Brest and Levine: D.E.I. Is Not Working on College Campuses. We Need a New Approach.

Good thoughtful discussion:

With colleges and universities beginning a new academic year, we can expect more contentious debate over programs that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Progressives are doubling down on programs that teach students that they are either oppressed peoples or oppressors, while red states are closing campus D.E.I. programs altogether.

For all of the complaints, some of these programs most likely serve the important goal of ensuring that all students are valued and engaged participants in their academic communities. But we fear that many other programs are too ideological, exacerbate the very problems they intend to solve and are incompatible with higher education’s longstanding mission of cultivating critical thinking. We propose an alternative: a pluralist-based approach to D.E.I. that would provide students with the self-confidence, mind-sets and skills to engage with challenging social and political issues.

Like many other universities, our university, Stanford, experienced a rise in antisemitic incidents after the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7 and Israel’s response. We were appointed to the university’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which was charged with assessing the nature and scope of the problem and making recommendations. The upshot of hearing from over 300 people in 50 listening sessions is that many Jews and Israelis have experienced bias and feel insecure on our campus.

A parallel committee formed to address anti-Muslim, Arab and Palestinian bias reached similar conclusions for those groups.

These findings are discouraging, given that institutions of higher learning have spent several decades and vast sums of money establishing institutional infrastructures to promote diversity, equity and inclusion. Discouraging, but not surprising — because our inquiries revealed how exclusionary and counterproductive some of these programs can be.

Our committee was pressed by many of those we interviewed to recommend adding Jews and Israelis to the identities currently recognized by Stanford’s D.E.I. programs so their harms would be treated with the same concern as those of people of color and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people, who are regarded as historically oppressed. This move would be required of many California colleges and universities under a measure moving through the California Legislature. But subsuming new groups into the traditional D.E.I. regime would only reinforce a flawed system.

D.E.I. training originated in the corporate world of the 1960s and migrated to universities in subsequent decades, initially to rectify the underrepresentation of minority groups and then to mitigate the tensions associated with more diverse populations. In recent years, the goals of diversity and inclusion have become the bête noire of the political right, in part to avoid reckoning with our nation’s history of slavery and discrimination in ways that might cause, as some state laws have put it, “discomfort, guilt or anguish.” We do not share this view. We believe that fostering a sense of belonging among students of diverse backgrounds is a precondition for educational success. That said, many D.E.I. training programs actually subvert their institutions’ educational missions.

Here’s why. A major purpose of higher education is to teach students the skill of critical inquiry, which the philosopher and educator John Dewey described as “the active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it.” Conscientious faculty members teaching about race and gender require their students to critically consider differing views of the status and history of people of color, women and L.G.B.T.Q.+ people. Teaching critical thinking about any topic is challenging and humbling work.

While issues of diversity, equity and inclusion are sometimes addressed in rigorous classroom courses, university-based D.E.I. programs tend to come in two basic forms: online or off-the-shelf trainings that are more suitable for airline safety briefings than exploring the complexities of interracial relations, and ideological workshops that inculcate theories of social justice as if there were no plausible alternatives. The Intergroup Dialogue, developed at the University of Michigan and used on many campuses around the country, “assist[s] participants in exploring issues of power, privilege, conflict and oppression.” The program’s success is measured by students’ acknowledgment of pervasive discrimination and their attribution of inequalities to structural causes, such as deeply rooted government policies.

D.E.I. programs often assign participants to identity categories based on rigid distinctions. In a D.E.I. training program at Stanford a few years ago, Jewish staff members were assigned to a “whiteness accountability” group, and some later complained that they were shot down when they tried to raise concerns about antisemitism. The former D.E.I. director at a Bay Area community college described D.E.I. as based on the premises “that the world is divided into two groups of people: the oppressors and the oppressed.” She was also told by colleagues and campus leaders that “Jews are ‘white oppressors,’” and her task was to “decenter whiteness.”

Rather than correcting stereotypes, diversity training too often reinforces them and breeds resentment, impeding students’ social development. An excessive focus on identity can be just as harmfulas the pretense that identity doesn’t matter. Overall, these programs may undermine the very groups they seek to aid by instilling a victim mind-set and by pitting students against one another.

Research shows that all students feel excluded from academic communities at one point or another, no matter their backgrounds. The Stanford psychologists Geoffrey Cohen and Greg Walton have found that “belonging uncertainty”— the “state of mind in which one suffers from doubts about whether one is fully accepted in a particular environment or ever could be” — can afflict all of us. From our perspective, if one student is excluded, all students’ learning is diminished. Belonging is a foundation for the shared pursuit of knowledge and the preparation of students as citizens and leaders of a diverse society.

American campuses need an alternative to ideological D.E.I. programs. They need programs that foster a sense of belonging and engagement for students of diverse backgrounds, religious beliefs and political views without subverting their schools’ educational missions. Such programs should be based on a pluralistic vision of the university community combined with its commitments to academic freedom and critical inquiry.

An increasing number of educators are coming to this conclusion. Musa al-Gharbi, a sociologist at Stony Brook University, presents a holistic approach to diversity. Conflicting viewpoints must be “brought into conversation with one another in a constructive way — to form a picture that is more complete and reliable than we would have were we to look at only the dominant perspective or only at subaltern perspectives,” he has written. Danielle Allen, a professor of political philosophy, ethics, and public policy at Harvard, champions “confident pluralism,” in which we “honor our own values while making decisions together.” And the philosopher Susan Neiman invokes a tradition of universalism that allows for — indeed requires — empathy with others rather than a competition among sufferings. “If you don’t base solidarity on deep principles that you share, it’s not real solidarity,” she has said. The group Interfaith America, which promotes interfaith cooperation, has developed a comprehensive Bridging the Gap curriculum that offers a practical guide for discourse across differences.

At the core of pluralistic approaches are facilitated conversations among participants with diverse identities, religious beliefs and political ideologies, but without a predetermined list of favored identities or a preconceived framework of power, privilege and oppression. Students are taught the complementary skills of telling stories about their own identities, values and experiences and listening with curiosity and interest to the stories of others, acknowledging differences and looking for commonalities.

Success would be an academic community of equally respected learners who possess critical thinking skills and are actively engaged in navigating challenging questions throughout the curriculum — an approach that teaches students how to think rather than what to think.

Pluralism does not ignore identity or pervasive structural inequalities. Rather, it provides a framework in which identity is construed broadly and understood as a starting point for dialogue, rather than the basis for separation and fragmentation. It commits questions about the causes and persistence of inequalities to the classroom, where they can be examined through the critical, evidence-based methods at the root of a university education. Respecting the diverse perspectives of one’s fellows and adhering to norms such as active listening, humility and generosity enable classroom conversations about contentious social and political issues.

Nonprofit and religious leaders are translating these ideas into an emerging movement. A collaborative of philanthropic funders called New Pluralists is organizing and supporting groups that are putting pluralism into practice. Such efforts face headwinds both from conservatives who are suspicious of all efforts to foster inclusion and from groups that believe they benefit from the current system. And it will require heavy lifting by educators to work together with their students to create the preconditions for authentic critical engagement.

The current system is not good for Jews at Stanford and other universities. It’s not good for Muslims, either. And it’s certainly not good for society as a whole.

Paul Brest is former dean and professor emeritus at Stanford Law School. Emily J. Levine is associate professor of education and history at Stanford.

Source: D.E.I. Is Not Working on College Campuses. We Need a New Approach.