On a fundamental level, DEI is fundamentally at odds with the mission of higher education, which is to create and disseminate knowledge.
Commentary
Utah
is currently considering a bill that “would overhaul diversity offices at the state’s public colleges and universities,” according to The Salt Lake Tribune. The measure would ban offices from engaging in “differential treatment” based on race and gender, and it would also ban administrators from using the terms “diversity, equity, and inclusion” (DEI) in their job titles.
While the question of how public institutions should be run is difficult to answer on principle, this move certainly feels like a step in the right direction. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression
noted, DEI offices have a history of chilling the speech of both professors and students.
But the problems with DEI in higher education go deeper. On a fundamental level, the most popular strains of DEI are fundamentally at odds with the mission of higher education, which is to create and disseminate knowledge.
In “
The Constitution of Knowledge,“ Jonathan Rauch laid out specific tenets of what he calls ”liberal science.“ ”Liberal science” is the process of knowledge production that has made the West so enormously successful and is the reason why we treat cancer with chemotherapy rather than oracles.
One of these tenets is that knowledge producers need to seek out disconfirmation. Knowledge production is fundamentally about “error-seeking.” Many DEI activists explicitly reject this. When white people disagree with DEI, they’re dismissed as suffering from what professor Alison Bailey terms “
privilege-preserving epistemic pushback“ (essentially, they’re irrationally disagreeing because DEI concepts threaten their privilege).
When people of color disagree with DEI, their concerns are dismissed as stemming from “internalized oppression.” As Robin DiAngelo and Ozlem Sensoy put it in their book “
Is Everyone Really Equal?“ one symptom of internalized oppression is ”believing that your struggles with social institutions (such as education, employment, health care) are the result of your (or your group’s) inadequacy, rather than the result of unequally distributed resources between dominant and minoritized groups.“ Or, in other words, ”internalized oppression” is when people of color disagree with Ms. DiAngelo and Ms. Sensoy’s central assertion about how dominant groups have all the power in the United States.
Rather than seeking or even tolerating disconfirmation and error-seeking, many DEI activists develop elaborate ways to dismiss the motives and reasoning of anyone who disagrees with them.
A second tenet of knowledge production that Mr. Rauch identified is that new knowledge can come from anyone. As he put it: “Claims which begin ‘as a Jew,’ or ‘as a queer,’ or for that matter ‘as minister of information’ or ‘as Pope’ or ‘as head of the Supreme Soviet,’ can be valid if they provide useful information about context or credentials.” But they become problematic if they “claim to settle an argument by appealing to personal or tribal authority, rather than earned authority.”
But prominent DEI activists explicitly reject this idea. They endorse a strong version of what’s called standpoint epistemology and insist that only members of oppressed groups can comment on specific issues. As Kesiena Boom put it in a Vice article titled “
100 Ways White People Can Make Life Less Frustrating for People of Color,“ ”Just because you can’t see racism around you doesn’t mean it’s not happening.“ Instead, white people are exhorted to always ”trust people of color’s assessment of a situation.”
To be clear, as Mr. Rauch says, lived experience can be a valuable source of information. But it can’t be the be-all and end-all source or a way to cut the discussion off at the knees. As Mr. Rauch wrote, “Anyone who does try to shut down inquiry or debate, or anyone who tries to preordain the outcome of an inquiry or a debate, is by definition removing herself from the knowledge-making business.”
The DEI activists I know have admirable intentions. And to be clear, not all of DEI is explicitly anti-science. But too much of it is. Universities need to decide if their goal is to produce knowledge or simply to train a new generation of activists, because these goals aren’t reconcilable. If their goal is the former, then the anti-science ideas of folks such as Ms. Bailey, Ms. DiAngelo, Ms. Sensoy, and Ms. Boom need to go.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
