don't want to hear complaints about it - after all, they're investing all this time and money! "How dare people complain that it's all either a mess of incompetence, or a cynical smoke-and-mirrors ploy! We go to all this effort to help them, and they say it's not good enough? Those wretched ingrates!"
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As for the apparent "rise in number of disputes", I feel like a broken record with how often I need to remind you of selection bias.
If you invest a bunch of money into a DEI initiative, even if much of it is wasted in ineffectual areas of the programs, odds are good that at least some of it will be effectively directed toward better reporting and documentation of incidents. And if you've suddenly got better reporting, you're almost always suddenly going to see what looks like a "rise" in the rate of the problem that you're reporting on - because suddenly you're hearing about cases that previously would never have been documented.
If your takeaway is that "these programs made things worse", rather than "these programs revealed that the problem was worse than we realized to begin with", then you're probably the sort of person who shouldn't be in charge of such programs. And yet that's exactly the sort of person I would expect college administrations to select: a bureaucracy-minded, majority-conforming individual who the rich white college directors approve of and trust to run the program the way they want it to be run. A token minority is the ideal choice - someone who lives and thinks like a moneyed white individual, but who possesses the right superficial detail of skin color, so that the elites can say, "See? We technically got a person of color! Now sit down and stop whining!".
FWIW, I think we simply don't know enough about the real inner workings of things like identity, grievance, group-identified guilt, etc., to design a program such as this one is trying to be. By "inner workings," I mean in terms of psychology, neurology, biochemistry, etc., on an individual level, and how that would play out in the interaction of individuals and groups. Nor do we know the detailed inner workings of why, in some cases, identities and grievances get smoothed out or mollified (in, for example, the way various once-scorned European groups in the US have become "white people," or the way the Irish Troubles now *seem*--let's hope accurately--like a thing fading into the past, as John has posted) while in others, an excited sense of identity and grievance leads to separation and homogenized nation-state building on the eastern European model (i. e., the sense that history has made it impossible for two groups to live together).
ReplyDeleteI would add that I think we really know very little about the same sort of inner workings as they apply to the interaction of uprooted youth massed together in close quarters (i. e., college students) and the institution-enwrapped employees who (try to) act as their teachers, administrators, etc. (one should, of course, supply mental scare quotes around a lot of these words), and what influences the vastly different outcomes that one observes students experiencing. As a start, it would be good to find some seemingly successful institutional "program" (I'll supply the scare quotes for that one) of any sort and look at it carefully.
@G- If you look into the incidents actually reported to DEI staff at universities, you will discovery that a large number of them are absurd. One of the cases cited from Michigan by the Times involved a professor who read aloud a text that included the word "negro." Since the word negro appears in almost ever text written by black intellectuals in the 1900-1965 period, that would mean never reading anything by Carver, Dubois, King, etc. Some of my friends have been accused of racism for things like not showing any works by black artists in a lecture on Greek and Roman art, or for failing minority students who never came to class. The basic problem with DEI initiatives is that they raise the salience of racial and other differences without providing any template for resolving the problems they call attention to. Until we can do that – and I agree with David that we absolutely do not know how to do that – raising the salience of differences just makes everything worse. You could also look into Freddie de Boer's analysis I linked to somewhere on this site, which was that since racism is not an administrative problem it makes to sense to try to solve it using administrative measures.
ReplyDelete