Why "DEI"?

The current war on DEI has proven to be unrelenting and highly destructive to the independence, academic freedom, and inclusiveness of American universities. And yet the values that gave rise to DEI initiatives throughout the country in the past two decades are deeply grounded in fundamental American values of equality, freedom, and community. How did we get to the place where DEI is regarded as extremist and alien?

First, some background. DEI is a slogan; it stands for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. The fundamental idea is that the basic institutions of a multicultural and multiracial democracy should actively embody the facts of social and cultural diversity of the population; they should welcome all comers in a spirit of democratic equality; and they should actively strive to create environments that are genuinely welcoming to people from all aspects of American society. Unlike elitist institutions of the 1920s, universities should not be places where economic, religious, or racial elites have primacy, and people from other groups are only marginally welcome. Instead, an institution in a democratic society, including especially universities, should actively embrace the equality, dignity, and worth of all its participants.

Given the history of discrimination in our society -- discrimination based on religion, ethnic origin, gender, race, and other social or cultural characteristics -- any thoughtful observer will realize that full democratic equality requires more than slogans, more than banners, and more than "celebrations of global diversity". Democratic equality requires active work on the part of citizens, leaders, and institutional participants to remake the culture and systems of the institution in ways that deliberately turn back the impulse of discrimination and disparagement across identity groups. If Chicagoans have the view that down-staters are backward, conventional, and generally not very innovative, then banks, labor unions, and universities in Chicago are likely to reflect those assumptions without any special effort on the part of "hate groups" to bring this about. It reflects what we might call "cultural-assumptions discrimination". So special efforts would be required to change the mentality and culture of all the participants, to un-do the workings of these forms of "implicit bias". And if down-state urban school systems are typically underfunded and under-performing relative to their counterparts in the affluent Chicago suburbs, then down-state urban students are likely enough to be under-represented at "merit-based" elite institutions in Chicago. This would be an example of "structural discrimination". And it implies that "affirmative" efforts would be needed in order to give down-state urban students an equitable opportunity of access to the elite university.

And what about inclusion, welcome, and equal dignity and respect for the individuals and groups who wind up participating in the institution? If the biased assumptions that color the perceptions and expectations of Chicagoans and down-staters alike persist in the institutional environment of the elite university, then we may expect that consequential inequalities of respect, dignity, and worth will persist into the institutional environment as well. This will have the effect of reproducing locally the group separation and disparagement that exists in the broader society. Active efforts at the local level -- in the classroom, in the residence hall, in the eating club or Greek organization -- will be needed in order to change the way that eighteen-year-olds think about themselves and their classmates, without falling into the traps of orthodoxy, political correctness, or ineffectual scolding.

Is there any doubt that cultures of discrimination, disparagement, and bias continue to exist in American society? Of course not; the persistence of these attitudes and behaviors are all too evident, even when expressed in indirect and "socially acceptable" ways. So people who are committed to full democratic equality as a goal, even though not a current reality, are forced to face the question: what kinds of social messages, programming, and educational initiatives can be imagined that have a real effect on each individual's private culture of bias and acceptance? Doing nothing means allowing patterns of bias and discrimination to continue indefinitely; enacting a program of "mandatory hidden bias training" may seem to be too prescriptive for an institution that respects the autonomy and dignity of its participants. So neither action seems right.

This is the problem that commitments to DEI are trying to solve: to find avenues through which inter-group antagonisms and suspicions, usually based on ignorance, can be relaxed in favor of an acceptance of difference and an eagerness for learning from people different from oneself. And significantly, participants in DEI initiatives have often made use of careful empirical research in various disciplines of the social and behavioral sciences. We might describe this as a challenging project of social engineering. Or more appropriately, we might describe it as the work of establishing and securing a robust multicultural inclusive democracy. And we have plenty of examples of leaders who understood the importance and difficulty of this challenge, including Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Barack Obama.

This goal is indeed worth struggling for, and its roots did not begin twenty years ago when the phrase "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" came into use. Rather, its roots go back to some of the most morally perceptive theorists of democracy itself -- not chiefly the classical liberal theorists like Hobbes and Locke, for whom a democratic society is simply an instrument through which rationally self-interested citizens pursued their own interests in their own ways, but in the more substantive theories of philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It was Rousseau who formulated the idea that all citizens contribute equally to the "general will" and to the wellbeing and freedom of the whole of society; it was Rousseau whose views could be summed up in the phrase, "a free community of equals". And it was Rousseau who argued unflinchingly for the equal freedom, dignity, and worth of all human beings. This is what the slogan "Diversity, Equity, Inclusion" is all about and what its advocates are trying to achieve.